NATIONAL SECURITY
Jessica Chen Weiss
Jessica Chen Weiss is the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. She served as senior advisor to the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State on a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured IR Scholars in 2021-22. Previously, she was the Michael J. Zak Professor of China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Cornell University, and before that an assistant professor at Yale University. Her first book, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford, 2014), examined how the Chinese Communist Party has managed nationalist, anti-foreign protests, tracing the government’s repression and facilitation of grassroots mobilization as a means of conveying reassurance and resolve. Her current book, A World Safe for Autocracy? The Domestic Politics of China’s Foreign Policy (under contract, Oxford), looks at how domestic politics and regime insecurity shape China’s foreign policy ambitions, prospects for peaceful coexistence, and the future of international order.
Ryan Hass
Ryan Hass is Director of the John L. Thornton China Center and the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies at The Brookings Institution. He focuses his research and analysis on enhancing policy development on the pressing political, economic, and security challenges facing the United States in East Asia. From 2013-17, Hass served as the director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia on the National Security Council staff. Prior to joining NSC, he served as a Foreign Service Officer in US Embassy Beijing, where he earned the State Department Director General’s award for impact and originality in reporting, an award given annually to the officer whose reporting had the greatest impact on the formulation of US foreign policy. Hass also served in Embassy Seoul and Embassy Ulaanbaatar, and domestically in the State Department Offices of Taiwan Coordination and Korean Affairs.
Joel Wuthnow
Joel Wuthnow is a Senior Research Fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs within the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at the National Defense University (NDU). His research areas include Chinese foreign and security policy, Chinese military affairs, U.S.-China relations, and strategic developments in East Asia. In addition to his duties in INSS, he also serves as an adjunct professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Prior to joining NDU, Dr. Wuthnow was a China analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), and a postdoctoral fellow in the China and the World Program at Princeton University.
Fiona Cunningham
Fiona Cunningham is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie at the intersection of technology and conflict, with an empirical focus on China. Fiona’s forthcoming book examines China’s distinctive approach to the dilemma of gaining leverage under the shadow of nuclear war, which relies on substitutes for nuclear threats. Her research has been supported by the Ploughshares Fund, the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada, the Stanton Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the China Confucius Studies Program. Previously, she served as Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University.
TRADE & COMPETITIVENESS
Meg Rithmire
Meg Rithmire is the James E. Robison Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. A political scientist by training, her primary expertise is in the comparative political economy of development with a focus on China and Asia. Her first book, Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism (Cambridge, 2015), examines the role of land politics, urban governments, and real estate in Chinese economic reforms. Her second book, Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (Oxford, 2023), examines state-business relations and especially financial liberalization in China, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Her research also focuses on China’s role in the world, including Chinese outward investment and lending practices and economic relations between China and other countries, especially the United States.
Mark Wu
Mark Wu is the Henry L. Stimson Professor at Harvard Law School, where he specializes in international trade and international economic law. His writings cover a broad range of topics, including the impact of emerging economies on global governance, digital technologies, trade remedies, environment, and foreign investment. In addition, he serves as the Faculty Director for the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and as a Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In 2021, he served as a Senior Advisor to the United States Trade Representative (USTR) while on leave from Harvard. He also served previously as a member of the agency review team for the Biden-Harris transition team. Earlier in his career, he served as the Director for Intellectual Property at the Office of the USTR, where he was the lead negotiator for the IP chapter of several U.S. free trade agreements.
Matt Ferchen
Matt Ferchen was most recently Senior Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. His research focuses on Chinese economic statecraft and economic influence as well as broader issues of economic security. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Leiden Asia Centre and a Lecturer at Leiden University’s Institute of Area Studies. He has also served as the Head of Global China Research at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS). Earlier in his career, Ferchen spent nearly a decade on the faculty of the International Relations Department at Tsinghua University and as a scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, in Beijing.
RESEARCH, EDUCATION, & ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Mary Gallagher
Mary E. Gallagher is the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. Her research focuses on Chinese politics, U.S.-China Relations, and Chinese state-society relations, especially labor politics and labor law. She was previously the Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization and Human Rights at the University of Michigan and director of the International Institute. Dr. Gallagher’s most recent book is Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers and the State (Cambridge, 2017). She is also the author or editor of several other books, including Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton, 2005). In addition to her academic research, she has consulted with governments, international organizations, and corporations on China’s domestic politics, labor and workplace conditions, and urbanization policies.
Rory Truex
Rory Truex is an Associate Professor in Princeton’s Department of Politics and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His research focuses on Chinese politics and theories of authoritarian rule. His book Making Autocracy Work: Representation and Responsiveness in Modern China investigates the nature of representation in authoritarian systems, specifically the politics surrounding China’s National People’s Congress. He is currently working on a new set of projects on repression, human rights, and dissent in contemporary China.
Margaret Lewis
Margaret Lewis is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Development at Seton Hall University, where her research focuses on law in China and Taiwan with an emphasis on criminal justice and human rights. She has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at National Taiwan University, a visiting professor at Academia Sinica, a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation’s US-Japan Leadership Program. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining Seton Hall, Professor Lewis served as a Senior Research Fellow at NYU School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute where she worked on criminal justice reforms in China.
