Speaker biographies
David Asher is an adjunct research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses and a senior executive with an asset management company in New York. From 2005 to 2007, Mr. Asher was a research staff member with the Institute for Defense Analyses and a senior associate scholar with the Heritage Foundation. He also was a member of the Armitage commission on U.S.-Japanese relations. From 2001 to 2005, he served as senior adviser for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and coordinator of the North Korea Working Group at the U.S. State Department, participating in the six-party talks, and directed a multinational initiative against North Korea’s proliferation and illicit activities for the National Security Council. Mr. Asher has been involved in East Asian economic, financial, and security affairs since the late 1980s in government, academia, and the private sector.
Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is 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 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).
Carolyn Leddy is a consultant for the National Institute for Public Policy. From July 2006 to November 2007, Ms. Leddy served as director for counterproliferation strategy at the National Security Council (NSC), where she covered North Korea’s nuclear program, proliferation financing, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) terrorism, and chemical and biological weapons proliferation. In September 2007, Ms. Leddy was a member of the U.S. delegation that visited the Yongbyon nuclear facility in North Korea. Prior to her position at NSC, Ms. Leddy was a senior adviser at the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation and a senior adviser at the Bureau of Arms Control, both at the U.S. State Department. In 2004, Ms. Leddy served as the executive assistant to the senior USG representative for WMDs in Libya, where she helped oversee implementation of Libya’s historic decision to give up its WMD programs. She has also held State Department positions as a foreign affairs officer and a presidential management fellow and, from 2002 to 2003, was a professional staff member for the Committee on Foreign Relations in the U.S. Senate.
Marcus Noland is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a visiting professor at Yale University. Mr. Noland was a senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and has held research or teaching positions at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Southern California, Tokyo University, Saitama University (now the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies), the University of Ghana, the Korea Development Institute, and the East-West Center. He has been the recipient of fellowships sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the Pohang Iron and Steel Corporation. Mr. Noland has authored, coauthored, or edited numerous books. His book Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas (Institute for International Economics, 2000) won the prestigious Ohira Memorial Prize. Mr. Noland’s most recent book, coauthored with Howard Pack, is Arab Economies in a Changing World (Peterson Institute, 2007). He has also written many scholarly articles on international economics, U.S. trade policy, and the economies of the Asia-Pacific region. He has served as an occasional consultant to organizations such as the World Bank and the National Intelligence Council and has testified before the U.S. Congress on numerous occasions.
Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her research areas include the Middle East, South Asia, terrorism, and weapons proliferation. Before coming to AEI, Ms. Pletka served for ten years as a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Since joining AEI, Ms. Pletka has developed a conference series on rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, directed a project on democracy in the Arab world, and designed a project to track global business in Iran. She was a member of the congressionally mandated U.S. Institute of Peace Task Force on the United Nations, which released its final report in 2005. She recently coedited Dissent and Reform in the Arab World: Empowering Democrats (AEI Press, 2008) and coauthored Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan (AEI, 2008).
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