Evan S. Medeiros

Evan S. Medeiros is the Penner Family Chair in Asia Studies in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and the Cling Family Distinguished Fellow in U.S.-China Studies. His research and teaching focus on the international politics of East Asia, U.S.-China relations and China’s foreign and national security policies. He has published several books and articles and regularly provides advice to global corporations and commentary to international media.   

Dr. Medeiros previously served for six years on the staff of the National Security Council as director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, and then as special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia. In the latter role, Dr. Medeiros served as President Obama’s top advisor on the Asia-Pacific and was responsible for coordinating U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific across the areas of diplomacy, defense policy, economic policy, and intelligence. 

Dr. Medeiros currently advises multinational companies as a senior advisor with The Asia Group, and is an NCUSCR board director. 

Andrew Polk

Andrew Polk is a co-founder and the head of economic research at Trivium China, a strategic advisory firm. Before founding Trivium, he was the China director at Medley Global Advisors, where he advised asset managers and hedge funds on developments in China’s economy and financial markets 

Previously, Mr. Polk was the resident China economist at The Conference Board’s China Center in Beijing, where he conducted economic analysis on the Chinese economy for corporate clients  

He is the co-author of The Long, Soft Fall in Chinese Growth and maintains a deep network of professional contacts in the official, academic, and business communities in China built over a decade of living in China and working on China issues. 

Mr. Polk holds an MA in economics and international relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a BA in American studies, communication, and religious studies from Texas A & M University.  He is an NCUSCR Public Intellectuals Program fellow. 

Ka Zeng

Dr. Ka Zeng is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  Her research focuses on China’s role in the global economy, specifically Chinese trade policy; China’s behavior in global economic governance; and China-related trade dispute dynamics. 

Dr. Zeng is the author or co-author of Trade Threats, Trade Wars  (2004), Greening China  (2011) and Fragmenting Globalization (2021). She has also edited or co-edited multiple books on China’s foreign trade policy and global trade governance. She is a contributor to many journals including International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Experimental Political Science, Journal of World Trade, International Interactions, China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, Social Science Quarterly, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Pacific Affairs, and China & World Economy. 

Dr. Zeng is a senior research fellow at the Wong Center for the Study of Multinational Corporations and is also an NCUSCR Public Intellectuals Program fellow. 

Eli Friedman

Eli Friedman is a professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), where he has taught since 2011. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley and joined the ILR faculty in 2011. His research explores how China’s global economic ascent has reshaped labor politics across the region, with current work focusing on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. He is the author of China in Global Capitalism (2024), The Urbanization of People (2022), and Insurgency Trap (2014), and his research has appeared in the ILR Review, Theory and Society, and China Quarterly, among others. Dr. Friedman teaches courses on China, Asia, labor, and global development and regularly leads a doctoral seminar in labor sociology. He also serves as faculty advisor for the Cornell Labor Action Tracker, the most comprehensive database of U.S. strike activity. 

Yun Zhou

Yun Zhou is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. Trained as a social demographer, Dr. Zhou’s research examines inequality and state-market-family relations through the lens of gender, marriage, and fertility. Intersecting the studies of population and politics, her current project investigates the demographic, political, and gendered consequences of China’s evolving reproductive governance. Dr. Zhou received her B.A. in Urdu Literature from Peking University (2011), during which time she lived and studied for a year in Islamabad, Pakistan. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 2017. In addition to her academic publications, Dr. Zhou’s research and commentary have been featured in The BBC, The Guardian, The New York Time, NPR, Reuters, The Washington Post, among others. 

Andrew Liu

Andrew Liu is an associate professor of history at Villanova University, specializing in modern China, South and East Asia, political economy, and global history. His first book, Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, was published by Yale University Press in 2020. He is also a Public Intellectuals Program fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. 

Yangyang Cheng

Yangyang Cheng is a research scholar in law and fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her work focuses on the development of science and technology in China and U.S.–China relations. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED, and received awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA), the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), and other media organizations. She is also a co-host, writer, and producer of the acclaimed narrative podcast series Dissident at the Doorstep from Crooked Media. 

Born and raised in China, Dr. Cheng received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor’s from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Before Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider for over a decade, most recently at Cornell University and Fermilab. 

Gina Anne Tam

Gina Anne Tam is an associate professor of modern Chinese history, and the co-director of Women and Gender Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is a Public Intellectuals Program fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and was a Wilson China fellow.  She is the author of Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 (2020), winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize, and her writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals as well as mainstream publications such as Foreign Affairs, Dissent, LARB and The Nation. She is currently writing a book about women and activism in post-war Hong Kong.  

