Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008.  Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.

Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.

Whitfield Diffie is a consulting scholar at CISAC. He was a visiting scholar in 2009-2010 and an affiliate from 2010-2012. He is best known for the discovery of the concept of public key cryptography, in 1975, which he developed along with Stanford University Electrical Engineering Professor Martin Hellman. Public key cryptography, which revolutionized not only cryptography but also the cryptographic community, now underlies the security of internet commerce.

During the 1980s, Diffie served as manager of secure systems research at Northern Telecom. In 1991, he joined Sun Microsystems as distinguished engineer and remained as Sun fellow and chief security officer until the spring of 2009.

Diffie spent the 1990s working to protect the individual and business right to use encryption, for which he argues in the book Privacy on the Line, the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, which he wrote jointly with Susan Landau. Diffie is a Marconi fellow and the recipient of a number of awards including the National Computer Systems Security Award (given jointly by NIST and NSA) and the Franklin Institute's Levy Prize.

At Stanford University, Dr. Dasher has directed the US-Asia Technology Management Center since 1994, and he has been Executive Director of the Center for Integrated Systems since 1998. He holds Consulting Professor appointments at Stanford in the Departments of Electrical Engineering (technology management), Asian Languages and Cultures (Japanese business), and at the Asia-Pacific Research Center for his work with the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He is also faculty adviser to student-run organizations such as the Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society and the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford.

From 2004, Dr. Dasher became the first non-Japanese person ever asked to join the governance of a Japanese national university, serving a term as a Board Director (理事) of Tohoku University . He continued as a member of the Management Council (経営協議会) until March 2010, and he now serves as Senior Advisor to the President (総長顧問) of Tohoku University. Dr. Dasher has been a member of the high-profile Program Committee of the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) of the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT) since 2007. He has served on the Multidisciplinary Assessment Committee of the C$500 million Canada Foundation for Innovation Leading Edge Fund in 2007 and again in 2010, and as a member of the Phase I and Phase II Review Panels of the C$200 million Canada Excellence Research Chairs Program in 2008 and again in 2010. He was a distinguished reviewer of the Hong Kong S.A.R. study on innovation in 2008–09, and since 2007 he has been a member of the Foresight Panel of the German Ministry of Education and Research. From 2001–03, Dr. Dasher was on the International Planning Committee advising the Japanese Minister of State for Science and Technology Policy in regard to the formation of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.

As allowed by Stanford policy, Dr. Dasher maintains an active management consulting practice, through which he is an advisor to start-up companies and large firms in the U.S., Japan, and China. He has been a board director of Tokyo-based ZyCube Inc. since 2006, and he is founder and chairman of Pearl Executive Shuttle in Valdosta, Georgia, U.S.A. In the non-profit sector, he is a Board Director of the Japan Society of Northern California and the Keizai Society U.S. – Japan Business Forum, and he is an advisor to organizations such as the Chinese Information and Networking Association, the Silicon Valley – China Wireless Technology Association, and the International Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Science and Technology (iFEST). In 2010 he served as a consultant to The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) in regard to their establishment of a worldwide remote mentoring program for entrepreneurs. Dr. Dasher frequently gives speeches and seminars throughout Japan and Asia, as well as in the U.S. Recent appearances include the Nikkei Shimbun Business Innovation Forum, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, speaking tours of Japan co-sponsored by METI and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, and guest lectures at Chubu University, Kochi University of Technology, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and the University of Tokyo.

From 1990–93, Dr. Dasher was a board director of two privately-held Japanese companies in Tokyo, at which he developed new business in international licensing of media rights packages and other intellectual properties. From 1986–90, he was Director of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute advanced field schools in Japan and Korea, which provide full-time language and area training to U.S. and select Commonwealth country diplomats assigned to those countries. He received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Linguistics from Stanford University and, along with Prof. Elizabeth Closs Traugott, he is co-author of the often-cited book Regularity in Semantic Change (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He received the Bachelor of Music degree in clarinet and orchestra conducting from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he served on the faculty from 1978-85.

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.

Masahiko Aoki was the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies in the Department of Economics, and a senior fellow of the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

Aoki was a theoretical and applied economist with a strong interest in institutional and comparative issues. He specialized in the theory of institutions, corporate architecture and governance, and the Japanese and Chinese economies.

His most recent book, Corporations in Evolving Diversity: Cognition, Governance, and Institutions, based on his 2008 Clarendon Lectures, was published in 2010 by Oxford University Press. It identifies a variety of corporate architecture as diverse associational cognitive systems, and discusses their implications to corporate governance, as well their modes of interactions with society, polity, and financial markets within a unified game-theoretic perspective. His previous book, Toward a Comparative Institutional Analysis, was published in 2001 by MIT Press. This work developed a conceptual and analytical framework for integrating comparative studies of institutions in economics and other social science disciplines using game-theoretic language. Aoki's research has been also published in the leading journals in economics, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Economic Literature, Industrial and Corporate Change, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations.

Aoki was the president of the International Economic Association from 2008 to 2011, and is also a former president of the Japanese Economic Association. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the founding editor of the Journal of Japanese and International Economies. He was awarded the Japan Academy Prize in 1990, and the sixth International Schumpeter Prize in 1998. Between 2001 and 2004, Aoki served as the president and chief research officer of the Research Institute of Economy, Trade, and Industry, an independent administrative institution specializing in public policy research in Japan.

Aoki graduated from the University of Tokyo with a B.A. and an M.A. in economics, and earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1967. He was formerly an assistant professor at Stanford University and Harvard University and served as both an associate and full professor at the University of Kyoto before rejoining the Stanford faculty in 1984.

