Founder and Executive Director

Graham Nelson is the founder of ADEN and a British diplomat with more than two decades of service in HM Diplomatic Service.  He has spent much of his career in East Asia, including five years as the United Kingdom’s Political and Public Affairs Counsellor in Seoul, where he led the British Embassy’s political reporting and public diplomacy and served on its senior leadership team.  He has also directed UK consular operations across North East Asia and led the United Kingdom’s political and economic work across southern China.

In 2016, he founded the Foreign Office’s first Open Source Unit, bringing data science, artificial intelligence, and behavioral insight into British foreign policy well before they became mainstream concerns of statecraft.  He went on to lead the FCDO’s digital transformation for the age of AI.  Through ADEN, he works to make catastrophic AI risk tangible for senior decision-makers and to strengthen AI governance across Korea, Japan, and the wider region.

A mathematician by training and a systems thinker by instinct, Graham pairs analytical rigor with cross-cultural fluency.  He speaks Korean, Mandarin, and Japanese; read Mathematics at Durham University; holds a master’s in East Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London; and trained in Mandarin at Peking University.

Chief Operating Officer

Christopher McKinney is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of ADEN, a former U.S. diplomat with more than thirty years of leadership across diplomacy, finance, and security.  At the State Department, he served as Special Assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Deputy Chief of Staff in the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Ukraine and as Deputy Director in the Bureau of Energy Resources, where he led teams managing U.S. energy relationships across more than sixty countries, with earlier postings in Berlin, Islamabad, Brussels, and Bogotá.

Before his diplomatic career, he spent fourteen years as an options trader on Wall Street, and earlier served for five years as an Airborne Ranger in the U.S. Army.  Chris holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and an MBA in finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Senior Advisor

Ambassador Marc Knapper is a Senior Advisor to ADEN and one of the United States’ most distinguished Asia diplomats, with a thirty-three-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service.  He served as U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam from 2022 to 2026, leading the upgrade of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

Among the U.S. government’s foremost experts on Korea and Japan, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Japan and Korea, as acting U.S. Ambassador in Seoul, and as Director for Japanese Affairs, with earlier postings in Seoul, Tokyo, and Hanoi.  He is a member of the International Commission on Missing Persons' Panel of Experts and is a recipient of the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award, the highest U.S. diplomatic honor.  Marc has also received the Presidential Meritorious Service Award, the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Certificate of Gratitude for contributions to U.S.-Japan relations, Vietnam’s Order of Friendship, the Department of Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency's Distinguished Public Service Medal, and the State Department’s Linguist of the Year Award.

Marc speaks Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese.  He is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University, where he earned a certificate in East Asian Studies, and he also studied at the University of Tokyo.  He is a principal at WestExec Advisors and the founder of Knapper Global Advisors.

Senior Advisor

Henry is a former U.S. diplomat who completed a twenty-five-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, retiring at the rank of Counselor in the Senior Foreign Service.  He served from 2021 to 2023 as Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul where he managed the bilateral security relationship.  Previous assignments include Director for European Affairs at the White House National Security Council under the Trump and Biden administrations, where he was responsible for our relationship with Turkey and the UK, and Director for Energy Diplomacy for Asia and the Middle East, where he built the U.S.-Japan-Korea trilateral energy cooperation in support of the Camp David Summit. 

Henry is a Principal at WestExec Advisors, Non-Resident Fellow at the Baker Institute, Center for Energy Studies, Rice University, Senior Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America, Senior Associate of the KF-VUB Korea Chair at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS), and the Founding Principal of Seekonk Global Strategy Group.  He speaks fluent Korean and French and holds a BA in International Relations from Brown University and a master’s in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College.  Henry is the founder of The Twenty-Five Year Apprenticeship, a resource for diplomatic tradecraft and a frequent contributor to news and media on the Korean peninsula and global affairs..

Regional Engagement Lead

Haryun Kim is ADEN's Director of Regional Engagement, an interpreter, documentary filmmaker, and cross-cultural communicator with more than two decades of experience bridging the languages and cultures of East Asia and the West. A native of Seoul, she leads the initiative's relationships and liaison across the region, drawing on a career built on listening across cultures and earning trust in delicate settings.

As a documentary director, she made A Class of Their Own, broadcast internationally by Al Jazeera, following the lives of internal migrant children in China's cities. For two decades she also served as an interpreter and coordinator for NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, at seven Olympic Games and three Asian Games, conducting interviews in five languages with figures including the Olympic champions Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt. Earlier in her career she interpreted for senior business leaders, among them heads of Fortune 100 companies, and supported North Koreans through the asylum process, work that demanded discretion, composure, and profound cultural sensitivity.

A documentary-maker by training and an interpreter by vocation, Haryun pairs deep cultural fluency with a rare gift for building trust across languages and divides. She speaks Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, and English, with working German and Cantonese; holds master's degrees in Social Anthropology from SOAS, University of London, and in Documentary Direction from the UK's National Film and Television School; and read German Language and Literature at Korea University. Alongside her work with ADEN, she is a practicing child and adolescent mental health specialist, a vocation that reflects the same attentiveness to unheard voices that has defined her career.

Research Associate

Ameema Talat is pursuing a cooperative Master’s degree between the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy. Her work focuses on post-conflict governance, genocide and mass violence, and the policy challenges posed by emerging technologies and evolving systems of global governance.

She has helped coordinate student and civil society input into UK development policy consultations by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact and the International Development Committee. Ameema further served as a delegate and social media lead at the 23rd Youth Diplomatic Forum in London. At the Global Governance Forum, she has supported research and expert convenings on the proposed United Nations Second Charter.

Ameema completed her Bachelors at Durham University and spent a year abroad at the University of Tokyo studying East Asian foreign diplomacy and international affairs. She represented the University of Tokyo at the 8th International UN Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review, and later represented UK UN Women at the 68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women. She speaks English, Urdu and Pahari-Patwari, with working French, Japanese and Arabic.