Prof. Yuen Yuen Ang Johns Hopkins University, USA

Yuen Yuen Ang (洪源远) is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. She is a China expert with a multi-cultural background and a multi-disciplinary scholar of development and innovation. Ang's work has been recognized for both its intellectual and public impact. She is the author... read moreof two acclaimed books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China's Gilded Age (2020), both featured in The Economist and described as "game-changing." She is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize for “impactful contributions to the study of comparative politics," awarded by the American Political Science Association, in addition to book awards across multiple social sciences: the Peter Katzenstein Prize (political economy), Viviana Zelizer Prize (economic sociology), Douglass North Award (institutional economics), Alice Amsden Award (socio-economics), and Barrington Moore Prize (honorable mention, historical sociology). Apolitical, the UK platform for public servants, named her among the world's 100 Most Influential Academics in Government. Foreign Affairs, the premier outlet on US foreign policy, named her writing among the "Best of Books" and "Best of Print." Ang has been profiled in American, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, and European outlets.

In 2023, Ang joined Johns Hopkins University as the first named chair of the Center for Economy & Society—funded by the Hewlett Foundation with the mission of exploring "alternatives to traditional economic thinking”—the SNF Agora Institute (dedicated to strengthening global democracy), and Department of Political Science. She was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for “high-caliber scholarship that applies fresh perspectives to the most pressing issues of our times.” She has served on many editorial and award committees, including at the American Political Science Association, American Sociology Association, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, The China Quarterly, World Politics, etc.

Her new research is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Canada's SSHRC. Her latest empirical projects examine whether state policies and targets to accelerate innovation in China work, focusing on patents and government investment funds, and patterns of policy communication and lawmaking in the Chinese bureaucracy. At the same time, she is exploring "applied history" through a unique US-China comparison; see her essay "The Clash of Two Gilded Ages," which argues that the two rivaling nations share more similarities than most people think.