About this speaker
Dr. Xiao-Shan Yap is Assistant Professor of Innovation and Global Governance at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Yap is Principal Investigator of the project ‘Planetary stewardship in view of earth-space sustainability’ (PLANETSTEWARDS), supported by the European Research Council (ERC) from 2024 – 2029. An interdisciplinary social scientist, Yap focuses on innovation, global governance, and development economics. She pioneered the concept of ‘earth-space sustainability’, which advocates for addressing challenges on Earth and in space in an integrative way as anthropogenic activities expand to outer space. In 2020, she founded ‘Earth-Space Sustainability’, the first science and policy initiative aimed at ensuring sustainable and functional earth-space systems in the future. In line with the initiative, she is also Co-Lead of the Working Group on Earth-Space Governance at the Earth System Governance Project, Chair of the ‘2024 Earth-Space Symposium’, Senior Policy Advisor of the EPFL Space Center, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland, and (Co)Chair of Commons in Space conference at the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) from 2022 - 2023. Among others, Yap's work has also been awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Starting Grant and a Geneva Science-Policy Interface (GSPI) Impact Collaboration Grant.
