Professor Flake is one of the world’s leading authorities on strategic developments in the Indo-Pacific. Having spent twenty-five years in the US foreign policy community focused on the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia and now seven years in Australia’s Indian Ocean capital he is an expert on key strategic relationships in the broader Indo-Pacific. He has authored many scholarly and policy studies on security developments in the region, and their policy implications for the US and its regional partners.

Since establishing the Centre in 2014, Professor Flake has worked to build stronger international relationships between Australia, the US and the broader Indo-Pacific. He has led the growth of several major international conferences in Australia and the region; and established a range of high-level diplomatic and policy dialogues on issues of shared concern for the Indo-Pacific.

Professor Flake is a sought-after media commentator, particularly on issues to do with US politics and foreign policy and strategic developments in the Indo-Pacific. His work has appeared in many leading international outlets, including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, as well as across the Australian media landscape.

Professor Flake holds a number of strategic leadership roles. He is a Governor of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia (AmCham), and serves on the board of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He is Co-Chair of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a member of the international advisory board of the David M. Kennedy Centre at Brigham Young University, and on the Board of the Australia Korea Business Council WA.

Prior to joining the Centre, he was the Executive Director of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation, an Associate Director of the Program on Conflict Resolution at The Atlantic Council of the United States, and Director for Research and Academic Affairs at the Korea Economic Institute of America.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Korean) and Master of Arts (International and Area Studies) from Brigham Young University. He speaks both fluent Korean and Laotian.

Prior to joining the Wilson Center as Director of the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy, Dr. Terry served in a range of important policy roles related to both Korea and its surrounding region. Formerly a Senior Fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), she served as a Senior Analyst on Korean issues at the CIA (2001-08), Director for Korea, Japan, and Oceanic Affairs at the National Security Council (2008-09), and Deputy National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council (2009-10).

She received numerous awards for her leadership and outstanding mission support, including the CIA Foreign Language award in 2008. From 2008 to 2009, she was the Director for Korea, Japan, and Oceanic affairs at the National Security Council under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In that role, she formulated, coordinated, and implemented U.S. government policy on Korea and Japan, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania. From 2009 to 2010, she was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council. In that position, she led the U.S. Intelligence Community’s production of strategic analysis on East Asian issues and authored multiple National Intelligence Estimates.

From 2010 to 2011, she served as the National Intelligence Fellow in the David Rockefeller Studies Program at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Since leaving the government, she has been a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute (2011-2015), where she taught both graduate and undergraduate courses on Korean politics and East Asia. She holds a Ph.D. (2001) and a Masters of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (1998) from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from New York University (1993).

Dr. Won Gon Park is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of North Korean Studies at Ewha Womans University.

He is currently holding a position as a member of the ROK Ministry of Foreign Affairs advisory committee. He was previously a professor of international studies at Handong Global University and a research fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA).

His main research interests include (history of) international relations in Northeast Asia, ROK-US Alliance, and North Korean studies. Professor Park earned his M.A. from Boston College and received his Ph.D. in international relations from Seoul National University.

Narushige Michishita is vice president and professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo.

He has served as a member of the National Security Secretariat Advisory Board of the Government of Japan, a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, senior research fellow at Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS), Ministry of Defense, and as assistant counsellor at the Cabinet Secretariat for Security and Crisis Management of the Government of Japan.He acquired his Ph.D. with distinction from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University.

A specialist in Japanese security and foreign policy as well as security issues on the Korean Peninsula, he is the author of “The US Maritime Strategy in the Pacific during the Cold War,” in Sebastian Bruns and Sarandis Papadopoulos, eds., Conceptualizing Maritime and Naval Strategy: Festschrift for Peter M. Swartz, Captain (USN) retired (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020); Lessons of the Cold War in the Pacific: U.S. Maritime Strategy, Crisis Prevention, and Japan’s Role (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2016) (co-authored with Peter M. Swartz and David F. Winkler); and North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966-2008 (Routledge, 2009).