Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is delighted to welcome a new cohort of fellows joining us starting in summer 2026.

APARC offers multiple prestigious fellowship opportunities for Stanford doctoral students, emerging scholars of exceptional promise, and accomplished faculty and mid-career experts researching contemporary Asia topics. Supported by these fellowships, our incoming fellows will complete dissertation research, work on book manuscripts, undertake new research projects, and engage with the center's scholarly community.

Meet the Fellows

Herbert Chang is an assistant professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth College and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Science for his work on network science and offshore finance. His research examines how emerging technologies reshape democratic behavior, including recent work on AI and misinformation in the 2024 Taiwan and U.S. presidential elections. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Scientific American, and has informed both academic and policy debates.

Chang will use his time at APARC to write a monograph on the interdependence of AI infrastructure and information ecosystems, with Taiwan and the United States as central empirical sites. He will also collaborate with SNAPL to quantify its talent-portfolio theory and empirically model how Asian Pacific nations cultivate and retain scientific expertise. 

Alicia R. Chen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. She studies international relations and political economy, with a focus on China. Her dissertation examines the domestic political economy of China's international aid and finance, revealing how domestic politics and institutions shape its overseas economic activities.

Her research is published in the British Journal of Political Science and has been generously supported by Stanford’s King Center on Global Development, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, among others.

Before her doctoral studies, Chen was a research specialist with the Empirical Studies of Conflict project at Princeton University. She holds a master's degree in international policy from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Southern California. 

Dr. Sheikh Jamal Hossain is a researcher and academic specializing in child development, maternal mental health, health promotion, and health economics. His professional interests center on advancing evidence-based interventions through rigorous research, teaching, and capacity strengthening, with a commitment to translating scientific evidence into policies and programs that improve the lives of women and children globally.

With over two decades of experience spanning academia, public health research, and international development, Dr. Hossain has led and contributed to large-scale randomized controlled trials, implementation research, and economic evaluations addressing early childhood development, nutrition, maternal mental health, and health system strengthening. He has successfully secured and managed research grants from international donors, including Grand Challenges Canada, UNICEF, FCDO, and Sida.

Dr. Hossain has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications, including 13 as first author, in leading international journals such as The Lancet Regional Health, Pediatrics, Social Science & Medicine, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and BMJ Global Health. He currently mentors multidisciplinary research teams and supervises early-career researchers and graduate students.

He earned his doctorate in women’s and children’s health from Uppsala University, with research focused on the effects of parenting interventions integrated with social protection programs on child development and maternal well-being in Bangladesh. He also holds master's degrees in public health and in health economics from the University of Dhaka.  

Angela Ju is an associate professor of international affairs and political science at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. She uses mixed-methods approaches to study race/ethnicity, gender, international migration, social determinants of health, the nonprofit sector, and urban politics in North America, Latin America, Europe, and East Asia. Her first book, Identities Matter: The Politics of Immigration and Incorporation (Oxford University Press), was published last year. 

While at APARC, Angela will be working on her second monograph, Taiwan's Migration Diplomacy Towards Mainland Chinese Migrants and Refugees. In this book, she will examine why Taiwan has not formed consistent immigration policies for migrants from Mainland China.

Using textual analysis of Taiwanese government legislation and publications, the book's primary argument is that Taiwan uses its migration policies to manage its foreign relations with Mainland China. It also argues that one way in which Taiwan pursues international participation, despite lacking international recognition as a state, is through its migration diplomacy.

Siyu Liang is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research lies at the intersection of political communication, public opinion, and computational social science, focusing on how media and information environments shape political attitudes in both democratic and authoritarian contexts.

Her dissertation examines the role of media in shaping perceptions of China in contemporary U.S.-China relations. In particular, she studies foreign influencer propaganda and the downstream effects of U.S.-China competition on public opinion and intergroup relations. As a computational social scientist, she develops and applies natural language processing and machine learning methods to study political communication and international politics, with particular interests in stance detection, transfer learning, and soft-label modeling.

At the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, she will expand this research agenda by examining how digital media and geopolitical conflict shape public opinion and social exclusion, with a particular focus on U.S.-Asia relations. She will also pursue projects on nationalism and racism in East Asia. Together, these projects seek to advance a more global understanding of how international politics shapes social inclusion and group relations across the Asia-Pacific region.

Siyu received master's degrees in statistics and political science from UCLA and holds bachelor's degrees in political science and statistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Deepika Padmanabhan is a political scientist whose research examines nationalism, language politics, and self-determination, with a regional focus on South Asia. 

Her book project explores how nation-building unfolds not only through grand policies and formal institutions, but also from the ground up, in everyday life. It examines how states promote national languages through routine, informal interactions with citizens, a process she terms the Everyday Imposition of language.

More broadly, her research explores how everyday practices shape political identities and collective belonging. In related projects, she examines the politics of language, food, film, and symbolic rituals as sites through which nationalism is cultivated, contested, and reproduced in daily life.

At APARC, Deepika will revise her book manuscript and develop additional projects on nationalism and political behavior. 

She received her doctorate in political science from Yale University in 2025. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and master’s degrees from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Department of Politics at New York University.

