Long serving JICUF trustees Delores Roeder and Samuel Shepherd officially retired from the board of trustees on March 31, 2019.

Delores was first elected to the JICUF board in 1986. She served as chair in the early 2000s and as secretary from 2010 to 2015. She was present at both the closing of the JICUF office in 1991 and the reopening in 1997. Delores provided insight and advice that can only come from long-standing experience, and even penned the definitive account of the history of JICUF.

Sam has served on the board for 12 years. Sam played a critical role as chair of the board during the past four years, guiding and mentoring Paul Hastings when Paul took on the leadership role at JICUF in September 2015. Under Sam’s guidance and leadership, JICUF has introduced several new programs, including the United States Scholars Initiative and the Syrian Scholars Initiative.

This coming year, Phyllis Larson will take on the position of chair, while Danny Ha will serve as secretary and David Janes as treasurer. In addition, two new trustees, Dr. Machi Dilworth and Dr. Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak, will be joining the board at the beginning of our new fiscal year on April 1, 2019.

Machi Fukuyama Dilworth most recently served as the Vice President for Gender Equality and Human Resource Development at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Prior to her role at OIST, she had a 33-year-long career in Washington D.C. as a government research administrator, including serving as the Associate Program Manager/ Associate Chief of Competitive Research Grants Office at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Director for the Office of International Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation. While at NSF, Machi served as Head of the NSF Tokyo Office and concurrently Science & Technology Attache at the US Embassy from 2007 to 2010. In 2002 she was awarded the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award from the White House, and in 2007 was designated a fellow for both the American Society of Plant Biologists and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Machi has always been conscious of the gender-based biases in scientific workplaces and Japanese society, and works for the professional and educational advancement of women at all levels. She received her B.A. in Natural Sciences at International Christian University and both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Plant Biochemistry and Physiology at University of California at Los Angeles.

Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak is an Associate Professor of Political Science/Asian Studies and the Department Chair for Political Science at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Kathy earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, and her B.A. in East Asian Studies and Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Between college and graduate school, she worked at Toshiba Corporation’s Tokyo headquarters for two years, and she returned to Japan for 16 months of field research during graduate school. Before joining the St. Olaf faculty in 2003, she taught for five years at New College of Florida. Kathy teaches both broad international and comparative politics classes (Introduction to International Relations, Immigration and Citizenship) and Asia-focused classes (Asian Regionalism, Japanese Politics, Human Rights in Asia). She has published several papers on Japanese immigration and citizenship politics. She spent the 2009-10 academic year as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, thanks to a Fulbright Research Grant, investigating democratic ideals and political socialization. She also teaches a St. Olaf class based at the Asian Rural Institute, and is a member of the board of the American Friends of Asian Rural Institute.

Welcome, Machi and Katherine!