Jonathan Spangler is the Director of the South China Sea Think Tank and a Doctoral Fellow with the Institute of European and American Studies at
Academia Sinica. His research focuses on the effects of actor involvement on escalation and deescalation in maritime territorial disputes. He is also a mountain search and rescue trainee, a trail runner, and a founding member of the Taiwan Peak-to-Peak Trail Project. Raised in Boulder, Colorado, he has spent the past eight years living in East Asia.