Thomas Vallely

Thomas J. Vallely is director of the Myanmar and Vietnam Programs at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center and chairman of the governing board of Fulbright University Vietnam.

Vallely founded the Harvard Vietnam Program in 1989 and established the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program (the Fulbright School) in Ho Chi Minh City in 1994. Under his leadership the Fulbright School emerged as a center of excellence in public policy research and teaching with a unique level of institutional independence and academic freedom. Vallely leveraged the Vietnam Program’s research to engage in a candid and constructively critical dialogue with the Vietnamese government about the strategic challenges confronting Vietnam in the context of regional and global trends and the evolving nature of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship. In recent years this dialog has included such as issues as political reform, technology policy, and green energy.

Over the course of his career Vallely has co-authored dozens of policy papers on a wide range of topics including political reform, Vietnam’s economic development strategy, higher education reform, technology policy, and green energy. Many of these papers have been translated into Vietnamese and read widely by Vietnamese policymakers. Vallely has played a leadership role in the development of several innovative educational exchange initiatives between the United States and Vietnam, including the Fulbright Exchange Program (1992), the Vietnam Education Foundation (2000), and Fulbright University Vietnam (2016).

Vallely founded Fulbright University Vietnam with a group of Vietnamese and American innovators. It is Vietnam’s first independent, nonprofit university. The Fulbright School merged with Fulbright University Vietnam to become the university’s graduate school of public policy and management. He is chairman of the Fulbright University Vietnam Board of Trustees.

At Harvard, in addition to his work on Vietnam, Vallely led multiple extended studies of the economic and political development of Myanmar, Indonesia, and Cambodia.

Prior to founding the Vietnam Program, Vallely was a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he worked on strategic and military issues in East and Southeast Asia. He has worked as a political consultant and was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1980, serving until 1987.

Vallely served as Senior Advisor to The Vietnam War, an epic ten-part documentary miniseries directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that premiered on PBS in the fall of 2017. At present he is an advisor to The American Revolution, Burns’s six-part, twelve-hour series on the founding of the United States. From 2014 through 2017, Vallely served on the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Policy Advisory Board. In 2014, the Phan Chau Trinh Cultural Foundation awarded Vallely the Phan Chau Trinh Cultural Prize for his contributions to Vietnamese higher education.

Vallely received a B.S. from the University of Massachusetts/Boston and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School. Vallely served with the United States Marine Corps in Vietnam.