John Everard, a retired British diplomat, is now a consultant for the UN.

In October 2006, only a few short months after Everard arrived in Pyongyang to serve as the British ambassador, North Korea conducted its first-ever nuclear test. Everard spent the next two-and-a-half years meeting with North Korean government officials and attending the official events so beloved by the North Korean regime. During this complicated period he provided crucial reports back to the British government on political developments.

He also traveled extensively throughout North Korea, witnessing scenes of daily life experienced by few foreigners: people shopping for food in Pyongyang’s informal street markets, urban residents taking time off to relax at the beach, and many other very human moments. Everard captured such snapshots of everyday life through dozens of photographs and detailed notes.

His distinguished career with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office spanned nearly 30 years and four continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America), and included a number of politically sensitive posts. As the youngest-ever British ambassador when he was appointed to Belarus (1993 to 1995), he built an embassy from the ground up just a few short years after the fall of the Soviet Union. He also skillfully managed diplomatic relations as the UK ambassador to Uruguay (2001 to 2005) during a period of economic crisis and the country’s election of its first left-wing government.

From 2010 to 2011 Everard spent one year at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, conducting research, writing, and participating in major international conferences on North Korea.

He holds BA and MA degrees in Chinese from Emmanuel College at Cambridge University, and a diploma in economics from Beijing University. Everard also earned an MBA from Manchester Business School, and is proficient in Chinese, Spanish, German, Russian, and French.

An avid cyclist and volunteer, Everard enjoys biking whenever he has the opportunity. He has been known to cycle from his London home to provincial cities to attend meetings of the Youth Hostels Association of England and Wales, of which he was a trustee from 2009 to 2010.

Everard currently resides with his wife in New York City.

Pantech Fellowships, generously funded by Pantech Group of Korea, are intended to cultivate a diverse international community of scholars and professionals committed to and capable of grappling with challenges posed by developments in Korea. We invite individuals from the United States, Korea, and other countries to apply.

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.

Henry S. Rowen was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of public policy and management emeritus at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and a senior fellow emeritus of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). Rowen was an expert on international security, economic development, and high tech industries in the United States and Asia. His most current research focused on the rise of Asia in high technologies.

In 2004 and 2005, Rowen served on the Presidential Commission on the Intelligence of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. From 2001 to 2004, he served on the Secretary of Defense Policy Advisory Board. Rowen was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the U.S. Department of Defense from 1989 to 1991. He was also chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 1981 to 1983. Rowen served as president of the RAND Corporation from 1967 to 1972, and was assistant director of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget from 1965 to 1966.

Rowen most recently co-edited Greater China's Quest for Innovation (Shorenstein APARC, 2008). He also co-edited Making IT: The Rise of Asia in High Tech (Stanford University Press, 2006) and The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2000). Rowen's other books include Prospects for Peace in South Asia (edited with Rafiq Dossani) and Behind East Asian Growth: The Political and Social Foundations of Prosperity (1998). Among his articles are "The Short March: China's Road to Democracy," in National Interest (1996); "Inchon in the Desert: My Rejected Plan," in National Interest (1995); and "The Tide underneath the 'Third Wave,'" in Journal of Democracy (1995).

Born in Boston in 1925, Rowen earned a bachelors degree in industrial management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 and a masters in economics from Oxford University in 1955.

Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the department of political science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Professor Oi is also the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University.

A PhD in political science from the University of Michigan, Oi first taught at Lehigh University and later in the Department of Government at Harvard University before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997.

Her work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on political economy and the process of reform in transitional systems. Oi has written extensively on China's rural politics and political economy. Her State and Peasant in Contemporary China (University of California Press, 1989) examined the core of rural politics in the Mao period—the struggle over the distribution of the grain harvest—and the clientelistic politics that ensued. Her Rural China Takes Off (University of California Press, 1999 and Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 1999) examines the property rights necessary for growth and coined the term “local state corporatism" to describe local-state-led growth that has been the cornerstone of China’s development model. 

She has edited a number of conference volumes on key issues in China’s reforms. The first was Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation (Brookings Institution Press, 2010), co-edited with Scott Rozelle and Xueguang Zhou, which examined the earlier phases of reform. Most recently, she co-edited with Thomas Fingar, Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future (Stanford University Press, 2020). The volume examines the difficult choices and tradeoffs that China leaders face after forty years of reform, when the economy has slowed and the population is aging, and with increasing demand for and costs of education, healthcare, elder care, and other social benefits.

Oi also works on the politics of corporate restructuring, with a focus on the incentives and institutional constraints of state actors. She has published three edited volumes related to this topic: one on China, Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform (Shorenstein APARC, 2011); one on Korea, co-edited with Byung-Kook Kim and Eun Mee Kim, Adapt, Fragment, Transform: Corporate Restructuring and System Reform in Korea (Shorenstein APARC, 2012); and a third on Japan, Syncretism: The Politics of Economic Restructuring and System Reform in Japan, co-edited with Kenji E. Kushida and Kay Shimizu (Brookings Institution, 2013). Other more recent articles include “Creating Corporate Groups to Strengthen China’s State-Owned Enterprises,” with Zhang Xiaowen, in Kjeld Erik Brodsgard, ed., Globalization and Public Sector Reform in China (Routledge, 2014) and "Unpacking the Patterns of Corporate Restructuring during China's SOE Reform," co-authored with Xiaojun Li, Economic and Political Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2018.

Oi continues her research on rural finance and local governance in China. She has done collaborative work with scholars in China, including conducting fieldwork on the organization of rural communities, the provision of public goods, and the fiscal pressures of rapid urbanization. This research is brought together in a co-edited volume, Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization (Brookings Institution Shorenstein APARC Series, 2017), with Karen Eggleston and Wang Yiming. Included in this volume is her “Institutional Challenges in Providing Affordable Housing in the People’s Republic of China,” with Niny Khor. 

As a member of the research team who began studying in the late 1980s one county in China, Oi with Steven Goldstein provides a window on China’s dramatic change over the decades in Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County (Stanford University Press, 2018). This volume assesses the later phases of reform and asks how this rural county has been able to manage governance with seemingly unchanged political institutions when the economy and society have transformed beyond recognition. The findings reveal a process of adaptive governance and institutional agility in the way that institutions actually operate, even as their outward appearances remain seemingly unchanged.

Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow from 2010 through 2015 and the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford in 2009.

From 2005 through 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-01 and 2004-05), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001-03), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Fingar is a graduate of Cornell University (A.B. in Government and History, 1968), and Stanford University (M.A., 1969 and Ph.D., 1977 both in political science). His most recent books are From Mandate to Blueprint: Lessons from Intelligence Reform (Stanford University Press, 2021), Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford University Press, 2011), The New Great Game: China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform, editor (Stanford University Press, 2016), Uneasy Partnerships: China and Japan, the Koreas, and Russia in the Era of Reform (Stanford, 2017), and Fateful Decisions: Choices that will Shape China’s Future, co-edited with Jean Oi (Stanford, 2020). His most recent article is, "The Role of Intelligence in Countering Illicit Nuclear-Related Procurement,” in Matthew Bunn, Martin B. Malin, William C. Potter, and Leonard S Spector, eds., Preventing Black Market Trade in Nuclear Technology (Cambridge, 2018)."

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Mr. Choe, has written extensively on United States-Korea relations for the international news media, including the Associated Press and The International Herald Tribune, the international version of The New York Times, where he currently serves as a correspondent. While at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Mr. Choe will analyze the perspective of U.S. experts focusing on issues concerning South Korea's government, media, and society.