In this episode, I converse with Yangyang Cheng, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade and was a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University and an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Yangyang received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 2015, and her Bachelor’s in Science from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Yangyang is a regular columnist for SupChina and her writings have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE World News, Foreign Policy, MIT Technology Review, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, ChinaFile, and other publications.

Yangyang currently studies the ethics and governance of science in China and their global implications. We indulge in a splendid conversation on her extremely interesting and riveting journey through science and life; early fascinations about the fundamental questions of the universe and abstractions; pursuing Physics in a manner akin to a world-class athlete; her time on the ATLAS and CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); exceptional mentors who inspired her; navigating rejections in life; diving into China studies straight from particle physics; future of fundamental curiosity-driven research; and many more things!!