Professor Joseph Wong is Vice-President, International, at the University of Toronto, where he is also a Professor of Political Science and a Professor in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He was the Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School from 2013 to 2023 and held the Canada Research Chair in Health, Democracy, and Development for two terms from 2006 to 2016. He was selected to be a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation mentor and fellow in 2023.
Professor Wong is the author of many academic articles and several books, including the latest From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia in 2022, published by Princeton University Press, as well as Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia’s Developmental States (2011) and Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea (2004), both published by Cornell University Press. His academic articles have been published in The Lancet, Perspectives on Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, the Bulletin of the WHO, Comparative Political Studies, Governance, Journal of East Asian Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, among others.
Inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals and in collaboration with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, Professor Wong founded the Reach Alliance: http://reachalliance.org/what-is-reach. Focusing on how development interventions reach the world’s hardest to reach (e.g. the poorest of the poor, the geographically remote, administratively invisible, socially marginalized), the Reach Alliance has produced over 90 case studies and published its findings in outlets such as the Bulletin of the WHO, the BMJ Global Health, Lancet, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review, among others. The Reach Alliance comprises nine university partners globally, including Tecnológico de Monterrey, University of Oxford, University College London, University of Melbourne, Ashesi University (Ghana), the University of Cape Town, Singapore Management University, and most recently, Howard University.