Senior Colonel Tran Hoai Nam is Deputy Director of the Institute for Defence International Relations, Ministry of Defence. He is responsible for researching national strategies and give the predictions about the security and relations between the countries in the political, economic contexts

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Pham Ngoc Minh Trang is a research fellow at the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law, based in Heidelberg, Germany. Her work at the Max Planck Foundation includes delivering capacity-building workshops on the law of the sea topics for officials from the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). Trang was also a Fulbright visiting scholar at New York University in 2019 and a Nippon fellow at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in 2015. Her research and publications primarily focus on dispute settlement mechanisms in the law of the sea, with a particular emphasis on resolutions for the South China Sea disputes, and ocean governance in the Indo-Pacific region.

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Dr. Almut Besold heads the Philippine office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (FNF), a German political foundation that has been active in the Philippines since 1986. She holds a doctorate in Arabic studies and previously worked for the FNF in Indonesia/Malaysia and Pakistan.

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Mr. Nicolas Mann serves as the First Secretary of the Political section at the Embassy of Canada to the Philippines

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Dr. Fang-Ting Cheng is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization (IDE-JETRO), which she joined in 2014. She specializes in international relations, global governance, and environmental politics, with a focus on how major powers and regional actors shape international and regional regimes to address global challenges such as climate change and energy transition.

Building on her extensive work in global environmental governance, Dr. Cheng’s current research examines energy, environmental, and industrial policies promoting low-carbon and decarbonized economies in the great Asian region. Her studies cover key policy instruments such as emissions trading systems, carbon taxation, and carbon neutrality strategies, as well as countries’ responses to climate-related disasters. Integrating perspectives from international relations and security studies, she also investigates how states in the Indo-Pacific region navigate the intersection of climate action, economic security, and geopolitical dynamics.

Dr. Cheng holds a B.A. from National Taiwan University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Law (International Relations) from the University of Tokyo. Her major publications include Japanese Environmental Diplomacy since the Kyoto Protocol (Mie University Press, 2013) and The Formation of Complementary Relationships among Overlapping Regimes: Negotiations on Climate Change, U.S.–China Relations, and the Paris Agreement (Gendaitosho, 2017).

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Major General Tran Van Luong is Vice Commandant and concurrently Chief of Staff of the Vietnam Coast Guard. With his position, he directly commands the VCG vessels and advisory agencies within the force to maintain security and safety at sea in Vietnam as well as the region

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Isabel Sofia Santiago is the Operations Officer for the Disaster Risk Reduction Enhancement at the Local Level (DRREALL) Program at Expertise France. She is also currently working on an independent research with her colleagues on the role of metalworking using the technique repoussé (pukpuk) in the Philippines.

She was previously with Asia Society Philippines as a Project Assistant for a project that focused on assessing Chinese investments in the Philippines. She is also affiliated with the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies as a Grant Writing Team Member.

Her research focus is on Philippine culture, Philippine fashion and textiles, geoeconomics, regional security and maritime issues.

Isabel graduated with a degree in Diplomacy and International Relations with a specialization in East and Southeast Asian Studies at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. She also completed J.F. Oberlin University’s Reconnaissance Japan program in Tokyo, Japan.

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Pratnashree Basu is an Associate Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme. She covers the Indo-Pacific region, with a focus on Japan’s role in the region. Her work also covers maritime geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific, with a particular emphasis on the East and South China Seas. Her research explores the geostrategic dimensions of a rules-based maritime order. She is a Japan Foundation Indo-Pacific Partnership Program (JFIPP Research Fellow 2024); a Sasakawa Peace Foundation and German Marshall Fund for the US Young Strategists Forum Fellow (2025); a Fellow of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies (2021 and 2023); and a US Department of State IVLP Fellow (2017).

With a decade of policy research experience, her research has been published in books, monographs, and peer-reviewed journals. Besides her regular research at ORF, she also contributes to online and print platforms like The Hindu Business Line, The Lowy Interpreter, The Hindu, 9DashLine, The Diplomat, and East Asia Forum, among others.

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CAPT Mark Asuncion is currently a military professor at the U.S. Naval War College. As a career naval officer, he has extensive experience in political-military affairs, to include military attache tours in Colombia, Mexico, and Libya, NATO policy chief on the U.S. Joint Staff, senior military advisor for East Asia and the Pacific at the U.S. Department of State, and as the Senior U.S. Government Official in Vanuatu. He has extensive operational experience in the Indo-Pacific as the Chief of Strategy and Engagement at the U.S. 7th Fleet, based in Yokosuka, Japan. He holds. BA in Economics from UC Berkeley, an MPA from Harvard University, and a Post-Graduate Diploma from Oxford University.

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