Dr. Aya Adachi is an associate fellow in DGAP’s Center for Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, and Technology. She specializes in economic security, geoeconomics, and de-risking strategies. Her work focuses on analyzing the foreign economic policies of the EU, Germany, China, and Japan, with particular emphasis on their engagement with the Indo-Pacific and the Global South. 

Adachi was a fellow at the Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung. Before that, she worked at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) and regularly served the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) as an external consultant for regional economic cooperation. 

Adachi completed her PhD at Ruhr University Bochum. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting scholar in Tokyo at Waseda University and the German Institute for Japanese Studies (Max Weber Foundation) and in Suzhou (China) at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Previously, she studied international relations, economics, and East Asian politics, as well as Mandarin Chinese, at the University of Groningen, Ruhr University Bochum, and Zhejiang University of Technology.