Jelena Große-Bley worked at the China Studies Institute at Freie Universität between 2018 and 2021 as a lecturer and researcher. She holds a M.A. in Modern East Asian Studies from Georg-August Universität (Göttingen) and a M.Sc. in Environmental Management from The University of Hong Kong. Before joining the China Studies Institute at Freie Universität (Berlin) in 2018, she spent a number of years studying and working in various locations across Greater China, including two years at Peking University (Beijing). A range of different topics at the intersection of social and environmental issues feature in her scholarly work. Her current research interests include digital and environmental governance, food systems and land management, knowledge generation and networks, as well as an eclectic array of perspectives concerned with shedding new light on the nature-human relationship. She worked or interned at different institutions, including Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ, Beijing), Centre for Modern East Asian Studies (CeMEAS) and German-Chinese Institute for Legal Studies (DCIR).

She is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University of Berlin and a member of its THESys Graduate Program at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) since 2020. Her PhD project is under the current working title "Climate change adaptation in China's agriculture - The production and role of local environmental knowledge".