About the Speaker

Renato Cruz De Castro is a distinguished professor at the Department of International Studies, De La Salle University, Manila, and holds the Dr. Aurelio Calderon Chair in Philippines-American Relations. He was a visiting fellow at the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS) of the Japanese Ministry of Defense in the summer of 2018.   He was a visiting researcher at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) from June to August 2017.   From September to December 2016, he was based in East-West Center in Washington D.C. as the U.S.-ASEAN Fulbright Initiative Researcher from the Philippines.  He is an alumnus of the Daniel Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (DIAPCSS) in Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.  In 2009, he became the U.S. State Department ASEAN Research Fellow from the Philippines and was based in the Political Science Department of Arizona State University.

Professor De Castro served as a consultant to the National Security Adviser (NSA), Secretary Caesar Garcia, of the National Security Council (NSC) during the Aquino Administration (2010-2016).  He conducts several professional courses on International Relations, Strategic, and Security Studies at the National Defense College (NDCP), Special Intelligence Training School (SITS) of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP), General Staff and Command College of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, and the Foreign Service Institute (FSI).  He is a module director managing the graduate course on International Security Studies (ISS) in the NDCP.  As a member of the Albert Del Rosario Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ADRI) Board of Trustees, he writes monthly opinion columns for the Philippine Star and Business World.

He has written over 100 articles on international relations and security that have been published in several scholarly journals and edited works in the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Malaysia, France, Singapore, Taiwan, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States.  In 2019, the Board of Trustees of the Philippine Political Science Association (PPSA) announced that Professor De Castro is the most prolific Filipino Political Scientist in scholarly publications and one of the top 10 Filipino Political Scientists in terms of several citations.  The 2022 AD Scientific Index ranked him 92nd among the top 100 scientists in the Philippines and one of the top 50 Social Scientists in the country.  AD Scientific Index also ranked him as the number one Filipino Political Scientist in publications and citations.  He earned his Ph.D. from the Government and International Studies Department of the University of South Carolina as a Fulbright Scholar in 2001. He obtained his B.A. and two master’s degrees from the University of the Philippines.