APARC Announces 2026-2028 Fellows Cohort: A Two‑Year Push for Asia‑Pacific Policy Solutions
APARC names a cross‑disciplinary team for policy-focused research
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia‑Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute has appointed its 2026-2028 fellows. Over the next two years this international, interdisciplinary group will pursue research designed to inform real‑world policymaking across the Asia‑Pacific. Combining academic rigor with on‑the‑ground engagement, the cohort will tackle urgent regional problems-from governance of emerging digital technologies and supply‑chain fragilities to climate adaptation and public‑health readiness.
Why this fellowship matters now
The Asia‑Pacific remains pivotal to the global economy and geopolitics. East Asian manufacturing clusters underpin critical technology supply chains; coastal megacities are facing intensifying flood and heat risks; and rapid digital adoption is creating both new economic opportunities and governance challenges. In this context, APARC’s new fellows are positioned to convert rigorous evidence into practical recommendations for governments, multilateral institutions, and private‑sector actors navigating fast‑moving change.
Topical Priorities and Geographic Emphases
Strategic themes guiding the cohort
The fellows’ work is organized around crosscutting priorities that mirror the region’s most pressing policy debates:
– Digital innovation and governance (with a focus on East Asia): research on data protection regimes, approaches to AI oversight, and policy frameworks for industrial automation.
– Climate, energy and just transitions (primarily Southeast Asia): comparative studies of decarbonization pathways that aim to preserve livelihoods while attracting sustainable investment.
– Health systems resilience and emergency preparedness (South Asia): projects to strengthen disease surveillance, optimize medical supply logistics, and bolster community‑level response capacity.
– Geopolitics, maritime security and resilience (Pacific Islands): analyses to inform infrastructure protection, maritime governance, and responses to climate‑linked displacement.
Methodologies: connecting granular evidence to policy choices
Fellows will use a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods-ethnography, archival work, remote sensing, machine learning and systems modeling-to produce evidence that is both detailed and policy‑relevant. Examples of methodological approaches include satellite‑based coastal monitoring to estimate erosion and relocation risk, social‑network methods to trace misinformation around elections, and integrated economic‑climate scenarios for industrial transition planning.
Illustrative projects and concrete deliverables
New research examples that demonstrate applied impact
– Designing NLP‑assisted monitoring tools and citizen verification systems to help election authorities anticipate and counterspread of false narratives.
– Field research with urban platform workers in Southeast Asian cities, paired with pilot policy designs for portable social protections and sectoral minimum standards.
– Joint modeling exercises with regional power utilities to identify renewable integration strategies that minimize job displacement in fossil‑fuel‑dependent communities.
– Legal and operational studies to upgrade incident‑response and dispute‑management practices in contested maritime zones, informed by recent regional case precedents.
From research to policy: pathways for uptake
Translating findings into usable guidance
APARC has organized the fellowship to accelerate the translation of scholarship into practice. Fellows will prepare concise, decision‑oriented outputs-policy briefs tailored for ministers and regulators, operational playbooks for implementers, reproducible datasets and open tools. Dissemination will occur through targeted briefings with policy partners, practitioner workshops, peer‑reviewed publications, and public convenings that bring together scholars, civil society and industry stakeholders.
Partnerships, capacity building and regulatory experimentation
A key element of the program is deep regional collaboration. Fellows will embed in local institutions-universities, think tanks and government agencies-to co‑produce context‑sensitive solutions. The program will also pilot regulatory sandboxes and innovation labs that pair researchers with regulators and entrepreneurs to prototype reforms in real time, and run training modules for mid‑career officials and emerging leaders to translate research findings into practical governance tools.
How impact will be assessed
APARC will track a mix of quantitative and qualitative indicators to gauge success: citations of research in policy documents, uptake of pilot interventions by partner institutions, downloads and reuse of open datasets, and the establishment of sustained domestic research collaborations. These metrics emphasize tangible policy uptake and enduring institutional capacity rather than academic output alone.
Institutional networks and regional collaboration
Strengthening ties across the Asia‑Pacific knowledge ecosystem
The 2026-2028 fellows will expand APARC’s role as a convening hub that links Stanford expertise with regional research centers and policy actors. By collaborating with ASEAN mechanisms, Pacific Island administrations, national ministries and local civil‑society groups, the cohort aims to co‑create solutions that are sensitive to local realities while generating comparative insights across subregions.
Concrete collaborative ambitions
– Co‑authoring a regional roadmap for AI governance in partnership with regulatory bodies and industry consortia.
– Piloting nature‑based flood defenses in coastal municipalities in South Asia, developed with community input and municipal partners.
– Assisting Pacific Island governments to integrate sea‑level rise projections into medium‑term infrastructure and disaster‑risk plans.
A distinctive approach: policy‑ready, cross‑disciplinary scholarship
Bridging disciplines to address complex policy problems
What sets this APARC cohort apart is its explicit focus on scholarship that is both methodologically innovative and immediately applicable. By drawing on social science, data science and engineering, and by centering sustained field engagement, fellows will generate comparative analyses that inform near‑term policy choices and contribute to longer‑term governance design.
Planned outputs
– Briefs and executive summaries targeted at high‑level policymakers.
– Well‑documented, open datasets and code to promote reproducible analysis.
– Practitioner guides, regulatory experimentation frameworks and toolkits.
– Public events and media‑oriented materials to translate technical findings into accessible narratives for broader civic debate.
Conclusion: Reinforcing APARC’s role in Asia‑Pacific policy engagement
With the arrival of the 2026-2028 fellows cohort, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia‑Pacific Research Center recommits to producing research that directly addresses the region’s accelerating economic, technological and environmental transformations. Through collaborative partnerships, rigorous mixed‑methods work and an emphasis on actionable outputs, the fellows will help shape policy and public discourse across the Asia‑Pacific-further solidifying APARC’s position within Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute as a center for applied, impact‑oriented study of the region.