Henry S. Rowen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a professor of public policy and management emeritus at the university's Graduate School of Business and a member Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center.

He was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the U.S. Department of Defense from 1989 to 1991. He was also chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 1981 to 1983. Rowen served as president of the RAND Corporation from 1967 to 1972 and was assistant director, U.S. Bureau of the Budget, from 1965 to 1966.

From 2001–2004 he served on the Secretary of Defense Policy Advisory Board. In 2004–05, he served on the Presidential Commission on the Intelligence of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Rowen is an expert on international security, economic development, and high tech industries in the U.S. and Asia. His current research focuses on the rise of Asia in high technologies.

His most recent work is co-editing MAKING IT: The Rise of Asia in Information Technologies (Stanford University Press, 2007). His other publications, which he co-edited, are The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2000); Behind East Asian Growth: The Political and Social Foundations of Prosperity (1998); and Defense Conversion, Economic Reform, and the Outlook for the Russian and Ukrainian Economies (1994), with Charles Wolf and Jeanne Zlotnick.

Among his articles are "Kim Jong II Must Go," Policy Review, No. 121 October/November 2003; "The Short March: China's Road to Democracy," National Interest (fall 1996); "Inchon in the Desert: My Rejected Plan," National Interest (summer 1995); "The Tide underneath the 'Third Wave,'" Journal of Democracy (January 1995); and "Vietnam Made Him," National Interest (winter 1995/96).

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1925, he earned a bachelor's degree in industrial management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 and a master's in economics from Oxford University in 1955.