Dr. Tam received her B.A. in history and Asian studies from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from Stanford University. 

Abigail Coplin

Abigail Coplin is an assistant professor of sociology and science, technology and society at Vassar College. Her research is situated in political sociology, economic sociology, and science and technology studies. She examines the entanglement—and coproduction—of science, politics, and nationalism in contemporary China, exposing how non-democratic states incorporate expertise into governance and legitimacy claims. Her work shows that while the Chinese Communist Party-state (CCP) seeks to harness science and technology as a legitimizing ideology and economic driver, semi-incorporating them into the state produces new, often unintended, dynamics the party-state must address. 

Dr. Coplin holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, an M.A. in regional studies of East Asia from Harvard University, and a B.S. in chemistry and East Asian studies from Yale University. She has held fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China, the Yale Council on East Asian Studies, and the Fulbright Association.  

Alison M. Friedman

Alison M. Friedman has been the James and Susan Moeser Executive and Artistic Director for Carolina Performing Arts (CPA) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2021; she lived and worked in China for the previous 20 years.
Prior to CPA, Ms. Friedman was artistic director of performing arts for the Hong Kong West Kowloon Cultural District, one of the world’s largest arts and cultural developments. Previously she founded and ran Ping Pong Productions, a U.S.- and Beijing-registered cultural exchange organization that worked in more than 50 countries on five continents. Her productions have toured Lincoln Center, the Sydney Opera House, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, China’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, Shanghai International Arts Festival, and other leading venues and festivals.

She was a 2002-03 Fulbright scholar to China and a John F. Kennedy Center arts management fellow. She is an NCUSCR Public Intellectuals Program fellow.

Andrew Polk

Andrew Polk is a co-founder and the head of economic research at Trivium China, a strategic advisory firm. Before founding Trivium, he was the China director at Medley Global Advisors, where he advised asset managers and hedge funds on developments in China’s economy and financial markets

Previously, Mr. Polk was the resident China economist at The Conference Board’s China Center in Beijing, where he conducted economic analysis on the Chinese economy for corporate clients

He is the co-author of The Long, Soft Fall in Chinese Growth and maintains a deep network of professional contacts in the official, academic, and business communities in China built over a decade of living in China and working on China issues.

Mr. Polk holds an MA in economics and international relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a BA in American studies, communication, and religious studies from Texas A & M University.  He is an NCUSCR Public Intellectuals Program fellow.

Jessica Chen Weiss

Jessica Chen Weiss is the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis. From 2021 to 2022, she served as senior advisor to the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department on a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship for tenured international relations scholars. She previously held positions at Cornell and Yale.

Dr. Weiss is the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations. Her research appears in International Organization, China Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, and Review of International Political Economy. and her commentary in many media outlets. She was profiled by the New Yorker and named one of Prospect Magazine’s Top Thinkers for 2024.

Dr. Weiss is a Public Intellectuals Program fellow and a member of the NCUSCR board of directors.

Andrew Greenland

Andrew Greenland is an assistant professor of economics in the Poole College of Management and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University. He is an NBER research economist and an associate editor at the Journal of Economic Perspectives. His research focuses on understanding the effects of tariffs and trade on the United States in both modern and historical settings. He has published multiple studies on the effects of trade with China on U.S. labor markets, firm behavior, and stock market reactions.  This research has been presented at top policy and research institutions including Yale, Dartmouth, Duke, Columbia, Princeton, the Federal Reserve Board, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and the National Bureau of Economic Research, among others.  His current projects examine the evolution of U.S. trade policy in the 1970s and 1980s, which reshaped the U.S. manufacturing landscape.  

Claire Reade

Claire Reade is a senior associate with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). From 2008 to 2014, she served as assistant U.S. trade representative for China affairs in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), where she was responsible for developing and implementing U.S. trade policy toward China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Mongolia. Previously, Ms. Reade served as the first chief counsel for China trade enforcement at USTR. Earlier, she was a senior international trade partner at Arnold & Porter. Ms. Reade is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a frequent speaker on international trade law issues. She received her law degree from Harvard and her master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.  

Spencer Cohen

Spencer Cohen is principal and founder of High Peak Strategy LLC, an economics and research consulting firm in Seattle, Washington, specializing in international trade, U.S.-China relations, port operations, and regional economic analysis. He works with clients across the United States, including West Coast, Gulf, and East Coast ports; economic development organizations; engineering firms; industry and trade associations; and state and local governments. Dr. Cohen holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Washington, where his research examined land markets, local government finance, and local state enterprises in China. He is a National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Public Intellectuals Program fellow, a 2023 American Mandarin Society fellow, and serves as affiliate faculty in the University of Washington Department of Geography.  

