Meet Our Team & Researchers

Aug 2021-Present

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Professor Mei’s is an archaeo-metallurgist, specializing in the origins and role of metallurgy in Early China, and cultural interactions between China and the West.

He studied physical chemistry in metallurgical processes and the history of science and technology at the Beijing University of Iron and Steel Technology (now the University of Science and Technology Beijing, USTB) in the 1980s. He first came to Cambridge in 1994, as a Li Foundation scholar working at the Needham Research Institute, then began his PhD study in archaeology at the University of Cambridge with a scholarship offered by the East Asian History of Science Foundation, Hong Kong. After postdoctoral work in Tokyo and Cambridge he returned to China in 2004 as a professor at the USTB and Director of the Institute of Historical Metallurgy and Materials. In recent years he has been a leading member of the team formed to write the volume on non- ferrous metallurgy for the Science and Civilisation in China series, founded by the great British sinologist and historian of science Joseph Needham (1900-1995). He is active in a number of international research groups, and is currently President of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine. In January 2014, he joined the Needham Research Institute as its Director.

Professor Mei is a Fellow of Churchill College, and Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge.

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John Moffett is a graduate of the Chinese Studies Department, Edinburgh University. He has been Librarian of the East Asian History of Science Library at the NRI since September 1992. He has served on various professional committees in Cambridge and is currently Chair of the China Library Group.

Ros Grooms holds a PhD in English and American Literature from the University of York (England) and a Master of Archival Studies from the University of British Columbia (Canada). She joined the NRI in 2018 to catalogue the papers Joseph Needham collected on his travels, complementing the previous archivist’s work on the Science and Civilisation in China files. She worked on a Wellcome funded cataloguing and digitisation project entitled ‘Science and Medicine in China from World War II to the Cultural Revolution: Sources from the Archives of Joseph and Dorothy Needham,’ which resulted in photographs published on the Cambridge University Digital Library, a workshop, information banners, conservation and cataloging work. In 2023, she began cataloging the NRI institutional records, which include minutes of meetings, administrative correspondence and building plans. In 2024, thanks to a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, she began her current project to catalogue and conserve the papers of Lu Gwei-Djen.

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Throughout my University career I have been based chiefly at Cambridge, holding various University and College posts, first at King’s and then at Darwin. From 1983 onwards I held a personal Chair in Ancient Philosophy and Science and from 1989 to my retirement in 2000 I was Master of Darwin College. I was Chairman of the East Asian History of Science trust, which is the governing body directing the work of the Needham Research Institute from 1992 to 2002, and I am currently Senior Scholar in Residence at that Institute.

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Christopher Cullen originally trained as an engineer, and holds an MA from Oxford in Engineering Science (BA 1967). He has a PhD in Classical Chinese from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (1977). He was a Stipendiary Research Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, from 1977 to 1981. He served as Director of the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge (NRI) from 2003 to 2014, after spending more than a decade as Senior Lecturer in the History of Chinese Science and Medicine in the Department of History at SOAS, while also serving part-time as Deputy Director of the NRI from 1992. He is now Emeritus Director of the NRI. He is an Associate of the unit ‘Chine, Corée, Japon’, UMR 8173 (CNRS, EHESS, & Université Paris-Cité), France, and Director of the Research Centre for the Transcultural Transmission of Science and Technology, and Silk Road Civilisation, University of Science and Technology, Hefei.

Feb. 2021-present

Dr Jingyi Jenny Zhao is ISF Senior Research Fellow at the Needham Research Institute and Official Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She completed her BA, MPhil, and PhD in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, and has held fellowships at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Her research adopts a cross-cultural, comparative approach to ancient Greek and early Chinese philosophical traditions, with a particular focus on moral education and the concept of the good life. She is also deeply engaged with broader methodological questions surrounding comparative research, including the significance of a cross-cultural engagement with the Classics in the 21st century.

Dr Zhao is co-editor and contributor to Ancient Greece and China Compared (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and author of Aristotle and Xunzi on Shame, Moral Education, and the Good Life (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is active in public outreach, having appeared in the BBC documentary The Story of China, been interviewed by The Guardian, and published a series of interviews with leading thinkers via her WeChat public account (jing yi fang tan “静一访谈”), as well as in various journals and magazines.

In 2024, she founded the Sino-Hellenic Network, an international platform for scholars working on the comparative study of ancient Greece and early China. More information is available on her personal website: www.jingyizhao.com.

