Qiuyan Wu

Quiyan is a PlanAdapt Fellow, based in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China.

As an educator and a Learning Scientist, Qiuyan is passionate about education and learning in and for climate adaptation. During her PhD, she was lucky to work on a cross-sector and cross-disciplinary research project on the transition from a linear to a circular economy. As a Learning Sciences researcher, she was responsible for documenting, monitoring, and facilitating the process of learning across partners to develop a convergence paradigm. She made visible diverse expertise on the project and made explicit the learning process, often the “black box” in multi-stakeholder collaboration. In addition to facilitating boundary-crossing collaboration and learning among team members, she contributed to two cross-cutting thematic working groups – Education & Outreach and JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion). Working in these groups, on one hand, strengthened her perspectives on community engagement as well as equity and justice, and on the other hand, helped her realize that what is critically important but also very challenging in sustainability transitions is how to engage local people with justice and care.

This research experience motivated her to focus her dissertation on local knowledge, learning, and agency in adapting to sustainability challenges and climate change impacts. Her goal is to translate research findings into guidance for interventions with local communities. She conducted her research with nomadic herders in Mongolia, centering on how they make sense of the challenges, how they adapt on the ground, how existing institutional interventions support or interfere with their adaptation, how they envision useful and meaningful institutional support for them, and toward what goals they adapt. She has put together her research findings in her monograph thesis [Wu, Q. (2025). Understanding Relations, Learning, and Transformations in Mongolian Herders’ Climate Change Adaptation. University of Illinois Chicago]. Currently, she is working on journal manuscripts to share the research.

Aligning with her interest in education, learning, and capacity building for climate adaptation, Qiuyan aims to work/continue to work in the following three areas: 1) conducting community-based research to spotlight locally led adaptation; 2) designing and delivering capacity training with local people or with organizations/experts who support local people; 3) acting as a knowledge broker to support trans-boundary collaboration across disciplines and sectors in addressing sustainability challenges.

Qiuyan holds a PhD in Learning Sciences from the University of Illinois Chicago, USA, a Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Shandong Jiaotong University, China.

For more info, see Qiuyan’s LinkedIn page.