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 collective action and institutional alignment become possible under conditions of uncertainty, technological disruption, and fragmented authority. She is particularly interested in how governance architectures enable coordination when roles, rules, and legitimacy are incomplete or contested.

Selina’s work bridges institutional analysis, process scholarship, and innovation studies to investigate how actors navigate ambiguity, negotiate legitimacy, and sustain collaboration in emerging technological domains. Rather than treating innovation as a problem of optimisation or control, she explores the relational, sensemaking, and structural conditions that support responsible and sustainable technological transformation. A distinctive thread in her research considers how underlying assumptions about agency, value, and coordination shape institutional design across different cultural and policy environments.

Her research contributes to debates on innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems, commercialisation policy, university-industry collaboration, interdisciplinary research, and the governance of transformative technologies. Methodologically, she adopts an interpretive, qualitative, and process-oriented approach grounded in in-depth fieldwork and comparative case analysis.

Selina’s current projects focus on the commercialisation and governance of synthetic biology and quantum technologies in Australia, with attention to translational research infrastructures, stakeholder coordination, and public legitimacy in national research initiatives. She chairs the Commercialisation and Translation Advisory Committee at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and contributes to the Centre’s strategic direction and external engagement.

She holds a PhD in Management and Entrepreneurship from Imperial College London. Her doctoral research examined the evolution of large-scale digital innovation initiatives in China, including longitudinal fieldwork conducted as a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University. Prior to academia, she held corporate and 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.