H.E. Yeo Han-koo is the former Minister for Trade for the Republic of Korea. During almost three decades of public service in the Korean government, Minister Yeo served as Secretary to the President for New Southern and Northern Policy in the Presidential Office and a variety of positions in the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy, including Deputy Minister for Trade Negotiations, Minister Counselor/Commercial Attache for the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in the USA. He also worked at the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group as senior investment officer. Minister Yeo holds a Master of Business Administration form Harvard Business School, a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from Seoul National University.

Michelle Ye Hee Lee is The Washington Post's Seoul/Tokyo bureau chief, covering Japan and the Koreas. She is based in Tokyo. Previously, she covered money and influence in politics and voting access on the national political enterprise and accountability team and was a reporter for The Post's Fact Checker. Prior to joining The Post in 2014, she was a government accountability reporter at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix.

Dr. Katrin Fraser Katz, is The Korea Society's inaugural Van Fleet Nonresident Senior Fellow. Dr. Katz is a former director for Japan, Korea, and oceanic affairs on the staff of the National Security Council, where she served from 2007 to 2008. Previously, she was a special assistant to the assistant secretary for international organization affairs at the U.S. Department of State and an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. She currently also serves as an Adjunct Fellow (Non-resident) in the Office of the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC. She was previously an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and has also taught at Georgetown University. In 2017, Dr. Katz received the inaugural Sherman Family Korea Emerging Scholar Lecture Series award from The Korea Society. Dr. Katz’s research, which has been supported by grants from the Korea Foundation and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, explores the interplay of cooperation and conflict in East Asia’s political, economic, and security dynamics. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University; a master’s degree in East Asian and international security studies from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she was awarded the John C. Perry Scholarship for East Asian Studies; and a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in international relations and Japanese from the University of Pennsylvania.