Frank A. Wolak is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His fields of specialization are Industrial Organization and Econometric Theory. His recent work studies methods for introducing competition into infrastructure industries -- telecommunications, electricity, water delivery and postal delivery services -- and on assessing the impacts of these competition policies on consumer and producer welfare. He is the Chairman of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator for electricity supply industry in California. He is a visiting scholar at University of California Energy Institute and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Professor Wolak received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Harvard University and his B.A. from Rice University.

Daniel C. Sneider is a lecturer in international policy at Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy and a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford. His own research is focused on current U.S. foreign and national security policy in Asia and on the foreign policy of Japan and Korea.  Since 2017, he has been based partly in Tokyo as a Visiting Researcher at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, where he is working on a diplomatic history of the creation and management of the U.S. security alliances with Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. Sneider contributes regularly to the leading Japanese publication Toyo Keizai as well as to the Nelson Report on Asia policy issues.

Sneider is the former Associate Director for Research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. At Shorenstein APARC, Sneider directed the center’s Divided Memories and Reconciliation project, a comparative study of the formation of wartime historical memory in East Asia. He is the co-author of a book on wartime memory and elite opinion, Divergent Memories, from Stanford University Press. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Gi-Wook Shin, of Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia, from Routledge and of Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies, from University of Washington Press.

Sneider was named a National Asia Research Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. He is the co-editor of Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia, Shorenstein APARC, distributed by Brookings Institution Press, 2007; of First Drafts of Korea: The U.S. Media and Perceptions of the Last Cold War Frontier, 2009; as well as of Does South Asia Exist?: Prospects for Regional Integration, 2010. Sneider’s path-breaking study “The New Asianism: Japanese Foreign Policy under the Democratic Party of Japan” appeared in the July 2011 issue of Asia Policy. He has also contributed to other volumes, including “Strategic Abandonment: Alliance Relations in Northeast Asia in the Post-Iraq Era” in Towards Sustainable Economic and Security Relations in East Asia: U.S. and ROK Policy Options, Korea Economic Institute, 2008; “The History and Meaning of Denuclearization,” in William H. Overholt, editor, North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War?, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2019; and “Evolution or new Doctrine? Japanese security policy in the era of collective self-defense,” in James D.J. Brown and Jeff Kingston, eds, Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia, Routledge, December 2017.

Sneider’s writings have appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, National Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Oriental Economist, Newsweek, Time, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, and Yale Global. He is frequently cited in such publications.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Sneider was a long-time foreign correspondent. His twice-weekly column for the San Jose Mercury News looking at international issues and national security from a West Coast perspective was syndicated nationally on the Knight Ridder Tribune wire service. Previously, Sneider served as national/foreign editor of the Mercury News. From 1990 to 1994, he was the Moscow bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, covering the end of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1985 to 1990, he was Tokyo correspondent for the Monitor, covering Japan and Korea. Prior to that he was a correspondent in India, covering South and Southeast Asia. He also wrote widely on defense issues, including as a contributor and correspondent for Defense News, the national defense weekly.

Sneider has a BA in East Asian history from Columbia University and an MPA from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Phillip Y. Lipscy was the Thomas Rohlen Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University until August 2019. His fields of research include international and comparative political economy, international security, and the politics of East Asia, particularly Japan.

Lipscy’s book from Cambridge University Press, Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations, examines how countries seek greater international influence by reforming or creating international organizations. His research addresses a wide range of substantive topics such as international cooperation, the politics of energy, the politics of financial crises, the use of secrecy in international policy making, and the effect of domestic politics on trade. He has also published extensively on Japanese politics and foreign policy.

Lipscy obtained his PhD in political science at Harvard University. He received his MA in international policy studies and BA in economics and political science at Stanford University. Lipscy has been affiliated with the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, the Institute for Global and International Studies at George Washington University, the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for International Policy Studies.

For additional information such as C.V., publications, and working papers, please visit Phillip Lipscy's homepage.

Takeo Hoshi was Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Professor of Finance (by courtesy) at the Graduate School of Business, and Director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), all at Stanford University. He served in these roles until August 2019.

Before he joined Stanford in 2012, he was Pacific Economic Cooperation Professor in International Economic Relations at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he conducted research and taught since 1988.

Hoshi is also Visiting Scholar at Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and at the Tokyo Center for Economic Research (TCER), and Senior Fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER). His main research interest includes corporate finance, banking, monetary policy and the Japanese economy.

He received 2015 Japanese Bankers Academic Research Promotion Foundation Award, 2011 Reischauer International Education Award of Japan Society of San Diego and Tijuana, 2006 Enjoji Jiro Memorial Prize of Nihon Keizai Shimbun-sha, and 2005 Japan Economic Association-Nakahara Prize.  His book titled Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan: The Road to the Future (MIT Press, 2001) co-authored with Anil Kashyap (Booth School of Business, University of Chicago) received the Nikkei Award for the Best Economics Books in 2002.  Other publications include “Will the U.S. and Europe Avoid a Lost Decade?  Lessons from Japan’s Post Crisis Experience” (Joint with Anil K Kashyap), IMF Economic Review, 2015, “Japan’s Financial Regulatory Responses to the Global Financial Crisis” (Joint with Kimie Harada, Masami Imai, Satoshi Koibuchi, and Ayako Yasuda), Journal of Financial Economic Policy, 2015, “Defying Gravity: Can Japanese sovereign debt continue to increase without a crisis?” (Joint with Takatoshi Ito) Economic Policy, 2014, “Will the U.S. Bank Recapitalization Succeed? Eight Lessons from Japan” (with Anil Kashyap), Journal of Financial Economics, 2010, and “Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan” (Joint with Ricardo Caballero and Anil Kashyap), American Economic Review, December 2008.

Hoshi received his B.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Tokyo in 1983, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988.