BERKELEY, CA, February 17, 2025 – The new Technology Competitiveness and Industrial Policy Center (TCIP) launched on February 13 at the University of California, Berkeley, with presentations and discussions from some of the most esteemed leaders in academia, industry, and policy.

Plenary remarks from founder Mark Liu, former executive chairman of TSMC, and UC Berkeley leaders including S. Shankar Sastry, Faculty Director of the new center, Tsu-Jae King Liu, Dean of the College of Engineering, Vice Chancellor of Research Katherine Yelick, and Distinguished Graduate School Professor Laura Tyson addressed vision, research and policy goals, government engagement in advanced technology, among other topics. Partners from Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Purdue, and Stanford were among the other universities represented at the event.

TCIP Center founder Mark Liu recalled his student days at UC Berkeley, where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1980 and 1983, respectively. He remembered happy times spent at Cory Hall “meddling with equipment” and "looking for something new, something no one had ever discovered" – experiences that would help shape his meteoric rise in advanced technology manufacturing.

Dr. Liu described envisioning a think tank, with technologists and business people engaging in independent, non-partisan research, and sharing sound policy proposals with policy makers on how to spur the U.S. to innovate more quickly in an era of high-stakes high-tech competition. That vision became reality today.

New TCIP Center Faculty Director Shankar Sastry, also a Berkeley graduate student in the late 1970s along with Liu, offered an overview of the global innovation ecosystem, noting that “the U.S. often takes the lead in development, but falls behind in scaling,” which is “critical in creating prosperity.”

Sastry also addressed the new center's intellectual underpinnings, casting back to the 1982 founding of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE). Two of the original three founders of BRIE, Distinguished Graduate School Professor Laura Tyson and Professor Emeritus John Zysman, spoke today on more than 40 years of technology and industrial policy.

Professor Tyson, who chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and directed the National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996 under President Bill Clinton, led with the importance of talent, and teaching basic science. Several speakers expressed similar concerns.

The launch event was held in Sutardja Dai Hall, where the TCIP Center will be located.