About Virtuous Sea

milestones

Organization History Timeline

2022

2024

2025

2026

Founded

VSC incorporated in California as a 501(c)(3) research organization. Community campfire programming brought us into direct contact with Chinese students navigating U.S. education — over 50 events to date, and the origin of the questions our research now investigates.

Access to the Student Population

Formalized partnerships with secondary and post-secondary institutions serving Chinese students, establishing the participant base and institutional relationships our studies depend on.

University Research Partnerships

Signed a five-year MOU with Avila University Arizona, opening a channel for institutional collaboration on international student outcomes and expanding our reach into U.S. campus communities.

First Major Study

Launched the 2026 Employment White Paper, surveying Chinese international students across six research tracks to document how they experience the U.S. job market — the first field-level dataset of its kind we've produced.

Ya Gao

President

Chinese-American philanthropist and international education advocate based in Bellevue, Washington. Born in Shanghai and educated across China and Canada, Ms. Gao brings a deeply global perspective shaped by multicultural experience. After achieving success as an early-stage investor, she devoted herself to philanthropy and founded Virtuous Sea with the mission of empowering mobility and advancing educational equity. She has led multiple cross-border inclusive education initiatives and remains committed to removing systemic barriers while building a global talent collaboration network.

Lucas Liu

Founder & Director

Chinese-American entrepreneur and financial strategist with experience spanning U.S. military service, finance, and international education. A former member of the U.S. Navy Special Forces, Mr. Zhao later held senior management roles in large-scale U.S. investment and real estate projects and became a certified high-net-worth wealth and inheritance planner with AXA France. He has managed over USD 50 million in cross-border assets and founded China's first Ten-Year Integrated International Education Program. At Virtuous Sea, he leads financial strategy, operations, and global partnerships.

Dr. Barbara Zá Franks, Ed.D.

Chief Research Officer

Dr. Barbara Zá Franks is an international educator with over 17 years of experience across the Caribbean, China, Africa, and the United States. She spent 11 years in China in senior academic leadership roles including Chief Academic Officer and Regional Dean. She holds an Ed.D. in Leadership. At VSC, she leads the 2026 Employment White Paper research project.

Dr. Alexander Sugar, Ph.D.

Director of University Partnerships

Dr. Sugar oversees VSC's institutional research collaborations and supervises research on employer-side and technical-field questions. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and brings twenty-two years of experience across academia and industry, beginning as a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and continuing as a natural language processing algorithm specialist at Meta and later a senior product manager and director of data science at a New York technology company. That industry background gives VSC firsthand knowledge of how American employers evaluate candidates and how career progression works inside U.S. companies — the questions our research exists to answer.

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