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Title slide of talk

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on November 17th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for a seminar with Robin Nabi.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Fall Seminar Series continues through December; see our Fall Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

Extensive attention has been paid to the potential harms of media consumption generally, and social media use in particular, with relatively little consideration given to the potential psychological benefits of media use. This talk will address why this bias exists and its potential for unintended negative consequences. Evidence of how self-selected and prescribed digital media content can support desirable outcomes, including reduced stress and procrastination, increased goal motivation and pursuit, and increased empathy and relational satisfaction, will be shared to highlight the need for better understanding of how to empower users to make media choices that can support their psychological well-being.

About the Speaker:

Robin L. Nabi is a Professor of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With degrees from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, she has published over 100 journal articles and book chapters investigating the effects of media use on emotional experiences, decision-making, and well-being. She is the co-editor of two volumes: The SAGE Handbook of Media Processes and Effects and Emotions in the Digital World (Oxford University Press). She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association, and her research has been featured in numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, NPR, CBC/Radio-Canada, and the Harvard Business Review.

Jeff Hancock

McClatchy Hall, S40 Studio
450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305

For those attending the in-person seminar, please bring your Stanford ID card/mobile ID to enter the building. 

Robin Nabi Professor of Communication University of California, Santa Barbara
Seminars

Toward a prescription for healthier, more balanced media diets

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Flyer for the discussion "Unpacking the Trump-Xi Summit." Headshots of speakers Mark Lambert and Laura Stone, and a photo of President Xi and President Trump walk on a red carpet.

Drawing on decades of experience at the center of U.S. policy toward China, Mark Lambert, former State Department China Coordinator and recently appointed China Policy Fellow at Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), and Ambassador Laura Stone, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for China and Mongolia and currently affiliated with Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies, offer an insider’s assessment of the Trump-Xi state visit and its implications for U.S.-China relations.

Lambert and Stone will examine what Washington and Beijing each sought from the visit, what the two leaders actually achieved, and what the agreements, rhetoric, and notable omissions reveal about the state of the relationship. They will assess the implications for trade and economic ties, Taiwan and regional security, strategic competition, and the prospects for managing tensions between the world’s two most powerful countries. Please join us for a candid discussion of what the state visit changed, what it did not, and where U.S.-China relations may be headed next.

Speakers: 

Mark Lambert

Mark Lambert is the China Policy Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). A career U.S. diplomat and one of the State Department’s leading China experts, he most recently served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for China and Taiwan and as the Department’s China Coordinator. Over the course of his Foreign Service career, Lambert held senior positions focused on China, East Asia, and international organizations, including multiple assignments in Beijing. He also served as a senior advisor in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, where his work focused on China’s role in the United Nations and other multilateral institutions.

Laura Stone

Ambassador Laura Stone is affiliated with Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, she most recently served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Previously, she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for China and Mongolia, with responsibility for managing U.S.-China relations during the Obama and first Trump administrations, and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia. Her other senior positions include Director of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs, Director of the State Department’s Office of Economic Policy in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Economic Counselor in Hanoi. She served three tours at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and has spent more than three decades working on U.S. policy toward China and the Indo-Pacific.

 

Directions and Parking > 

Philippines Conference Room (C330)
Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Mark Lambert, China Policy Fellow, APARC
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Visiting Scholar at APARC, 2022-23, 2023-24
China Policy Fellow, 2022-23, 2023-24
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Laura M. Stone joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as Visiting Scholar and China Policy Fellow for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years. She currently serves the U.S. Department of State, recently as Deputy Coordinator for the Secretary's Office for COVID Response and Health Security. While at APARC, she conducted research with the China Program and Professor Jean Oi regarding contemporary China affairs and U.S.-China policy.

