Wai Yee WAN is Associate Dean (Research and Internationalisation) and Professor, School of Law, City University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining City University of Hong Kong in January 2020, she was at Singapore Management University (SMU), where she last held the positions of Dean of Post-Graduate Research Programmes and Professor of Law.

Immediately prior to joining academia in late 2005, she was a partner at Allen & Gledhill in Singapore, where she practised in mergers and acquisitions and equity capital markets. Her main areas of research are in corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, securities regulation, financial consumer regulation and global restructuring and insolvency. Her research work centres on the optimal legal institutions and governance framework in order for securities markets to flourish. She has a particular interest in Asian securities markets and why the solutions to corporate governance issues, securities market integration and reorganisation of distressed companies in the West (the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US)) may not be ideal as a basis of global best practice or may not work as intended in Asia.

Her publications have appeared in books and in international peer-reviewed legal journals, including American Journal of Comparative Law, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, European Business Organisations Law Review, Journal of Corporate Law Studies, Journal of Business Law, Company and Securities Law Journal and Lloyds’ Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly. In 2021, at CityU, she has successfully obtained the Collaborative Research Fund award of HKD3.11 million for the project “Hong Kong Insolvency and Restructuring Law and Policy in Times of COVID-19 and Beyond” (as Project Coordinator). While at SMU, she has received external research grants and research awards and fellowships, including the Ministry of Education Tier 2 research grant, the Singapore Judicial College grant, Lee Kuan Yew Fellowship for Research Excellence (the highest honour given for research excellence in SMU), the Lee Kong Chian Fellowship, Hauser Global Research Fellowship by NYU, and the Lee Foundation Fellowship for Research Excellence. Her research findings have been relied on in consultation papers involving law and regulatory reforms locally and internationally.

She is on the editorial boards of International Insolvency Review, Australian Journal of Corporate Law and Company Lawyer and she has served on national committees relating to law reform and policy in Singapore.