Yu Cao, PhD

Yu Cao, PhD, is a Senior Fellow at The Arctic Institute. She is a contributing writer to the Institute’s weekly publication in app form, The Arctic This Week App. Yu’s areas of interests include Arctic policy, energy security and justice, and Corporate Social Responsibility in the extractive industry.

Yu is currently an Assistant Professor in Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development at California Polytechnic State University. She completed her PhD degree – on multinational extractive industries’ Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives – in Political Science at Northern Arizona University. Between 2023 and 2025, she was a Postdoc at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP). At ACEP, Yu has been working on the Community Appropriate Sustainable Energy Security (CASES) projects. CASES’s goals include developing and applying tools for energy planning to help northern communities enhance values and long-term capacity, and strengthen community energy sovereignty. Yu engages with CASES Alaska communities, coordinating Alaska input into international comparative analyses.

Yu also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law and Legal Studies from Shanghai International Studies University, a Master’s degree in Economics from Kent State University, and a Master’s degree in Arctic and Northern Studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her graduate thesis on communities’ reflections on oil companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility activities in Utqiaġvik, Alaska was published in the Yearbook of Polar Law.