Grace Zeng is a political scientist specializing in international political economy, with a focus on China's use of trade and investment to influence global regulatory governance. Her research examines how states leverage economic tools to shape international rules and institutions. Her work on China's trade practices shows how China uses seemingly technical health and safety regulations to exert pressure on other nations, systematically increasing import restrictions in response to political tensions.

At APARC, she will pursue projects that extend this research agenda by examining China's growing influence in global governance. One project investigates whether China strategically uses infrastructure investment and foreign subsidiaries to shape international environmental standards. Another examines China’s information control system through the lens of its WTO commitments and the global governance of cyberspace.

Before joining Stanford, Grace was a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her doctorate in politics from Princeton University. She also holds a master's degree in the social sciences (MAPSS) from the University of Chicago and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Hong Kong.

Argument and Contribution

At the national level, the United States struggled to effectively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic: federal policy was delayed and inconsistent, supply shortages were widespread, and political pressure undermined accurate public health guidance. At the state and local levels, however, there was a great deal of variation in terms of the capacity to respond to COVID. While indicators of state capacity often focus on “formal” indicators like institutional resources, staffing, and finances, translating formal capacities into effectively implemented policies is neither a simple nor an automatic process. 

In “Building the Plane While Flying,” Didi Kuo and Andrew S. Kelly draw our attention to the importance of informal indicators of public health capacity. These include strong relationships within and across government agencies, the embeddedness of health officers in local communities, and prior experience with responding to disasters, among other factors. The authors argue that local governments with strong informal capacity were better able to communicate with and learn from one another, as well as to gain the trust of community members, during the pandemic. Conversely, localities with otherwise strong formal capacities often failed to respond to the challenges at hand. This is because they were unable to effectively leverage their relationships and organizational networks.
 

Kuo and Kelly’s paper is informed by qualitative analysis of California’s public health institutions as well as in-depth interviews with health officers across seventeen Northern, Central, and Southern California counties. The interviews illuminate the concrete processes by which local governments responded (or struggled to respond) to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the paper’s key contributions is to push us to conceptualize state capacity more broadly and to focus on the factors that drive not just policy development, but policy implementation. 

The Importance of Informal Capacity

The bulk of the paper disaggregates informal capacity into its various mechanisms and processes. Each of these proves to be crucial in explaining different pandemic outcomes at the local level. One such mechanism is coordination within local governments. To illustrate this, consider public health officers, who enjoy broad legal powers to protect public health as well as financial resources and personnel at their disposal. By law, officers possess significant capacities to mitigate health crises. Yet across the interviews, health officers reported that effectively implementing COVID-19 policy required their cooperation and communication with a host of actors, including the County Counsel (the county’s top lawyer), Chief Administrative Officer, and Board of Supervisors, which is charged with appointing health officers.
 

Closely related to intra-governmental coordination is the importance of autonomy, particularly in the face of political pressure. For example, boards of supervisors sometimes undermined the public guidance provided by health officers. (This guidance could range from the need to close schools to officers simply communicating truthfully with localities about COVID-19 risks.) Overcoming efforts by board members to ignore or muzzle officers required coordination between those actors who were more insulated from political pressure.

Another key component of informal capacity was prior experience responding to emergencies and California’s myriad of natural disasters, such as fires, floods, or mudslides. Health officers from more experienced counties noted their ability to draw upon established emergency procedures and partnerships. For example, some counties had previously cooperated with each other, as well as with independent agencies like the Red Cross, to provide aid and shelter to those affected by wildfires. These experiences — for which no amount of financial resources or personnel can substitute — served as templates to help coordinate COVID-19 policy responses.

Informal capacity also depended upon health departments effectively communicating with the public. Many departments initially lacked the infrastructure to do this, and therefore relied on cooperation with other actors like school superintendents, sheriffs, and community leaders. Some counties created toolkits to improve their community’s understanding of personal protective equipment (PPE) or even produced local TV shows. Still others scheduled conference calls with local hospitals, faith leaders, and nursing homes. Given that many of these communication efforts were improvised, public health officers stressed the importance of formalizing coordination between state and nonstate actors so as to improve emergency preparedness in the future.
 

In addition to coordination within local governments, effective policy-making and communication required coordination across governments. One such institution was the Association of Bay Area Health Officers (ABAHO), founded in the 1980s during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. ABAHO members had also coordinated policy responses to the H1N1 outbreak. These cross-county partnerships enabled early, rapid, and unified responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. By contrast, the authors find that regions without such networks faced greater challenges in developing and implementing public policy.

A final aspect of informal capacity is the social embeddedness of health officials in their communities. This includes partnerships with leaders of businesses and faith groups, teachers, and restaurant owners. Not only did these partnerships increase the scope of outreach, but they also often established relationships that had not existed beforehand. Gaining a foothold in local communities thus increased the likelihood that community members would support policies and enabled local governments to access hard-to-reach populations.
 

Kuo and Kelly’s analysis of informal capacity should give us pause when considering existing indices of public health preparedness; some of these have ranked the United States quite high despite its often ineffective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. That this mismatch occurs is arguably a function of observers prioritizing formal capacities. For federal, decentralized countries like the US, informal capacities and relationships are essential not only for delivering services but for generating legitimacy and trust among those receiving services.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.