Leadership
Mark Liu, Founder
Dr. Mark Liu is the Chairman of J&M Copper Beech Ventures in Palo Alto, CA and the founder of the Technology Competitiveness and Industrial Policy Center at UC Berkeley. He was also Executive Chairman of TSMC (2018–2024) and under his leadership, TSMC expanded from a Taiwan-centric manufacturer to a global enterprise, growing its presence in the United States, Japan and Germany.
Prior to serving as Chairman, Dr. Liu was President and Co-CEO of TSMC (2013–2018), leading the company’s cutting-edge semiconductor technology development and solidifying its position as an industry leader. He was Co-Chief Operating Officer (2012–2013) and previously held several senior leadership positions, including Senior Vice President of Advanced Technology Business and Senior Vice President of Operations, where he established TSMC’s first 12-inch fab and later spearheaded the development of TSMC's GIGAFAB® operations and Digitized Fab operations.
Prior to joining TSMC, Dr. Liu was with AT&T Bell Laboratory as a research manager for the High-Speed Electronics Research Laboratory (1987–1993), working on optical fiber communication systems. Earlier in his career, he was a process integration manager of CMOS technology development at Intel Corporation (1983–1987), developing silicon process technologies for microprocessors.
Beyond TSMC, Dr. Liu has been a key figure semiconductor industry. He served as Chairman of the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association (2019–2023) and twice chaired the World Semiconductor Council (2020, 2022). He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the U.C. Berkeley Foundation, the Engineering Advisory Board of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering and the Board of Directors at Micron Technology.
Dr. Liu holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
S. Shankar Sastry
S. Shankar Sastry is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Computer Science and holds faculty appointments in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Bioengineering, and Mechanical Engineering, all at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2008 to 2018 he was the Dean and Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering at Berkeley and from 2004 to 2007 he was the Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), an interdisciplinary center spanning UC campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz. He has served as Chairman, Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Director of the Information Technology Office at DARPA, and Director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley. Prior to joining the EECS faculty in 1983, he was a professor at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley.
His areas of research are embedded and autonomous software, computer vision, computation in novel substrates such as quantum computing, nonlinear and adaptive control, robotic telesurgery, control of hybrid and embedded systems, network embedded systems, and software. He has been concerned with cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection, and helped establish the NSF Science and Technology Center Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST). He has coauthored over 650 technical papers and 10 books and supervised over 65 doctoral students and over 50 MS students to completion.
Larry Rohrbough
Larry Rohrbough is Executive Director of the Technology Competitiveness and Industrial Policy Center (TCIP Center) at the University of California, Berkeley. Larry has experience in leading multi-university, interdisciplinary research institutes, managing public/private research and development initiatives, software engineering, technology consulting, and program management. In addition to helping launch the TCIP Center, Larry is Executive Director of the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the benefits of artificial intelligence for business, government, and society and advancing the science of digital transformation. Prior to that, Larry was Executive Director of the Siebel Energy Institute and the TRUST Science & Technology Center, an inter-disciplinary center focused on building scientific foundations of cybersecurity and secure critical infrastructure systems and addressing the policy, legal, social, and economic implications of technology-based solutions, Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Larry was Chief Technology Officer of the ESCHER Research Institute, a non-profit organization focused on transitioning government-sponsored open source technology and tools from the research community to industry and government.
Larry holds a B.S. in Systems Analysis from Miami University and an M.S. in Software Systems Engineering from George Mason University.