Mei Wu, Ph.D.

Associate Professor 

Director of the Center for Comparative and International Education

        Mei Wu received a Ph.D in higher education from the University of Idaho, the USA in 2008. She also earned MBA from Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and MSc in international finance from CERAM (SKEMA) Business School in France, with scholarship from the DAAD and French government. Mei is currently an associate professor at the Research Institute of Higher Education, Yunnan University, China. Her research interests included ethnic minority education, comparative and international education, and institutional research. As the project manager, since 2016, Mei organized and coordinated the Ministry of Education’s undergraduate teaching and learning quality evaluation for more than twenty universities and colleges in Yunnan Province. Mei is a council member of China Comparative Education Society, and the member of CIES and NOCIES. She was a member of AERA and presented more than 10 papers during 2006-2011.     

Hua Fan, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Associate director of the Center for Comparative and International Education

        Hua Fan is currently an assistant professor and deputy director of the Center for Comparative and International Education Research (CCIE) at Yunnan university, China. And I get my PhD degree from Xiamen university in China in 2014. I recently mainly focus on using the research tools of social science to reveal the inter-related causes of education quality and the experience of students learning and research in interdisciplinary centers/ departments/programs in World-class universities, considering differences across the lines of university group, gender, class, geography, sexuality, et cetera. I believe an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary interdisciplinary education programs in world-class universities. I have used a variety of social science methods – participant observation, in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments to shed light on this question in perspective of qualitative research methodology. In addition, I also recently focus on the explore what rural teachers in western China perceive of students who live in lower SES households and how they practice pedagogically to improve rural students’ academic achievements. Based on my research on this educational issues, I am going to provide a better understandings of rural teachers’ perceptions and expectations of their low-SES students, and their pedagogical practices and other educational practices to improve learning outcomes of rural students in China, as well as aims to shed light on the challenges and difficulties faced by the rural teachers and their students in their teaching and learning.

        I have published two books and several of research articles, my research projects recently include one national funded research project, two provincial funded research project, and Evaluation center of the China’s ministry funded research project, which are predominantly focusing on undergraduates’ academic experience in interdisciplinary centers /programs/ in world-class universities, as well as teacher perceptions and practice of improving low-SES student academic achievement in rural China.. So, my current research interest is situated at both intersection of understanding the experiences, confusion, expectations and needs in the framework construction and changes of interdisciplinary education programs and the process that influences both students and teachers individual beliefs and attitudes, to explore some meaningful academic experience in world-top universities and rural schools in China.  In pursuing these research interests, I currently engaged two long-term studies separately: the impact of interdisciplinary education for the experience of students’ learning and research in world-class universities, and qualitative research on teacher perceptions and practice of improving low-SES student academic achievement in rural China.