
Dr Nana DE GRAAFF
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
CHERN Chair
also Grant Holder and Scientific Representative
n.a.de.graaff@vu.nl
Naná de Graaff is Associate Professor in International Relations at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, VU Amsterdam. Her China related research interests are in the globalization of Chinese firms and business elites, Chinese political elite networks and interactions with Western corporate and political elites. She also studies American foreign policy elites and the (geo)politics of energy and its transition. De Graaff is Principal Investigator of the Vidi project ‘Globalization Unravelling? The Geopolitics of Europe-China Technological Decoupling’, leading a research team for the coming 4 years funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). She is elected Executive Council member of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), and International Advisory Board member of the OUP / Chatham House journal International Affairs. She publishes in leading journals such as Review of International Political Economy, International Affairs, European Journal of International Relations and Global Networks.

Prof Jeffrey HENDERSON
University of Bristol
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies
CHERN Vice Chair
jeffrey.henderson@bristol.ac.uk
Jeffrey Henderson is Professor Emeritus of International Development at the University of Bristol. Educated at universities in Britain and the United States, he has previously held appointments at the Universities of Manchester, Hong Kong and Birmingham and Visiting Professorships or Fellowships at the Universities of Lodz, Warwick, Glasgow, Leeds, Melbourne, New England, California at Berkeley, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz and at Kwansei Gakuin University, Kobe and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests have been predominantly concerned with the dynamics and consequences of economic, social and political transformations in East Asia and Europe and, inter alia, he was one of the initiators of the global production networks approach to economic development. His books and cognate contributions include: Global Restructuring and Territorial Development ( with Manuel Castells); The Globalisation of High Technology Production ; States and Development in the Asian Pacific Rim (with Richard P. Appelbaum); Industrial Transformation in Eastern Europe in the Light of the East Asian Experience; East Asian Transformation; and Globalisation with Chinese Characteristics (special issue of Development and Change – with Richard P. Appelbaum and Suet Ying Ho).
http://www.bris.ac.uk/spais/people/person/jeffrey-w-henderson/

Alexandra FILIUS MSc
Graduate School of Social Sciences – Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Network Manager
e-mail: a.filius@vu.nl
Alexandra holds a bachelor degree China Studies from Leiden University and a master degree Culture, Organization and Management from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. During her studies she lived Beijing for one year. She wrote her master thesis about the experiences of Chinese PhD students in the Netherlands. Currently, she works as program manager for the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Junior Lecturer at Vrije Universiteit.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-filius-70537078/

Ms Jelena GLEDIĆ
University of Belgrade
Faculty of Philology
Communication Manager
jelenagledic@gmail.com
Jelena Gledić is a Senior Instructor at the University of Belgrade, where she teaches a range of undergraduate courses in the field of Chinese language and culture at the Faculty of Philology. She also held a cross-appointment at Osaka University’s Graduate School of Language and Culture as a Specially Appointed Associate Professor. Her recent research has mainly been focused on the Chinese presence on the borders of the EU, and especially in Serbia. In addition to her research on China, she has been active in the field of teaching and learning innovation, as well as communication, doing extensive fieldwork at universities in the US, UK, China and Japan, and working as project assistant at the University of Zurich’s Language and Space Lab.

Prof Giles MOHAN
Open University
Strategy and Resource Manager
giles.mohan@open.ac.uk
Giles is Professor of International Development at the Open University. He has held various UK academic posts over the past 30 years and has an area specialism in West Africa. Giles is a human geography who works on international development, and he has focused on decentralisation and participation, questions of citizenship and diaspora, and migration and development. Recent work has addressed China’s engagement with Africa supported by a series of large grants from the ESRC and GCRF. Giles’ current ERC-funded REDEFINE project builds on this China-Africa work to track the implications of Chinese investment in Europe. He has published in leading human geography, Development Studies, and African Studies journals. Giles has designed and managed a range of distance learning courses aimed at undergraduate and Masters students, and latterly extended this to short, CPD courses for international development professionals in major international NGOs, donors and Southern NGOs. He has also worked on a range of media projects with the BBC around international development including Comic Relief documentaries, the Reith Lectures and a World Service series on the SDGs.

