Christopher Wyrod
Vice President
Christopher Wyrod is Vice President of the U.S.-Indonesia Society (USINDO). Mr. Wyrod has worked across Asia for over two decades in senior positions within the U.S. government and leading international organizations. A democracy and governance specialist, Mr. Wyrod has supported and advised civil society, private-sector partners, and government offices in over two dozen countries. In Asia, he served as the deputy country representative for The Asia Foundation in Indonesia, and he has led country programs in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Timor-Leste with USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, international organizations including Internews and PACT, and at both the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). He has also lived and worked in Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan.
In Washington DC, Mr. Wyrod was a portfolio lead at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and conducted research at the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) and the U. S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI). He has received several meritorious honor awards from the U.S. State Department and USAID for his work and participated in numerous election observation missions in Asia, including as a team leader of the Asia Pacific Democracy Partnership.
Mr. Wyrod has presented briefings and research papers at the International Forum for Democratic Studies, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), and other conferences, as well as before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His writings have appeared in The Journal of Democracy, International Affairs Review, The Historian, and The International Journal of the Sociology of Language among other publications. He has also contributed chapters to several books, including Democratization in Africa: Progress and Retreat (John Hopkins University Press 2010), Writing Systems (Routledge 2014), Southeast Asia: Transition and Transformation (Wenzao Ursuline University Press 2018), and Southeast Asia: State vs Market vs Society (Wenzao Ursuline University Press 2025).
Mr. Wyrod earned a Master’s in International Development Studies from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he was a Freeman Foundation Fellow, and a degree in Anthropology from the University of Michigan’s Honors College. He also received certificates in Refugee Studies from York University and in Indonesian from Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, Indonesia as a USINDO Fellow.