Asked to summarize his biography and career, Donald K. Emmerson notes the legacy of an itinerant childhood: his curiosity about the world and his relish of difference, variety and surprise. A well-respected Southeast Asia scholar at Stanford since 1999, he admits to a contrarian streak and corresponding regard for Socratic discourse. His publications in 2014 include essays on epistemology, one forthcoming in Pacific Affairs, the other in Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies.

Emmerson is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), an affiliated faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, an affiliated scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Recently he spoke with Shorenstein APARC about his life and career within and beyond academe.

Your father was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Did that background affect your professional life?

Indeed it did. Thanks to my dad’s career, I grew up all over the world. We changed countries every two years. I was born in Japan, spent most of my childhood in Peru, the USSR, Pakistan, India and Lebanon, lived for various lengths of time in France, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Netherlands, and traveled extensively in other countries. Constantly changing places fostered an appetite for novelty and surprise. Rotating through different cultures, languages, and schools bred empathy and curiosity. The vulnerability and ignorance of a newly arrived stranger gave rise to the pleasure of asking questions and, later, questioning the answers. Now I encourage my students to enjoy and learn from their own encounters with what is unfamiliar, in homework and fieldwork alike. 

Were you always focused on Southeast Asia? 

No. I had visited Southeast Asia earlier, but a fortuitous failure in grad school play a key role in my decision to concentrate on Southeast Asia. At Yale I planned a dissertation on African nationalism. I applied for fieldwork support to every funding source I could think of, but all of the envelopes I received in reply were thin. Fortunately, I had already developed an interest in Indonesia, and was offered last-minute funding from Yale to begin learning Indonesian. Two years of fieldwork in Jakarta yielded a dissertation that became my first book, Indonesia’s Elite: Political Culture and Cultural Politics. I sometimes think I should reimburse the African Studies Council for covering my tuition at Yale – doubtless among the worst investments they ever made. 

Indonesia stimulated my curiosity in several directions. Living in an archipelago led me to maritime studies and to writing on the rivalries in the South China Sea. Fieldwork among Madurese fishermen inspired Rethinking Artisanal Fisheries Development: Western Concepts, Asian Experiences. Experiences with Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia channeled my earlier impressions of Muslim societies into scholarship and motivated a debate with an anthropologist in the book Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam. 

What led you to Stanford?

In the early 1980s, I took two years of leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become a visiting scholar at Stanford, and later I returned to The Farm for shorter periods. At Stanford I enjoyed gaining fresh perspectives from colleagues in the wider contexts of East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. In 1999, I accepted an appointment as a senior fellow in FSI to start and run a program on Southeast Asia at Stanford with initial support from the Luce Foundation.

As a fellow, most of your time is focused on research, but you also proctor a fellowship program and have led student trips overseas. How have you found the experience advising younger scholars?

In 2006, I took a talented and motivated group of Stanford undergrads to Singapore for a Bing Overseas Seminar. I turned them loose to conduct original field research in the city-state, including focusing on sensitive topics such as Singapore’s use of laws and courts to punish political opposition. Despite the critical nature of some of their findings, a selection was published in a student journal at the National University of Singapore (NUS). NUS then sent a contingent of its own students to Stanford for a research seminar that I was pleased to host. I encouraged the NUS students to break out of the Stanford “bubble” and include in their projects not only the accomplishments of Silicon Valley but its problems as well, including those evident in East Palo Alto.

That exchange also helped lay the groundwork for an endowment whereby NUS and Stanford annually and jointly select a deserving applicant to receive the Lee Kong China NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. The 2014 recipient is Lee Jones, a scholar from the University of London who will write on regional efforts to combat non-traditional security threats such as air pollution, money laundering and pandemic disease.

Where does the American “pivot to Asia” now stand, and how does it inform your work? 

Events in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and now in Crimea as well, have pulled American attention away from Southeast Asia. Yet the reasons for priority interest in the region have not gone away. East Asia remains the planet’s most consequential zone of economic growth. No other region is more directly exposed to the potentially clashing interests and actions of the world’s major states – China, Japan, India and the United States. The eleven countries of Southeast Asia – 630 million people – could become a concourse for peaceful trans-Pacific cooperation, or the locus of a new Sino-American cold war. It is in that hopeful yet risky context that I am presently researching China’s relations with Southeast Asia, especially regarding the South China Sea, and taking part in exchanges between Stanford scholars and our counterparts in Southeast Asia and China. 

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

Okay. Here are three instructive failures I experienced in 1999, the year I joined the Stanford faculty. I was evacuated from East Timor, along with other international observers, to escape massive violence by pro-Indonesian vigilantes bent on punishing the population for voting for independence. The press pass around my neck failed to protect me from the tear gas used to disperse demonstrators at that year’s meeting of the World Trade Organization – the “Battle of Seattle.” And in North Carolina in semifinal competition at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, performing as Mel Koronelos, I went down to well-deserved defeat at the hands of a terrific black rapper named DC Renegade, whose skit included the imaginary machine-gunning of Mel himself, who enjoyed toppling backward to complete the scene. 

