Previously, he taught political economy and how to rebuild countries after wars at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and international development policy at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He consulted for the World Bank, was Assistant Resident Representative for the United Nations Development Programme in East Timor, and Advisor to Cambodia’s first private equity fund Leopard Capital. A TED Fellow, Fulbright Specialist, Delphi Fellow of BigThink, Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, and Fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar, he is on the boards of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Partners for Development, the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, the Southeast Asia Development Program, Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, the
Journal of International Relations and Development (Palgrave), the
International Public Management Journal (Taylor & Francis), the Journal of South-East Asian American Education & Advancement (University of Texas), and Politics and the Life Sciences (Allen Press). He advises the Faculty of Development Studies at the Royal University of Phnom Penh and is a Councilor for the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. He is the author of
Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2013) and co-author of
The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest is Reshaping the World (Routledge, 2013). He wrote and narrated the award-winning documentary film “The End/Beginning: Cambodia” (47 minutes, 2011,
news blurb) based on his 2009
TED Talk and has appeared in several other documentaries. A graduate of Princeton and Berkeley, he moved to the United States from France as a Cambodian refugee at the age of 10.
