Demetrios G. Papademetriou is Distinguished Senior Fellow, Co-Founder and President Emeritus of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), and President of MPI Europe. Dr. Papademetriou has published more than 270 books, monographs, articles and research reports on migration and related issues, and advises senior government officials, foundations, and civil society organizations in dozens of countries. He also convenes the Transatlantic Council on Migration and the Regional (North American) Migration Study Group, chairs the Advisory Board of The Open Society Foundations’ International Migration Initiative (IMI), and is Co-Founder and Chair Emeritus of Metropolis.
In a ceremony held last night on Stanford campus, SPICE Director Gary Mukai received the 2015 Stanford Alumni Award in recognition of his leadership and service in the field of education.
“This year, we cannot be more honored to recognize Dr. Gary Mukai for his tireless and selfless work in advancing educational equity and increasing cultural competency in classroom curriculum and instruction,” remarked Van Anh Tran, Board Member of the Stanford Asian Pacific American Alumni Club (SAPAAC). “Gary pushes the boundaries of education and culturally competent K–14 curriculum.”
SAPAAC presents the Alumni Award annually to a distinguished Stanford alumnus who has made exceptional contributions to the Stanford community and broader community in service, leadership, or financial contribution. Past recipients of the award have included distinguished Stanford alumni from throughout the decades, comprising activists, philanthropists, artists, civil rights lawyers, businesspeople, a mayor, a California Supreme Court justice, and other luminaries.
“I feel so undeserving of this award,” reflected Mukai. “I am very humbled.”
That humility belies Mukai’s fierce commitment—and tremendous contributions—to the fields of international and cross-cultural education. Since joining SPICE in 1988, Mukai has workshopped with thousands of K–12 teachers, locally and internationally, on culturally sensitive pedagogical training and curriculum resources. He has provided immersive enrichment opportunities to hundreds of teachers through SPICE’s free multicultural professional development seminars. And he has established an intensive series of free online international relations courses for high school students—the first of its kind.
Despite these contributions, Mukai is perhaps best known for his work in curriculum development. Throughout his tenure at SPICE, Gary has overseen the development of well over 100 curriculum units on themes as diverse as Native American storytelling, the historical Silk Road, and North Korea. These cross-cultural materials have touched countless students over the past 27 years, both within the United States and abroad.
Mukai’s strong dedication to this work has inspired others to take up the banner of international and cross-cultural education as well. Victoria Yee was one. As a Stanford undergraduate, she worked under Mukai’s supervision to develop a teacher’s guide on Filipino-American identity. It was her first exposure to the field of education, and her first glimpse of what life as an educator might be like.
“I had little training in curriculum design or pedagogy. However, Gary was incredibly nurturing, patient, and supportive through every proposal, revision meeting, and draft,” says Yee. “Through his mentorship, my confidence in navigating the education realm…dramatically improved, [as well as] my conviction in institutionalizing diverse global curriculum at schools and my ability to make a difference in education.” Today she is a U.S. Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in rural Taiwan, and she credits her path largely to Mukai’s tutelage and encouragement.
“He is truly an invaluable asset to Stanford and beyond.”
For his part, Mukai prefers to downplay the praise with humor. After formally accepting the Alumni Award at last night’s ceremony, he stepped to the podium and thanked the award’s presenters and his family for their unwavering support. “I am very touched,” he continued, “that many SPICE staff (past and present)—as well as some of my friends—chose to come to see me instead of watch the top American Idol finalists this evening.”
