Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of two acclaimed books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China's Gilded Age (2020), both featured in The Economist and described as "game-changing." Her scholarship has received multiple awards across disciplines: political science, economics, and sociology. In addition to being the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize from the American Political Science Association (APSA) for “impactful contributions to the study of comparative politics,” she has received the Peter Katzenstein Prize (political economy), Viviana Zelizer Prize (economic sociology), Douglass North Award (institutional economics), Alice Amsden Award (socio-economics), and Barrington Moore Prize (honorable mention, historical sociology).

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) produced a 7-part video series featuring her work, “The Economics of China,” which is available on YouTube. Her research on adaptive political communication is supported by the US National Science Foundation. She was also awarded the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship for “high-caliber scholarship that applies fresh perspectives to the most pressing issues of our times.”

Drawing on her scholarship, Ang contributes actively to public service and education. She is a Trustee of the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company, a guardian of the Trust Principles (independence, integrity, and freedom from bias) in news reporting. Apolitical in the UK named her among the world's "100 Most Influential Academics in Government," based on nominations from policymakers. She has testified before the US-China Economic & Security Commission and served as a consultant for the US State Department and various national and international development agencies. Her public writing appears in outlets worldwide, including Foreign Affairs, Pengpai (China), The Ideas Letter (Open Society), The New York Times, ThinkChina (Singapore), and is reprinted in Africa, East and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Foreign Affairs, a premier journal on US foreign policy, named her writing among the "Best of Books" and "Best of Print." Ang is featured in media outlets in and beyond the US, including CGTN Visionaries, Die Zeit (Germany), Economy Chosun (South Korea), Endgame (Indonesia), Ezra Klein Show, Freakonomics Radio, The New York Times, to name a few. In the last decade, she has been invited to speak at over 500 venues in all continents, including several keynote speeches at the United Nations.  

Recently, she delivered keynote speeches on “Adaptive Political Economy” at the UNDP Global Leadership Retreat and SOAS Development Leadership Dialogue, summarized in an editorial at Project Syndicate, "Doing Development in the Polycrisis." Her latest research on China explores the country's economic paradox: a growth slowdown paired with a tech boom. She is also creating a 2.0 version of the Unbundled Corruption Index, which debuted in her 2020 book, China's Gilded Age.  

Ang is a Singaporean who received her BA and PhD from Colorado College and Stanford University respectively. Her office is at the JHU Bloomberg Center in Washington DC.