Emily Feng

Emily Feng is an international correspondent for NPR covering China, Taiwan, and beyond. She joined NPR in 2019. She traveled to big cities and small villages to report on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of the Asia Pacific. Ms. Feng contributes to NPR’s newsmagazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms.

Ms. Feng’s reporting has also allowed her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands and write about girl bands and art. She has filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine, the top of a mosque in Qinghai, and inside a cave where Chairman Mao once lived.

She was 2023 winner of the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, awarded to a rising public media journalist 35 years of age or younger. She also received the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award for her overall reporting on the Asia Pacific.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California Irvine and a former member of NCUSCR’s Board of Directors. He has written for newspapers, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and general interest magazines, ranging from the Atlantic to Dissent and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books are Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, published in 2020 by Columbia Global Reports, and The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, forthcoming in June from the same press.

Dr. Wasserstrom received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, his MA from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sewell Chan

Sewell Chan joined the Columbia Journalism Review as executive editor in 2024. Previously, he was editor in chief of the Texas Tribune (2021-2024), during which the nonprofit newsroom won its first National Magazine Award and was a Pulitzer finalist for the first time. From 2018 to 2021, he was a deputy managing editor and then the editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversaw coverage that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Mr. Chan worked at the New York Times from 2004 to 2018, as a metro reporter, Washington correspondent, deputy op-ed editor, and international news editor. He began his career as a local reporter at the Washington Post in 2000. Mr. Chan is an alumnus of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Young Leaders Program.

Emily Feng

Emily Feng is a correspondent for NPR covering China, Taiwan, and beyond. She joined NPR in 2019. She traveled to big cities and small villages to report on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of the Asia Pacific.  

Ms. Feng’s reporting has allowed her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands and write about girl bands and art. She has filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine, the top of a mosque in Qinghai, and inside a cave where Chairman Mao once lived. 

She was 2023 winner of the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, awarded to a rising public media journalist 35 years of age or younger. She also received the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award for her overall reporting on the Asia Pacific. 

A graduate of Duke University, Ms. Feng received dual degrees in Asian and Middle Eastern studies and public policy. 

Manjari Chatterjee Miller

Manjari Chatterjee Miller is professor of international relations and the inaugural Munk Chair in Global India at the Munk School. She is a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and an associate at the Asia Center, Harvard University. Dr. Miller is the author of  Why Nations Rise: Narratives and the Path to Great Power  (2021, shortlisted for the 2022 Hedley Bull Prize in International Relations), Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China  (2013), and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations  (2020). 

Previously, Dr. Miller was a tenured associate professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and has held fellowships at Harvard and Princeton. She has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed and policy journals, and chapters in edited books. A frequent contributor to media and policy outlets in the United States and abroad, from 2020 to 2024 Dr. Miller was a columnist for the Hindustan Times. She received a B.A. from the University of Delhi, an MSc. from the University of London, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She was a post-doctoral fellow in the China and the World Program at Princeton University. 

Liu Zongyi

Liu Zongyi is a senior fellow and the director of the Center for South Asia Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SISS). He also serves as the director of the research office of major power relations at the Institute for International Strategic and Security Studies (SISS) and the director of the Centre for China Studies (Bangladesh). His research focuses on India’s economy and foreign policy, China’s foreign policy, BRICS, and the G-2. Dr. Liu has published extensively in Chinese and international journals and has contributed over 300 commentaries in both Chinese and English to various newspapers and magazines. Dr. Liu has been a visiting fellow at institutions including the German Development Institute, OECD, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Indian National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, and the Institute of Strategic Studies of Islamabad. 

Dr. Liu holds a B.A. in economics from Shandong University of Finance, an M.A. in Chinese and American studies from The John Hopkins University Nanjing Center, and a Ph.D. in international relations from China Foreign Affairs University. 

Mark W. Frazier

Mark W. Frazier is a China-India scholar whose research interests focus on comparative urbanization, labor politics, and citizenship in China and India. He is a professor of politics at The New School (TNS), co-director of the India China Institute (ICI), and a fellow in the NCUSCR Public Intellectuals Program. Before joining TNS, Dr. Frazier was a Fulbright Research Fellow in China and held faculty positions at the University of Oklahoma and at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Constrained Expertise in India and China: Knowledge and Power in Policymaking  (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) developed from an ICI project on the politics of expertise. His 2019 book, The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth Century Shanghai and Bombay  (Cambridge University Press), explored how urban geography, political institutions, and historical legacies shaped patterns of protest and labor activism in the two cities. He has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, Daedalus, and The Diplomat.  Dr. Frazier holds a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley.