Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in the Department of Sociology, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the founding director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) since 2001, all at Stanford University. In May 2024, Shin also launched the Taiwan Program at APARC. He served as director of APARC for two decades (2005-2025). As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, democracy, migration, and international relations.

In Summer 2023, Shin launched the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), which is a new research initiative committed to addressing emergent social, cultural, economic, and political challenges in Asia. Across four research themes– “Talent Flows and Development,” “Nationalism and Racism,” “U.S.-Asia Relations,” and “Democratic Crisis and Reform”–the lab brings scholars and students to produce interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, policy-relevant, and comparative studies and publications. Shin’s latest book, The Four Talent Giants, a comparative study of talent strategies of Japan, Australia, China, and India to be published by Stanford University Press in the summer of 2025, is an outcome of SNAPL.

Shin is also the author/editor of twenty-seven books and numerous articles. His books include The Four Talent Giants: National Strategies for Human Resource Development Across Japan, Australia, China, and India (2025); Korean Democracy in Crisis: The Threat of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization (2022); The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security (2021); Superficial Korea (2017); Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War (2016); Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea (2015); Criminality, Collaboration, and Reconciliation: Europe and Asia Confronts the Memory of World War II (2014); New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan (2014); History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories (2011); South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (2011); One Alliance, Two Lenses: U.S.-Korea Relations in a New Era (2010); Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia (2007);  and Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (2006). Due to the wide popularity of his publications, many have been translated and distributed to Korean audiences. His articles have appeared in academic and policy journals, including American Journal of Sociology, World Development, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Comparative Education, International Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, Journal of Democracy, and Foreign Affairs.

Shin is not only the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, but also continues to actively raise funds for Korean/Asian studies at Stanford. He gives frequent lectures and seminars on topics ranging from Korean nationalism and politics to Korea's foreign relations, historical reconciliation in Northeast Asia, and talent strategies. He serves on councils and advisory boards in the United States and South Korea and promotes policy dialogue between the two allies. He regularly writes op-eds and gives interviews to the media in both Korean and English.

Before joining Stanford in 2001, Shin taught at the University of Iowa (1991-94) and the University of California, Los Angeles (1994-2001). After receiving his BA from Yonsei University in Korea, he was awarded his MA and PhD from the University of Washington in 1991.

Daniel C. Sneider is a lecturer in international policy at Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy and a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford. His own research is focused on current U.S. foreign and national security policy in Asia and on the foreign policy of Japan and Korea.  Since 2017, he has been based partly in Tokyo as a Visiting Researcher at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, where he is working on a diplomatic history of the creation and management of the U.S. security alliances with Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. Sneider contributes regularly to the leading Japanese publication Toyo Keizai as well as to the Nelson Report on Asia policy issues.

Sneider is the former Associate Director for Research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. At Shorenstein APARC, Sneider directed the center’s Divided Memories and Reconciliation project, a comparative study of the formation of wartime historical memory in East Asia. He is the co-author of a book on wartime memory and elite opinion, Divergent Memories, from Stanford University Press. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Gi-Wook Shin, of Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia, from Routledge and of Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies, from University of Washington Press.

Sneider was named a National Asia Research Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. He is the co-editor of Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia, Shorenstein APARC, distributed by Brookings Institution Press, 2007; of First Drafts of Korea: The U.S. Media and Perceptions of the Last Cold War Frontier, 2009; as well as of Does South Asia Exist?: Prospects for Regional Integration, 2010. Sneider’s path-breaking study “The New Asianism: Japanese Foreign Policy under the Democratic Party of Japan” appeared in the July 2011 issue of Asia Policy. He has also contributed to other volumes, including “Strategic Abandonment: Alliance Relations in Northeast Asia in the Post-Iraq Era” in Towards Sustainable Economic and Security Relations in East Asia: U.S. and ROK Policy Options, Korea Economic Institute, 2008; “The History and Meaning of Denuclearization,” in William H. Overholt, editor, North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War?, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2019; and “Evolution or new Doctrine? Japanese security policy in the era of collective self-defense,” in James D.J. Brown and Jeff Kingston, eds, Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia, Routledge, December 2017.