2024-

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Catherine Jami is a Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she has a dual background in mathematics and Chinese studies. Working at CNRS since 1991, she has studied the reception of European sciences introduced into China by the Jesuits from the early 17th century onwards. Starting with the mathematical sciences, she has extended her work in several directions: imperial science at the beginning of the Qing dynasty (The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority in China during the Kangxi reign (1662-1722) (Oxford University Press, 2012); the role of elite mobility in the circulation of knowledge Individual Itineraries and the Spatial Dynamics of Knowledge: Science, Technology and Medicine in China, 17th-20th centuries [edited] (Paris, Collège de France, 2017); the circulation of science between Europe and East Asia, with a series of books co-edited with Luis Saraiva (Singapore, World Scientific); in collaboration with Christopher Cullen, she is working on Sino-European exchanges in the field of astronomy in Qing China. In addition to this research, she has held positions of responsibility at an international level. In particular, she was Secretary General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. She has been the editor-in-chief of the journal East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine from 2017 to 2024.

Oct. 2025-September 2028

Yumi Suzuki has been working on Sino-Hellenic comparative history of philosophy and science for many years. She completed an MA degree in Ancient Greek Philosophy and an MA research degree in Classics at Durham University, then a PhD degree in Chinese and Comparative Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. She has previously worked as a lecturer and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Hong Kong, East China Normal University, and the University of Bern. Her main research interests lie in scientific methods and reasoning including definition, logic, deduction and induction, as well as human cognition and understanding of nonhuman living beings. Her current project addresses nomenclature and classification of animals and plants in early Chinese and ancient Greek “zoological” and “botanical” sources. She is also completing a co-edited volume, Green Antiquity: Comparing Environmental Thought in Early China and Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press) as well as a monograph based on her MA and PhD theses.

2021-

Bill Mak completed his BA in linguistics at McGill University and received his Ph.D. in Indian literature and Buddhist philology from Peking University. He held a number of research and teaching positions in Germany, Hong Kong, and Japan before his former appointment as Associate Professor at Kyoto University, with a focus on research in the history of astronomy and astral science in China and India. He is currently Principal Researcher at the Tsz Shan Monastery Buddhist Art Museum and Honorary Research Fellow at the Jao Tsung-I Petite Ecole, University of Hong Kong. While in Cambridge, he is affiliated with the Needham Research Institute and Robinson College, Cambridge University, completing his book Foreign Astral Science in China: From Six Dynasties to Northern Song just published in NRI Monograph Series

Foreign Astral Sciences in China | From the Six Dynasties to the North. His publications may be found here.

October 2023-

Chen Zhiyu is a PhD student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Her project, funded by Gates Cambridge, investigates the entanglement of geographical knowledge in the South China Sea between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is generally interested in the history of science and medicine from a cross-cultural perspective, focusing on processes such as translations and the transmission of visual and material culture.

Oct. 2025 – April 2026

Jia YU 余 佳 holds a doctorate in the History of Science from the University of Cambridge. Specialising in cross-cultural analysis of science, technology, and medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she is interested in questions exploring the nature of knowledge and expertise as operative sources of cultural, material, and linguistic conventions. While a Research Associate at the NRI she is developing a book project based on her doctoral research titled Nature and Its Scholars: A History of Bowu in Chinese Learned Culture. This illuminates how interpretations of bowu — a Chinese term often translated as ‘natural science’ — inhabited and contributed different conceptions and studies of nature in China over time. She is also finalising her research papers, including Stanley Gerr’s wartime translation cabinets (one of NRI’s own collections) and an analysis of the ‘experience of nature’ and field trips in Republican China.

November 2024-November 2025

Professor Liu Jie holds a professorship at the Research Centre for Philosophy of Science and Technology at Shanxi University. Her primary research focus lies in the philosophy of mathematics, with a particular emphasis on mathematical structuralism. Currently, she is engaged in a project centered on structural accounts of mathematical explanation, aiming to elucidate the connection between mathematics and the natural sciences.

2017-present

Sally Church has a BA in Chinese history from Middlebury College (Vermont). Her MA from the University of Chicago and PhD from Harvard were both in Chinese literature. Formerly an Affiliated Researcher in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, she is a Research Associate in the Centre of Development Studies and an Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College in addition to her NRI affiliation. Her academic work focuses on various aspects of pre-modern Chinese history and the Silk Road, including the maritime expeditions of Zheng He (1405-1433), the overland expeditions of Chen Cheng (1413-1420), and the travels of Faxian to India (399-414). She recently co-edited with Imre Galambos a translation of Rong Xinjiang’s work, entitled The Silk Road and Cultural Exchanges between East and West (Brill 2023). She is also Director of the UK educational charity Civilizations in Contact (Reg. No. 1148995). Sally is currently a Research Associate at the NRI working on a critical edition of the Longjiang chuanchang zhi 龍江船廠志.

