Seth Bailey became Director for the Office of Korean and Mongolian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State in July 2023. His last assignment was in Honolulu as a visiting professor and Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the DoD-affiliated Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. From 2019-2022, Seth served as the Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at U.S. Embassy Beijing, where he led negotiations with the PRC. Seth has also served overseas assignments in South Korea, Sri Lanka, China, and Afghanistan. In Washington, Seth has served on the China Desk, in the Economic Bureau, the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, and in the Bureau of Counterterrorism. Seth was an attorney before joining the State Department.

Markus Garlauskas is the director of the new Indo-Pacific Security Initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, which replaces the former Asia Security Initiative. He leads this new initiative’s efforts focused on security, prosperity, and freedom in the Indo-Pacific region. He led projects focused on deterrence and defense issues in East Asia as a nonresident senior fellow from August 2020 until assuming his duties as director in January 2023. Garlauskas served in the US government for nearly twenty years. He was appointed to the Senior National Intelligence Service as the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for North Korea on the National Intelligence Council from July 2014 to June 2020. As NIO, he led the US intelligence community’s strategic analysis on North Korea issues and expanded analytic outreach to non-government experts. He also provided direct analytic support to top-level policy deliberations, including the presidential transition, as well as the Singapore and Hanoi summits with North Korea.

Rachel Minyoung Lee is a Senior Fellow for the Stimson Center’s Korea Program and 38 North. Lee was a North Korea collection expert and analyst with Open Source Enterprise (OSE; formerly known as Open Source Center) in the US government from 2000 to 2019. During that time, she wrote on the gamut of North Korean issues, from leadership, domestic politics and economy, and foreign policy, to social and cultural developments. As Analysis Team Lead, Lee led a team of collection officers and analysts to track and analyze North and South Korean issues with implications for Pyongyang’s regime stability and regional security. Most recently, from 2022 to early 2024, Lee headed engagement and network-building efforts at the Vienna-based Open Nuclear Network (ONN). Lee earned her B.A. in English literature and her M.A. in international law, both at Korea University in Seoul.