Anh Dao is a junior from Albertville, Alabama, studying Politics with a minor in Chinese Language & Culture. Last summer, he interned at Leidos, supporting telecommunications and cloud services for multiple NASA space centers. In 2024, he attended the Princeton Summer School in Classical Chinese, where he translated foundational philosophical texts such as the Analects and Mencius to better understand their influence on modern Chinese governance. Before coming to Princeton, Anh spent a year studying Mandarin at Tamkang University in Taiwan as a U.S. State Department National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) scholar. His interests center on Southeast Asia’s rising middle powers, particularly Vietnam, and how competition between the United States and China influences, but does not define, their strategic choices. He seeks to challenge binary narratives of alignment by studying policies that middle powers use to maintain autonomy and pursue development. On campus, Anh is an Army ROTC cadet and president of Princeton Club Golf. He is proficient in Vietnamese and Mandarin.