Sherri G. Kraham joined the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in March 2004 as its Director of Development Policy, working on a broad range of policy issues related to MCC's innovative approach to development. Ms. Kraham, a lawyer, transferred from the U.S. Department of State where she worked overseeing and implementing various U.S. Foreign Assistance including development, peacekeeping and security, humanitarian assistance, and human rights programs. She spent several years working on programs related to Iraq and prior to joining MCC, Ms. Kraham deployed to Baghdad working with the Coalition Provisional Authority as part of the first civilian team that worked on reconstruction following the war.

About the Millenium Challenge Corporation: President George W. Bush established the Millenium Challenge Account in order to link greater contributions from developed nations to greater responsibility from developing nations. The Millennium Challenge Account (MCA)is designed to concretely link assitance to performance by providing aid to those countries that rule justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom. With strong bipartisan support, Congress authorized the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to administer the MCA and provided $1 billion in initial funding for FY04. President Bush's request for the MCA in FY 2005 was $2.5 billion of which Congress appropriated $1.5 billion. The President has pledged to increase funding for the MCA to $5 billion in the future.

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.