Deborah Healey
Professor; CIBEL Co-Director
Deborah Healey is a Professor at UNSW Law and a Director of the China International Business and Economic Law Centre. She is also a member of the Centre for Law, Markets and Regulation. Her research and teaching focus on competition law and policy in Australia, China, Hong Kong and the ASEAN nations and she has written widely in them over a long period of time. She is a regular visitor to those jurisdictions to research and teach. Within the area of competition law, she is particularly interested in the role of government in the market, both in Australia and internationally; merger regulation; competition in banking and finance; and the digital economy. Deborah has undertaken substantial research in the development of the Anti-Monopoly Law of China against the background of its political economy and has written widely alone and with Chinese co-authors and in material translated into Chinese. She has consulted with, and completed research projects for, UNCTAD, OECD and ASEAN, She is a Non-Government Adviser to the International Competition Network and a member of the Law Council of Australia Competition Law Committee.
Weihuan Zhou
Professor; CIBEL Co-Director
Dr Zhou is Professor and Co-Director of the China International Business and Economic Law (CIBEL) Centre, Faculty of Law and Justice, UNSW Sydney. His research explores the most current and controversial issues in the field of international economic law (IEL), particularly the nexus between international trade law and China. He is the (co)-author of Between Market Economy and State Capitalism: China’s State-Owned Enterprises and The World Trading System (CUP, 2022) and China’s Implementation of Rulings of the WTO (Hart, 2019) and co-editor of Rethinking, Repackaging and Rescuing World Trade Law in the Post-Pandemic Era (Hart, 2021), Non-Market Economies in the Global Trading System: The Special Case of China (Springer, 2018) and The China-Australia Free Trade Agreement: A 21st-Century Model (Hart, 2018). His work has appeared in all top journals in the field and in some of the best journals in the broader field of international law (such as the American Journal of International Law and International & Comparative Law Quarterly). His work has been cited widely, including in reports of the European Parliament, the Parliament of Australia, Australia’s Productivity Commission, US Congressional Research Services and World Economic Forum and by leading scholars in the field. Dr Zhou has taken a number of senior professional and academic roles internationally, including a former Executive Council Member and currently co-Secretary of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL), and editorial board member of the World Trade Review and the Journal of International Trade Law and Policy. Dr Zhou is a qualified lawyer in Australia and consults for governments and major companies on trade remedy cases and other cross-border trade and investment matters.
Ross Buckley
Laureate and Scientia Professor; KPMG Law -- KWM Chair in Disruptive Innovation and Law; ARC Laureate Fellow
My research interests are FinTech, RegTech, central bank digital currencies and the Consumer Data Right and, more broadly, the full range of issues that the rise of data and its algorithmic analysis pose for society.
My Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship, 2020 - 2025, is a $2.6 million project that explores how Australia might best regulate the rise of data and its analysis so as to seize the related benefits while managing the many risks. We are currently recruiting Postdoctoral Fellows and doctoral candidates to work on this project. See the Laureate Project website at https://fintechrevn.org/ for details of these opportunities, and for all of the Project's research outputs.
Cameron Holley
Professor; Head of School of Law, Society, and Criminology
Cameron is a Professor and Head of School for the School of Law, Society and Criminology at UNSW Law & Justice. He is the current co-chair of the International Network of Environmental Compliance and Enforcement (INECE) Academic Committee, a member of the Taskforce on Earth System Law, and an associate editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Environmental Law. Cameron has publications in the areas of environmental law, natural resources law, energy law and water law, with a focus on regulation and governance. His past work has examined energy and disaster risk education in Hong Kong and Indonesia, and his current research agenda is centred on water, energy and climate governance.
Mimi Zou
Professor; Head of School of Private and Commercial Law
Mimi Zou is Professor of Law and incoming Head of School, School of Private and Commercial Law at UNSW. Prior to UNSW, Mimi held the Chair in Commercial Law at the University of Exeter, UK. Mimi’s research focuses on the impact of new technologies on private and commercial law. She founded and led the first legal tech innovation lab at the University of Oxford and held the first academic post in Chinese law at Oxford. She graduated with the BCL and DPhil degrees from Oxford on Oxford-Australia and Commonwealth scholarships, and with LLB and BEc Soc Sci Honours degrees from the University of Sydney.
