Dr. Mohd Zulkhairi Mustapha is a Professor in the Department of Accounting, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Malaya. He holds a Ph.D. in Accounting and Finance from Cardiff University, United Kingdom, and is an associate member of the Malaysian Institute of Certified Public Accountants (MICPA). He currently serves as the Director of Universiti Malaya Business School. Over the years, he has held several key administrative positions, including Deputy Dean (Undergraduate), Head of the Department of Accounting, Head of the Customer Feedback and Improvement Unit at the Quality Management Enhancement Centre (QMEC), and Coordinator of the Bachelor of Accounting programme. With over two decades of teaching and research experience across undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional programmes, Dr. Mohd Zulkhairi is recognised for his expertise in taxation and corporate governance. He has served as an examiner for several professional bodies, including the Chartered Tax Institute of Malaysia (CTIM), the Malaysian Institute of Certified Public Accountants (MICPA), and the Malaysian Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators (MAICSA). His contributions to curriculum development are well acknowledged. He has served as an internal programme assessor at the Universiti Malaya, a taxation expert reviewer for Halatuju Accounting Programme 4, an external examiner for the Bachelor of Accounting and Finance at First City University, and a member of the advisory board for the Bachelor of Accounting programme at Malaysian polytechnics under the Ministry of Higher Education. Dr. Mohd Zulkhairi’s research interests include tax governance, tax compliance, international taxation, ESG, and internal corporate governance mechanisms. He has published extensively in reputable accounting and management journals and conducted consultancy projects that informed government policies and decision-making. He is also a regular reviewer of research proposals and academic articles, a thesis examiner, and a guest expert on local media such as TV3, Astro, and Bernama. He is frequently invited by universities and professional bodies to deliver lectures, seminars, and training on taxation and corporate governance. To date, he has secured research grants exceeding half a million ringgit from various public and private agencies, including the Malaysian Tax Research Foundation (MTRF) and the Malaysian Institute of Certified Public Accountants (MICPA). Dr. Mohd Zulkhairi also serves as Consulting Editor for the Asian Journal of Accounting Research (AJAR), a Scopus-indexed journal, and was formerly the Area Managing Editor for the Asian Journal of Business and Accounting (AJBA).

  Started his research career in the think tank sector, Dr. Lee Chee Leong (Karl) is attracted to the rise of non-traditional diplomacy in the international order today. Such appeal has taken Dr. Lee into new research horizons that started with his Monash University's doctoral research on the Chinese sub-state diplomacy in China-ASEAN economic cooperation. With constructive supervision by Professor Helen Nesadurai and Associate Professor Kuik Cheng Chwee, Dr. Lee completed his doctoral thesis that unravels how a faraway and least developed sub-state of Guangxi managed to overcome its own hurdles, navigate the complexities within the Chinese state and become the frontline actor in China-ASEAN economic cooperation.  Following his doctoral completion, Dr. Lee's research on non-traditional diplomacy has expanded into Taiwan’s quasi-state diplomacy in Southeast Asia. Such quest has led him spending at great length in comprehending the concept of soft power, a concept that finds its relevance to Taiwan, which has no official diplomatic with Southeast Asia but is heavily connected to the region and has to rely on soft power in its engagements with these Southeast Asian nations. By comparing different case studies of Taiwan's quasi-state engagement within Southeast Asia, Dr. Lee has developed the soft power diffusion process to explain how such phenomenon operates in the real world. His ongoing and incoming research projects include Unpacking ‘De-risking’ China in the Indo-Pacific Region: Economic Statecraft (ES) & Geoeconomics, Taiwan's New Southbound Policy (NSP) and NSP+: The Domestic-International Dichotomy, The Taiwanese Connections in Nvidia's Global AI Supply Chain and Taiwan and Ireland: The Story of Two Tech Powerhouses.  To date, Dr. Lee was the recipient of several scholarships and fellowships in Malaysia and overseas: University of Malaya’s Graduate Fellowship (2010-2011); Monash University’s Merit Scholarship (2016-2019); Chinese Government Scholarship (2018-2019); and Taiwan Fellowship (2020). Prior to his appointment as Senior Lecturer at the Institute of China Studies (ICS), he was the Visiting Scholar at Guangxi University for Nationalities (GXUN) (2018-2019), Taiwan Fellow at National Chengchi University (NCCU) (2020) and Associate Fellow at ICS UM (2016-2019). He welcomes any potential PhD candidate who would like to work on Taiwan-Southeast Asia relations, comparative cases of ES between Asia and Europe, US-China-ASEAN semiconductor geoeconomics and case studies of donut economies in Asia. He is also willing to discuss with potential doctoral candidates on proposals related to the Chinese sub-state (provincial and city) diplomacy toward ASEAN, comparative cases of sub-state diplomacy between Asia and Europe as well as conceptual innovations of sub-state diplomacy vis-a-vis soft power.     

Dr. Yew Wei Lit is a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Malaya. Prior to this, he was a lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University and a postdoctoral fellow at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Based disciplinarily in comparative politics and environmental studies, his research has focused on the politics of development and environmental contention, and more broadly on civil society dynamics in China and Southeast Asia. Dr. Yew obtained a PhD in Asian and International Studies from City University of Hong Kong. He received his MSc in Comparative Politics (Asia) from the London School of Economics and his BIT from Multimedia University (Malaysia).