Average life expectancy in Mongolia is 65 years, much shorter than that of other East Asian countries such as South Korea (78.5 years) and China (72.5 years). Furthermore, healthy life expectancy in Mongolia is even shorter, rendering the situation even more tragic. The World Health Organization estimates that the healthy life expectancy is 53 years for males and 58 years for females.

This colloquium will provide an overview of health in Mongolia and its healthcare system, with expertise from two speakers. First, Dr. Gendengarjaa Baigalimaa, Developing Asia Health Policy Fellow at Shorenstein APARC, will discuss her comparative study of how knowledge of cervical cancer risk factors has influenced behavior changes in Mongolia before and after the introduction of the National Cervical Cancer Program.

Second, Dr. Dashdorj will present on overview of the healthcare initiatives of the Onom Foundation, designed to mitigate excess and premature mortality of Mongolians via knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship. He will report on a March national health policy meeting in Mongolia’s capital and recent strides in health improvement made with the support of the Onom Foundation.

Gendengarjaa Baigalimaa joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2013-2014 academic year as the Developing Asia Health Policy Fellow. She joins APARC from the Mongolian National Cancer Center, where she serves as a Gynecological Oncologist.

During her appointment as Health Policy Fellow, she is completing her comparative study of how knowledge of cervical cancer risk factors has influenced behavior changes in Mongolia before and after the introduction of the National Cervical Cancer Program.

Baigalimaa is the Executive Director of Mongolian Society of Gynecological Oncologists and is also a member of the International Gynecological Cancer Society (IGCS) in Mongolia, Russia, and France.

Baigalimaa holds a MD from Minsk Belarussia Medical University. She also received a Masters in Health Science from Mongolian Medical University. She is fluent in both Russian and English.

Dr. Dashdorj hails from very humble beginnings. He was born and raised in the southwestern outskirts of Mongolia known as Gobi-Altay province, where the Altay Mountains border with the bare rock covered desert basins of the Gobi. Because of the unique upbringing, Dr. Dashdorj has a profound commitment for making a tangible difference in lives of fellow Mongols. At the same time, he strongly believes that entrepreneurship is the best vehicle for making a difference.

He obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Purdue University in 2005 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the US National Institutes of Health. His research using ultrafast optical spectroscopy and time-resolved x-ray imaging techniques is published in 17 original manuscripts in prominent, peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2010, Dr. Dashdorj became a faculty member at the Argonne National Laboratory. Despite his successes in scientific research, he gave up his academic career in 2013 to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams, since he truly believed that he can make a tangible difference via entrepreneurship, experimenting with a model of subsidizing philanthropic actions by a certain percentage of equity and profits of a for-profit company.

In recent years Chinese courts, in particular those in Henan Province, have begun to place a vast quantity of court options online.  This talk examines one-year of publicly available criminal judgments from one basic-level rural county court and one intermediate court in Henan in order to better understand trends in routine criminal adjudication in China.  The result is an account of ordinary criminal justice that is both familiar and striking:  a system that treats serious crimes, in particular those affecting state interests, harshly while at the same time acting leniently in routine cases.  Most significantly, examination of more than five hundred court decisions shows the vital role that settlement plays in criminal cases in China today.  Defendants who agree to compensate their victims receive strikingly lighter sentences than those who do not.  Likewise, settlement plays a role in resolving even serious crimes, at times appearing to make the difference between life and death for criminal defendants.  These findings provide insight into a range of debates concerning the roles being played by the Chinese criminal justice system and the functions of courts in that system.  Examination of cases from Henan also provides a base for discussing the future of empirical research on Chinese court judgments, demonstrating that there is much to learn from the vast volume of cases that have in recent years become publicly available.

Benjamin L. Liebman is the Robert L. Lieff Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia Law School. His recent publications include “Malpractice Mobs: Medical Dispute Resolution in China,” Columbia Law Review (2013); “A Return to Populist Legality? Historical Legacies and Legal Reform,” in Mao’s Invisible Hand (edited by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, 2011); and “Toward Competitive Supervision?  The Media and the Courts,” China Quarterly (2011).

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Ambassador Ryozo Kato, former Ambassador of Japan to the United States from 2001 - 08, the longest tenure of any Japanese Ambassador to the United States, and former Commissioner of Nippon Professional Baseball from 2008 - 2013, has had a long and distinguished career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Japanese Government. A graduate of Tokyo University Faculty of Law and Yale Law School, he served his country in Australia, Egypt, and the United States, in addition to multiple global assignments within the Ministry in Tokyo.

