Sophal Ear is Senior Associate Dean of Student Success (previously Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs and Global Development in 2021-22) and a tenured Associate Professor in the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University where he lectures on global political economy, international organizations, and regional management in Asia. He previously taught at Occidental College, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He has consulted for the World Bank and was Assistant Resident Representative for the United Nations Development Programme in East Timor, a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an Advisor to Cambodia’s first private equity fund, Leopard Capital, Audit Chair of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Treasurer of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, Secretary of the Southeast Asia Development Program, and Corresponding Secretary of the Crescenta Valley Town Council. A TED Fellow, Fulbright Specialist, and Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he sits on the boards of Refugees International (Washington, D.C.), Partners for Development (Silver Spring, Maryland), International Public Management Network (Washington, D.C.), and the Center for Khmer Studies (Siem Reap, Cambodia).
Ear is the author of Viral Sovereignty and the Political Economy of Pandemics: What Explains How Countries Handle Outbreaks (Routledge, 2022) and Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2013), co-author of The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest Is Reshaping the World (Routledge, 2013), and co-editor of a virtual issue of the journal Politics and the Life Sciences on Coronavirus: Politics, Economics, and Pandemics (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In 2021-2022, he was Chair of the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Advisory Board of the Los Angeles County District Attorney. He wrote and narrated the award-winning documentary film The End/Beginning: Cambodia (47 minutes, 2011) based on his 2009 TED Talk, and he has appeared in four other documentaries. A graduate of Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, he moved to the U.S. from France as a Cambodian refugee at the age of ten.
