Dr Pak Wan Major Pau

• PhD in Public Administration and Policy, University of Birmingham, 2026
•  Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA), Advance HE, 2024
•  MSc in Public Policy and Management, King’s College London, 2017
•  BA in History, Wuhan University, 2016

Dr Pau is interested in what happens when policies look coherent on paper but feel very different on the ground. Much of his research starts from that tension. Dr Pau completed his PhD in Public Administration and Policy at the University of Birmingham in 2026, examining how grassroots organisations reshaped disaster recovery when official responses failed to reflect community priorities.

Since then, Dr Pau's research has continued to follow people and institutions through moments of disruption, from agricultural adaptation and rural resilience to civic mobilisation after urban disaster. Dr Pau has also taught seminars of politics, international relations, comparative public management, and research methods modules. In both research and teaching, Dr Pau is drawn to questions that sit between institutions and everyday life. 

Dr Pau's current research examines agricultural adaptation and social resilience in rural communities in Shandong and Guangdong, where he contributes to research design, fieldwork coordination, literature review, and data analysis. Dr Pau's doctoral research focused on grassroots organisations and disaster recovery in communities in Kaohsiung and Pingtung, examining governance, social capital, indigenous communities, and state-society relations after Typhoon Morakot. Dr Pau is also developing research on post-disaster civic mobilisation and state-society relations in Hong Kong. Across these projects, his wider interests include public policy, resilience, climate adaptation, community agency, and comparative governance in East Asia.