HUMAN RIGHTS, LAW, & DEMOCRACY
Daniel Mattingly
Daniel Mattingly is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He studies authoritarian politics and historical political economy with a focus on China. He is the author of The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge, 2020), which examines how the Chinese state controls protests and implements ambitious social policies. It was named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs magazine and received the best book award from the Democracy and Autocracy Section of the American Political Science Association. His current book project examines the role of the military in China’s domestic and international politics.
Neysun Mahboubi
As of October 2023, Neysun Mahboubi is Director of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches various courses related to Chinese history, law, and policy. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow with the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Previously he was a Research Scholar of Penn’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China, where he remains affiliated. His primary academic interests are in the areas of administrative law, comparative law, and Chinese law, and his current writing focuses on the development of modern Chinese administrative law. He frequently comments on Chinese law and policy developments and U.S.-China relations for various media outlets. He has taught also at Princeton University’s School of Public & International Affairs, the University of Connecticut School of Law, and Yale Law School.
Darren Byler
Darren Byler is an Assistant Professor in International Studies at Simon Fraser University. His teaching and research examines the dispossession of stateless populations through forms of contemporary capitalism and colonialism in China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. In public-facing work regarding the crisis confronting the Uyghurs and others in Northwest China, he has worked in an advisory capacity with faculty and researchers at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University to build a Xinjiang Documentation Project featuring personal testimonies and archives, internal police reports, translations and other documents concerning the ongoing detention of Turkic Muslims in China and the erasure of their native knowledge.
Amy Gadsden
Amy Gadsden is Associate Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, in which capacity she works with Penn’s schools and centers to develop and implement strategies to increase Penn’s global engagement both on campus and overseas, including by advancing Penn’s activities with respect to China. Previously, she served as Associate Dean for International and Strategic Initiatives at Penn Law School, where she built a comprehensive program aimed at expanding the Law School’s global curriculum. Before coming to Penn, she served as Special Advisor for China at the U.S. Department of State, and before that she served as China Director for the International Republican Institute. She has published widely on democracy and human rights in China, documenting legal and civil society reform, and was one of the first American scholars to observe and write about grassroots elections in China in the mid-1990s.
CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT
Alex Wang
Alex Wang is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and a Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. His research focuses on the law and politics of Chinese environmental governance. Previous work has examined Chinese climate policy, U.S.-China environmental cooperation and competition, environmental bureaucracy, information disclosure, public interest litigation, the role of state-owned enterprises in environmental governance, and symbolic uses of governance reform. Prior to joining UCLA Law, he was a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) based in Beijing and the creator and founding director of NRDC’s China Environmental Law & Governance Project. In that capacity, he worked with China’s government agencies, legal community, and environmental groups to improve environmental laws and strengthen the role of the public in environmental protection.
Angel Hsu
Angel Hsu is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and the Environment, Ecology and Energy Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is also Founder and Director of the Data-Driven EnviroLab, an interdisciplinary research group that innovates and applies quantitative approaches to pressing environmental issues. Her research explores the intersection of science and policy and the use of data-driven approaches to understand environmental sustainability, particularly in the areas of climate change and energy, urbanization and air quality. Focusing particularly on China and the Global South, she has provided expert testimony to the US-China Economic Security and Review Commission, and is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and a Public Intellectual Program Fellow.
Jonas Nahm
Jonas Nahm is an Associate Professor of Energy, Resources, and Environment at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). His research interests lie in comparative political economy, at the intersection of climate policy, environmental politics, and economic and industrial policy; he uses the analytical tools of political science to examine what drives state responses to climate change and to identify political obstacles to government attempts to decarbonize domestic economies. His book Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the New Global Economy (Oxford, 2021) examines the development of the wind and solar industries. In 2023-24 he was on leave from SAIS, serving on the White House Council of Economic Advisors.
TECHNOLOGY
Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is Associate Professor and Director of the Asia Policy Program at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves as editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review. She is currently, in 2024-25, a visiting associate professor of research in Indo-Pacific security at the U.S. Army War College’s China Landpower Studies Center, and a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is the author of Dictators and Their Secret Police (Cambridge, 2016) and Politics of the North Korean Diaspora (Cambridge, 2023), and is currently finishing a book on how regime security shapes Chinese grand strategy. Her work focuses on authoritarianism, security, and East Asia.
Robert Williams
Robert Williams is a Senior Research Scholar in Law and the Executive Director (on leave) of the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, where he focuses on U.S.-China relations and Chinese law and policy. He is also a Lecturer in Global Affairs at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously, he clerked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice and for the Honorable E. Grady Jolly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He was an attorney in private practice before coming to Yale. He currently serves at the U.S. Department of State.
Julia Voo
Julia Voo is Senior Fellow and Head of the Cyber Power and Future Conflict Programme at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), in Singapore. Previously, she was the Director for Cyber and Tech Policy at HP Inc., and concurrently held a Cyber Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She also was Research Director for China Cyber Policy at Harvard Belfer, where she led the team behind Belfer’s National Cyber Power Index and a US-China Track 2 Dialogue on cyber-security. Earlier in her career, Voo served at the British Embassy in Beijing where she covered China’s cyber and artificial intelligence policy from a commercial perspective, technical standards, and other trade policy issues.
