He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2000. He is also an alumnus of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies. Landry is the author of Decentralized Authoritarianism in China (CUP, 2008) and a co-investigator of several survey projects in China, including national surveys of "Legal Reforms" (2004), "Inequality & Distributive Justice" (2004 and 2009), "The China Survey" (2008) as well as local studies on "Education in Rural Yunnan" (2004) and "Elections in Shandong and Henan" (2005 and 2010). Most of his survey work makes use of spatial sampling with GPS, as technique developed in collaboration with the RCCC. He is also consultant with the UNDP in Hanoi on projects related to Public Administration and Legal reforms in Vietnam.