I draw on multidisciplinary scholarship to understand culture and the self with a specific interest in how ideas are kept alive through cultural expressions and practices. One current focus is to build a sound body of knowledge around ecological worldviews and practices and integrate Earth ethics into technological design and use at the cultural meaning level. This is to take seriously the idea that we are always in nature and critique a historically derived demarcation between human condition and experience in their engineered environments and the broader Earth ecology. My work thus serves to examine cultural ideas and practices that insulate the self from the Earth ecology and understand what such insulation does to the self in terms of psychological experience of agency, felt structure and freedom. 

I was born and grew up in a lovely small city with a lot of rivers and lakes in Jiangsu province, China. I later came to the U.S. for graduate school. I received my Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where I was lucky to be advised by Prof. Brian Lowery. After that, I have been working with Prof. Hazel Markus on research related to culture, creativity, and smart technology. My work has been supported by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), and Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program (HPDTRP). 

On this site, you can find my on-going research and art projects, papers and educational materials. Please reach out if you are interested in potential collaboration or learning more about my projects! I would like to practice a "philosopher on a walk" model and share my thinking via workshops, talks and so on. There is real joy in thinking together, and addressing many urgent issues of our time entails finding new ways to co-create knowledge in an open, participatory manner. My email is cxu66@stanford.edu.