Nate Berg is a freelance journalist covering cities, architecture, design, and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, National Public Radio, Wired, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, 99% Invisible and many others. He is a former staff writer at the website now known as CityLab and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen. He is based in Los Angeles.
Jonathan Masters helps lead a team of writers and editors that produces wide-ranging content for CFR.org, including backgrounders, interviews, visual stories, and events. He also writes on foreign policy and national security. He was the chief editor of “Campaign 2016: The Candidates and the World,” an interactive guide to the US presidential election that won an Online News Association award. In the summer of 2017, he reported in Japan on autonomous vehicles as an Abe journalism fellow. His work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, and other publications. Masters has a BA in political science from Emory University
Minako Sasako is a staff writer at the Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan’s major daily newspapers. She began her career at Yomiuri in 2002 and currently reports for the international news desk. Her largest project to date is her reportage on the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, an event she reported on extensively, interviewing nuclear plant workers, as well as survivors. Her work there led to the publication of a book in 2016. She holds an MBA from University of Southampton, UK.
Alana Semuels is senior economics correspondent at Time Magazine. She was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic and a staff writer and national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. She has a masters degree from The London School of Economics and a bachelors degree from Harvard College.
Kyunghee Lee is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, Michigan State University. She received her EdD from Harvard University and PhD from Columbia University. Her research focuses on poverty-related issues such as adverse impacts of poverty on children and effective anti-early intervention programs. In particular, she has examined non-parental child care arrangements for low income working mothers in the context of welfare reform and investigated impacts of Head Start program on outcomes for children and families. Her current research focuses on a comparative study of poverty, human development, and parenting practice issues between the US and Japan
Kohei Watanabe is associate professor at Teikyo University (Tokyo, Japan) and a research associate at the Malaysian Commonwealth Studies Centre, University of Cambridge, UK. He obtained his PhD (Geography, Cambridge) on the topic of household waste management. His current research topics include analysis of municipal waste statistics, food waste minimisation and waste management in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Adam P. Liff is associate professor of East Asian International Relations at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, where he also serves as founding director of its 21st Century Japan Politics & Society Initiative. His research focuses on international security affairs and the Asia-Pacific—especially Japanese and Chinese security policy; U.S. Asia-Pacific strategy; the U.S.-Japan alliance; and the rise of China. Beyond IU, Dr. Liff is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Associate-in-Research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He holds a PhD and MA in Politics from Princeton
Hirofumi Uchida is a professor of Banking and Finance at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University, Japan. He received his MA in Economics in 1995 and his PhD in Economics in 1999, both from Osaka University. Prior to joining Kobe University in 2009, Professor Uchida was with the Kyoto Institute for Economic Research at Kyoto University, and the Faculty of Economics at Wakayama University. He was also a visiting scholar at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University as a 2003 Fulbright Scholar. His research interests focus on banking, financial institutions, and financial system architecture. His research has
Shinsuke Tanaka is an Assistant Professor of Economics at The Fletcher School and Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at the School of Medicine, Tufts University. Tanaka’s fields of interest are environmental economics, health economics, and development economics. Broadly, he is interested in the study of interactions between environmental policies, public health, and economic activities, and their implications for economic development in low- income countries.
