Institute of Politics

Dr. Yangyang Cheng is a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her work focuses on the development of science and technology in China and U.S.‒China relations. Her essays on these and related topics have appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED, and have received several awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA), Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Her literary criticism has received the 2024 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from The Washington Monthly and a 2022 People's Choice Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is an editor at the Made in China Journal and hosts its Gateway to Global China podcast. She is also a co-host, writer, and producer of the acclaimed narrative podcast series, Dissident at the Doorstep, from Crooked Media. She served on the inaugural jury for the Baifang Schell Book Prize from Asia Society and has been a judge for the James Beard Journalism Awards.

Born and raised in China, Cheng received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor’s from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade, most recently at Cornell University and as an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. While at the University of Chicago, Cheng served on the Student Advisory Board at the Institute of Politics (IOP) and was a co-founder of the IOP's student-run International Policy Program.