Ep8 Tim’s Travails: Meet Chen Wang, CEO of Steelike, Inc., and former Deputy Executive Director for Regulatory Affairs of the American Intellectual Property Law Association
December 2025 — This month on IP attorney and author Timothy Trainer’s podcast/video show we meet Chen Wang, the co-founder and CEO of Steelike, and former Deputy Executive Director for Regulatory Affairs of the American Intellectual Property Law Association.
This month’s topic: Women in Engineering
Questions for Chen:
- How did you decide to enter this area? What were your interests and influences as a child? How did that impact your decision to become an engineer, and then a lawyer?
- How do the areas of engineering and law complement each other?
- As the CEO of Steelike, how do you see the role of AI impacting your industry? What are some of the upsides and downsides?
- What do you believe is the role of personal relationships in the age of the Internet and AI? How do you see it playing out in the next 3-5 years, and beyond?
About Chen: Based in Springfield, VA, Steelike supplies a proprietary ultra-high-performance composite material, known as Steelike UHPC, for the construction, repair, preservation, and protection of infrastructure. Previously, she was Deputy Executive Director for Regulatory Affairs of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), based in Arlington, Virginia, where she served as a senior advisor to the Executive Director, and had day-to-day responsibility for AIPLA’s domestic and international intellectual property policy work and regulatory issues of concern to the Association.
She also held the position of Deputy Chief Intellectual Property Counsel and Corporate Counsel at E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. Her legal practice encompassed corporate mergers and acquisitions, technology licensing, world-wide patent procurement, freedom-to-operate analysis, counseling related to trade secret protection, IP strategy formulation and implementation as well the preparation, negotiation, implementation and interpretation of agreements with multinationals, universities, and various governmental entities.
Chen serves as an Advisor on the International Trade Advisory Committee, a unique public-private partnership jointly managed by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Office of United States Trade Representative (USTR), engaged in formulating U.S. trade policy. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In addition, she is the Continuing Author of the Baxter, World Patent Law and Practice treatise, published by Matthew Bender & Company, a LexisNexis company.
After graduating with a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan College of Engineering, and a J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law, Chen began her career as an associate at a boutique intellectual property law firm based in Chicago.
Learn more:
Photos of Tim by AnnaGibbs.com
About Tim’s Travails: In this podcast/video sereis, IP attorney and author Tim Trainer introduce us to experts around the country who have insight into the law, international trade, and more, to help us better understand our world in 2025 and beyond.
Tim, himself, fits the bill for he worked for three decades for the US government and private law firms focusing on international trade, and has developed a deep understanding of global economics and politics.
Writing books is his passion. The author of seven books as of 2025, he has penned several non-fiction tomes, including his first book, Customs Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights; the 15th edition was published in 2020. Thomson Reuters’ Aspatore Books published Tim’s next title in 2015, Potato Chips to Computer Chips: The War on Fake Stuff. Fiction was a genre he always wanted to try. In 2017, Pendulum Over the Pacific was released by Joshua Tree Publishing. “This political intrigue story is set in Tokyo and Washington, D.C., and centers on trade tensions between the U.S. and Japan in the late 1980s,” Tim explains. In 2023, his first series hit bookstores: The China Connection. In December 2024, he followed it with The China Factor.
Stay tuned for more episodes on InkandescentRadio.com and Inkandescent.tv, and of course, log in regularly for new blog entries and other information on Tim’s website, www.TimothyTrainer.com.
