Dr. Sok Siphana is a practicing attorney and the Managing Partner at the law firm of SokSiphana&associates/a Member of Zicolaw in Cambodia. He is also serving as Senior Advisor to the Royal Government of Cambodia. Previously from 1999 to 2005, he served as Secretary of State at the Ministry of Commerce, where he was instrumental in negotiating Cambodia’s accession to the World Trade Organization. From October 2005 to July 2009 he served as Director at the International Trade Center, a joint technical agency of UNCTAD and WTO in Geneva, Switzerland. From 2011-2018, he served as the Chairman of the Board of Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI). Dr. Sok is holder of a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Widener University School of Law in Delaware, United States (1992) and a Ph.D. from Bond University School of Law in Queensland, Australia (2009). He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. on Comparative Laws with the Université de Paris II, Panthéon-Assas.

Dr. Hans Westlund is born in 1957. Since 2007, he is Professor in Regional Planning, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, and Professor in Entrepreneurship, Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping, Sweden. He received a PhD in Economic History from the University of Umeå, in 1992.
His involvement with Regional Science activities and institutions is multifaceted and long-lasting. He acted as Chairman of the Local Organisation Committee for the European Regional Science Association’s (ERSA) legendary 50th Anniversary congress, in Jönköping 2010. 2006-2014 he served as Member of the European Organising Committee of the European Regional Science Association. Since 2005, he has also been member of the board of directors of the Western Regional Science Association, for which he served as president 2013/14 and became lifetime Fellow 2018. He has served as Councillor-at-large of the Regional Science Association International, RSAI and he has been chairing ERSA’s Epainos Prize Committee and the WRSA’s Tiebout Prize Committee.
Beyond Regional Science, he is member of the Swedish Prime Minister’s National Innovation Council; co-editor of the Springer book series Advances in Spatial Science; member of the China Urban Science Research Association’s Resilience City Expert Committee; and member of the International Geographical Union’s Commission for Agricultural Geography and Land Engineering.
Among all his commissions, he has been a member of the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation´s Sector Committee for Research on the Civil Society; chairman and founder (together with Professor Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Kyoto University) of the International workshop “Social Capital and Development Trends in Japan´s and Sweden´s Countryside”; member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry’s Committee for Rural Development; and member of the Swedish research council Formas’ Scientific Council. Together with co-author Tigran Haas, he was given the Routledge Best Book Award 2018 for the book In the Post-Urban World, which also has been translated to Japanese.
His research interests include urban and regional development, social capital, innovation, entrepreneurship, and peripheral and rural regions.

Dr. Chheng Kimlong holds a PhD in Economics from the Australian National University, a Master in Economics from Kobe University, and a Master in Business Administration from Preston University. Dr. Chheng is Director of Centre for Governance Innovation and Democracy (CGID) of the Asian Vision Institute (AVI) and is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), Cambodia. He has had over 12 years of practical experience in quantitative and qualitative research and consultancy for local research think tanks and international development agencies. He has tracked and researched on key areas of Cambodian economy, including agriculture, trade, investment, financial sector, garment and footwear industries, oil and gas sectors, and real estate sector. He was Economic-Commercial Specialist for the United States Embassy in Phnom Penh from 2008 to 2012. Prior to that, he was Research Consultant at Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI), Research Assistant in charge of private sector and economic development at Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and Socio-Economic Specialist for aid-funded rural community development projects. He has been working extensively with the Cambodian government ministries and institutions at national and subnational levels, foreign governments, international development agencies, civil society organizations, and private sector. In addition, he has had many years of teaching economics and business classes and supervising undergraduate and post-graduate students at several private and public universities in Cambodia.

Budy P. Resosudarmo is a developmental and environmental economist working on interlinks between natural shocks and environmental condition and local economies, household incomes, human development and the environment, and investigating the political economy of environmental policies and resource utilisation. Since mid 1990s, he has been publishing series of articles on the impacts of energy, air pollution and climate change policies on local economy as well as human welfare and health condition. He has also been working on policies supporting the development and resilience of small-scale fishing communities in small islands and on improving our understanding toward the consequences of natural shocks during childhood on adulthood development outcomes.

Budy has been mostly working on development and environmental issues in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. More recently, the focus of his research has been on energy transformation and integration, disaster management and insurances, and development in lagging regions. In conducting his research, he implements, among others, impact evaluation, spatial and inter-regional modelling techniques. He. has been active and contribution on development of academic association in the field of regional science and environmental economics in Southeast Asia. He was the 1997-1998 president of the Regional Science Association International, the 2013-2015 president of the Pacific Regional Science Conference Organization, the 2012-2015 vice president of the East Asia Association of Environmental and Resource Economics, and the 2009-2017 vice president of the Indonesian Regional Science Association.

Budy is currently the president of the Asian Association of Environmental and Resource Economics, a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International, a member of the Advisory Committee of the Economy and Environment Institute-Indonesia and a member of the Advisory Board of the Indonesian Regional Science Indonesia.

Yuri Mansury is trained as a regional scientist and currently teaches urban planning analysis. His current areas of research are the economics of technology and innovation, computational modeling of urban systems, spatial networks, disaster impact analysis, and unbalanced regional development.

He has authored and co-authored peer-reviewed articles published in a variety of social science journals including Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, and Regional Science Policy and Practice. Mansury held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University.