Ito Peng is a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings. She is the Canada research chair in global social policy and the director of the Centre for Global Social Policy at the department of sociology, and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Her research focuses on global social policy, public policy, and political economy, specializing in the care economy and family, gender, migration, and climate change policies. She teaches Political Sociology and Social Contexts of Public Policymaking. She currently leads two research projects: 1) Care Economies in Context: Towards Sustainable Social and Economic Development, a global partnership research project that investigates care infrastructures in nine countries in five global regions and uses that data to develop gender-sensitive macroeconomic models of care economies in these countries; and 2) Care and Climate Change Policies project, a task force for the Royal Society of Canada aimed to compile a package of policy briefs and think pieces on different dimensions of care and climate change.
Peng is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the Sectoral Table on the Care Economy for the Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), and a distinguished fellow of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, currently serving as a thought leader for the foundation’s Women’s Business Missions to Asia Pacific initiative. She was a co-lead for Room 5 of the 17-Rooms Global Flagship project (2021-2023) and a senior policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2025).