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Laura Stone, U.S. Ambassador (ret.)
Seminars
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Flyer for the discussion "Unpacking the Trump-Xi Summit." Headshots of speakers Mark Lambert and Laura Stone, and a photo of President Xi and President Trump walk on a red carpet.
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title page of seminar by Anthony Chen

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on October 13th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for a seminar with Anthony Chen.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Fall Seminar Series continues through December; see our Fall Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

Policy on young people and technology has been gaining momentum, on the assumption that what adolescents do online is the problem to be removed. This talk starts from the opposite premise: young people turn to technology to meet the developmental needs that define adolescence, their identity, relationships, and mental health. Drawing on existing and ongoing empirical work, Anthony Chen argues that technology use is better read as information about what young people need than as the reason they are struggling. These findings may change what schools, families, and regulators think they should do as young people navigate the technology world.

About the Speaker:

Anthony Chen is a postdoctoral scholar at the Tech Impact and Policy Center. His research examines how social media and emerging technologies shape identity, relationships, and well-being, with a particular focus on adolescents and young adults. His work has been supported by Hopelab, the Jacobs Foundation, and the National Communication Association, and has appeared in leading communication and interdisciplinary journals. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Communication Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Irvine.

Sunny Xun Liu

McClatchy Hall, S40 Studio
450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305

For those attending the in-person seminar, please bring your Stanford ID card/mobile ID to enter the building. 

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Postdoctoral Scholar
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Anthony Chen is a postdoctoral scholar at the Tech Impact and Policy Center. His research examines how social media and emerging technologies shape identity, relationships, and well-being, with a particular focus on adolescents and young adults. His work has been supported by Hopelab, the Jacobs Foundation, and the National Communication Association, and has appeared in leading communication and interdisciplinary journals. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Communication Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Irvine.
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Seminars

What Young People's Technology Use Tells Us

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10.5.26BookTalk_HowToSurviveAuthoritarianism

Join the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law for a conversation with Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev, Russian journalists in exile and co-authors of How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian's Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America (Liveright, 2026). The book argues that Americans confronting a rising tide of authoritarianism don't need to invent a vocabulary for it: Russians already built one over generations of contending with illiberal rule. Kuznetsova and Storyev compile roughly 100 Russian words and phrases, from "power vertical," used to describe hypercentralized governance, to "mnogohodovochka," a term that mocks misguided state initiatives, tracing how this vernacular of double-speak helped ordinary citizens "make sense of how illiberalism takes shape." The discussion will bring that framework to the American context, examining the mechanics of authoritarian consolidation and the strategies available for resisting it, and drawing comparisons between the Russian experience and current U.S. politics. Satre Family Senior Fellow & Mosbacher Director Kathryn Stoner will be moderating the discussion.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Maria Kuznetsova is a human rights expert from Russia who tackles political prosecution and anti-war repressions. She has expertise in developing international advocacy campaigns and engaging in strategic communication with journalists and public figures on human rights issues, especially in the context of Russian war against Ukraine. Kuznetsova received a master of public policy from Harvard Kennedy School and is based in San Francisco.

Dan Storyev grew up between Russia and the US. An Oxford graduate, he has been working as a journalist and researcher for years, specialising on writing about the former Soviet space for English-language outlets. His writing appeared in the Financial Times, New York Times and Foreign Policy amongst others. Dan covers human rights and conflicts and has reported from hotspots all over the world, including Ukraine and Myanmar. Dan writes the English newsletter at OVD-Info, a leading Russian human rights watchdog, which Dan also represented at conferences, radio, TV and more. Dan had worked as a lecturer and tutor for a decade — his diverse experience includes guest lectures at Oxford, Ghent and KCL.

Kathryn Stoner
Kathryn Stoner

Only those with an active Stanford ID and access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. Others may attend virtually, via Zoom - join with passcode: 123456.

Registration required.

Maria Kuznetsova Associate Professor University of Auburn
Dan Storyev Writer & Researcher
Seminars
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Vachudova REDS Seminar 2026
We are amid the greatest transformation of Europe’s domestic politics, international institutions and geopolitical ambitions since the collapse of communism three decades ago. Russia’s war, Ukraine’s steadfast response, and America’s authoritarian turn are reshaping political contestation while also transforming Europe’s security order and testing its institutions: NATO is fortifying, the OSCE is incapacitated, and the EU has started to ramp up its defense and its geopolitical power. All of this is happening as Europe and the US have become more polarized and unpredictable. 
 
