Edward A. Cunningham
Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Edward Cunningham is a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Industrial Performance Center and is completing his PhD in the MIT Department of Political Science. Mr. Cunningham graduated from Georgetown University and received an A.M. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He also served as the program officer of the China Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was selected as a Fulbright Fellow to the PRC, appointed an adjunct professor at Xinan Jiaotong University’s School of Public Administration, and conducted his fieldwork as a visiting fellow at Tsinghua University. His primary research interests relate to China’s energy reform, political economy, industrial organization, and comparative business-government relations.
Mr. Cunningham has worked in Beijing, studied at Peking University and spoken at international and national conferences on issues of energy, industrial policy, competitiveness, and public administration. While at MIT, he served as a core team member and researcher, respectively, of two major multidisciplinary studies. The first research project, a five-year “Globalization Study” of international competitiveness and corporate strategy, examined over 500 leading companies and led to the publication How We Compete (Doubleday, 2005). The second research project, a three-year study of the global coal market, leading energy technologies, and the political economy of energy investment, led to the report The Future of Coal (MIT, 2007). He is the author or a contributing author of several publications, including: Global Taiwan (M.E. Sharpe, 2005); Gonggong Guanli Pinglun(vol. 6) (Tsinghua University Press, 2007); China and East Asian Energy: Prospects and Issues, (vol. 2) (Australia-Japan Research Centre, ANU, 2008); “Why Pollute? Explaining the Environmental Performance of Chinese Power Plants”, China Economic Quarterly, Sept. 2008;and “China’s Energy Governance: Perception and Reality”, in the Audits of the Conventional Wisdom series by MIT’s Center for International Studies.