Strait Talk Facilitators

Ryan Chiu was born and raised in Taiwan. He is a peacebuilding practitioner. He has been involved with Strait Talk since 2013, when he attended Strait Talk Brown as a delegate. Ryan has been facilitating Strait Talk symposia and training future facilitators since 2016 and currently serves as Strait Talk’s Director of Program Design and Evaluation. He holds an M.S. degree from George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution and a BA from National Dong Hwa University.

Having worked in multiple locations in the US, East Asia, and Brazil, coaching conflict engagement and facilitating workshops and dialogues, he has over 50 workshops in diverse settings under his belt. In an effort to further Strait Talk as a movement overhauling the process through which regional relationships can be built, Ryan has adapted methodologies from fields including international relations, psychology, and sociology to implement a non-conventional problem-solving workshop and produce actionable solutions for the Taiwan Strait issue.

Ava Shen was born and raised in Zhengzhou. She first participated in Strait Talk virtually in 2021 as a Mainland China delegate. She has been training to become a facilitator since 2022 and served one of the co-facilitators for the GW Strait Talk symposium in 2024. She has been part of the Strait Talk Board since 2024.

Ava obtained a Master’s degree from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. Outside of Strait Talk, she works as a political risk analyst at Eurasia Group.