International class of fellows joins Center for Business and Government

Twenty new fellows from 10 different countries have joined the Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Business and Government (CBG) for the 2004-05 academic year.

“Our fellows bridge theory and practice, infusing the center with new perspectives,” says CBG Director John Ruggie. “The center sits at the key intersection of business and government as it impacts public policy. The worlds of the academy and of practice mutually benefit from this ongoing dialogue and interaction.”

CBG fellows are carefully selected as a result of their demonstrated leadership in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors or because of their scholarship at the interface of business and government.

The center’s new fellows are as follows:

Sarah Abdelkader will work with the Regulatory Policy Program on a risk-informed safety framework study for the Federal Railroad Administration. Abdelkader is currently a management and program analyst with the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, Mass.

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Additional information about the CBG

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Ren-he Cao is an instructor in the department of political science and public administration at the School of Management at Xiangtan University in China. He has published several books including an “Introduction to Public Administration” and “Methods in Modern Public Administration.” Cao will be researching patterns of local governments’ public administration in China.

Mark Fagan is focused on the shifting debate on the best path for regulation of the electric utility industry, and will take a comparative approach to lessons learned from deregulation in other industries. Fagan is founding partner of the management and consulting firm Norbridge Inc., and was vice president at Mercer Management Consulting.

Salwa Hammami is a graduate from the Brown University doctoral program in economics where her work focused on applied microeconomics and applied game theory. Hammami has published on topics ranging from credit card debt to labor unions in the United States.

Mark Kramer is a senior fellow working on the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative (CSR). Kramer is currently managing director and founder of the Foundation Strategy Group LLC in Boston, as well as chairman and founder of the Center for Effective Philanthropy Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

Tohru Nakamura is a professor of economics at Kobe Gakuin University in Japan. Prior to his current position, he taught economics at Matsusaka University and has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He will be researching external debt and growth in Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) and looking at whether the HIPC Initiative has been effective in terms of poverty reduction.

Katsunori Nomura is this year’s Kansai Keizai Doyukai fellow. As the chief administrator for the human resources department of the Obayashi Corp., Japan’s fourth-largest construction firm, Nomura is responsible for a new retirement salary system as well as union negotiations. Nomura will be exploring the implications of low Japanese birthrate and an aging population on human resource management in the Japanese work force.

John Price is a senior fellow and the CEO of Isogenis, an emerging drug and therapy company in the United States, which is expanding to Europe. In addition to leading Isogenis in developing corporate strategies, Price has also held positions with operating and capital markets at the Toronto Stock Exchange, American Express, and Deloitte and Touche. He will explore issues of bioethics and corporate governance.

Baoxing Qiu is a New World Fellow and China’s vice minister of construction. Qiu has much experience in local government as mayor of Hanzhou and Jinhua municipalities in Zhejiang Province. He will work on researching urbanization and the challenges to achieving sustainable development.

Jose Miguel Vassallo is a professor of transport economics at the ETSI Caminos UPM in Madrid, from which he also holds a Ph.D. in the same field. His research focuses on transport infrastructure management and regulation, and he works closely with the European Conference of Transport Research Institutes, as well as Spain’s secretary of transport and infrastructure.

Jianmin Wang is the dean of the public administration department at the School of Management at Beijing Normal University. He is a deputy with the People’s Congress of Beijing as well as the deputy director in the department of education and culture at the Central Committee of Jiusan Society. Wang is studying models of institutional reform of performance appraisal of government officials in China.

Richard Jun Wang is chief representative of Standard Life Investments in China. His primary responsibility is managing and developing business opportunities for the company and maintaining regulatory contacts. He will be working on a comparative study on the mutual fund industry in the United States and China.

Tracy Su-Chin Yang is a fellow at the Asian Development Bank Institute in Japan as well as the Chinese Institute of Economics and Business in Taiwan. She is also a research associate with Australia National University’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Yang will be working on financing the growth of small and medium enterprises in China.

Liexun Yang is division chief of the management science department of the National Natural Science Foundation (NNSFC) of China. He directs the NNSFC public administration research program and works to create an environment conducive to original innovation for scientific researchers in China.

Yaru Xiang is director of the division of social security in China’s Ministry of Finance. She is one of three fellows sponsored by the ministry this fall. The greatest challenges of her work surround rural social security, disaster assistance, veteran resettlement, as well as welfare for the elderly and disabled.

Yanxin You is a fellow from China’s Ministry of Finance, where she is the section chief of the economic construction department. You will be working on researching U.S. models of fiscal and revenue policy on the environment, resource and land asset management, and their applicability in the China context.

Xian Ping Xu is a New World Fellow. Xu serves as vice governor of Hunan Province. The most challenging part of his role in provincial government is meeting the demands of transition between planning and market economic systems in modern China. His goal is to seek solutions to these challenges and to learn from comparative examples of economic development and public leadership.

Simon Zadek is a senior fellow working on the CSR Initiative. Zadek is currently chief executive of AccountAbility, a nonprofit international membership institute committed to promoting accountability for sustainable development. He has served on distinguished councils such as the UN Commission for Social Development Expert Group on CSR.

Sheng Hua Zhao is program division chief of the international cooperation department of China’s Development Research Center (DRC), where he manages bilateral and multilateral DRC programs. He will be working on comparative approaches and innovations in finance and banking, and will apply his findings to his DRC work.

Cheng-yue Zhou is deputy director general of China’s Treasury Department, and is one of three fellows sponsored by the Ministry of Finance. As a senior adviser to the vice minister of the treasury, Zhou directly affects policy addressing public finance issues from public debt management to the government securities market. His research will focus on treasury cash management, treasury securities, and American bond markets.

These fellows and senior fellows join an equally impressive group of returning fellows. This group includes fellows Phan Chanh Duong, Jennifer Light, Deshan Lin, Iqbal Quadir, Raquel Galindo, Koji Nomura, Haifeng Wang, and senior fellows Marshall Carter, Jean-Jacques Degroof, Jerome Grossman, Thomas J. Healey, Jun Kurihara, Michael Michael, Jane Nelson, William Rosenberg, Robert Steel, Linda Peek Schacht, Alan Trager, Jeffrey Williams, and Steven Wilson. For more information on any of the center’s fellows, please visit http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/cbg/.