Across Europe, governments that uphold liberal democracy are confronted by governments and political parties that have undermined liberal democratic institutions at home and sought favors from the Kremlin abroad. Within some European countries, elections are fought between two blocs of parties – those who vow to protect liberal democratic institutions and those who have a track record of diminishing them. In this time of polarization and war, can international institutions and transatlantic cooperation defend the democratic West? The rise of authoritarian-minded political parties in Europe and the US puts at risk fundamental interests: a shared and prosperous liberal democratic West, the stability and decisiveness of NATO, and the survival and recovery of Ukraine.


 

Milada Anna Vachudova is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her current projects include protest in defense of liberal democracy across Europe, the revival of EU enlargement, and the upending of European security amidst the transformation of European politics and institutions owing to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Her recent articles explore the trajectories of European states due to strengthening ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding – and how these changes are impacting party systems and civic participation. She is part of the core team of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on the positions of political parties across Europe. Professor Vachudova holds a B.A. from Stanford University. As a British Marshall Scholar, she completed an M.Phil. and a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford. She has held fellowships and grants from various institutions including the European University Institute, the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the Center of International Studies at Princeton University, the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.


REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY


The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

Anna Grzymała-Busse, Kathryn Stoner
Milada Vachudova, University of North Carolina Presenter
Seminars
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Racism against East Europeans constitutes a major gap in racism research and anti-racism debates. Yet there is a long tradition of treating the region and its inhabitants as inferior, with devastating consequences throughout history. This book is the first comprehensive study of racism in the entangled histories of Germany and Eastern Europe—a racism that is not based on skin color and affects people despite their mostly phenotypical whiteness. Embedded in colonial imaginations of Eastern Europe, anti-East European racism took its most radical and brutal shape during Nazism. But racist knowledge persisted across the rupture of 1945 and the Cold War and took on new shapes after the fall of communism in 1989, when East-West migration once again became an important feature of European and German reality. This book makes a case for the long overdue eastward expansion of the contemporary racism debate. 
 

 
Jannis Panagiotidis is a historian and migration scholar. He is scientific director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. His publications include the monographs The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana UP 2019), Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland: eine Einführung (Beltz Juventa 2021), and Antiosteuropäischer Rassismus in Deutschland: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Beltz Juventa 2024, with Hans-Christian Petersen).
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Jannis Panagiotidis, University of Vienna Presenter
Seminars
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Jana Hunter TEC event Dec 3
Who decides what time it is? In Habsburg Bohemia, that question drew in nearly every other: nation and empire, identity and sovereignty, capital and a newly connected world. Railways and telegraphs created a time shared across distance, and with it a debate over who had the power to set it. Histories of time standardization have told a story of unification; histories of Habsburg sovereignty, meanwhile, have located its conflicts in diets and parliaments. This talk brings them together, asking how an empire tried to synchronize every local clock, where authority over time was located, and why time became a question of sovereignty. After 1867, Bohemia's unresolved constitutional status moved into the infrastructure of daily life: whose observatory produced noon, which meridian ran the trains, whose clocks kept the time. At stake was not only who ruled Bohemia, but how time could be controlled at all. 
 
By the turn of the century, Bohemians called their divided time dualismus, the word for the constitutional settlement itself. This talk traces these jurisdictional disputes over four decades from railway decrees to universal time. The lines of conflict did not run simply between empire and nation: German liberals, Czech nationalists, intellectuals, and businessmen appealed to historic rights, national identity, commercial interest, and civic embarrassment. Jurisdiction over time was scalar, dispersed across ministries, railway companies, international conferences, and municipal councils, and exercised through everyday practice; sovereignty over time was claimed everywhere but located nowhere. The talk closes by asking, as the satirists of the day did, whether any authority could make a polity agree on something as basic as noon.
 