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Beth Duff-Brown became the Communications Manager at Stanford Health Policy in May 2015. She was the editorial director at the Center for International Security and Cooperation for three years before joining the health policy and research centers at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the School of Medicine. Before coming to Stanford, Beth worked in Africa and Asia as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press, including as bureau chief for South Asia, based in New Delhi, and as the Deputy Asia Editor at the Asia-Pacific Desk in Bangkok, overseeing the daily news report from Afghanistan to Australia. She was a 2010-2011 Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, where she developed a digital platform to tell stories about women and girls in the developing world. Beth has a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Concerns about the quality of state-financed nursing home care has led to the wide-scale adoption by states of pass-through subsidies, in which Medicaid reimbursement rates are directly tied to staffing expenditure. We examine the effects of Medicaid pass-through on nursing home staffing and quality of care by adapting a two-step FGLS method that addresses clustering and state-level temporal autocorrelation. We find that pass-through subsidies increases staffing by about 1% on average and 2.7% in nursing homes with a low share of Medicaid patients. Furthermore, pass-through subsidies reduce the incidences of pressure ulcer worsening by about 0.9%.
I propose and test a theoretical framework that explains institutional change in international relations. Like firms in markets, international institutions are affected by the underlying characteristics of their policy areas. Some policy areas are prone to produce institutions facing relatively little competition, limiting the outside options of member states and impeding redistributive change. In comparison, institutions facing severe competition will quickly reflect changes in underlying state interests and power. To test the theory empirically, I exploit common features of the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—to isolate the effect of variation in policy area characteristics. The empirical tests show that, despite having identical membership and internal rules, bargaining outcomes in the Bretton Woods institutions have diverged sharply and in accordance with the theory.
Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter praised two Stanford luminaries during his Pentagon policy speech on cybersecurity. He gave the annual Drell Lecture for Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. The lecture is named for theoretical physicist and arms control expert Sidney Drell, the center’s co-founder, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Drell and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry – a FSI senior fellow and consulting professor at CISAC – were both mentors to Carter. Drell could not attend due to illness and Perry was in the audience. Here are the comments Carter made about the two men who had such a significant impact on his life:
Thank you, Dr. Hennessy, for that introduction. And thanks to all my many friends and colleagues here at Stanford for the opportunity to be with you today. It’s a special privilege for me to give the Sidney Drell Lecture, and I need to tell you why.
I began my career in elementary particle physics, and the classic textbook in relativistic quantum field theory was Bjorken and Drell, entitled Relativistic Quantum Fields, which described the first of what are known as gauge field theories, namely quantum electrodynamics. Here is my copy of Bjorken and Drell, with my hand marking in the margins.
For my doctorate in theoretical physics, I worked on quantum chromodynamics, a gauge field theory of the force by which quarks are held together to make sub-nuclear particles. And at Oxford University’s department of theoretical physics, the external thesis examiner for my doctorate was none other than Sidney Drell.
When I visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in subsequent years as a post-doc, I remember sitting on the porch of the rambling ranch house right here on the Stanford campus that Sid and Harriet Drell lived in. As post-docs tend to do, I would hang around their house at dinnertime hoping that Harriet would invite me in to dinner, which she usually did. Sometimes their daughter Persis would be there, who is now, of course, the dean of engineering here at Stanford University.
A few years later, Sid was assisting the assembly of a team of scientists for the U.S. Congress on a topic that preoccupied Cold War Washington at the time: how to base the ten-warhead MX intercontinental ballistic missile so that it could not be destroyed in a first strike by 3,000 equivalent megatons of Soviet throw-weight atop their SS-18 missile. He recommended that I join this team. Sid Drell as an inspiration to all those who worked in those years to control the danger of nuclear weapons. This was the beginning of my involvement in national security affairs.
About that time, I got to meet then-Under Secretary of Defense in charge of technology and procurement for the Department of Defense. He impressed me with how lucid and logical he was, and how well he applied technical thinking to national security problems. That Under Secretary was of course William Perry, who is also present here today, and who later because Deputy Secretary of Defense and finally Secretary of Defense in a progression that I have followed some 20 years later. Bill has been a major figure in my life, including standing in for my father at my wedding.
So I thank both Sid Drell and Bill Perry, and many, many other colleagues and friends here at CISAC, at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the hoover Institution, and in the engineering faculty. I especially thank everyone for their warm welcome for me as a visitor earlier this academic year. Not quite two months into it, on a fateful Monday morning in November, though, duty called. And I found myself nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Defense.
