Shelby Perkins is a Research Assistant at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and a Master in International Policy candidate at Stanford University, where she specializes in cyber policy and security. At SIO, she monitors and writes on social media platform policies and various international disinformation campaigns. Previously, she worked in Lesotho as a Peace Corps volunteer and in higher education. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and Spanish, with a minor in Democracy Studies, from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and is a proud first-generation college graduate. 

Soojong Kim is a postdoctoral fellow, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL). He received his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers around social media, misinformation, and computational social science. As a former computer scientist and engineer, he is also interested in applying and developing innovative research methods, including web-based experiments, computational modeling, network analysis, and natural language processing.

He is recently focusing on three research projects. (1) Real-time Misinformation Monitoring: Evaluating the impacts of real-world misinformation messages in real-time and reducing their adverse socio-psychological consequences. (2) Virtual Social Media: Discovering and examining factors that influence behavior and perception of social media users based on interactive multi-agent network experiments. (3) Map of Misinformation: Investigating the structure of disinformation messages and the landscape of the fake news ecosystem and designing effective misinformation suppression/prevention strategies.

Dr. Kim worked at Samsung Electronics as a computer scientist for several years after earning his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University, South Korea. He also holds his Master's degree in sociology. He is a recipient of the ICA Best Paper Award, Wharton Russell Ackoff Fellowship, Waterhouse Family Institute Research Grant Award, Annenberg Doctoral Research Fellowship, and MisinfoCon Research Grant.

Find more information on Dr. Kim’s research and news at his personal site http://www.soojong.kim/

Anna Zhang joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as APARC Predoctoral Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. She is a PhD candidate at the political science department. Her research interests include civil conflict, state building, and internal migration. Her dissertation studies China's institutional solution to the challenges of territorial control. 

Shan Huang joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as APARC Predoctoral Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year and is currently a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Stanford University. He is broadly interested in urban studies and contemporary social movements with an area focus of Hong Kong and Mainland China. His dissertation examines how Hong Kong government’s developmental schemes are confronted by grassroots actions aimed at democratizing urban planning and promoting alternative urban futures. An ethnographic account of Hong Kong’s political culture in the post-Handover era, it also seeks to reflect on urbanism of our times.

Nhu Truong joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. Her research focuses on authoritarian politics and the nature of communist and post-communist regimes, particularly pertaining to regime repressive-responsiveness, dynamics of social resistance, repertoires of social contention, and political legitimation. As a Shorenstein Fellow, Nhu Truong worked to develop her dissertation into a book manuscript. More specifically, she worked on buttressing the theory by contrasting Cambodia with China and Vietnam, as well as exploring the variable outcomes and knock-on effects of authoritarian responsiveness as groundwork for her next comparative project.

Nhu Truong’s dissertation explains how and why the two most similar communist, authoritarian regimes of China and Vietnam differ in their responsiveness to mounting unrest caused by government land seizures. Authoritarian regimes manage social unrest not merely by relying on raw coercive power, but also by demonstrating responsiveness to social demands. Yet, not all authoritarian regimes are equally responsive to social pressures. Despite their many similarities, Vietnam has exhibited greater institutionalized responsiveness, whereas China has been relatively more reactive. Theory and empirical findings based on 16 months of fieldwork and in-depth comparative historical analysis of China and Vietnam illuminate the divergent institutional pathways and the nature of responsiveness to social pressures under communist and authoritarian rule.

Nhu Truong obtained her Ph.D. in comparative politics in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, with an area focus on China, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia. She received an MPA in International Policy and Management from New York University, Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, an MA in Asian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in International Studies from Kenyon College. Prior to embarking on her doctoral study, she had work experience in international development in Vietnam, Cambodia, and policy research on China.

Michael Bennon is a Research Scholar at CDDRL for the Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative. Michael's research interests include infrastructure policy, project finance, public-private partnerships and institutional design in the infrastructure sector. Michael also teaches Global Project Finance to graduate students at Stanford. Prior to Stanford, Michael served as a Captain in the US Army and US Army Corps of Engineers for five years, leading Engineer units, managing projects, and planning for infrastructure development in the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan and Thailand.