Ivor Mason is a Professor of Developmental Biology at King’s College London. His research concerns embryonic brain development and he is a world leader in the field of fibroblast growth factor signaling in the embryo. He lectures and leads workshops and practical classes in subject areas spanning molecular and cell biology, developmental biology, genetics and evolution, histology, anatomy and neurobiology. He is currently developing online teaching resources for medicine. Professor Mason has served as Secretary of the British Society for Developmental Biology and for the UK Medical Research Council as a member of its Neuroscience and Mental Health Grant Panel and Advisory Board, its Molecular and Cell Biology Advisory Board and has chaired its Studentship Award Panel. Professor Mason also has an interest in science communication and is developing an undergraduate module in that area. He writes for The i national newspaper in the UK and was previously a British Science Association Media Fellow.

Dr Kimberly Goldsmith is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biostatistics & Health Informatics at King’s College London. She is a Biostatistician and Clinical Trials specialist with extensive experience in clinical trials in mental health as well as other disease areas. Her particular areas of interest are complex psychological therapy treatments and mediation of treatment effects.She holds an Honours degree in Biology and MSc in Microbiology and Virology from McMaster University, and a Master of Public Health from Oregon Health & Science University.  She was awarded a NIHR Doctoral Research Fellowship in 2011 and graduated with a PhD in Biostatistics from King’s in 2014. She has  previously worked as a statistician and data manager in the areas of employment support for people with disabilities (in the United States), antimicrobial resistance, and heart and lung diseases.

Andrea Ellner, PhD in Political Science (Berlin), MA in History (Munich), is a Lecturer in the Department of Defence Studies at King’s College London. Her research focuses on civil-military relations, specifically moral injury, gender integration in armed forces, and the Women, Peace & Security (WPS) Agenda, including sexual violence in militaries and armed conflict. She has disseminated her research and provided expert advice to peers and practitioners nationally and internationally. Dr Ellner contributed to and co-edited with Professors Brad Allenby (ASU, Phoenix) and Tom Frame (UNSW, Canberra) the White Paper 'Moral Injury: Towards an International Perspective,' released at New America, Washington DC, in conjunction with the PluS Alliance in 2017. Also in 2017 she contributed to a panel on moral injury at the Future of War Conference, Washington DC, presented on the WPS Agenda and Just War Theory at the annual Euro-ISME conference, Brussels, and provided subject matter expertise on research and Professional Military Education (PME) on WPS at the Australian Defence Force Academy-UNSW, Canberra. In Defence Studies she is academic lead on gender, armed forces and violent conflict. She is a member of the Core Team (Gender SME) in the Centre for Military Ethics, King’s College, London.

Dr. Sean Beevers is a Senior Lecturer in Air Quality Modelling at King’s College London and founder of the London Air Quality Network. He helped to establish the Environmental Research Group at King’s and has worked closely with London policy makers to implement major changes to the city, such as the Congestion Charging Zone, the Low Emission Zone, the Mayor’s Air Quality Strategy, and the Ultra Low Emission Zone. Dr Beevers has been an investigator on numerous research projects looking at associations between air pollution and health. His future research goals are to develop King’s as a world leading air pollution exposure modelling group, develop smart policies to reduce the impacts of air pollution, and to investigate the interaction between air quality and climate change policy.

Dr David Whetham is Director of the King’s Centre for Military Ethics and a Reader in Military Ethics in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. He has a PhD in War Studies from King’s and his main research interests are focussed on the ethical dimensions of warfare and the development of the laws of war. Dr Whetham has previously worked as a BBC researcher and with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Kosovo, supporting the 2001 and 2002 elections. He has been a Resident Fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, a Visiting Fellow with the Centre for Defence Leadership and Ethics at the Australian Defence College, Canberra, and a visiting lecturer in military ethics at the Baltic Defence College and for the Royal Brunei Armed Forces. He is also a co-founder of the European Chapter of the International Society for Military Ethics and is a member of the Military Ethics Education Network steering group.

