Joy Y. Zhang is a British sociologist with a first degree in medicine. She is the Founding Director of the Centre for Global Science and Epistemic Justice at the University of Kent. Her expertise is on the transnational governance of scientific risks, with particular focus on the erosion of epistemic boundaries and the rise of cosmopolitan identities formed by changing disciplinary, geopolitical and state-society power relations. Empirically, her research investigates the relations between four major scientific powers in the world: China, India, the UK and the US. She has led studies on stem cells, synthetic biology, genome editing, food movements and environmental politics.

Her research agenda has been consolidated into the founding of the BioGovernance Commons initiative in 2021 and the Centre for Global Science and Epistemic Justice (GSEJ) at the University of Kent in February 2022. Since its founding, GSEJ has hosted regular events that have attracted participants and speakers from 23 different countries/regions, including, most recently, a UK-India bilateral G20 meeting on biogovernance and science diplomacy in New Delhi, co-organised with the prestigious RIS, a think tank of India’s Ministry of External Affairs.

She is the author of three academic monographs: The Cosmopolitanization of Science: Stem Cell Governance in China (2012), Green Politics in China: Environmental Governance and State-Society Relations (2013), The Elephant and the Dragon in Contemporary Life Sciences: A Call for Decolonising Global Governance (2022). She is regularly interviewed by global media and has provided policy consultation to leading institutions in Europe and in Asia.