Dr Lijiaozi Cheng (she/they)

Lijiaozi holds the Mildred Blaxter Fellowship and is currently focusing on her interests in the concepts of health and illness, examining how the grey areas between health and illness are conceptualized and operationalized in everyday life, as well as in public health and academic research contexts in China.

She completed her PhD at Sheffield in 2022, with a thesis entitled 'Making Sense of Suboptimal Health (亚健康): Negotiating and Embodying the Conceptual Space of“Neither Healthy Nor Diseased”'. After her PhD, Lijiaozi received a University of Sheffield publication scholarship to further develop her ideas for publication. She was also awarded the Petrie Watson Exhibitions Prize and the Phil Strong Memorial Prize during her doctoral studies.

Before beginning her Mildred Blaxter Fellowship, she concluded her role as a Research Associate on a project focused on embedding cultural intelligence in institutional leadership to improve inclusion at the University of Sheffield. In this role, she organized, designed, and convened a series of focus groups to survey and document the lived experiences of staff in each faculty regarding cultural inclusion. Additionally, she has worked as a Project Support Administrator at the University of Leeds for the ESRC White Rose University Consortium-funded collaborative network 'Vital Circulations' and as a Research Assistant at Bath Spa University for the 'Race to Recruit' project. This project focused on campaigns encouraging uptake of vaccination and participation in COVID-19 research targeting UK-based minority ethnic groups.

Lijiaozi has an interdisciplinary background, having completed her master’s degree in literature and Modernity at the University of Edinburgh and her undergraduate degree in English and Communications at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.