Yuzhuo Cai
About me
Yuzhuo Cai is a Senior Lecturer and Adjunct Professor in higher education administration at the Higher Education Group (HEG) of the Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Finland. He has worked at HEG for over two decades, including serving as Acting Professor from 2013 to 2014. Additionally, he is the Deputy Director at the Research Centre on Transnationalism and Transformation (TRANSIT), which spans three faculties at Tampere University, and the Co-Director of the Sino-Finnish Education Research Centre at the Sino-Finnish Joint Learning Innovation Institute, involving more than 20 Chinese and Finnish universities.
He is currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, and Co-Director of the Global Research Institute for Finnish Education at the Education University of Hong Kong. He also holds guest professorships at Beijing Normal University, Tongji University, and Yunnan Normal University, and is a visiting professor at The Asia Pacific Higher Education Research Partnership (APHERP) hosted by Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Additionally, he serves as a doctoral student supervisor at Peking University, and Catholic University of the Sacred Heart.
He holds editorial roles as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Triple Helix, Co-Editor of the Journal of Studies in International Education, and Associate Editor of the Journal of the Knowledge Economy. Moreover, he is a member of the advisory board for the Master of Arts in International Higher Education and Management program at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and a member of the Think Tank for the China Coordination Group under the SGroup university network in Europe.
His research primarily focuses on higher education and innovation studies, with particular emphasis on the interaction between higher education and society within innovation ecosystems, incorporating international perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches. The key areas where his research is internationally recognised include institutional theory analysis of higher education, the Triple Helix model of innovation, universities’ engagement in innovation ecosystems and graduate employability. He is also involved in comparative studies of Chinese and Finnish education and plays a leading role in facilitating international research networks in these fields.
With over 150 academic publications, his work has accumulated more than 4,000 citations (h-index = 32). His research has been published in renowned journals across multiple disciplines such as Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, Journal of Studies in International Education, Minerva, Technovation, International Journal of Management Reviews, Science and Public Policy, and Scientometrics. He is recognised as one of the most productive researchers in his faculty at Tampere University and received the Most Cited Paper Award in 2022. Furthermore, Furthermore, he has been listed in Stanford/Elsevier’s Top 2% Scientist Rankings in the field of education for three consecutive years.
He has been intensively teaching courses on higher education and administrative sciences at Tampere University and has frequently given guest lectures at many universities abroad over the past 15 years. He has also supervised six PhD students to completion, is currently supervising five more, and has supervised 28 Master’s students.
Among his various roles in funded research projects, his most prominent achievement is serving as the Principal Investigator of a recently funded Horizon Europe project on youth’s education-employment transitions in post-COVID-19 Europe, awarded a grant of 2.9 million euros. Besides, he coordinated four Nordic or Finnish projects, and serving as work package leader for nine EU-funded projects.
His dedication to interdisciplinary research is partially fuelled by his diverse academic background, which includes a BA in Computer Sciences, an MA in Psychology from China, an M.Phil in Comparative and International Education from the University of Oslo, and a PhD in Administrative Sciences from the University of Tampere.