Koen Smeets is a Yenching Academy and Silk Road Scholar, and a recipient of a CUSEF x One Young World scholarship, a special program that brought him to Montreal in 2024. He leads a team preserving an oral history of the re-establishment and contemporary state of US-China academic relations through the 'China Hands' platform. He is the first and only foreign member of Tsinghua University's CISS Youth Organization and a Visiting Scholar at Grandview Institution. Born in the Netherlands, Koen is an Advisor to the Tsinghua University Student Association for China-U.S. People-to-People Exchange.