Prof. David Arase is a CAPRI 2023 Senior Fellow and Resident Professor of International Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China (2012-present). Prior to this, he was Professor of Politics at Pomona College, Claremont, CA, where he began as Assistant Professor in 1989. He was a Lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London from 1994 to 1995. He earned a BA from Cornell University (1977), an MA at Johns Hopkins SAIS (1982), and a PhD in Political Science from the University of California Berkeley (1989). David’s research areas include Indo-Pacific security, comparative foreign policy (special focus on China and Japan), Sino-US relations, international development (foreign aid), and comparative Asian politics. He has conducted resident research at National Chengchi University (Taiwan, 2022-23), Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong (2020-22), several times at ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute (Singapore, since 2015), and the National Institute of Defense Studies (Tokyo, 2014). David is author of Buying Power: The political economy of Japan’s foreign aid (Lynne Rienner, 1995). He is editor or co-editor and chapter author of six volumes, including most recently The US-Japan Alliance: Balancing Soft and Hard Power in East Asia (Routledge-Nissan Institute, 2010), which was awarded the 2011 Ohira Memorial Foundation (Tokyo) Special Prize; The Rise of China: Implications for East Asian Order (Palgrave 2016); Routledge Handbook of Africa-Asia Relations (Routledge, 2018); and The Belt and Road Initiative in Asia, Africa, and Europe (Routledge 2023). David has also authored numerous journal articles, book chapters, and media commentaries addressing his research interests.

Audrey Chia is Associate Professor at the NUS Business School, with a concurrent joint appointment at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS). She is Deputy Chair of the Programme Management Committee of the MSc. (Environmental Management) Programme, the University’s flagship sustainability programme.

Prof. Chia’s research applies leadership, change and innovation as theoretical foundations to address health, environmental and social challenges. Her research has been published in journals such as JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), The BMJ (British Medical Journal) and Obesity Reviews. She has served as an invited expert on social entrepreneurship, innovative philanthropy, innovative financing and sustainable development at meetings of the United Nations, Asian Development Bank, OECD, and the Asia-Pacific Leaders’ Malaria Alliance. In recognition of her expertise, Prof Chia was appointed to the Management Committee of the United Nations Global Compact Network Singapore.

Prof Chia has delivered keynote or plenary addresses and made presentations at conferences such as the Academy of Management, the Integrated Care Foundation, the European Union Workplace Innovation Network, the World Health Summit, and the Xiong An International Health Forum. She is regularly invited to judge venture competitions, such as the Swiss Re Entrepreneurs for Resilience Award, Singtel Futuremakers, DBS-NUS Social Venture Challenge, and NUS Medical Grand Challenge.

As a consultant on leadership and change, Prof Chia has worked with public, private, non-profit and multilateral organisations. Prof. Chia directs NUS Business School’s Leadership Development Programme which attracts participants across the world.

Kuei-Tien Chou is a professor in the Graduate Institute of National Development, National Taiwan University (NTU). He recently contributed to the books Sociology of Climate Change – High Carbon Society and its Transformation Challenge (National Taiwan University Press, 2017), Energy Transition in East Asia – A Social Scientific Perspective (Routledge, 2018), Climate Change Governance in Asia (Routledge, 2020), and Air Pollution Governance in East Asia (Routledge 2022).

Currently, Dr. Chou is director of the Risk Society and Policy Research Center, NTU, where he constructs a risk communicative platform between politicians, industry, civil society and media in terms of the radical societal transition in Taiwan and in East Asia. He leads young researchers in RSPRC to engage in advocacy for sustainable transitions and published several journal articles, edited books, and policy papers discussing the new paradigm of transboundary risk governance. His research interests include risk governance, sustainable development, globalization, technological democracy, risk communication, and East Asia Risk Society. Recently, he has dedicated himself to the issues of pandemics and climate change governance to reflect sustainability and cosmopolitan governance challenges.

