Rongbin Han is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. His research interests include contentious politics, media politics, political participation, digital activism, cybersecurity, Internet governance, democratization, and authoritarian resilience with a focus on China and East Asia. He is the author of Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience (Columbia University Press, 2018) and co-author of Directed Digital Dissidence in Autocracies: How China Wins Online (Oxford University Press, 2023). He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, a M.S. in Political Science from National University of Singapore, and a Bachelor of Law in International Studies from Peking University. Dr. Han plans to visit Honolulu in Spring 2025.

Kenneth Gofigan Kuper is an Assistant Professor of Political Science, Chamoru Studies, and Micronesian Studies at the University of Guam. He is also the co-founder of the Pacific Center for Island Security, a Guam-based organization which aims at providing an island/islander perspective to the geopolitical maneuvering in the region. His research focuses on geopolitics in Oceania, militarization, decolonization, and paradiplomacy with a focus on Micronesia. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and a M.A. in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. While he was in Honolulu in October 2024, Dr. Kuper gave a public lecture on great power conflict in Micronesia, visited a graduate seminar in the Department of Pacific Islands Studies, and held a talk story with UH Mānoa students.

Public Lecture:
Sharpening the Spear: Geostrategic Competition in Micronesia (October 3, 2024)

Ken Haig is Head of Energy and Environment Policy for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the Asia-Pacific region and Japan where he is helping to chart AWS’s path to 100% renewable energy by 2025 and net carbon neutrality by 2040. Before joining AWS, Dr. Haig helped start the Asia-Pacific business for Opower, a startup that pioneered the blending of behavioral science and data science to promote large-scale energy management programs (acquired by Oracle in 2016). Prior to this, he was a US-based academic teaching and researching comparative politics and public policy at U.C. Berkeley, Harvard University, and Bard College. He holds a B.A. in History from Harvard University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He was born and raised in Hawaii. While he was in Honolulu in April 2024, Dr. Haig gave a talk as part of the Careers in Asia-Pacific Affairs speaker series, visited a graduate seminar in the Department of Asian Studies, and met with UH Mānoa faculty and students.

Professional Development Talk:
Working with Climate Change and Sustainability in the Asia-Pacific (April 17, 2024)

Elina Noor is a Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where she focuses on developments in Southeast Asia, particularly the impact and implications of technology in reshaping power dynamics, governance, and nation-building in the region. Prior to joining Carnegie, Ms. Noor was Director of Political-Security Affairs and Deputy Director of the Washington, D.C. office at the Asia Society Policy Institute, Associate Professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Director of Foreign Policy and Security Studies at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies Malaysia, and part of the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. Between 2017 and 2019, she was a member of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, and she currently serves on the ICRC’s Global Advisory Board on digital threats during conflict. Ms. Noor holds a B.A. in Jurisprudence from Oxford University, an LL.M (Public International Law) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London and an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University. While she was in Honolulu in October 2023, Ms. Noor gave a public talk on her research, spoke on a Careers in Asia-Pacific Affairs panel about think tank careers, visited a graduate seminar in the Department of Asian Studies, and met with UH Mānoa faculty and students.

Public Lecture:
Technology and Tensions in Southeast Asia (October 24, 2023)

Professional Development Panel:
Think Tank Careers: Policy, Communications, and Project Management (October 25, 2023)

Marianne Riddervold is a Professor of Political Science at Innlandet Norway University of Applied Sciences  and at the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs, NUPI. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her professional interests include European integration and institutions, transatlantic relations, European foreign and security policy, EU crises, maritime security policy, and theory development within the study of international relations and European integration. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Oslo, where she previously was employed as a postdoctoral fellow and researcher. Dr. Riddervold was in residence in Honolulu during Summer 2023 to pursue research related to the global commons.