Our Team

Dr. Kongdan (Katy) Oh is a Senior Asia Specialist at the Institute for Defense Analyses. She was formerly a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution (1997-2016) and a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation (1987-1995). She has taught courses at the University of California, San Diego, George Washington University, and the University of Maryland Global Campus in Asia. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Board of Directors of the United States Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, and the Board of Directors of the Korea Economic Institute of America, and she is the co-founder and former co-director of The Korea Club of Washington, D.C.

She has authored, co-authored, and edited 8 books and numerous research monographs, articles, and book chapters. She has briefed top policy makers of the United States, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. She is fluent in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, and can communicate in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Following her most recent book, The Hidden People of North Korea (Second Edition, 2015), she will be publishing another book on North Korea and a Korean-language memoir in the spring of 2021.