Project Directors

Alexsia Chan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Her research interests are in comparative politics, research methods, and Chinese politics, and her dissertation examines public service provision for rural migrant workers in urban China. Before coming to Berkeley, she worked in community development and taught in Thailand, South Africa, Croatia, and the United States. She holds an MA in political science from UC Berkeley and a BA in political science and economics from Rutgers University.

E-Mail: alexsia "at" berkeley.edu

Kristi Govella is the East Asia Project Director at BASC and a Ph.D. candidate in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on comparative politics and international relations in East Asia, and her dissertation looks at the role of cross-national coalitions in the Japanese foreign policy-making process. Her other research interests include East Asian regional institutional architecture, Japanese and Chinese political economy, organizational theory, social networks, and trade-security linkages. During the 2010-2011 academic year, Kristi will be conducting fieldwork in Tokyo as a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellow and a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Social Science. Kristi has also worked at the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in addition to participating in Track II activities through the Pacific Forum CSIS and the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP). She holds an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in Political Science and Japanese from the University of Washington, Seattle.

E-Mail: kgovella "at" berkeley.edu

Website: http://www.kristigovella.com

Sara A. Newland entered the Ph.D. program in Fall 2006. Before coming to Berkeley, she studied Political Science at Wellesley College, taught middle school in rural North Carolina as a Teach For America corps member, and worked at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Currently conducting dissertation research on local governance and public service provision in China's poor and minority counties, Sara divides her time between Berkeley, Beijing, and southwestern China. Sara is the co-organizer of the Working Group on East Asian Politics and Project Director at the Berkeley APEC Study Center.

E-Mail: snewland "at" berkeley.edu

Website: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~snewland

Chloe Thurston is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science at U.C. Berkeley and Managing Editor of Business & Politics. Her research interests are in comparative political economy and public policy of advanced industrialized democracies. Her dissertation examines the transformation of housing finance and homeownership in industrialized democracies after the 1970s. Other current projects are on the regulation of non-standard forms of employment in the United States and Europe, and the elite framing of immigration policy in Britain. Chloe holds an M.A. in political science from U.C. Berkeley and a B.A. in economics and political science from Johns Hopkins University.

E-Mail: cthurston "at" berkeley.edu