Wanying Zhou is a Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. She is also a registered psychologist and therapist, trained at the University of Cambridge, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on adolescent well-being, social-emotional development, and global mental health, with a particular interest in how young people thrive in diverse cultural and educational settings and in developing culturally sensitive tools to capture how individuals experience and evaluate their lives.

Wanying’s interest in well-being is both professional and deeply personal. Having grown up across multiple cultures, she became aware of how the values a society upholds—what is celebrated, what is silenced, and what is considered “a good life”—profoundly shape people’s lived experiences of wellbeing. Her work approaches wellbeing as a dynamic construct that unfolds within relationships, communities, and broader cultural narratives.

She serves on the editorial boards of leading academic journals, including the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and on the board of the Waka Waka Project, an educational charity in Tanzania.