Raymond Leos

A native of the U.S. state of California, Raymond Leos has lived and worked in Cambodia for nearly two decades, serving as a university professor, faculty dean, government advisor and development consultant.

Professor Leos completed his Bachelor of Arts (B.A) with honors in history from Claremont McKenna College, and received his Juris Doctorate (J.D.) from the University of California, Davis King Hall School of Law. He also did his post graduate study in the Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) program in film and television production at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Theater, Film and Television.

Before joining AUPP, Professor Leos was the Dean of the Faculty of Communications and Media Arts at Pannasastra University of Cambodia for over nineteen years, and for nearly nine years, a senior adjunct lecturer at the Royal University of Law and Economics (RULE) in Phnom Penh, where he taught courses in the bachelor and masters programs in international relations and international law.

He has also served as a Senior Parliamentary Advisor to the National Assembly of Cambodia and as an advisor to the Access to Information Technical Working Group (TWG), which worked with the UN agency UNESCO and the Ministry of Information of the Royal Government of Cambodia in the drafting of Cambodia’s first access to information law.

Professor Leos has been a consultant for numerous development projects in Cambodia, including those funded by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Asian Development Bank (ADB), European Union, and The Asia Foundation. He has also served as a technical advisor to several local non-governmental organizations, and has forged ties with the business sector in Cambodia, through his association with the American Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia (AMCHAM), and as a member of the AMCHAM Board of Governors from 2014 to 2016.

His professional and research interests include developing effective legal frameworks for transparency, the role of access to information in promoting human rights, good governance and economic growth, and the social, political and economic impacts of new digital media platforms. He is currently at work on two book projects—one examining the history and the social, political and economic underpinnings of propaganda, and another focusing on Cambodian-U.S. relations during the Indochina War of the 1960s and 70s.

Prior to coming to Cambodia in 2002, Professor Leos worked in the United States as a free-lance writer, filmmaker, and as a lawyer specializing in criminal law, media law, intellectual property, labor law and civil rights issues.