Speaker biographies
Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is also a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. He serves on the advisory board of the Korea Economic Institute of America and is a founding member of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Mr. Eberstadt is currently, inter alia, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and the Visiting Committee for the Harvard School of Public Health. Mr. Eberstadt is regularly consulted by governmental and international organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Bank. He has published over three hundred studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security. His dozen-plus books and monographs include The Poverty of Communism (Transaction, 1988); The Tyranny of Numbers (AEI Press, 1995); The End of North Korea (AEI Press, 1999); Korea’s Future and the Great Power (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2001); The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis and Catastrophe (Transaction, 2007); and most recently, Europe’s Coming Demographic Challenge: Unlocking the Value of Health (AEI Press, 2007).
Monica Das Gupta is a senior social scientist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, where she conducts qualitative research on population and health issues. She is currently working on issues of gender, poverty, and public health services in South Asia. Prviously, Ms. Gupta was a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Population and Development Studies. She was associate director of the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi in 1991 and a senior demographer from 1982 until 1991. She also served as a consultant to the United Nations Population Fund in 1981.
Mark P. Lagon is ambassador-at-large, director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the U.S. State Department, and senior adviser to the secretary of state. From 2004 to 2007, Mr. Lagon served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, where he had lead responsibility for United Nations (UN)-related human rights and humanitarian issues, UN administration and reform, and the bureau’s public diplomacy and outreach programs. He previously served as a member of the secretary of state’s policy planning staff, where he focused on UN and international organizations, democracy and human rights, and public diplomacy. Mr. Lagon was the principal aide to the former director of foreign policy studies at AEI, the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Mr. Lagon is the author of The Reagan Doctrine: Sources of American Conduct in the Cold War’s Last Chapter (Praeger, 1994) and was associate editor of the journal Perspectives on Political Science.
Laura J. Lederer is senior director of Global Projects on Trafficking in Persons in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the U.S. Department of State and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School. In 1997, she received the Gustavus Meyers Center for Study of Human Rights Annual Award for Outstanding Work on Human Rights for her work on harmful speech issues. Ms. Lederer founded and directed the Protection Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1997, and in 2000 she moved the Protection Project to the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She is the editor of Take Back the Night (Harper Perennial, 1980) and The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography (Hill and Wang, 1995) and the author of numerous articles on trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of women and children.
