Co-Principal Investigator

Shelley Rigger is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College. She has a PhD in Government from Harvard University and a BA in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University. She has been a visiting researcher at National Chengchi University in Taiwan (2005) and a visiting professor at Fudan University (2006) and Shanghai Jiaotong University (2013 & 2015). She is a non-resident fellow of the China Policy Institute at Nottingham University and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). She is also a director of The Taiwan Fund, a closed-end investment fund specializing in Taiwan-listed companies. Rigger is the author of two books on Taiwan’s domestic politics, Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (Routledge 1999) and From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (Lynne Rienner Publishers 2001). In 2011 she published Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse, a book for general readers. She has published articles on Taiwan’s domestic politics, the national identity issue in Taiwan-China relations and related topics. Her monograph, “Taiwan’s Rising Rationalism: Generations, Politics and ‘Taiwan Nationalism’” was published by the East West Center in Washington in November 2006. In 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar based in Taipei, where she worked on a study of Taiwan’s contributions to the PRC’s economic take-off and a study of Taiwanese youth.

Kristen Eshleman is Director of Innovation Initiatives at Davidson College, where she provides operational leadership for innovation strategy, process, and projects out of the President’s Office. Her team is responsible for providing an executive view on external change pressures that have a potential impact on the college. In response, this team facilitates community-generated ideas and drives complex project-based initiatives that have the potential to lower costs, generate new revenue, or meet other strategic goals and ambitions.

Laurie J. Heyer is the John T. Kimbrough Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty Director of the Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Data Science at Davidson College. Dr. Heyer came to Davidson in 2000 after a postdoctoral position in the Center for Computational and Experimental Genomics at the University of Southern California. She received her B.S. and M.S. from the University of Texas at Arlington, and was an operations research analyst before doctoral work in Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. As a founding member of the genomics program at Davidson College, she regularly supervises student projects at the intersection of mathematics, biology, and computer science, and has coauthored two textbooks with faculty from Davidson’s Biology Department. Dr. Heyer is also the founder of Project PRONTO, a collaborative initiative in which Davidson students build web tools to enhance the student experience.