Travis Tanner

Travis has more than two decades of experience building bridges between Chinese and U.S. corporate, government, academic, and non-profit communities. Travis served as President of the U.S.-China Strong Foundation, an offshoot of the Obama administration’s 100,000 Strong Initiative and a public-private partnership designed to equip the future generation of leaders with the knowledge and skills needed to engage productively with China.  While there, Travis established and directed the foundation’s operations in China and drove engagement with key stakeholders and partners including Chinese and U.S. government officials, business leaders, academic institutions, media outlets, philanthropists, and students.

Travis has also worked in the think tank industry conducting research projects examining a range of policy issues in the U.S.-China relationship, including China’s intellectual property, technology standards, and innovation policy; China’s military development; and U.S.-China people-to-people exchange. He previously served as senior project director at The National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) and director of NBR’s Kenneth B. and Anne H.H. Pyle Center for Northeast Asian Studies. He was deputy director and assistant director of the Chinese Studies Program at the Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) in Washington, DC and worked as a research assistant at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Travis is the author, contributing author, or coeditor of numerous publications on the strategic, economic, and political dimensions of the U.S.-China relationship, including coeditor of U.S.-China Relations in Strategic Domains (Routledge, 2020) as well as five volumes of NBR’s Strategic Asia series. He is frequently featured in major media outlets in both the U.S. and China.

Travis is the recipient of the Doak A. Barnett and Hassenfeld Fellowships and holds a Master’s degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University – SAIS and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese language and literature from the University of Utah. He serves as a senior advisor to NBR, is a Tsinghua University Schwarzman College industry mentor, is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and serves as Co-Chair of the AmCham China Policy Committee.

Travis is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese.