Hayden Idson is a junior at Columbia College and the Juilliard School, enrolled in the Columbia-Juilliard Exchange Program. He is majoring in Political Science with a minor in East Asian Studies. His research interests center on Taiwan’s security, particularly cross-strait relations, U.S. foreign policy, and the role of civic nationalism, language politics, and democratic values in strengthening social cohesion and deterring coercion. He is fluent in Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin and is proficient in Japanese. At Columbia, he has led both Taiwanese and Cantonese language interest groups, where he organized discussion sessions and introduced peers to the political and cultural dimensions of language use.