 
Jana Hunter is Assistant Professor at Stanford University, where she works on modern Central and Eastern Europe with particular interests in time, science and technology, modernity, and environmental change. Her first book project, Kingdom of Hours: The Transformation of Time in Habsburg Bohemia, 1848-1918, uses time as a lens to rethink the making of modern Central Europe. Rather than treating modern time as a single, accelerating rhythm, the study examines the coexistence of natural and industrial, religious and secular, nationalist and imperial, and mechanical and subjective temporalities that structured everyday life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bohemia. Moving from rural villages and mining towns to Prague’s municipal councils and the Reichsrat, the book reconstructs how local actors reworked temporal regimes to serve imperial, national, regional, and commercial aims, offering a new framework for understanding modernization beyond the categories of nation and empire. 
 
Her second project, Testing Grounds: From Marx to Oppenheimer—Czechoslovakia’s Global Legacy, 1918-Present, traces how twentieth-century ideologies of modernity were lived, imposed, and resisted through the uranium-mining town of Jáchymov. Once dubbed the “cradle of the atomic bomb,” Jáchymov became a testing ground for successive empires and energy regimes, its landscape transformed by extractive ambition, political violence, and environmental fallout. Bringing Karl Marx’s ecological critique into dialogue with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s nuclear physics, the project reframes the history of militarized landscapes and energy transitions, situating East-Central Europe within global histories of extraction and environmental change. Hunter received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2024 and her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at Princeton University, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Herder Institute. Before joining Stanford, she was a Lecturer in Modern European History at New College, Oxford.
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Jana Hunter, Stanford University Presenter
Seminars
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About the event: China is practicing gray-zone coercion in the Indo-Pacific, deploying military vessels for drills in the waters between Taiwan and the Philippines. This “salami-slicing” strategy, advanced under Xi Jinping, incrementally escalates pressure on neighboring states while remaining below the threshold of open conflict. Disruption of critical sea lanes—through which fuel and food supplies transit—would have catastrophic implications for human populations dependent on uninterrupted maritime traffic. This talk presents research from the Stanford Geopolitical Coercion and Global Health Impact Initiative on maritime disruptions in the Indo-Pacific and what they would mean for human populations if maritime traffic were interrupted in a manner comparable to a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with particular attention to effects on food security, energy access, and maternal and child health.

About the speaker: Dr. Ruth Gibson is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Innovation in Global Health, Affiliated Scholar at CISAC and the Founding Executive Director of the Stanford Geopolitical Human Impact Research Lab—the first research initiative at Stanford University dedicated to examining how geopolitical decisions shape human lives, with particular attention to children. Based in the Department of Pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine, the Initiative brings together health modeling, open-source intelligence, and international humanitarian law to produce rigorous, policy-relevant scholarship. She co-leads The Lancet Series on Foreign Engagement and Health in an Era of Geopolitical Crisis with Professor Gary Darmstadt. Dr. Gibson earned her PhD in geopolitical coercion and global health from the University of British Columbia and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation from 2022 to 2025. Drawing on more than a decade of international global health experience across five continents, her research focuses on the health consequences of sanctions, blockades, and armed conflict, especially their effects on maternal and child health.

William J. Perry Conference Room 

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Affiliated Scholar
Ruth Gibson Headshot PhD

Dr. Ruth Gibson serves as an affiliated scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Her scholarly expertise encompasses global health, foreign affairs, and strategic studies, with a particular emphasis on enhancing maternal and child health in geopolitically fragile regions—nations contending with war, sanctions, and diplomatic challenges.

Dr. Gibson is presently co-leading a Lancet series on the future of foreign aid, which scrutinizes military aid, humanitarian aid, and official development assistance. This Lancet Series investigates how these forms of foreign aid can be more effectively harnessed and integrated to fulfill their intended goals, while advancing prospects for humanity's future. She collaborates with the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, partnering with the Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures to establish a universal monitoring framework for evaluating the effects of sanctions on human rights. She has contributed to reports prepared for the International Criminal Court. Dr. Gibson is a research collaborator with the Global Burden of Disease Consortium at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, supporting efforts in global health estimation and forecasting. She is a reviewer for Nature. Her research has been published in The Lancet and The Lancet Global Health, and her insights on geopolitics and human health have featured in international media outlets, including TIME magazine.