Aug. 2026 – Aug. 2027

Professor Fan Lei is Director of the Research Center for the History of Science and Technology at Shandong University of TCM. Her main research interests are pre-modern TCM literature and traditional TCM techniques. During her visiting fellowship at the NRI she will conduct research for her project ‘The Reception, Interpretation, and Reconstruction of TCM Knowledge and Techniques in Modern Europe’.

Sept.2026-Sept.2027

Ren Jie received his Ph.D. from the School of History and Culture of Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and is now Associate Professor at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Inner Mongolia Normal University. His main research areas include the history of metrology, the history of astronomy, the history of navigation, the history of thought, and the social history of science and technology. While at the NRI he will be working on his project on Chinese stellar navigation in the 15^th Century.

Sept. 2026-Aug. 2027

Ma Weihua is a Professor in the School of History, Zhengzhou University. He received his PhD from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and has conducted research visits at the University of Sydney, Princeton University and Soochow University (Taipei). His first research project focused on Sino-Western astronomical exchanges in the seventeenth century. He is the author of Calendars, Religion and Imperial Power: Rethinking the contest Between Chinese and Western Calendar during the Late Ming and Early Qing Period. Currently, he is investigating the relationship between the ritual of worshipping Heaven and state governance in the Qing dynasty.

Oct. 2025-2026

Oliver Hargrave is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford and is currently researching the intellectual history of rainbows in pre-modern China for the Needham Institute on the Jing Brand Fellowship. He is interested in the intersection of Chinese conceptions of the natural world with intellectual history, including philosophy and religion. His DPhil research was on textual representations of trees in Early and Medieval China, with a particular focus on strange or unusual trees and how they were understood.

Sept. 2026-March 2027

Jiajing Zhang is Associate Professor of History of Science at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include the history of cartography, the history of geography, and the history of modern and contemporary science and technology in China. During her stay at the Needham Research Institute, she will focus her research on her current project Coordinates of Knowledge: Reassessing Quantitative Cartography through Astronomical and Mathematical Practices in Qing China.

Oct. 2026 – Feb.2027

Han Han (Sunny) is a Professor at the National Institute for Cultural Development, Wuhan University, specializing in modern Chinese history, industrial heritage, and art history. Since 2021, he has served as Deputy Dean and Senior Researcher at Wuhan University’s Landscape Architecture Design Institute. In 2025, he became Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Culture. He is the author of two English-language books, A Hundred Stories: Industrial Heritage Changes China and Literature Journals in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in China (1931–1938). While at the NRI he will work on his project on the transformation of incense-making in modern China.

Oct.2026-June 2027

Wei Liu is a Research Fellow and Head of the Division of Scientific Research at the Institute of Conservation, National Museum of China. Her research interests focus on the non-invasive examination, material characterization, manufacturing technology, and condition assessment of metal artefacts. She is also interested in exploring the integration of machine-learning methods and spectral imaging techniques in heritage science research. During her visiting fellowship at the NRI, she will conduct a systematic study of the technological characteristics, developmental trajectory, and regional transmission of gold and silver inlay techniques from the late Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE) to the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–9 CE).

Oct. 2026 – March 2027

Panpan is an associate professor at the College of Humanities & Social Development, Northwest A&F University, China. Her research focuses on ancient metallic decorative techniques, with particular interest in the transmission and cultural exchange of granulation. During her fellowship at the NRI, she will systematically collect data on granulated artefacts and their techniques from the Mediterranean to the Eurasian Steppe for cross-cultural comparison with Chinese samples. Based on the stylistic evolution, and combining physical examination and scientific analyses, she will reconstruct its eastward transmission routes, clarify its local evolution, and explore the adaptation and innovation of this foreign technique following its introduction into ancient Central China.

Oct.2026 – March 2027

Wang Jichen is an Associate Professor at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Inner Mongolia Normal University. He received his PhD from the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the history of science and technology in pre-modern China, especially agricultural history and phenological calendars. Currently, he is investigating the relationship between phenological knowledge, climate adaptation, and rural practice in Song-Ming China.