Selina Cao

Dr Zhe (Selina) Cao is a Research Fellow in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at UQ Business School and an ARC Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology. Her research examines how fragmented worlds can work together. She studies how actors, institutions, and knowledge systems interact and coordinate under conditions of uncertainty, technological disruption, and fragmented authority, with particular interest in how engagement becomes possible across sectors, disciplines, and cultures without erasing difference.

Her work explores fragmentation and coordination at three interconnected levels: institutional, epistemic, and ontological. She investigates how organisations and governance systems coordinate across institutional boundaries, how knowledge travels across disciplines and cultures, and how individuals and organisations engage paradox and persistent tensions in organisational life.

Theoretical Lenses

Her work draws on several streams of organisation and management scholarship, including:

• Ecosystem theory
• Institutional theory and institutional governance
• Process and practice-based perspectives on organisations
• Paradox and tensions in organisational life
• Epistemic infrastructures and knowledge translation across cultures

Empirical Contexts

She investigates these questions in settings where fragmentation is especially visible, including:

• Innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems
• Commercialisation and research translation
• University-industry collaboration
• Interdisciplinary research environments
• Governance of emerging technologies such as synthetic biology and quantum technologies
• Cross-cultural knowledge production and translation in management research

Methodologically, she adopts interpretive, qualitative, and process-oriented approaches, including in-depth fieldwork and comparative case analysis.

Her current empirical projects focus on the commercialisation and governance of synthetic biology and quantum technologies in Australia, with particular attention to translational research infrastructures, stakeholder coordination, and public legitimacy in national innovation initiatives. She also chairs the Commercialisation and Translation Advisory Committee at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology.

Alongside this empirical work, Selina develops conceptual and philosophical research in organisation theory examining how paradox, relational ways of being, and epistemic infrastructures shape how actors engage difference in organisational life.

She holds a PhD in Management and Entrepreneurship from Imperial College London. Her doctoral research examined large-scale digital innovation initiatives in China, drawing on longitudinal fieldwork conducted at Tsinghua University. Prior to academia, she held professional roles at DuPont and PwC in North America, experiences that continue to inform her interest in the lived realities of organisational and institutional change.