TOM PLATE, author of the ongoing ‘Giants of Asia’ series, is an American journalist with an international career at media institutions from London to Los Angeles. Born in New York, he completed his studies at Amherst College and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he earned his master’s degree in public and international affairs. His syndicated columns focusing on Asia and America, begun in 1996, have run in major newspapers in Asia and America.
He has received awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. When he was Editor of Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper garnered the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Los Angeles riots.
From 1994 to 2008, he taught in the communication and policy studies programs at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been a Media Fellow at Stanford University and a fellow in Tokyo at the Japanese Foreign Press Center’s annual Asia-Pacific Media Conference. He is currently Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, as well as a Visiting Professor at United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, UAE.
He was the founder of the non-profit Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), whose webpage resurfaced as AsiaMedia at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (lmu.edu/asiamedia). He also founded the Pacific Perspectives Media Center in Beverly Hills, California, a non-profit organization now under AsiaMedia.
On the West Coast, he is a board member of the Pacific Century Institute and a Senior Fellow at the USC Center for the Digital Future; on the East Coast he is a long-standing member of the Princeton Club of New York and the Phi Beta Kappa Society. For years he was a participant at the retreats of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Professor Plate is the author of ten books, including the bestsellers Confessions of an American Media Man (2007), Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew (2010), Conversations with Mahathir Mohamad (2011), Conversations with Thaksin (2011) and Conversations with Ban Ki-moon (2012), all published by Marshall Cavendish Editions. Under a pseudonym, he is the author of the novel The Only Way to Go. He resides in Beverly Hills with his wife Andrea, a licensed clinical social worker, and their two cats.
Conversations with Ban Ki-moon
What the United Nations Is Really Like: The View From the Top
ISBN: 978 981 4302 04 3
240 pp
Conversations with Thaksin
From Exile to Deliverance:
Thailand’s Populist Tycoon Tells His Story
ISBN: 978 981 4328 68 5
252 pp
Conversations with Mahathir Mohamad
Doctor M: Operation Malaysia
ISBN: 978 981 4276 63 4
248 pp