Having spent many of his formative years in the Philippines and Australia, Ian is a wayward Wisconsinite who remains enthusiastic about the Green Bay Packers. While completing his B.A. at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he deepened his interests in international relations and economics through internships at the Australian Parliament House, USAID Philippines, International Alert, and the U.K. Mission to the U.N. in New York (where he helped support the Mission's engagement with the launching of the Sustainable Development Goals). After graduating from Occidental, he spent two years teaching English in a far corner of Kyushu as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. This led into a full academic year of intensive study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama. This past summer, he interned with the Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice unit of The World Bank. After completing his graduate studies, Ian hopes to leverage his skills in policy analysis to help solve pressing geopolitical and macroeconomic challenges.