Positions which Ambassador Kato served in the United States include the Third Secretary in the Embassy (1967–1969), Minister in the Embassy (1987–1990), and Consul-General in San Francisco (1992–1994). He returned to Japan to serve as the Director-General of the Asian Affairs Bureau (1995–1997) and the Deputy-General of the Foreign Policy Bureau (1997–1999). After serving as the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs (1999–2001), he was appointed the Ambassador of Japan to the United States of America from 2001 to 2008. He has been recognized and respected on both sides of the Pacific for his outstanding understanding of the issues and his clarity in direction to resolve them.

Mr. Rudd served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Foreign Minister from 2010 to 2012, before returning to the Prime Ministership in 2013. As Prime Minister, Mr. Rudd led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis. Australia's fiscal response to the crisis was reviewed by the IMF as the most effective stimulus strategy of all member states. Australia was the only major advanced economy not to go into recession. Mr. Rudd is also internationally recognized as one of the founders of the G20 which drove the global response to the crisis, and which in 2009 helped prevent the crisis from spiraling into a second global depression.

As Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Mr. Rudd was active in global and regional foreign policy leadership. He was a driving force in expanding the East Asia Summit to include both the US and Russia in 2010. He also initiated the concept of transforming the EAS into a wider Asia Pacific Community to help manage deep-routed tensions in Asia by building over time the institutions and culture of common security in Asia. On climate change, Mr. Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and legislated in 2008 for a 20% mandatory renewable energy target for Australia. Mr. Rudd launched Australia's challenge in the International Court of Justice with the object of stopping Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. Mr Rudd drove Australia’s successful bid for its current non-permanent seat on the United Nation’s Security Council and the near doubling of Australia's foreign aid budget.

Mr. Rudd remains engaged in a range of international challenges including global economic management, the rise of China, climate change and sustainable development. He is on the International Advisory Panel of Chatham House. He is a proficient speaker of Mandarin Chinese, a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University and funded the establishment of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. He was a co-author of the recent report of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Global Sustainability – “Resilient People, Resilient Planet" and chairs the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States. He also remains actively engaged in indigenous reconciliation.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 is known as the first nuclear arms control agreement. One of its declared aims, however, is environmental, namely "to put an end to the contamination of man's environment by radioactive substances." At the beginning of the atomic age, however, few voiced concerns about the worldwide dispersion of radioactive fallout. How did we come to reappraise that contamination as a global problem requiring a global solution? I will argue that the problem of fallout was not only born global as a material fact, but also globalized as a social-epistemic process thanks to the Cold War, which transformed scientific knowledge, ethical outlooks, technological conditions, and political incentives by the time when the PTBT was concluded.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Toshihiro Higuchi (Ph.D. in History, Georgetown) is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Associate Lecturer at the History of Science Department, University of Wisconsin—Madison. Higuchi held a postdoctoral fellowship at CISAC in 2011-12. He will move to the University of Kyoto in June 2014 as a research assistant professor. His current book project traces the science and politics of worldwide contamination by radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear-weapons testing as one of the first truly global environmental problems.

John W. (Jack) Rowe MD, an expert on health care economics and healthy aging, will be the inaugural speaker for the Stanford Center on Longevity Distinguished Lecture Series. Rowe is professor of health policy and management, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and former CEO of Aetna Inc.

Rowe’s lecture, “Myths and Realities of an Aging Society,” will be from 6 to 7 p.m. (reception at 5:30 p.m.), Tuesday, April 13.

Koret Distinguished Lecture Series: Lecture IV

From early 2012, South Korea-Japan relations worsened due to what many Koreans regard as a series of Japanese provocations involving historical and territorial disputes. Unfortunately, the neighbors failed to utilize the opportunity to improve the situation following leadership changes in both countries at the beginning of 2013. Today their bilateral relationship, long considered a cornerstone of peace and stability in Northeast Asia, appears to the worst since the normalization of diplomatic ties in 1965. Former Korean ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo will analyze the complicated structural reasons behind this downward spiral and explore whether differences over history can be addressed and an early diplomatic "reset" achieved.

Ambassador Shin has served various diplomatic positions during his thirty-five year career in foreign affairs, including service as ambassador to the State of Israel from 2006 to 2008 and to Japan from 2011 to 2013. He is currently a professor at the Korean National Diplomatic Academy and also a special research fellow at the Institute of Japanese Studies, Seoul National University.

The Koret Distinguished Lecture Series was established in 2013 with the generous support of the Koret Foundation. 

This project focuses on intestinal roundworms, a neglected disease in China.  These infections may have a devastating effect on a population, siphoning valuable nutrients away from the host, leading to malnutrition, stunted growth and poorer school performance. In the study, the researchers aim to contribute to the literature by conducting a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) in rural China to measure the impact of worm infection on school children.