Dr. Christina Yan Zhang

Christina has been a metaverse pioneer since 2006 with a PhD in digital twin for the AEC industry. Christina has 18 years’ experience turning vision into successful businesses. She worked for QS, the world university rankings agency 2013-2020, as China Director. Her work impacted 5 years’ £750bn government funding to 3005 universities with 48 million students. She has sat on 20+ committees for UNESCO, World Bank, Commonwealth, EU on Innovation. She is UN ITU Co-chair of Pres-standardisation for CitiVerse TaskGroup to develop future smart cities. She authored the first UN approved technical report on “People-centred CitiVerse”, which proposed eight levels of CitiVerse starting points (from citizens to countries to planet) and a new people-centred, planet-friendly approach to public private partnership. She sits on Advisory Council for Centre for Science Futures of International Science Council, the world's largest science body of 230 national/international academies of sciences; and advisory board on “AI Economy” for The Economist Impact alongside UN high-level advisory body on AI members. The Metaverse Institute is one of four organisations who proposed ITU to set up the “Global Initiative on Virtual Worlds—Discovering the CitiVerse” in 2023, which was launched by UNICC, ITU and Digital Dubai in June 2024.