Yuka Ando is a senior researcher at the India-Japa Laboratory of the Keio Research Institute at SFC. Ando served as political secretary to Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara from 2010 to 2011 under the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) administration. Prior to that, she spent a decade working at the DPJ headquarters, where she handled international affairs of the party.

Ando was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, and a visiting fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. From 2000 to 2002, she served as special assistant for political affairs at the Embassy of Japan in Kuwait.

Ando published a book last February on Japan’s diplomacy in the 1970s: comparative studies on the foreign policies of the Japanese government in the first and the second oil crises. She has taught as a lecturer at Keio University and has published numerous articles on international relations.