Dr Ágnes SZUNOMÁR
Institute of World Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies (IWE CERS)
WG1 Leader
szunomar.agnes@krtk.mta.h
Ágnes Szunomár, PhD is a Hungarian economist who extensively looks at China’s economic footprint in Europe. She is the head of Research Group on Development Economics at the Institute of World Economics, CERS, Hungary and assistant professor at Corvinus University of Budapest. She has more than 100 scientific publications, has led and participated in several international research projects. She is also a member of China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe (CHOICE) network. Her most recent works are: Emerging-market Multinational Enterprises in East Central Europe, Empty shell no more: China’s growing footprint in Central and Eastern Europe and Employee relations at Asian subsidiaries in Hungary: Do home or host country factors dominate?

Dr Tim RÜHLIG
European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS)
WG2 Leader
tim.ruhlig@iss.europa.eu
Dr Tim Rühlig is the Senior Analyst for Asia/Global China at the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS). His research focuses on China’s foreign, economic and technology policy, EU-China relations, economic security, German-China policy, and Hong Kong affairs. He is also working on the politicization of technical standard-setting and China’s role as a security actor in the Pacific and beyond.
Before joining the EUISS, Dr Rühlig worked at the European Commission for DG I.D.E.A., the in-house advisor hub of President Ursula von der Leyen, with a focus on China’s technology policy. Previously, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) and a Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI).
https://timruhlig.eu/

Johannes PETRY
Goethe University Frankfurt
WG3 Leader
j.petry@soz.uni-frankfurt.de
Johannes Petry is a political economist researching the politics of global finance, investigating post-crisis transformations of the global financial system and their impact on the global norms, institutions and governance that underpin the global economy. Currently, he is a Senior Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt, the Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded ‘StateCapFinance’ research project and a Research Fellow a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation & Regionalisation (University of Warwick). His research focuses especially on the internationalization of China’s capital markets, financial market infrastructures, the development of non-Western financial systems, and the geopolitics of global finance. He is the co-author of BRICS and the Global Financial Order: Liberalism Contested? (with Andreas Nölke; Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Dr Agota REVESZ
Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
WG4 Leader
agota.revesz@tu-berlin.de
Ágota Révész is a sinologist with multiple years of experience in academia and diplomacy. Fluent in English, German, Chinese and Hungarian, she now conducts research on EU-China narratives, while also working on research security between Germany and China, as well as raising China competence among non-sinologists. Her teaching focuses on EU-China relations and intercultural competence with a focus on China.

Dr Martina BOFULIN
ZRC SAZU
WG5 Leader
martina.bofulin@zrc-sazu.si
Dr Martina Bofulin is a permanent research associate at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and an expert on migration and mobility between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Europe. She has done extensive fieldwork research in China, Serbia, and Slovenia focusing on material and immaterial movements among these locations. She has published on China’s diaspora policies, Chinese migrant transnationalism, and inclusion of Chinese migrants in high-impact peer-reviewed journals (China Perspectives, Asian Studies, Journal of Chinese Overseas, etc.) as well as in contributions to edited volumes (e.g., Intimate migrations by Berghahn Books, Handbook of Overseas Chinese in Europe by Brill Publishers). Her multi-year in-depth ethnography on migrants from SE China has been published in a monograph Home and away (ZRC SAZU Publishing House).

Nicholas JEPSON
University of Manchester
WG6 Leader
nicholas.jepson@manchester.ac.uk
Nick Jepson is Hallsworth Research Fellow in Chinese political economy at the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute. He is the author of the recently published book In China’s Wake: How the commodity boom transformed development strategies in the global south (Columbia University Press). His current research examines how China’s emergence as a major bilateral creditor is transforming systems of global financial governance.