Brian J. Gerber is an associate professor at the College of Public Service and Community Solutions, Arizona State University, where he is director of the Emergency Management and Homeland Security program. Gerber received his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University (SUNY) in 2000. His research specialization areas include disaster policy and management, homeland security policy and administration, and environmental regulatory policy and has published such research in a number of academic journals. Prior to arriving at ASU, he served as executive director of the Buechner Institute for Governance at the University of Colorado Denver, as research director for the Stephenson Disaster Management Institute at Louisiana State University, was a research associate with West Virginia University’s Regional Research Institute, was a research fellow with the National Science Foundation’s “Next Generation of Hazards Researchers” program and has served as a subject matter expert on a variety of projects.  He sits on the executive committee of the National Council for Public-Private Partnerships, was a five-year member of the Denver Board of Environmental Health. Gerber has extensive experience performing policy analysis and program evaluation work for state and local government agencies, as well as major national nonprofits engaged in disaster relief and recovery work. 

Joni Adamson is Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of English and Senior Sustainability Scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University.  She directs the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI) at ASU and is Past President (2012) of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), the largest international organization of environmental humanists.  She serves on the editorial boards of her field’s leading journals and is the author and/or co-editor of many books and volumes that helped to establish and expand the environmental humanities and environmental justice critical studies, including Humanities for the Environment (HfE): Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice (Routledge 2017); Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies—Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (Routledge 2016); and Keywords for Environmental Studies (New York University Press, 2016). She is a Convener of the North American Observatory of the Humanities for the Environment global network (HfE), an Andrew Mellon Foundation seed-funded system of eight Observatories focused on globally networking humanists, social scientists, and scientists working on the challenges of climate change, social inequities, and environmental injustices.

Dr. Paul Westerhoff is a full professor in the Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering program in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, which is part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University and currently serves as a Senior Advisor on Science and Engineering to the ASU Provost. Westerhoff obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a MS from University of Massachusetts and BS from Lehigh University.  Westerhoff leads research funded by AWWARF, USEPA, NSF, DOD and local organizations investigating the fate of nanomaterials in water, use of nanomaterial-based technologies for water and reuse treatment, reactions and fate of oxo-anions (bromate, nitrate, arsenate) during water treatment, characterization, treatment and oxidation of natural organic matter in watersheds, formation of disinfection by-products, removal of taste and odor micropollutants. Westerhoff has received several research awards including the 2013 AEESP/Arcadis Frontier in Research Award, 2005 ASCE Walter L. Huber Research Award and the 2006 WEF Paul L. Busch Award.

Dragica Vasileska joined the ASU faculty in August 1997. She has published over 130 articles in refereed journals, book chapters, and in conference proceedings in the areas of solid-state electronics, transport in semiconductors, and semiconductor device modeling. She has also given numerous invited talks. She is a member of IEEE, the American Physical Society, and Phi Kappa Phi.

B. L. Turner II took his B.A. and M.A. degrees in geography from the University of Texas at Austin in 1968 and 1969 respectively, and his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1974. At ASU he is the Gilbert F. White Professor of Environment and Society. Turner came to ASU after 28 years in the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, where he was Higgins Professor of Environment and Society, served as Director of that School for more than decade, and helped to create and administer the George Perkins Marsh Institute, which engages a range of human-environment problems. Professor Turner is currently engaged in land change science focused especially on deforestation and sustainability in the southern Yucatán. Turner continues to engage in large range of research activities focused on the theme of human-environment relationships. These range from those of the ancient Maya peoples of Mesoamerica, to smallholder farming behavior in the tropics, to tropical deforestation and sustainability. A significant portion of this work combines natural, human and remote sensing/geographical information sciences to address problems of human-environment systems, including: land change science, sustainability science, cultural and political ecology, global environmental and climate change.

Brian Smith is a behavioral neuroscientist who studies how animals learn about odors in order to predict important events, such as an encounter with food, a mate or predator. His research employs detailed behavioral studies of learning and memory. He and his research team also use a combination of electrophysiological, bioimaging, molecular and computational techniques to directly link changes in behavior to changes in the brain. Smith’s research focuses on learning and memory systems in both insects and mammals. His work is being applied to studies of human diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as to the negative effects of heavy metal poisoning on learning and memory.

