GDPI People (NEW)

Principal Investigator

Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and he continues to lead its programs on Arab Reform and Democracy and Democracy in Taiwan. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His sixth and most recent book, In Search of Democracy (Routledge, 2016), explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his work on democratic development, particularly in Africa and Asia. He has also edited or co-edited more than 40 books on democratic development around the world.

Research Scholar

Charles is a Research Scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, and a board member of the International Centre for Trade Transparency and Monitoring. Charles served as an elected member of the Legislative Council in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, representing the Information Technology functional constituency, for two terms from 2012 to 2020. In 2021, he founded Tech for Good Asia, an initiative to advocate positive use of technology for businesses and civil communities. As an entrepreneur, Charles co-founded HKNet in 1994, one of the earliest Internet service providers in Hong Kong, which was acquired by NTT Communications in 2000. He was the founding chair of the Internet Society Hong Kong, honorary president and former president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, former chair of the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association, and former chair of the Asian, Australiasian and Pacific Islands Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO) of ICANN. Charles holds a BS in Computer and Electrical Engineering and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

Founding Executive Director

Eileen Donahoe is the founding Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPI) at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center. She was appointed by White House as the inaugural Special Envoy and Coordinator for Digital Freedom and served in the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. She served as the first US Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva during the Obama Administration. After leaving government, she was Director of Global Affairs at Human Rights Watch where she represented the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy, with special emphasis on digital rights, cybersecurity and internet governance. Earlier in her career, she was a technology litigator at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley. Eileen serves on the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy; the World Economic Forum Council on the Future of Digital Economy; Microsoft’s Technology and Human Rights Advisory Board; GIFCT Independent Advisory Board; the Freedom Online Coalition Advisory Network; and the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She holds a BA from Dartmouth, a J.D. from Stanford Law School, an MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford, an M.T.S. from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in Ethics and Social Theory from the GTU Cooperative Program with UC Berkeley.