Lisa Toohey
Professor
Professor Lisa Toohey is an internationally recognised expert in trade law, focussing especially on WTO dispute settlement who rejoined UNSW in February 2024. She was one of CIBEL’s original founding members in 2015 and prior to academia practised as a lawyer in Australia and Vietnam. Lisa currently leads two externally funded projects, one on Traceability and Trade in the Asia-Pacific, and the second on Weaponised Trade. She is available for supervision of PhD projects within her areas of expertise.
Jonathan Bonnitcha
Associate Professor
Jonathan is an Associate Professor in UNSW’s Faculty of Law and Justice. He is best-known for his research on investment treaties. His research also considers the inter-relationships between different systems of foreign investment governance, including investor-state contracts, national investment laws, national investment dispute management agencies and international principles, such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
From 2022 to 2025, Jonathan is a Chief Investigator on the ARC-funded project China’s Belt and Road Initiative: A New Model of Economic Governance?, along with CIBEL colleagues Heng Wang, Kun Fan and Ross Buckley. Within this project, Jonathan is leading the research stream on investor-state contracting between Chinese firms engaged in outward foreign investment and government entities of the host states in which they invest.
May Fong Cheong
Associate Professor
Dr May Fong Cheong is Associate Professor at the School of Private and Commercial Law, Faculty of Law and Justice, UNSW Sydney. She is also Adjunct Professor at Multimedia University Malaysia and was formerly Professor and Dean at the Faculty of Law, University of Malaya. She completed her Bachelor of Laws (Honours) at the University of Malaya, Master of Laws at the National University of Singapore, and her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She also holds a Diploma in Shariah Law and Practice from International Islamic University Malaysia. Dr Cheong researches the private law of obligations, especially in the fields of contract law, commercial law, consumer law and competition law. She specialises in Asian Comparative Law including Chinese Law along with the law in India and Southeast Asian jurisdictions.
Kun Fan
Associate Professor
Fan Kun is Associate Professor of UNSW Law's China International Business and Economic Law (CIBEL) Centre. Her teaching and research focus in the area of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), comparative legal studies, and law and society. Professor Fan has studied and worked in China, Singapore, U.S.A., Switzerland, France, Hong Kong and Canada, and speaks Chinese, English and French. With her training in both the East and the West, in both common law and civil law jurisdictions, she is particularly interested in broad intellectual inquiries across national, disciplinary and professional boundaries. Before joining us, Professor Fan was an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at McGill University in Canada and was named the Norton Rose Fulbright Faculty Scholar in Arbitration & Commercial Law in 2017. She has also taught for seven years at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2009-2016) and was a Visiting Scholar of the Harvard Yenching Institute at Harvard University (2012-2013).
Alexandra George
Associate Professor
Dr Alexandra George joined the UNSW Law Faculty in 2007, having had earlier academic appointments at Queen Mary, University of London, the University of Wales, Swansea and the University of Exeter in the UK. She has also worked at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy and at the University of Sydney, has practised as an intellectual property and media lawyer, was Associate to Justice MF Moore in the Federal Court of Australia and the Industrial Relations Court of Australia, and worked in journalism at Reuters.
Alexandra’s research focuses on international intellectual property and the philosophy of intellectual property law. Recent publications examine issues of jurisdiction and enforcement in international intellectual property law, including intellectual property implications of Brexit. Her philosophical research examines issues such as the metaphysics and structure of intellectual property law, and ‘property’ concepts in the commodification of intangible objects.
Xiaochuan Weng
Associate Professor
Charlie Xiao-chuan WENG joined the UNSW Law faculty in 2015 as an Associate Professor. Previously, he was Eastern Scholar Chair Professor of Law and Assistant Dean at the KoGuan Law School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU, China) . He also taught at Nagoya University Graduate School of Law (Japan) as Designated Associate Professor. He studied law at East China University of Political Science and Law (ECUPL) before completing his LLM at the National University of Singapore (NUS). After working for ECUPL for five years, he went to the University of Pennsylvania School of Law for his LLM and SJD in corporate law, followed by an appointment as a Robert S. McNamara Fellow at the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law. In 2012, he was recruited by SJTU as a Research Professor. He also held fellow/visiting professor positions in many leading research institutions, such as Stanford Law School and Cambridge University.
Anton Didenko
Senior Lecturer
Anton is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney. He specialises in banking and finance law (with a focus on FinTech and cyber security) and has published widely on the legal aspects of central bank digital currencies (CBDC), regulatory sandboxes, decentralised finance and open banking. Anton’s research on CBDC (including a report published by the Asian Development Bank and an article ‘Central Bank Digital Currencies as a Potential Response to Some Particularly Pacific Problems’ in Asia Pacific Law Review) attracted a lot of attention from international organisations and policymakers (including the G20 and the Bank for International Settlements), as well as leading central banks.
