Marina S. Ottaway specializes in democracy and post-conflict reconstruction issues. She is a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project, a research endeavor that analyzes the state of democracy around the world and the efforts by the United States and other countries to promote democracy. Her new book, Democracy Challenged, a comparative study of semiauthoritarian regimes in Africa, the Caucasus, Latin America, and the Middle East, was published in January 2003. Her current works focus on political transformation in the Middle East and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She is also a lecturer in African Studies at the Nitze School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Ottaway carried out research in Africa and in the Middle East and taught at the University of Addis Ababa, the University of Zambia, the American University in Cairo, and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

She received her undergraduate educatin at University of Pavia, Italy and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Ottaway's selected Publications include, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism (Carnegie, 2003); Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, edited with Thomas Carothers (Carnegie, 2000); Africa's New Leaders: Democracy or State Reconstruction? (Carnegie, 1999)

Dr. Hilton Root, an academic and policy specialist in international political economy and development joined the Faculty of Pitzer, a member of Claremont Colleges, as Freeman Fellow from June 2003 to June 2005. Before joining, he served the current administration as US Executive Director Designate of the Asian Development Bank, and as senior advisor on development finance to the Department of the Treasury. Dr. Root was Director and Senior Fellow of Global Studies at the Milken Institute and was a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Initiative on Economic Growth and Democracy at the Hoover Institution. His areas of expertise are international economics, economic development and policy reform, and Asian affairs.

As a policy expert, Dr. Root advises the Asian Development Bank, the IMF, the World Bank, the UNDP, the OECD, the US State Department, the US Treasury Department and USAID. He has completed projects in 23 countries. The analytical framework he contributed to the World Bank's Asian Miracle study, 1993, was part of the effort to put institutions on the development agenda. While at the ADB as chief advisor on governance, he was the principal author of the ADB's Board-approved governance policy. He presided over a committee on governance indicators at the OECD and initiated the restructuring of the Sri Lanka civil service as an advisor to President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. He was one of the principal contributors to the design of the Millenium Challenge Account of the Bush administration.

As an academic, he has taught at the University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Dr. Root has written and lectured extensively, publishing six books and more than 100 articles. He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal Asia, the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He has published and presented in both the English and the French languages and has been translated into many languages including Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

He has been awarded honors for The Key to the East Asian Miracle: Making Shared Growth Credible (with J. Edgardo Campos), which won the 1997 Charles H. Levine Award for best book of the year by the International Political Science Association. The Social Sciences History Association awarded him the 1995 best book prize of its Economic History Section for The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England. From the American Historical Association he received the Chester Higby Prize, 1986, for the best article among those published during the previous two years. He is on the board of a number of organizations and journals including the Open Society Institute, Center for Public Integrity and Review of Pacific Basin Markets and Policies. Dr. Root received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1983.

CDDRL Fellow, J. Alexander Thier will discuss Afghanistan's experiences with nation building, particularly in the post-Taliban era. J Alexander Thier was legal advisor to Afghanistan's Constitutional and Judicial Reform Commissions in Kabul in 2003-2004, where he assisted in the development of a new constitution and judicial system. In 2002 Alex worked in Kabul as a Constitutional and Legal expert to the British Department for International Development, and as Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group.

Greater China is the most rapidly growing region in both production and market share in the semiconductor industry, and Chinese professionals play increasingly important roles for the development in the region. SPRIE/ITRI cooperated with CASPA in conducting a study to assess the perspectives of Chinese professionals on the rise of the IC industry in Greater China, and exploring the factors influencing their movement decisions. This panel will present a preview of data from the 2005 web-based survey and interviews--preliminary results, insights from the interviews, and potential implications for professionals, corporate managers, and policymakers.

CASPA: Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association. With more than 3500 members and 10 chapters distributed across US and Asia, CASPA is the largest Chinese American semiconductor professional organization worldwide.

ITRI: Industrial Technology Research Institute. ITRI is a major industrial technology research institute in Taiwan, with more than 6,000 employees and annual budget around $US 5 billion. Many major Taiwanese semiconductor companies, such as TSMC and UMC, are ITRI spin-offs.

This two-day research workshop at Stanford University aims to bring together experts to explore the nature of the connections between universities/research institutes and industry in the United States , Taiwan , and Mainland China . Within this national and international context, the workshop will focus on several leading cases, including Stanford University , Tsinghua University in Beijing , and the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Hsinchu Science-based Park. The workshop will facilitate exchange of data and ideas among leading scholars and practitioners from several disciplines, institutions, and countries. Workshop proceedings will be published and distributed by SPRIE as part of its Greater China Networks program.

In recent years, the rise of the Knowledge Economy has underscored the essential role technological innovation has played in economic development. As key institutions in the innovation process, universities and public research institutes have become the center of many theoretical and empirical studies, most of which have focused on the various roles of academia in national innovation systems and their linkages with industry in fulfilling these roles.