Sachiko Masuda joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2021-22 academic year from the University of Tokyo, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, where she serves as an associate professor.

Masuda is dedicated to the study of legal systems and regulations, infrastructure, and industrial structures necessary for advances in technology and a safer society, especially in the pharmaceutical and medical fields. During her time at Shorenstein APARC, Masuda conducted a comparative study between the US and Japan regarding “Human genetic information for medical innovation: Examining policy issues related to domestic and cross-border sharing and ensuring control” with Professor Karen Eggleston.

Masuda received a Ph.D. in Arts and Sciences (specializing in intellectual property law) in 2006 and a B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1997 from the University of Tokyo. She is a registered patent attorney and pharmacist in Japan.

Mary-Collier Wilks joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia for the 2021-2022 year. Her research interests include globalization, gender, and the politics of international development. Wilks' interests arose due to her work as a grant writer at a local NGO, Social Services of Cambodia. At that time, she began to think about the complicated process of foreign aid and international development, seeing how resources and ideas from all over the world flow through NGOs to affect the lives of people in Cambodia. Following from this experience, her research agenda centers meaning-making and power dynamics in international organizations. She is particularly interested in how development is encountered in people’s everyday lives, and the gendered meanings, divisions, and struggles that arise from such encounters.

Wilks recently obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Virginia. For her dissertation, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright IIE, she conducted a multi-sited ethnography comparing INGOs from the U.S. and Japan implementing women's health programs in Cambodia. Her dissertation contributes to scholarly theories of global civil society and international development, contending that in order to adequately analyze and improve development outcomes, we must attend to national variation in INGO programs and practices. She has also worked as a consultant in the development sector, working as a researcher for a local NGO in Cambodia, conducting a gender analysis for a USAID health project, and served as a trainer for a USAID Women’s Leadership Conference.

At APARC, she worked on transforming her dissertation manuscript into a book and extending her comparative research agenda to investigate how NGO practices are shaped by the business cultures in which their donors are embedded.

Diana Stanescu joined APARC as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia for the 2021-2022 academic year. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, at Harvard University. She holds a B.A. in International Relations & Asian Studies from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Princeton University. During 2018-2020 she was a Pre-Doctoral Exchange Scholar in the Department of Government at Harvard.

Her research interests include international trade, regulation, and lobbying with a focus on Japan, using formal and quantitative methods. Her research addresses the overarching question of how bureaucracies shape global economic governance, from a structural and agent-driven perspective. Her dissertation, “The Bureaucratic Politics of Foreign Economic Policymaking,” explains the mechanisms by which stakeholders shape international economic policy through bureaucratic channels of influence.  Additional work looks at the micro-foundations of bureaucratic structure and its consequences for policy; examines the role of individual bureaucrats within domestic and international institutions; and develops micro-level data on bureaucratic careers and appointments.

As a Shorenstein APARC Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Stanescu further assessed how politicians and interest group representatives maneuver within bureaucratic channels to have influence over foreign economic policy. In particular, she examinedhow bureaucratic-interest group networks help firms obtain market access abroad, with evidence from trade and foreign direct investment in Japan.

Charles Crabtree joined APARC as a visiting assistant professor with the Japan Program for the 2021-22 academic year. Crabtree is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. During his time on campus, while on leave from Dartmouth, he researched fairness in politics, with applications to areas including the study of repression, human rights, policing, and immigration. 

Crabtree's research focuses on the politics, sociology, and economics of discrimination across countries in Asia, particularly in Japan, where out-group discrimination continues to mar the lived experiences of many. He examines the consequences of discrimination and evaluates various means of reducing it in politics, the workplace, and everyday life.  His book on this subject, Studying Discrimination: An Experimental Approach, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. He has published his research in various academic journals and regularly writes about American and Japanese politics for prominent national and international media outlets.

Crabtree holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Michigan and master's degrees from Pennsylvania State University and Northwestern University. 

Masami Yamamoto is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2021-22.  Yamamoto has held various positions related to fiscal and monetary policy at Japan's Ministry of Finance (MOF).  Before joining Shorenstein APARC, he served as the Director of the Office for countering illicit financial flows at the MOF since 2020 and was involved in the FATF mutual evaluation of Japan and the policy coordination of anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing, and combatting-proliferation finance with relevant ministries.  Prior to that, Yamamoto conducted financial inspections of major banks, supervised regional banks, and worked on regional economic revitalization in some areas.  In addition, he worked overseas in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Singapore, and made study reports on political and economic situations in the Asia-Pacific, Europe and Africa.

Masahiko Oishi is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2021-22.