Qiqi Zhou is a dedicated researcher, teacher, and academic communicator, boasting a background in simulation gaming, social innovation for sustainability, and media production. Since 2021, she has been a senior researcher and lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences. The research and teaching are affiliated with the R&D department of the Academy for Games and Media, where she is actively engaged in the field of "Media Innovation & Sustainability" with a keen focus on emerging paradigms such as "the Metaverse" and "Virtual reality," and its “Connectedness to Nature.”
Her main research and professional interests are the development, usage, and evaluation of serious games and gaming-simulation for learning and sustainability. By actively incorporating game-based learning, system thinking, and mixed methods, she fosters an interactive learning environment that encourages critical thinking and creativity among her students to unravel the multifaceted roles of advanced internet technologies and their potential impacts on society. She is also an experienced coordinator in collaborative international research programs, mainly liaising between the Netherlands and China.
She has more than 8 years of experience in TV production, and more than 15 years of research, teaching, and project management in the international context of higher education. She holds a Ph.D. (TU-Delft, 2014) in policy sciences and an MSc. in Environmental Sciences (Wageningen University, 2006). From 2008 until 2014, she was a Ph.D. researcher and an assistant professor at the Technology, Policy, and Management (TPM) faculty at Delf University of Technology, the Netherlands. Her main interest topics are organizational change and management-oriented learning, such as sustainable development. In her research and teaching, she frequently works with gaming simulation and serious games. From 2015 until 2021, she works as associate dean for Asia and faculty of Innovative Learning at TIAS School for Business and Society, Tilburg University. She is keenly interested in cross-cultural learning and leads international collaboration on degree education programs, exchange visits, and business events. Before coming to the Netherlands, she worked in China as a professional graphic designer, news presenter, journalist, and TV program editor.
She uses Mandarin and English at an academic level and speaks Dutch fluently.

Gaming-simulation design, application, facilitation and research, serious gaming, ocean literacy, policy analysis, complex systems, system thinking, sustainability science, Connectedness to Nature, immersive Media, mixed-method, Q methodology, thematic Analysis