Prior to her academic career, Dr. Gibson dedicated a decade to humanitarian and global health endeavors across eight countries on five continents. Her efforts focused on fragile states confronting poverty, human rights violations, and armed conflict. She led a humanitarian foundation in Madagascar in the aftermath of a military coup, dealing with the disintegration of the healthcare system amid international sanctions on foreign aid. While living in the Middle East, she worked for Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health Affairs and the Health Ministries of Yemen and Somalia on telemedicine-driven medical education, as well as cultivating diplomatic relations through shared fundamental health objectives amid periods of conflict. Throughout this decade of overseas experience, Dr. Gibson directly observed the human costs of war and geopolitical coercion, an experience that informs her ongoing research.

Dr. Gibson earned an Honors Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from the University of Toronto, a fellowship in Medical Education from the Wilson Center at the University Health Network, and a PhD in Global Health and Strategic Studies from the University of British Columbia. She completed her postdoctoral training at CISAC from 2022 to 2025. She also undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH), Stanford Medicine, between 2022 and 2023, where she currently holds the position of visiting scholar. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Health Policy, Stanford University, from 2024 to 2025. She is conversational in English, Mandarin Chinese, and French.

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Ruth Gibson
Seminars
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Two Routes to Scale: Innovation Clusters in Tokyo-Yokohama and the Greater Bay Area

What makes a science and innovation cluster thrive, and how can regions scale their global impact? This seminar explores two of the world’s leading innovation clusters, Tokyo-Yokohama and China’s Greater Bay Area, ranked among the top clusters in WIPO’s Global Innovation Cluster Index. Drawing on interviews and new reports from the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT), Executive Director Dr. Andreas Göthenberg will share perspectives from STINT’s Science Intelligence work on global science and innovation, followed by presentations from Dr. Laura Barbieri and Dr. Erik Forsberg on the ecosystems, strengths, and development trajectories of these two regions.

Speakers:

Dr. Andreas Göthenberg was appointed Executive Director of STINT as of September 1, 2009. And since 2024, he has been a Board Member at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 1996 and 2003, respectively. 

From 2006 until 2009, he was a Science and Technology Attaché at the Embassy of Sweden in Tokyo, Japan. Before that, he worked as a Center Manager and Senior Researcher in China, setting up joint research and education centers for KTH Royal Institute of Technology at Zhejiang University and Fudan University.
 

Dr. Laura Barbieri is a STINT Science Fellow in Japan and South Korea. Based in Tokyo, she is currently a Visiting Scholar at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS). Previously, she was a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Osaka Metropolitan University, where she conducted malaria immunology research within the SATREPS JICA Project in collaboration with Kenyan and Japanese partners.

Dr. Barbieri holds a PhD in Experimental Immunology from the University of Padova (Italy), carried out with Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), and a Master’s degree in Medical Biotechnologies from Padova in collaboration with King’s College London (UK). She also worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK) and was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Tokyo (Japan).
 

Dr. Erik Forsberg has been the STINT Representative in Asia since 2018. He has worked in China for more than 17 years, and was the Founding Vice Director of the Sino–Swedish Joint Research Center of Photonics as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow and an Associate Professor at Zhejiang University, China.

Dr. Forsberg was the Founding Graduate Dean at the Higher Colleges of Technology (United Arab Emirates) and a Visiting Scientist at Hokkaido University (Japan). Currently, he is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Zhejiang University and a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Malaya (Malaysia). In parallel with his academic work, he has been active in industry and entrepreneurship in China, co-founding several startups.

 

Directions and Parking > 

Okimoto Conference Room (E307)
Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Andreas Göthenberg, Executive Director, STINT
Laura Barbieri, Science Fellow in Japan and South Korea, STINT; Visiting Scholar, GRIPS
Erik Forsberg, Representative in China and ASEAN, STINT; Associate Professor, Zhejiang University
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