Dr. Patricia L. Maclachlan is Professor of Government and Asian Studies and the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  She received her PhD in comparative politics from Columbia University and spent one year as a research associate in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University.

A student of interest group politics and political-economic reform in Japan, Dr. Maclachlan's publications include The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871-2010 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) and Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism (Columbia University Press, 2002). She also co-edited (with Dr. Sheldon Garon) and contributed to The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (Cornell University Press, 2006), and has written several articles and book chapters on consumer-related issues in Japan and the West, Japanese civil society, Japanese postal politics, and agricultural reform.

She is also the author, along with Dr. Kay Shimizu, of Betting on the Farm: Institutional Change in Japanese Agriculture, which was released in March 2022 by Cornell University Press and details organizational and strategic change among Japanese agricultural cooperatives in the context of rural demographic and economic decline.

Dr. Maclachlan currently serves on the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, the U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON), and the American Advisory Committee of the Japan Foundation.