Alexander Brenner is a China expert and vice president for research at the Washington, DC, office of GreenPoint, the consulting group founded by fellow ICWA alumnus Dan Wright. He has lived in China for eight years and written widely about contemporary Chinese issues. He wrote a column for Reuters, when based in Beijing, addressing consumption patterns of the emerging middle class, efforts to reform the education system to spur innovation and other subjects. During his ICWA fellowship, Alex reported about urban transformation, a major development of the day, on topics ranging from the rise of automobile culture to the experience of migrant workers. He received a fellowship from the Blakemore Foundation for advanced Mandarin study (founder Tom Blakemore was another ICWA fellow). Alex began his language training as a Yale-China Association English language instructor at Guangzhou’s Zhongshan University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale and a master’s in China studies from Johns Hopkins University SAIS.