Kaiyi Zhu is a PhD candidate at TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, Chair of History of Architecture & and Urban Planning. She is trained as an architect with interests in conservation and transformation of heritage, and received the master degree in Conservation of Historic Buildings at the University of Bath (UK).

Kaiyi’s doctoral research project is titled as "In the Name of Conservation”, and mainly focuses on three aspects: transnational exchanges of ideas, pedagogies, interpretation of heritage conservation discourse in China and related policy making, and practical approaches adopted in historic neighbourhoods transformation in big cities. She authored paper Temporalities and the conservation of cultural relic protection units: legislative, economic and citizen times of the Bugaoli community in globalising Shanghai for the Journal of Built Heritage, and The Social Dimension of Urban Transformation in Shanghai: Population Mobility, Modernity, and Globalization for the Journal of Urban History. 

As a PhD candidate, she worked as a teaching instructor and assistant at TU Delft, published papers in peer-reviewed journals, and attended conferences and symposiums. Kaiyi has extensive research interests, the scope including water heritage, adaptive reuse of modern architecture in the Netherlands, sustainable waterscape, temporalities of urban development and urban justice. She presented papers related to the complexity of urban transformation and conservation of historic neighbourhoods, and chaired conference sessions for IPHS 2020 (postponed) and IVR World Congress 2019. She is an editorial staff of the European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes, and a reviewer of the Journal of Architecture. She is also a member of the Centre for Global Heritage and Development under the heritage & environment section.