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2011 Asia Essay Contest Judging panel

Professor Richard Benedetto

American University; TFAS Faculty, Journalism Internship Seminar (Capital Semester and Institute on Political Journalism)

Prof. Richard Benedetto is a retired White House and national political correspondent for USA TODAY and political columnist for Gannett News Service. He reported on government and politics on the local, state and national levels for nearly 40 years.

A native of Utica, N.Y., Benedetto began his journalism career with the Buffalo Evening News, and held government reporting positions with the Utica (N.Y) Daily Press and Observer-Dispatch. He also worked in the Albany bureau of Gannett News Service, covering state and government politics during the Gov. Hugh Carey administration.

He is a founding member of USA Today, joining the newspaper in Washington, D.C. in 1982, prior to its debut. He wrote the paper's front-page cover story on its initial day of publication.

In addition to reporting on the White House and national politics, Benedetto wrote a weekly political column for the Gannett News Service, which serves the Gannett Co. Inc.'s 85 daily newspapers. The column also appeared on USA Today's website.  He covered the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In addition, he has covered the presidential campaigns of 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004.

Benedetto holds Bachelor and Master Degrees from Syracuse University. In 1992, Syracuse awarded him an honorary doctorate.

He has lectured at colleges and universities across the country and has received numerous journalism awards. In 2011, he was a visiting professor at Furman University and Grinnell College. He first taught news writing and reporting as an adjunct professor at Utica College. He was honored in 1998 with the National Italian-American Foundation Media Award for his projection of a positive image for Italian-Americans. He was named “Outstanding Professor” by TFAS in 2009.

In 2006, Benedetto wrote a memoir of his long reporting career, Politicians Are People, Too. In addition to his teaching, he continues to contribute political commentary to outlets such as USA Today, AOL News, Politico, C-Span and FoxNews.com.

Ms. Yolanda Jinxin Ma

Social Media Editor, South China Morning Post

Ms. Ma serves as the first-ever Social Media Editor at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. She oversees the Post’s social media development and led HK's first crowd-sourced interactive mapping project, CitizenMap, which was honored at this year's Society of Publishers in Asia Awards. Ms. Ma is also the first Chinese Editor for the International Journalists' Network and writes for various Chinese websites and publications, introducing up-to-date new media developments and citizen journalism to China.

Dr. Kimberly Meltzer

Professor, Georgetown University

Dr. Kimberly Meltzer is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the graduate program in Communication, Culture and Technology.  She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her academic career, Dr. Meltzer worked for news organizations including CNN and NBC. She has also worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Discovery Communications, and Gazette Newspapers. Her areas of research and teaching include journalism studies, political communication, media technology, and popular culture.

She has experience working on large-scale political communication and public policy grants, and presents and publishes her work regularly at national and international conferences. Her book, TV News Anchors and Journalistic Tradition: How Journalists Adapt to Technology, was published in 2010. Dr. Meltzer is a 1996 graduate of The Institute on Political Journalism and serves on its Board of Visitors.

Previous Judging panels

2010 Asia Essay Contest

Gregory R. Lyons

PARTNER, Wiley Rein LLP

Mr. Lyons represents a wide variety of corporations in matters relating to enforcement and defense of patent and intellectual property rights. He also assists clients in connection with patent due diligence matters and intellectual property portfolio valuation. Mr. Lyons is a member of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA). He was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar, Maryland Bar and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He received is J.D., cum laude from Harvard School of Law and his M.S.E.E. and B.S.E.E. from the University of Maryland.

Representative Experience

• Litigates numerous complex patent actions involving a wide variety of high technology issues, including pharmaceuticals (Hatch-Waxman), communications satellites, network interface devices, Internet business methods and semiconductors.

• Member of trial team that obtained a $23.1 million verdict in a patent infringement lawsuit against a maker of wireless email devices after the jury found the line of wireless email products, software and services willfully infringed five patents. Verdict was named as one of The National Law Journal’s “Top 100 Verdicts of 2002.”

• Member of trial team that secured a significant victory for our pharmaceutical clients in a protracted patent infringement litigation involving proton pump inhibitor technology.