Prior to joining UNSW Sydney, Anton worked as a lawyer in various roles, including as head of legal support of international operations in major commercial banks.
Anton is a leading expert in transnational commercial law: he is the author of a monograph on the documentary history of the Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment (Hart, 2021) and the managing editor of the Cape Town Convention Journal.
Anton holds multiple law degrees from a number of countries, including an MJur and a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
Lu Wang
Lecturer
Dr Lu Wang is a Lecturer and Member of the China International Business and Economic Law (CIBEL) Centre at the UNSW Faculty of Law and Justice. She specialises in international economic law broadly defined, with particular focus on international investment law, international arbitration, State-owned enterprises (SOEs) and Chinese regulation of foreign trade and investment. Lu works closely with international organisations and key actors involved in cross-border investment and has engaged in a few major research projects on Chinese investment treaties. She has published on cutting-edge issues in international economic law with world-leading publishers and served as a co-guest editor of the ICSID Review – Foreign Investment Law Journal for its first Special Focus Issue on SOE and international investment law (published by Oxford University Press).
Lu joined UNSW after completing two PhDs from the University of Liverpool (UK) and Xi’an Jiaotong University (China). She worked temporarily at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) of the World Bank Group in Washington DC (2018) and was a Visiting Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge (2014).
Dr Xue (Sophia) Bai
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr Xue (Sophia) BAI is a Postdoctoral Fellow at China International Business & Economic Law (CIBEL) Centre, Faculty of Law and Justice, University of New South Wales. Her research explores different government restraints on competition, with a particular focus on how state-owned enterprises (SOEs) interact with competition law and policy. Other research areas include the interaction between sustainability and competition law, the application of competition law in the digital market, competitive neutrality policy, and competition impact assessment. She has published widely in the field, including her recent article ‘Competitive Neutrality: OECD Recommendations and the Australian Experience’ (2023) 19(2) Journal of Competition Law & Economics with Rhonda L Smith and Deborah Healey.
Dr Bai was awarded the Concurrences Ph.D. Award in Law 2022, for her thesis ‘Reform of Chinese State-Owned Enterprises - What China Can Learn from the Practice of Competitive Neutrality Policy in Australia’, and her book based on the thesis was published in June 2023.
Leon Trakman
Emeritus Professor
Professor Leon Trakman is Former Dean of Law at the University of New South Wales, 2002-2007 and currently a UNSW Professor of Law.
A Doctoral Fellow at Harvard, he holds both Masters and Doctorate degrees earned at the Harvard Law School. His academic appointments include: Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of California, Davis; Professor of Law, Dalhousie Law School; Visiting Professor, Wisconsin Law School; Visiting Professor of Law, University of Cape Town; Bora Laskin National Fellow in Human Rights, Canada, 1997/98; Killam Professor, Killam Foundation, Visiting Professor, Tulane Law School; Bolton Visiting Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University.
He has received prestigious fellowships. These include the Bora Laskin National Fellowship (one awarded annually across all university disciplines in Canada), a Killam Senior Fellowship; various grants awarded by the Canada Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2018, he concluded a four-year Discovery Grant awarded by Australian Research Council for which he was Lead Chief Investigator.
| NAME | POSITION AND ORGANISATION |
|---|---|
| Professor Lyria Bennett Moses | Associate Dean Research and Director of the Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation, UNSW Law & Justice |
| Scientia Professor Ross Buckley | KPMG Law-KWM Professor of Disruptive Innovation and Law, UNSW Law & Justice; Australian Laureate Fellow (ARC) |
| Professor Lucas Lixinski (Chair) | Associate Dean International, UNSW Law & Justice |
| Professor Deborah Healey | Co-Director, China International Business and Economic Law (CIBEL) Centre, UNSW Law & Justice |
| Professor Shan Pan | Deputy Head of School (Research) at the School of Information Systems and Technology Management, Director of the Digital Sustainability Knowledge Hub and AGSM Scholar, UNSW Business School |
| Ms Jacqueline White | Senior Business Development Manager, UNSW Knowledge Exchange |
| Professor Weihuan Zhou | Co-Director, China International Business and Economic Law (CIBEL) Centre, UNSW Law & Justice |