Syaru Shirley Lin

Syaru Shirley Lin is a senior advisor at Crestview.

Syaru Shirley Lin is a senior advisor at Crestview. She is currently the Compton Visiting Professor in World Politics at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. She also teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University in Beijing and National Chengchi University in Taipei. Shirley retired as a partner of Goldman Sachs, where she led the Principal Investment Area for Asia ex-Japan, managing investments in twelve countries. In that capacity, she spearheaded the firm’s investments in many technology start-ups and was a founding board member of Alibaba Group and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. Prior to her work in private equity and venture capital, she specialized in the privatization of state-owned enterprises in mainland China and Singapore.

Shirley has served on the boards of numerous private and public companies and currently serves as a director of Goldman Sachs Asia Bank and Langham Hospitality Investments. She has been appointed by the Hong Kong government to the Hong Kong Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation and is also a director of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, which supports the development and adoption of new therapeutic medical technologies.

Shirley graduated, cum laude, from Harvard College and earned her master's and Ph.D. in politics and public administration from the University of Hong Kong. Her teaching and research examine issues in the international and comparative political economy particularly challenges facing high-income economies in Asia. Her book on Taiwan’s cross-strait economic policy, Taiwan’s China Dilemma, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016 and in Chinese by Business Weekly in 2019.