Professor Yu Tiejun joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as China Policy Fellow for the 2024 fall quarter. He currently serves as President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies (IISS) and Professor at the School of International Studies (SIS), all at Peking University (PKU). Previously, he studied at the University of Tokyo in 1998-2000. He served as visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University in 2005, and also as visiting scholar at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University in 2005-06.

Dr. Yu has co-edited The Sino-Japanese Security and Defense Exchange: Past, Present, and Prospect (Beijing: World Affairs Press, 2012, with Zhu Feng and Akiyama Masahiro). He is also the Chinese translator of Myths of Empire by Jack Snyder (2007) and Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics by Arnold Wolfers (2006). His research interests include International Security, China-U.S.-Japan Relations, and China’s National Defense Policy. He won the Excellent Teaching Award of Peking University in 2010. Dr. Yu received his Ph.D., M.A. and B.A. from Peking University.

While at APARC, he conducted research on contemporary China affairs and U.S.-China policy.

Brandon Yoder joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Stanford Next Asia Policy Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year. He currently serves as Senior Lecturer at Australian National University in the School of Politics and International Relations, Australian Centre on China in the World, as well as non-resident Research Fellow at National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Centre on Asia and Globalisation. While at APARC, he worked with the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL) on U.S.-Asia relations.

Xinxin Lu joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting student researcher in the fall of 2025 until winter 2026. She is currently a doctoral student in Sociology at Tsinghua University. Her dissertation focuses on "The Dying and the Chinese Family: The Economic, Moral, and Cultural Logic of End-of-Life Care in China."

Matthew Dolbow joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting scholar from 2024 to 2026 from the U.S. Department of State.  Before coming to APARC, Mr. Dolbow strengthened U.S. military deterrence capabilities in Asia as the U.S. Consul General in Okinawa, Japan.  As Chief of Staff in the U.S. National Security Council’s international economics office during the first Trump administration, Mr. Dolbow helped compile the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy, which declared for the first time that "economic security is national security," and thus helped to establish a new bipartisan U.S. consensus on innovative trade, investment screening, and energy policies that increased U.S. competitiveness and secured the U.S. defense industrial base. As head of economic strategy at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2013 to 2016, Mr. Dolbow created a Department of State-wide training program that taught colleagues to track and assess China's Belt and Road Initiative projects.  While at APARC, he will be conducting research on competition with China related to technology, innovation, human capital, and national security.

You Jung Lee joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting scholar for the 2024-2025 academic year. She is a journalist for the Korea Economic Daily, having spent over 10 years covering areas including international affairs and, most recently, construction and the real estate market. While at APARC, she conducted research examining Korea's housing and real estate market, its policies and financial structure, and comparing Korea's system to that of the U.S.

Shilin Jia joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia for the 2024-2025 academic year.  He was previously a postdoctoral teaching fellow in computational social science at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. degree in sociology. He received an M.A. degree in sociology from National Chengchi University, Taiwan and a B.A. degree in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. His scholarly interest lies in applying computational methods to the study of political culture and organizations, with a special focus on post-reform China.

Jia has spent years analyzing job transfers of communist party elites in China. It is a project that he built up from scratch by using machines to code party elites’ CVs. His goal is to understand how the party-state has evolved through the division of labor and circulation of its elite members. He is also working on a computational content analysis project tracking ideological changes in the full text of 60 years of the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China. The aim of that project is to understand how incompatible ideas in an ideological system can be gradually reconciled and how the concept of “market” was unfettered in that process. More recently, He has started a new project building word-embedding models based on multiple languages of Google N-grams and studying identity formation across language communities.

At APARC, while continuing to work on his existing projects, Jia began a book manuscript that provides a comprehensive analysis of the changing career patterns of CCP elites over 30 years of China’s economic reform.