David Lampton

Senior Research Fellow, SAIS Foreign Policy Institute

David M. Lampton is Senior Research Fellow at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies—SAIS. For more than two decades he was Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies at SAIS. Lampton is former Chairman of the The Asia Foundation in San Francisco, former President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations in New York, and former Dean of Faculty at SAIS. His many publications, academic and popular, deal with US-China Relations, Chinese Foreign Policy, Chinese Leadership, Chinese Politics, and Chinese Power. His most recent volume tells the exciting story of China’s drive to build high-speed railways in Southeast Asia—Rivers of Iron. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in political science where, as an undergraduate student, he was a firefighter. Lampton has an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies. He is a Life Trustee on the Board of Trustees of Colorado College and was in the US Army Reserve in the enlisted and commissioned ranks.