Osvaldo Sala is the Foundation Professor and Julie A. Wrigley Chair at Arizona State University, where he contributes to both the School of Life Sciences and School of Sustainability. He came to ASU in 2010 from Brown University where he was the founding Director of the Environmental Change Initiative and the Sloan Lindemann Professor of Biology. Dr. Sala has explored several topics throughout his career from water controls on carbon and nitrogen dynamics in arid and semi-arid ecosystems to the consequences of changes in biodiversity on the functioning of ecosystems, including the development of biodiversity scenarios for the next 50 years. He is particularly interested in working with scenarios as a way of simplifying, understanding, and communicating the complex relationships that emerge from the study of social-ecological systems. He has worked in the Patagonian steppe, annual grasslands of California, steppes of Colorado and deserts of Southern Africa and currently he has experiments in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico. Osvaldo Sala served in numerous international institutions and in different capacities from the Scientific Committee of Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), where he was the president, to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

Mark Henderson is professor of Engineering at Arizona State University at the Polytechnic campus. He received the MS degree in biomechanical engineering and the Ph.D. in mechanical engineering (CAD) from Purdue University. Henderson was named a Presidential Young Investigator from 1985-90 and is co-author of the textbook, Computer-Integrated Design and Manufacturing. His major research includes 60 papers in computer-aided design and global engineering and he serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Computer-Aided Design (CAD).  Henderson is on the founding faculty of an engineering program at ASU's Polytechnic campus. He is also co-founder of the InnovationSpace, a new approach to transdisciplinary product development and entrepreneurship. Henderson's interests extend across typical disciplinary boundaries and include global design teams, innovative product design, computer graphics, CAD and rapid prototyping.

Dr. Erica Forzani is Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering Program as well as joint faculty in the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Program in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport, and Energy at Arizona State University (SEMTE). Dr. Forzani also has a joint appointment with ASU’s Center for Bioelectronics & Biosensors (CBB) at The Biodesign Institute, and she is Deputy Director of CBB.  Dr. Forzani’s current research interests are the development of novel hybrid chemical and biosensors and the integration of sensors into wireless, non-invasive and inexpensive sensor devices. She is focused on health applications, and environmental health and safety. Currently, she has over 40 peer-reviewed publications, seven patent applications and two transferred intellectual properties. In addition, she has served as Guest Editor of Nanotechnology Journal, and is member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Dr. Coon has a PhD in Counseling Psychology from Stanford University, a MEd from University of Oklahoma, and a BA in Foreign Service/Public Affairs, from the University of Oklahoma.  His research interests include design, evaluation, and translation of effective psychosocial interventions for midlife and older adults facing chronic illness (e.g., Alzheimer's disease, cancer, HIV/AIDS) and their family caregivers.

Professor Patrick Leman is the Dean of Education at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience. His research is in the area of child psychology, with a particular emphasis on children’s moral understanding, exclusion and inclusion and issues of social justice, how this is affected by gender and ethnicity.

Dr Harding is a Reader in Palliative Care at King's College London and has a number of collaborations with African palliative care leaders that has brought change in outcome measure for research and clinical practice as well has significantly grown the evidence base. Dr Harding’s research areas include outcome measurement and tool validation, HIV/AIDS, heart failure, family caregivers, sub-Saharan Africa, Global Health, audit and quality improvement, mixed methods, intervention development and testing.

Dr Megan Bowman began her career in Australia as a solicitor at a top-tier commercial law firm and then subsequently at a non-profit environmental law organisation. Her expertise focuses on transnational analyses of commercial and financial regulation, climate finance, corporate ethics, and optimal regulatory design which accounts for both the levers and limits of law and policy.

Dr Kyle Dyer is a Senior Lecturer in Addiction Science at Kings College London, and the Academic Lead for Education and Training within the Department of Addiction (KCL). Dr Dyer’s research interests include the application of oral fluid for therapeutic drug monitoring, harms associated with the use of methamphetamine, the relationship between alcohol and drug concentration and psycho-behavioural and cognitive impairment and factors impacting upon the translation of research into practice.

Dr George Adamson is an interdisciplinary geographer with specialisms that span the physical, social and cultural dimensions of geography, particularly climate. His research calls for a greater attention to pre-industrial or 'natural climate variability' and also an appreciation of the deeper historical interrelationship of climate and society.