• Obtained summary judgment of non-infringement for our client in a case involving a leading pharmaceutical product for treating Parkinson’s disease.

• Obtained summary judgment of invalidity for our client in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey in a case involving non-sedating antihistamine products. 

• Member of trial team that successfully represented a client in a patent infringement action before the International Trade Commission (ITC) in a case involving novel microwave filters on satellites.

• Secured a victory for client ARM Ltd. in defense of claims of patent infringement pertaining to the design of microprocessors.

Dr. Parth Shah

President, Centre for Civil Society

Dr. Parth Shah is the President of the Centre for Civil Society, a think tank for public policy solutions within the framework of rule of law, subsidiarity, and competitive markets.

Parth's research and advocacy work centers on the themes of economic freedom (law, liberty and livelihood campaign), choice and competition in education (fund students, not schools), property right approach for the environment (terracotta vision of stewardship), and good governance (new public management and the duty to publish).

He has conceptualized and organized liberal educational programs for the Indian youth including Liberty & Society Seminars, Jeevika Livelihood Documentary Competition, and Researching Reality Internship Program. He has edited Morality of Markets, Friedman on India, Profiles in Courage: Dissent on Indian Socialism, Do Corporations Have Social Responsibility? and co-edited Law, Liberty & Livelihood: Making a Living on the Street; Terracotta Reader: A Market Approach to the Environment; BR Shenoy: Theoretical Vision and BR Shenoy: Economic Prophecies and Agenda for Change.

Parth is on the editorial board of EducationWorld, Vishleshan, and Khoj, and is informal advisor to many non-profits. He has taken liberal ideas to numerous national and international workshops and conferences and writes regularly in the popular media. He is the youngest Indian member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

2009 Asia Essay Contest

Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch

Julia Chang Bloch is President of the US-China Education Trust (USCET), a non-profit organization working in China to promote US-China relations through education and exchange. USCET works with a network of 34 Chinese institutions, and Ambassador Bloch serves as Distinguished Adviser or Visiting Professor at several top Beijing and Shanghai universities.

Ambassador Bloch, the first Asian American to hold such rank in U.S. history, has had an extensive career in international affairs and government service, beginning as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sabah, Malaysia, in 1964, and culminating as U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Nepal in 1989. From 1981 to 1988, Ambassador Bloch served at the U.S. Agency for International Development as Assistant Administrator for Food for Peace and Voluntary Assistance and as Assistant Administrator for Asia and the Near East, positions appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. She also was the Chief Minority Counsel to a Senate Select Committee; a Senate professional staff member; the Deputy Director of the Office of African Affairs at the U.S. Information Agency; a Fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and an Associate of the U.S.-Japan Relations Program of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard.

After 25 years in government service, Ambassador Bloch moved to the corporate sector in 1993, becoming Group Executive Vice President at the Bank of America, where she created the Corporate Relations Department, heading the bank’s Public Relations, Government Affairs, and Public Policy operations. From 1996 to 1998, Ambassador Bloch moved into philanthropy, serving as President and CEO of the United States-Japan Foundation, a private grant making institution, with $100 million in assets. Beginning in 1998, Ambassador Bloch shifted her focus to China, first becoming Visiting Professor at the Institute for International Relations and Executive Vice Chairman of the American Studies Center at Peking University, and subsequently affiliating with Fudan University in Shanghai, as well as the University of Maryland as Ambassador-in-Residence at the Institute for Global Chinese Affairs.

A native of China who came to the U.S. at age nine, Ambassador Bloch grew up in San Francisco and earned a bachelor's degree in Communications and Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, and a master's degree in Government and East Asia Regional Studies from Harvard University in 1967. She was awarded an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from Northeastern University in 1986.