Dr. Aurel Croissant is a distinguished political science professor at Heidelberg University in Germany. He is currently in Taipei as a Fellow of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy and visiting scholar and adjunct professor at National Taiwan University. His teaching and research focus on comparative democracy research, comparative authoritarianism, processes of democratization and autocratization, and political systems in the Asia-Pacific, particularly Southeast Asia, and the Korean Peninsula.

He has co-authored more than 170 scholarly works, including books, articles, and chapters, focusing on political dynamics in Southeast and East Asia, democratization studies, civil–military relations, etc. Some of the books he published include Dictators’ Endgames, Civil-Military Relations and Democracy in the Third Wave, and Civil-Military Relations in Southeast Asia. His two forthcoming pieces, “From Capacity to Performance: Pathways of Democratic Resilience in Asia” and “Democratic Resilience in the Twenty-First Century” are currently under review with different journals.

Dr. Croissant has served as a fellow at many institutions worldwide, including a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, Global Ewha Fellow at Ewha Womans University, a lifetime fellow at East West Center, and a fellow of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. He completed his MA in Political Science, Sociology, and Public Law and PhD in Political Science from Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz.

Jack A. Goldstone (PhD Harvard) is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center. Previously, Dr. Goldstone was on the faculty of Northwestern University and the University of California, and has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, awarded the 1993 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award of the American Sociological Association; Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History; and nine other books as well as over one hundred research articles on topics in politics, social movements, democratization, and long-term social change. He has appeared on NPR, CNN, Al-Jazeera, Fox News, and written for Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Al-Hayat and the International Herald Tribune.

The New Population Bomb,” received world-wide attention. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and won Fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Council of Learned Societies. His current research focuses on conditions for building democracy and stability in developing nations, the impact of population change on the global economy and international security, and the cultural origins of modern economic growth. Goldstone is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and served on the advisory board of the Council’s Center for Preventive Action. His latest books are Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford U. Press 2014), Handbook of Revolutions of the 21st Century (Springer 2022) and International Handbook of Population Policies (Springer 2022).

Dr. Minah Kang is professor at the Department of Public Administration at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. Until recently, she served the Korean government as the first female Commissioner of the Board of Audit and Inspection, the Supreme Audit Institution of Korea. She is currently serving as the President of the KAIDEC (Korea Association of International Development and Cooperation). She served as a committee member of various expert advisory committees, including the Presidential Committee on the 4th Industrial Revolution, the Primary Ministers’ Committee for International Development Cooperation (CIDC), and many advisory boards for the Korean government. Since 2018, she is an active member of W20, one of the engagement groups to the G20 focused on gender equity, and in 2022, was co-chair of the Working Group on Health for the W20 G20 Indonesia. Within the education sector, she served as the Dean of the Ewha Career Development Center and the Vice President of Ewha Institute for Leadership Development, which provides assistance and guidance on career development for female college students. She is the recipient of the Best Professor of the Year Award and the Best Researcher Award of the Year at Ewha.

Her research interests include global health and governance, public accountability, M&E for ODA, women empowerment, and audit and evaluation for innovation. She published numerous articles in internationally recognized public policy and health policy journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Medical Care, Health Policy, and JAMA. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Health Systems & Reform and Associate Editor of BMC Health Services Research. She completed a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University, Masters of Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School and BA from Ewha Womans University.

Dr. Shuhei Nomura is a Professor at the Global Research Institute of Keio University. He is deeply committed to practice, education, and research, actively engaging in domestic and international health policy formation processes through data-driven decision support. His areas of expertise are wide-ranging, with a primary focus on disease burden. His work also encompasses diplomacy and development aid, nutrition science and policy, pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPR), as well as health emergency and disaster risk management (Health EDRM). Dr. Nomura holds several concurrent positions, including membership on the Scientific Council for Global Burden of Disease research, participation in the Independent Expert Group of the Global Nutrition Report, and consultancy for the Japan office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, he has taken on the role of research team leader for excess deaths monitoring at the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan.