The Faculty Spotlight Q&A series highlights a different faculty member at Shorenstein APARC each month giving a personal look at his or her teaching approaches and outlook on related topics and upcoming activities.

Andres Moreno is not just unearthing the genetic backgrounds of many Latin Americans and Caribbeans. He’s also making sense of the history of this region, and piecing together a clearer genetic medical history of understudied populations. By looking at the genetic history of Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Hondurans and Colombians, Moreno’s research unearths these populations’ ties to Europe, native tribes and Africans, and serves as a way to understand the waves of migration in these populations.

And he’s able to do much of this work because of the Dr. George Rozenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries, given out by the Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR) to a promising young researcher.

“The Rosenkranz Prize is such a unique opportunity to promote the work of some of Stanford’s most promising young investigators,” CHP/PCOR Director Douglas K. Owens, also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a professor of medicine, said. “We’ve had researchers from within our centers, and with Andres we have a Rosenkranz recipient who’s thinking about international health from a completely new angle for CHP/PCOR.”

The $100,000 prize is given to young Stanford researchers focusing on how to improve health care access in developing countries. The award’s namesake, George Rozankranz, first synthesized cortisone in 1951, and later progestin (the active ingredient in oral birth control pills). He went on to establish the Mexican National Institute for Genomic Medicine, and his family created the Rosenkranz Prize in 2009.

“The Rosenkranz Prize has allowed me to build research independence upon original ideas and collaborative efforts initiated in different regions throughout Latin America and the Pacific,” Moreno said. “These efforts are paving the way to conduct population and medical genomics research in populations from developing regions traditionally underrepresented in large-scale genetic projects.”

Moreno continued: “This is only the beginning though. There is much to do to bridge the gap between developed and developing countries in terms of biomedical research, so funding opportunities like the Rosenkranz Award are essential to tackle this problem.”

As part of this work, Moreno published article in PLOS Genetics in November 2013, with two more anticipated in 2014.

“In this publication we especially wanted to focus on people in the Caribbean,” Moreno said. “We felt that this region has been understudied in terms of genetic complexity, and wanted to know which part of Africa, Europe and a Native American tribal genes existed. And its implications for medicine.”

In understanding a person’s genetic history, a doctor can determine whether a patient has gene variants that correlate with a disease. For example, because Ashkenazi Jewish women have an increased likelihood of having breast and ovarian cancer, their health providers are more likely to monitor for these cancers. 

Moreno’s advisor and co-author on the PLOS papers, Stanford Genetics Professor Carlos Bustamente, described Moreno’s work on this project: “Andres was extraordinary in putting the data all together, developing algorithms and doing simulation work,” he said. Moreno would seek to understand the implications of their findings, think through how this would affect their design of the next round of experiments and  “translate it into future genetic studies and interpretation of genomes that come into the clinic.”

The findings also tell a historical story of the region. In the Caribbean, Moreno and his co-authors were able to pinpoint where in Africa particular segments of the population had come from and when they contributed to the genetic pool. The first wave of Africans came from the western tip of Africa (present day Senegal and Gambia), a region that was an original contributor for all African slaves. But another strand of African heritage also emerged in their studies—from Africa’s gold coast (Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea). Moreno explained, “We can now genetically pinpoint when and where ancestry came from in Africa.”

Moreno said in looking at the populations, a major difference was between the genetic heritage of the island and mainland populations. In the case of the four islands, there were very consistent results of roughly the same date of European genes—about 500 years ago, which, Moreno pointed out, is exactly when colonization happened.

But in the mainland areas, Moreno and colleagues didn’t find European lines until two generations later, meaning Europeans first settled in the islands and then moved to the mainland.

Similarly, the Native American strands are distinct. Moreno and his co-authors believe that the Native American genes among the Caribbean populations are from inland Amazon tribes—a completely different Native American background than what’s typically found among Native American descendants in the United States.

Bustamente said Moreno has great breadth, commanding the whole operation—sampling in the field, collecting the data in the lab, doing the data scrubbing and analysis. Each of these tasks is typically undertaken by a different person. “He does all of this—and it gives him a real edge,” Bustamente said. “He thinks in a very integrated fashion. Plus he’s an MD!”

Kathryn McDonald, executive director for CHP/PCOR, said Moreno’s work represents the essence of the Rosenkranz Prize. “We really wanted this award to reach all angles of the Stanford health policy research community, and Andres embodies this. He’s expanding our understanding of health care and predisposition for diseases in a host of developing countries. It’s exciting—and such important—work.”

Teal Pennebaker is a freelance writer.