I am Associate Professor in Educational Leadership, Management and Governance and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Education in Asia (CREA). My research interests lie in distributed leadership, social justice leadership, leaders’ and teachers’ professional development, and educational leadership policy-making. Currently, I teach in Doctorate in Education (EdD), MA Internationalisation and Globalisation, and MA Education (blended learning) programmes and supervise over a dozen Ph.D. and EdD students. On top of my teaching and research work at the University of Bath, I also hold an appointment as the co-Convenor for the Network 26 Educational leadership at the European Educational Research Association (EERA).

Before joining the University of Bath, I studied a Bachelor’s degree (Educational Administration) at the East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. From 2007 to 2017, I completed both a Master’s and a Ph.D degree (Educational Leadership) at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. My doctoral thesis explored and compared distributed leadership practices in Finnish and Shanghai schools. From 2017 to 2019, I worked first as a Postdoctoral Researcher then as a Senior Researcher at the University of Teacher Education Zug, Switzerland. During those two years, I conducted several systematic reviews mapping the development of educational leadership, administration and management research.

Research interests

• Distributed leadership
• Social justice leadership
• Leaders’ and teachers’ professional development
• Educational leadership policy-making
• Comparative education