2026 Annual Conference Special Panels
Fireside Chat with Monica Gorman & Laura Taylor-Kale
Opening plenary featuring the Managing Director of Crowell Global Advisors and the Founder & CEO of Catalytic Capital Strategies LLC on US competitiveness and industrial policy
AI Infrastructure & the Electric Grid
Experts from Nvidia, Council on Foreign Relations, Brattle Group, and Dartmouth examine the collision between AI data center demand and the US electricity system
Inside China’s AI Ecosystem
Douglas Fuller (Georgetown/Zhejiang University) and Paul Triolo (DGA–Albright Stonebridge Group) provide a ground-level empirical look at open source, hardware diversity, and shifting trade dynamics
Strategic Government Procurement
Susan Helper (Case Western) leads a panel of OMB, FDA, and Federation of American Scientists practitioners on how federal buying power can drive reindustrialization
Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Resilience
Experts from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School, the Brookings Institution, and US Pharmacopeia discuss national security risks in the US drug supply
Ethics & Governance for Agentic AI
IBM and Kinaxis practitioners join academics from Portland State and Villanova to address governance frameworks as AI systems become increasingly autonomous
Manufacturing USA’s Future
Bill Bonvillian (MIT), David Adler, and the US Manufacturing Innovation Council present findings from the May 2026 National Academies study on the program’s future through 2035