Dr. Yen Pottinger is an infectious disease laboratory expert and public health specialist with over 15 years of experience both domestically and internationally. She currently serves as Senior Technical Advisor for Laboratory Surveillance at ICAP, Columbia University. She focuses on implementing HIV public health programs primarily in Africa, namely point-of-care recency testing in the CDC-funded Tracking with Recency Assays to Control the Epidemic (TRACE) Project. Previously, she was Senior Laboratory Advisor for the Population-based HIV Impact Assessment (PHIA) Project. She also works on improving HIV laboratory systems and diagnostic testing, collaborating with health ministries and other global and local partners in ICAP-supported countries. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Pottinger has provided technical assistance and guidance to CDC and U.S. government entities, ministries of health, and other partners on SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing and safety protocols. She is also principal investigator for a CDC-funded project on antimicrobial resistance in Kenya. Over 8 years at CDC, Dr. Pottinger developed, validated, and implemented the limiting antigen avidity assay, which is now the most widely used assay globally for estimating and surveilling HIV incidence. Dr. Pottinger holds a Doctoral degree from the University of California, Davis in Pharmacology and Toxicology. She completed postdoctoral training as an ORISE fellow at CDC Atlanta.

Chiaoning Su is an Associate Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University, where she also serves as the Director of the Barry M. Klein Center for Culture and Globalization.

Her research spans two interconnected areas: journalism of crisis and journalism in crisis. The first examines the representation and production of crisis news, while the second explores journalism’s role in public life amid the challenges of declining democracy. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Media, Culture & Society, International Journal of Communication, Asian Journal of Communication, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, and Communication Review.

Beyond Oakland University, Chiaoning has served as President of the Association for Chinese Communication Studies (2018–2020). She is currently a Research Fellow in the 2023–25 U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group at UC Berkeley and a recipient of the 2023 Global Taiwan Institute Research Grant. Before transitioning to academia, she worked as a communication specialist at Ogilvy Public Relations and contributed to several political campaigns in Taiwan, where she developed expertise in strategic messaging and crisis management.

Chiaoning holds a B.A. in Sociology from National Taiwan University, an M.A. in Organizational Communication from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in Media and Communication from Temple University.

Dr. Feng-jen (Jean) Tsai is the Director and a professor of the Global Health and Health Security program, Taipei Medical University. She is also an adjunct professor of the Graduate Institute of Health and Biotechnology Law at Taipei Medical University.

Her research specializations are in the fields of global health policy and law, infectious disease control, health system strengthening, trade and health, and occupational health. As a scholar trained both in law and public health, Jean applies both quantitative and qualitative approaches to answer questions in global health. Prior to entering academia, Jean worked as a lawyer in Taiwan.

Sir Collin Fonotau Tukuitonga KNZM is a Niuean-born New Zealand doctor, public health academic, public policy expert and advocate for reducing health inequalities of Māori and Pasifika people. He has held several positions in public health and government in New Zealand and internationally.

He was appointed a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to Pacific and public health, in 2022.

Sir Collin has held several highly influential offices, including Director General of the Pacific Community (SPC), Commissioner and Co-ordinator for WHO Geneva, Chief Executive of the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs and Director of Public Health, Ministry of Health. He was also instrumental in establishing Pacific Language weeks as an Aotearoa New Zealand government initiative, and in his home of Niue, he established the biannual Niue Culture and Arts Festival.

Sir Collin is one of our most prominent Pacific figures in the health sector in Aotearoa and globally. His voice was crucial in advocating for Pasifika during the Covid crisis in Aotearoa, and he has been consistently vocal in pointing to inequities for Pasifika in the health system and pushing for policy to impact Pasifika in better ways.

His current positions at the University of Auckland are Associate Dean Pacific, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences Administration; Associate Professor, Population Health; and Director – University Research, Centre for Pacific and Global Health.