Orlando Tongyue Zhu is a Research Fellow in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She is currently working on the Cultures of the Cryosphere project with Bronwyn Parry, where her research focuses on biomedical cryotechnologies and the circulation of frozen biological materials.

Broadly, her research examines how technologies of cooling and preservation reshape material life, temporal experience, and everyday politics. She explores these questions through ethnographic research on refrigeration, cold-chain infrastructures, and practices of storage and preservation.

Her doctoral research examined refrigeration, scarcity, and everyday political life in urban China. Based on long-term fieldwork in Beijing, it followed refrigeration from cold-chain infrastructures into urban homes, tracing how practices of storing and discarding food give material form to memories of scarcity, generational experience, labour and migration, and changing expectations for the future.

Her current research turns from the refrigeration of food to the cryopreservation of biological life. She follows frozen gametes, cells, tissues, and biospecimens as they move through clinics, laboratories, storage facilities, and cold chains, with particular interest in the temporalities, social relations, and intimate hopes and uncertainties produced through practices of freezing and preservation.

Orlando received her PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2026. Her doctoral fieldwork was supported by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.