Christina Yan Zhang

Christina is a metaverse pioneer. She started her master research on the topic in 2006 and completed a PhD using digital twin for the construction industry. Christina is an award-winning leader with 18 years experience. She was China Director for QS, the world university ranking agency 2013-2020. Starting from scratch, she grew the UK-headquartered firm’s success in China. In 2016, China’s Vice Premier highlighted the use of QS rankings in a speech, impacting 5 years funding allocations of £750bn to 3005 universities with 48 million students. She has sat on 20+ committees for UNESCO, World Bank, Commonwealth, EU, and UK Governments on innovations. She is Vice Chair of the UN’s ICT agency-International Telecommunications Union’s Metaverse Working Group on Sustainability, Accessibility & Inclusion and Co-chair on Pre-standardisation for the CitiVerse Task Group. She works with members states to set up the UN definition and roadmap using frontier technologies for citizen-centred cities, which leads to standards. She sits on Advisory Council of Centre for Science Futures at International Science Council, with a UN mandate on science. She advises on how AI impacts on the global innovation ecosystem. The Metaverse Institute advise the UN, governments, investors, corporates using frontier technologies for positive impact.