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Tom Plate

Syndicated Columnist and Director
Media Center
University of California at Los Angeles

Tom Plate is an internationally syndicated columnist, who writes about America's relationship with the Pacific Rim and travels frequently to Asia.

Mr. Plate's columns appear often in many world newspapers -- in Asia, in the United States and in Europe -- including The Straits Times (Singapore), The International Herald Tribune (Paris), The Honolulu Advertiser, The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), The San Francisco Chronicle, The Japan Times (Tokyo), The Korea Times (Seoul) and The Seattle Times. The twice-weekly foreign- affairs column is syndicated via the UCLA MEDIA CENTER, a nonprofit at the University of California, Los Angeles. Plate has a joint appointment in the College of Letters and Science as well as in the School of Public Policy at UCLA, where he began teaching full-time in 1996.

He teaches courses on Asia's media and politics, and on business, government and media ethics. He has lectured at UCLA's Anderson School, the East West Center at the University of Hawaii, The Getty Museum and Trust, and at universities in Asia and America. He is working on an autobiography and is heard on radio as an occasional BBC commentator. He is the founder of the non-profit Asia Pacific Media Network, headquartered at UCLA. APMN is an international network for educators, journalists and media professionals, government and business officials concerned with regionally common issues, controversies and opportunities. Mr. Plate is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, the Asia Society, the Princeton Club of New York and the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He is a graduate of Amherst College and Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, with a master's degree in public and international affairs. He is the author of five books and has been a journalist at Time, Newsday and New York Magazine. From 1989-1995 he was Editor of the Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times. His journalism honors include the American Society of Newspaper Editors' "Deadline Writing Award" and the Greater Los Angeles Press Club Award for "Best Editorial" three years running. He has been a Media Fellow at Stanford University and a Fellow in Tokyo at the Foreign Press Center's Asia-Pacific Media Conference. Listed in Who's Who in America, he has been, for the last five years, an invited participant at the annual retreat of the World Economic Forum in Davos.