Ambassador Bloch serves on a number of corporate and non-profit boards, including: Asia Institute for Political Economy, the University of HK, the Atlantic Council, Council of American Ambassadors, US Asia Pacific Council, Meridian International Center, World Affairs Council, the Fund for American Studies, and Penn Mutual Insurance Co. She was elected as a Fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration and is on the Expert/Eminent Persons Register of the ASEAN Regional Forum, a member of the Woodrow Wilson Council, as well as Trustee Emeriti of the Asia Society, Honorary Member of the Board of Directors of the Friends Society of the Asian Division, Library of Congress, and Honorary Fellow of the Foreign Policy Association. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and American Academy of Diplomacy, she also serves on the Edumasters International Advisory Committee and the Editorial Board of Berkshire Publishing Group’s Encyclopedia of China.

She has received numerous awards, and her publications include: Women and Diplomacy, Bonds Across Borders, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007; Nepal: End of Shangri-la, Liberal Democracy Nepal Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2005, America’s Love-Hate Relationship with China, American Forum Journal of the Fudan University Center of American Studies, 2003, Commercial Diplomacy, Living with China: US-China Relations in the 21 st Century, an American Assembly book, New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. Japanese Foreign Aid and the Politics of Burden Sharing, Yen for Development, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1991.

Professor K.C. Fung

K.C. Fung is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research areas are in international trade and finance, trade policies, multinational corporations, the WTO and the economics of the Asia/Pacific.

He has done influential work on trade and network, trade policies under imperfect competition and the Japanese keiretsu. He has also made substantial contributions to the international economics of China. His work includes the correct measurement of the U.S.-China bilateral trade balance, estimation of the domesticvalue added and foreign content of Chinese exports as well as trade and investment relationships between China and the United States, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. He recently has also worked on the economics of production sharing and global supply chain.

Fung was a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in both the Bush I and the Clinton administrations and he received a letter of commendation from the U.S. President. He was a Senior Research Fellow at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and he was a consultant to the World Bank, the WTO and the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI). He was a U.S. government delegate to the OECD and was an advisor and academic collaborator at the United States International Trade Commission (USITC). He partnered with the WTO and trained senior government officials from thirty-one countries. He also provided management training to senior executives associated with Alcatel and UTStarcom. He was also an external consultant for Morgan Stanley and a consultant for BBVA.

He has taught at Stanford University, the University ofWisconsin-Madison, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Hong Kong. At Stanford, he taught a Ph.D. course on trade theory. He was tenured at Mount Holyoke College and he was a visiting scholar/researcher at the University of Tokyo (Japan), Bruegel (Brussels), Tilburg University (Netherlands), The Bank of Finland (Helsinki), Chung Hua Institution of Economic Research (Taiwan) and the National University of Singapore. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Hong Kong Institute of Economics and Business Strategy (HIEBS), an Associate Director of the Hong Kong Centre for Economic Research (HKCER) and an academic consultant to the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Dr. Jo Kwong

Jo Kwong is the Vice President of Institute Relations at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.  For more than two decades, she has worked to promote and develop an international network of independent think tanks devoted to the ideas of liberty.  Prior to joining Atlas in 1989, Kwong worked at free market organizations including the Institute for Humane Studies (Virginia); Capital Research Center ( Washington, DC); and the Property and Environment Research Center ( Montana). 

Kwong received her doctorate in Natural Resource Economics from the University of Michigan and her undergraduate degree in biology at Brown University.  She began her career in the free-market, nonprofit sector with a postdoctoral program in Nonprofit Management at the Institute for Humane Studies under the mentorship of John Blundell, currently the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs ( London).  She lectures internationally on topics ranging from free-market environmentalism, markets and morality, globalization and women; to think tank management and development. 

Kwong's policy books include Myths about Environmental Policy (Citizens for the Environment, Washington, D.C.), Protecting the Environment: Old Rhetoric, New Imperatives ( Capital Research Center, Washington, D.C.), and Market Environmentalism: Lessons for Hong Kong (Hong Kong Centre for Economic Research, Hong Kong). She is a contributing author to The Yellowstone Primer: Land and Resource Management in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, San Francisco) and Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns (Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York).

In addition, Kwong has published in journals including the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Urban Lands, and the American Land Forum, as well as in the popular press such as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.  On think tank management, she has authored "how to" guides including "The Think Tank Primer: Strategies for Advancing Freedom around the World" and "Guidelines and Recommendations for Starting an Institute," which are available at the Atlas website at www.Atlasnetwork.org.