Sneider’s writings have appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, National Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Oriental Economist, Newsweek, Time, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, and Yale Global. He is frequently cited in such publications.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Sneider was a long-time foreign correspondent. His twice-weekly column for the San Jose Mercury News looking at international issues and national security from a West Coast perspective was syndicated nationally on the Knight Ridder Tribune wire service. Previously, Sneider served as national/foreign editor of the Mercury News. From 1990 to 1994, he was the Moscow bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, covering the end of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1985 to 1990, he was Tokyo correspondent for the Monitor, covering Japan and Korea. Prior to that he was a correspondent in India, covering South and Southeast Asia. He also wrote widely on defense issues, including as a contributor and correspondent for Defense News, the national defense weekly.

Sneider has a BA in East Asian history from Columbia University and an MPA from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Rafiq Dossani was a senior research scholar at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and erstwhile director of the Stanford Center for South Asia. His research interests include South Asian security, government, higher education, technology, and business.  

Dossani’s most recent book is Knowledge Perspectives of New Product Development, co-edited with D. Assimakopoulos and E. Carayannis, published in 2011 by Springer. His earlier books include Does South Asia Exist?, published in 2010 by Shorenstein APARC; India Arriving, published in 2007 by AMACOM Books/American Management Association (reprinted in India in 2008 by McGraw-Hill, and in China in 2009 by Oriental Publishing House); Prospects for Peace in South Asia, co-edited with Henry Rowen, published in 2005 by Stanford University Press; and Telecommunications Reform in India, published in 2002 by Greenwood Press. One book is under preparation: Higher Education in the BRIC Countries, co-authored with Martin Carnoy and others, to be published in 2012.

Dossani currently chairs FOCUS USA, a non-profit organization that supports emergency relief in the developing world. Between 2004 and 2010, he was a trustee of Hidden Villa, a non-profit educational organization in the Bay Area. He also serves on the board of the Industry Studies Association, and is chair of the Industry Studies Association Annual Conference for 2010–12.

Earlier, Dossani worked for the Robert Fleming Investment Banking group, first as CEO of its India operations and later as head of its San Francisco operations. He also previously served as the chairman and CEO of a stockbroking firm on the OTCEI stock exchange in India, as the deputy editor of Business India Weekly, and as a professor of finance at Pennsylvania State University.

Dossani holds a BA in economics from St. Stephen's College, New Delhi, India; an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, India; and a PhD in finance from Northwestern University.

Haggay is interested in Middle Eastern historical and contemporary economies, as well as in labor and family economics. For 2008-09, he was a post-doctoral fellow at CDDRL and also teaches a course on Middle Eastern economic history at the Stanford's economics department.

During the fellowship year, Haggay examined the causes and implications of a major socio-economic transformation, which took place in the Gaza Strip during the second half of the twentieth century: The refugees who initially were less educated than the urbanites became by the 1980s better educated. Haggay suggested that the institution of the Palestinian family and ironically the refugees lack of access to credit market played a key role in the rise of the refugees to educational primacy. One plausible result of this transformation is the growth of the Hamas, whose Gazan leadership includes many highly educated men of refugee origin.

In the previous year, Haggay finished his Ph.D. in the economics department at the Hebrew University. His dissertation used the case of Ottoman Gaza for examining how the proximity of a semi-arid eco-system ­ a common characteriistic of wide regions of the Middle East ­ affected the demographic,, economic, and political development of an early modern Middle Eastern economy. His job market paper, analyzes a unique micro-dataset on protection payments, which villages made to armed nomadic tribes, for evaluating the interaction of this widespread but usually hidden institution with taxation, economic growth, and military technology. It demonstrates that strong predatory state could enhance economic development in an economy with multiple predators.

Hakjoon Kim was a Distinguished Practitioner at Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford. He is chairman of the Dong-A Ilbo, one of South Korea's largest and most influential newspapers with a circulation of over two million. He has served as president of the University of Inchon, the Korean Political Science Association, and the Korean Federation of Teachers' Associations. He was a scholar at the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation in Germany and a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.