Dr. Xiao-Shan Yap is Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and serves as Senior Policy Advisor to the EPFL Space Center, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland. Yap is Principal Investigator and the director of a five-year research program (2024 - 2029) on ‘Planetary stewardship in view of earth-space sustainability’ (PLANETSTEWARDS), supported by a 1.5 million euro ‘Starting Grant’ from the European Research Council (ERC).
Yap is an interdisciplinary social scientist focusing on the intersection of innovation and transitions, global governance, and development economics. She is pioneering a research agenda on 'earth-space sustainability' to specify opportunities and challenges for sustainable planetary futures as anthropogenic activities expand to outer space. In 2020, she founded ‘Earth-Space Sustainability’, the first science and policy initiative aiming at ensuring sustainable and functional earth-space systems. She is also Co-Director of the Working Group on Earth-Space Governance at the Earth System Governance Project, Chair of Commons in Space conference at the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), a senior member of the Steering Group at the Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN), and serves on the Editorial Board of the leading journal Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions.
Among others, Yap's work had also been awarded with a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship in 2015, a Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship in 2017, a Geneva Science-Policy Interface (GSPI) Impact Collaboration Grant, and a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Starting Grant of 1.8 mil CHF in 2023.