Rate My Professor Xuemei Bai

Distinguished Professor Xuemei Bai is Professor of Urban Environment and Human Ecology at the Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University. She holds a B.Sc. from Peking University and M.Eng. and Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo. She joined ANU in 2011, following positions as Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO, Visiting Professor at Yale University, Senior Researcher at environmental research institutes in Japan, Adjunct Professor at Beijing Normal University, and Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo. Currently, she leads the ARC Laureate Project "Cities as transformative agents for a climate-safe future," administered by ANU with funding of $3,141,020. She is also affiliated with the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions.

Professor Bai's research focuses on frontiers of urban sustainability science and policy, including drivers and impacts of urbanization, urban socio-ecological systems' structure, function, processes and evolution, urban metabolism, cities and climate change, urban resilience, policy and governance, sustainability experiments, transitions and transformations, and urban futures in the Anthropocene. She has authored or co-authored over 200 publications, including more than 20 in Nature, Science, and Nature Research journals such as "How to stop cities and companies causing planetary harm" (Nature, 2022), "City–company collaboration towards aligned science-based target setting" (Nature Sustainability, 2025), and "Cities as transformative agents for global sustainability" (Science, 2025). Her scholarship has received over 48,000 citations on Google Scholar and 17,867 on Scopus. She served as Lead Author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Global Energy Assessment, IPBES Global Assessment, and IPCC AR6.

Among her honors are Fellowship of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (2017), Volvo Environment Prize Laureate (2018), Global Economy Prize (2021), ARC Laureate Fellowship (2023), listings among the World's 100 Most Influential People in Climate Change Policy (2019, 2021), and recognition as a 2025 Highly Cited Researcher. Professor Bai is Deputy Editor of Global Sustainability and serves on editorial boards of journals including Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, and the International Journal of Sustainable Cities and Society. She has held leadership roles in Future Earth, Earth Commission, IHDP, and US National Academies initiatives, contributed to European Research Council panels, served on award juries, delivered invited lectures at top institutions, and supervised award-winning PhD and Honours students.