Dr. Yuan Gao is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Higher Education Research, Southern University of Science and Technology, and an Australian-Chinese scholar. She has been recognised as a Category A Foreign Expert in Guangdong Province and a High-Level Overseas Talent in Shenzhen. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2016, under the supervision of Professor Simon Marginson (University of Oxford). She completed her undergraduate studies at Peking University and holds a postgraduate degree from the University of Bristol, United Kingdom.

Prior to the current appointment, Dr. Gao held research positions at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne; the Centre for International Research on Educational Systems, Victoria University; and the Centre for Higher Education Equity and Diversity Research, La Trobe University. During her career in Australia, she contributed to numerous research projects funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA), and both federal and state government agencies. She has authored nearly ten research reports, including the nationally significant project Securing the Future of Australia.

Dr. Gao's research interests encompass global scientific collaboration networks, the internationalisation of higher education, and the transformation of knowledge production paradigms in higher education. She has published 24 articles in SSCI-indexed journals and 12 articles in CSSCI-indexed journals, along with one sole-authored English monograph and one edited volume.

Dr. Gao serves on the editorial boards of the SSCI journals Higher Education, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, and Tertiary Education and Management. She also serves as an external examiner and doctoral committee member for Ph.D. dissertations at Massey University, New Zealand, and the University of Hong Kong.