Dr. Kim Vender

Kim Vender is an affiliate researcher at the Centre for EU-Asia Connectivity (CEAC). Her research focuses on China and environmental governance. Her broader interests encompass the complexities of climate change and biodiversity governance, development cooperation, the concept of international leadership, and China’s engagement with the EU and Latin America. Kim holds a Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations from the University of Edinburgh (UOE), an M.A. in East Asian Politics from Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), and a B.A. in China Studies from the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin).  

Kim’s work experience includes both academic and practitioner roles. As an academic, she co-led the UOE’s Geopolitics Lab under the UK-Ukraine Twinning Initiative (funded by Research England/UUKi), enabling collaboration between Edinburgh University and Taras Shevchenko National University Kyiv. She furthermore worked as a Research Assistant to Dr. Kristen Hopewell, then Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at UOE, and as a Student Assistant to Prof. Dr. Sebastian Bersick, Chair of International Political Economy of East Asia at RUB. She served as team lead in the 2015 Youth Innovation Competition on Global Governance (YICGG) in Milan, Italy, where her team’s project won “best project proposal.” Kim also has extensive teaching experience ranging from international political economy and global development challenges to comparative politics.

In practitioner roles, Kim coordinated biodiversity and climate resilience projects in Scotland and holds a Conservation Project Management & Design certification awarded by the Conservation Measures Partnership. Her experience also extends to consultancy work for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in Beijing, China, work placements with German political foundations in Berlin and Beijing, the Centre for China-EU Relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, and more than four years of co-convening the Foreign Policy Research Network in Edinburgh.

Interested in the evidence-policy nexus, Kim is keen to explore policy engagement to facilitate real-world impact of political science research. In her capacity as co-founder of the SDG Research Network at UOE and during her time at political foundations, she organised workshops and panel talks with policymakers in the UK, Germany, and China. Regarding her doctoral research, Kim presented her findings to the Scottish Government’s International Climate Change Team on Loss and Damage during their COP28 preparation in 2023. She is now transforming her PhD thesis into a book, which will be published by Routledge in 2025.