Email is the best way to reach me and I read all of it. This page sets out what is useful to include, which mostly exists to save you a round of correspondence rather than to put anything in your way.
Doctoral supervision
I supervise in three areas: project management, governance, risk, contracts and procurement in infrastructure projects, particularly public-private partnerships; social sustainability and social licence for infrastructure, including public acceptance of contested facilities; and digital transformation and artificial intelligence applications in project organisations. The research page sets out what I work on and why, and the supervision page sets out how I supervise, which is worth reading before deciding whether we would suit each other.
One thing to check early: I am a qualitative and mixed methods researcher. If your project is fundamentally a modelling, optimisation or large-scale econometric study, I am the wrong principal supervisor, though I may be a useful co-supervisor alongside someone who does that well.
One condition worth stating early: I supervise full-time candidates. The way I supervise depends on short cycles with something reviewable at the end of each, and that rhythm is hard to hold around a full-time job. If you are working now, the realistic routes are a stipend that lets you stop, or an arrangement with an employer that frees the time properly rather than nominally.
Whether I can take a new candidate depends on the year and on what else I am carrying, so the fastest way to find out is to ask.
What a strong scholarship application looks like
I assess scholarship applications for the faculty, so it is worth saying plainly what the assessment actually rewards. Most applicants put nearly all their effort into the research proposal. The proposal matters, but it carries far less weight than people assume. Roughly two thirds of the assessment rests on what you have already done, meaning your education and research-relevant experience and your research outputs. Those are the things that take months or years to build and cannot be produced in the fortnight before a deadline.
The window that counts is the past ten years. A degree completed longer ago contributes little on its own, which affects many of the working professionals who come to me from our postgraduate programs. If your formal education is older, the route runs through professional experience that is genuinely research-relevant, and that term has a specific meaning: work in which you reviewed and synthesised a body of knowledge, exercised independent judgement on a complex problem, designed or used research within a project, and presented findings clearly to different audiences. Consultancy, expert advisory work, evaluation and substantial contributions to a professional body all qualify. Senior project delivery experience on its own generally does not. If you have done the first kind of work, the task is to evidence it in those terms rather than to list job titles.
On outputs, the step that matters most is leading one rather than contributing to several. First authorship on a single peer-reviewed article in a ranked journal counts for more than middle authorship on a handful. Two things follow from that. If you are already publishing with someone, ask to lead one paper rather than join three. And if you are a practitioner with no journal publications, an industry paper or report authored for a national or peak professional body sits on the same footing, which is a route open to people whose work will never appear in a journal.
The remaining weight sits on fit with the school's research priorities and on the proposal itself: a clearly identified question, a defensible account of why it matters, evidence that you have read the current literature rather than a survey of it from a decade ago, and a method that suits the question. Length is not the point. The process also assumes that I have met you and satisfied myself that you understand what is in your own proposal, so a document written for you, or generated for you, does not survive the first conversation. There are also small adjustments in the round, including for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander applicants and for UTS graduates.
Two things are worth saying to anyone this discourages. The framework is not designed for anyone to score full marks, and there is no threshold to clear. Strength in one category can carry an application where another is thin, which is the ordinary position both for a mid-career practitioner with a substantial professional record and no publications, and for a recent research masters graduate with the reverse.
One point I would put directly to domestic applicants, meaning Australian citizens, permanent residents and New Zealand citizens. Your odds are considerably better than an overseas applicant's. Most Research Training Program stipends and fee offsets are allocated to domestic candidates, while international applicants compete for a much smaller pool, so an application that would not be competitive from overseas is often a realistic one here. If you are working in the industry, hold a UTS degree, and have been assuming that a funded doctorate is out of reach, that assumption is probably wrong. It would mean leaving work for the duration, which is what a stipend exists to make possible. It costs nothing to ask, and I would rather have the conversation than have you decide against it on a guess.
When you write, please send:
- your CV and academic transcripts, with the dates your degrees were awarded;
- a list of any research outputs, marking clearly which ones you led;
- a short account of research-relevant work from the past ten years, described by what it required of you rather than by job title;
- English language test results, if relevant to your application;
- a page or two describing a research problem rather than a topic: what is unresolved, why it matters to someone outside a university, and roughly how you would investigate it;
- a sentence on what you have read of my work and why it bears on that problem;
- your scholarship situation, including whether you are applying for a UTS Research Training Program scholarship, a China Scholarship Council award, or another sponsor.
On funding: I cannot fund candidates myself. UTS scholarships are competitive and are assessed at faculty level against the criteria described above, and several of my former candidates came through CSC or equivalent sponsorship. It is better to know where you stand on this at the first email than at the third.
I do not reply to messages sent to many academics at once. They are easy to recognise, and a specific paragraph about your own problem is a far stronger application than a long one about your general enthusiasm for project management.
Research collaboration
I am open to joint work on papers, grant applications and research projects, and most of my publishing is collaborative. Two things are worth saying plainly. I join papers I have worked on, and I would rather contribute properly to one study than be listed on several. And for grants, the useful conversation happens months before the deadline, not in the fortnight before it.
Visiting researchers
I have hosted visiting doctoral candidates and academic staff at UTS, usually for stays of several months funded by their home institution or by a national scholarship scheme. These work when there is a defined output, most often a paper we plan before arrival. If you are considering a visit, write with the dates, the funding arrangement and what you would want to produce while here.
Industry and government
My research has been used in reference documents and guidance by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and a number of national agencies, and I have worked with government and industry bodies in Australia and China on partnership structuring, risk allocation and public acceptance. I am interested in applied research, advisory work, evaluation, and executive or in-house sessions for project teams. If you have a specific problem, describe it and I will say honestly whether I am the right person or can point you to someone better placed.
Talks and invitations
I give keynotes, seminars and workshops, and have delivered close to forty invited talks. The topics I speak on most often are public-private partnerships and infrastructure delivery, risk allocation and procurement strategy, social licence for infrastructure and public acceptance, and publishing in the field, including literature review method and what editors actually look for. For an invitation, the useful details are the date, the audience, the length and whether the session is in person or online.
Contact
Email is best: Yongjian.Ke@uts.edu.au. I am usually able to reply within a day or two, and if a question needs a conversation I am available for Zoom or Teams on any workday. I am on the UTS campus in Ultimo on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so those are the days to suggest for meeting in person.
The profile links at the top of this page hold the full record, and my CV is there as well.