Ambassador J. Stapleton (Stape) Roy is Founding Director Emeritus of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC and a Wilson Center Distinguished Scholar. He served as Director of the Kissinger Institute from September 2008 until August 2013 and continues to be a Senior Adviser to the Institute.

Stape Roy was born in China, where his parents were educational missionaries, spending much of his youth there during the upheavals of World War II and the communist revolution. He joined the US Foreign Service immediately after graduating from Princeton in 1956, retiring 45 years later with the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the service. In 1978 he participated in the secret negotiations that led to the establishment of US-PRC diplomatic relations. During a career focused on East Asia and the Soviet Union, his ambassadorial assignments included Singapore, the People's Republic of China, and Indonesia. During the first Bush administration, he served as Executive Secretary of the State Department and Special Assistant to Secretary of State James Baker. His final post with the State Department was as Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research.

Following his retirement from the State Department in 2001, Ambassador Roy joined Kissinger Associates, Inc., a strategic consulting firm, becoming Vice Chairman in 2006. In 2007 he was briefly called back to government service to participate in a panel of outside experts to review the State Department's security practices in Iraq. In September 2008, he moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to head the newly created Kissinger Institute, while continuing as a Senior Adviser to Kissinger Associates. In 2001 he received Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award for Distinguished Public Service.

Ambassador Roy is a former director and current Board Advisor of Freeport-McMoRan. He retired from the ConocoPhillips board in 2008. He is a Trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Trustee Emeritus of The Asia Foundation, Chairman of the United States Asia Pacific Council, a Vice Chairman of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and serves on the boards of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy of Georgetown University, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the U.S.-China Policy Foundation. He is a Distinguished Senior Adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC and a Distinguished Graduate and Member of the Hall of Fame of the National War College.

His publications include "Political and Economic Prospects for East Asia in the 1990s and Beyond," The Pacific in the 1990s: Economic and Strategic Change, Janos Radvanyi Editor, University Press of America, 1990; "Deng's Reform Movement and the West: An American Perspective," China in the Era of Deng Xiaoping: A Decade of Reform, Michael Yingmao Kau and Susan H. Marsh Editors, M. E. Sharpe, 1993; and "Letter from Jakarta," SAIS Review: A Journal of International Affairs, Summer/Fall 1997 issue (Volume XVII, Number Two); "The Internal Logic of China's Political Development," The Globalist, June 3, 2011; Review of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, by Ezra Vogel, The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn 2011).