COVID-19: Views from the U.S. front line

Matt Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Pottinger served at the White House for four years in senior roles on the National Security Council staff, including as deputy national security advisor from 2019 to 2021. He was previously the senior director for Asia, where he led the Trump administration’s work on the Indo-Pacific region and its shift on China policy. Before his White House service, Pottinger worked as a reporter in China for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Following active duty, he founded and led an Asia-focused risk consultancy and ran Asia research at an investment fund in New York.

Yen Pottinger is an infectious disease laboratory expert and public health specialist, currently serving as senior technical advisor for laboratory surveillance at ICAP at Columbia University. She focuses on implementing HIV public health programs, primarily in Africa. Pottinger is the former HIV incidence team lead at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She developed, validated, and implemented the limiting antigen avidity assay, which is now the most widely used assay globally for estimating and surveilling HIV incidence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she provided technical assistance and guidance to CDC and U.S. government entities, ministries of health, and other partners on SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing and safety protocols.

Syaru Shirley Lin, research professor at the Miller Center and a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and National Chengchi University in Taipei. Lin is the founder and chair of the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation (CAPRI) and a steering committee member of the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience under the World Economic Forum. Her book, Taiwan’s China Dilemma, analyzes the impact of the evolution of Taiwanese national identity on cross-Strait economic policy. Lin is currently writing a book on the challenges facing high-income societies in Asia Pacific, including inequality, demographic decline, inadequate policy and technological innovation, and threats to public health and environmental sustainability. Her commentaries frequently appear in both English and Chinese media. Previously, she was a partner at Goldman Sachs, where she led the firm’s private equity and venture capital efforts in Asia.