Lai-Ha Chan is a Senior Lecturer in the Social and Political Sciences Program, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and a Research Associate at the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She was a Fung Global Fellow (2016–2017) at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University, New Jersey. Her research on China’s role in global and regional politics is widely recognized, resulting in two award-winning journal articles, two monographs, two edited volumes, 16 peer-reviewed journal articles and 15 book chapters.

Her recent publications include the co-edited volume China-US Great-Power Rivalry: The Competitive Dynamics of Order-Building in the Indo-Pacific (Routledge, 2024), a journal article shortlisted for the 2024 Boyer Prize: “Quad 2.0 in flux, how possible? A study of India’s changing ‘significant other’,” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 77 (5), 2023: 483–508; and another journal article: "The Promoise of AUKUS: Implications of its minilateral institutional form," Australian Journal of International Affairs, 78 (6), 2024: 848-868. 

Her current research foci centre on global governance and minilateralism. Dr Chan has recently been awarded the Japan Foundation Indo-Pacific Partnership Fellowship (2024-2025). This fellowship supports her resarch project, 'Governing Deep-Sea Mining in the Indo-Pacific', which critically examines the geopolitical, environmental, and legal dimensions of seabed resource governance amid intensifying great-power competition and contested visions of the global commons. This fellowship will enable her to conduct research at Princeton University in July 2025 and undertake an extended research residency in Kyoto from November 2025 to February 2026. 

Dr Chan is an Executive Editor of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific (IRAP), a leading Q1 journal published by Oxford University Press. She is also the co-convenor of the Asia Pacific Research Group under the new Faculty at UTS.