Karen Lai (黎碧瑶) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. She is an economic geographer with research interests in money and finance, global cities, markets, neoliberalism, and political economy, focusing particularly on issues of networks, knowledge, regulation, and economic development in East and Southeast Asia.
She received her Bachelor and Master degrees from the National University of Singapore and obtained her PhD degree from the University of Nottingham (UK). She has published in internationally-refereed journals such as Environment & Planning A, Journal of Economic Geography, Geoforum and Urban Studies, and was co-author of ‘Changing Landscapes of Singapore’ (2003). Her PhD dissertation (titled: Approaches to ‘markets’: the development of Shanghai as an international financial centre) was awarded the annual PhD prize in 2009 by the Economic Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers). From 2008 to 2010, she was at the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia (Canada) on a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