Associate Professor Holley is a research leader in Environmental Law at UNSW and one of its ‘20 rising stars who will change our world’.  He is responsible for the Environmental Law course at UNSW, where he and his colleagues pioneered technology enhanced video learning solutions for UNSW Law. He also led the development of UNSW Law’s first interdisciplinary Master of Environmental Law and Policy. His research background focuses on the fields of environmental and water law. An interdisciplinary and empirical researcher, his work has focused on regulatory and governance frameworks for solving pressing global sustainability challenges, including water scarcity, biodiversity loss, natural disasters, climate change and pollution. He has published widely on these issues, with research spanning Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Spain, Hong Kong, the United States and Indonesia. He is closely involved with a number of industry partners, professional and non-government organisations, and in 2014 was awarded the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Academy of Environmental Law junior scholarship prize for his contribution to environmental law. He has held a number of Australian Research Council grants, including a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, and he is a laureate of the Embassy of France Scientific Mobilisation Program.

Professor Luca Viganò is a Professor in Computer Science (Software Modelling and Applied Logic). He is also ViceDean (International) for Natural and Mathematical Sciences, promoting international collaboration throughout the Faculty. His research interests include formal Methods for security, security logics, security testing, and labelled deduction for non-classical logics (modal logics, sub structural logics, etc.) and the combination of logics.

Barry Bozeman, PhD, is Arizona Centennial Professor of public management and technology policy and the director of the Center of Organizational Research and Design at Arizona State University. Bozeman also serves as the director of the School of Public Affairs.

Most of Bozeman’s research primarily focuses on public management, organization theory, and science and technology policy. His practitioner experience includes a position at the National Science Foundation’s Division of Information Technology and a visiting position at the Science and Technology Agency’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy. He also has served as a consultant to a variety of federal and state agencies in the US, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Commerce, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy. Bozeman has helped in the design and evaluation of the national innovation systems of the Republic of South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, France, Israel, Chile, and Argentina.

David Guston, PhD, is the founding director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and interim co-director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. Professor Guston is co-director of ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes, where he is principal investigator and director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society. He also is a senior sustainability scientist for the Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU.

Guston’s research interests include societal aspects of emerging technologies, responsible innovation, anticipatory governance, technology assessment, and public engagement in science and technology. He is published and cited on research and development policy, technology assessment, public participation in science and technology, and the politics of science policy. His book, Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research was awarded the Don K. Price Prize by the American Political Science Association for best book in science and technology policy. In addition to co-authoring several publications, Guston is also the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Responsible Innovation.

Professor Kingsford is Director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science at UNSW Sydney. Good management of river systems is dependent on good information of the ecological responses and a long history of monitoring the breeding of waterbirds in the Macquarie Marshes is producing dividends. The Macquarie Marshes is now established as the most important site in Australia for the breeding of colonial waterbirds (herons, egrets and ibis). The project monitors the impacts of changing water regimes on the breeding and abundance of waterbirds in the Macquarie Marshes.  In October of each year Professor Kingsford conducts an aerial survey to estimate the abundance of waterbirds in eastern Australia. This project is one of the largest surveys of fauna in the world.

Nina McDermott is Head of the English Language Centre at King's College London and has overall responsibility for all programmes run by the Centre. She has worked for many years in the fields of EFL, EAP and Business English in both the UK and Europe. Her current research interests are in the fields of learner autonomy and effective learning in a higher education environment.

Professor Frank Kelly holds the chair in Environmental Health at King's College London, where he is Director of the Department of Analytical, Environmental & Forensic Sciences. His other positions of responsibility are Director of the Environmental Research Group, Director of the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Health Impact of Environmental Hazards and Deputy Director of the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment & Health. From these multiple positions he is able to combine his two main research interests, namely free radical/antioxidant biochemistry and the impact of atmospheric pollution on human health

Carolyn M. Warner is a Professor of Political Science in the School of Politics and Global Studies at ASU. Warner’s research and teaching areas are religion and politics, and the political economy of corruption. The common thread is a long-standing interest in the role of beliefs and institutional structures in shaping the behavior of religious organizations, politicians and firms. Her recent work on religion has studied two facets of it, focusing on its role in conflict, on the one hand, and in social welfare on the other. Her work on corruption has examined how political and economic competition in the European Union has created incentives and opportunities for corruption, rather than reducing corruption. She is working on a new project about the politics of sex abuse in the Catholic Church and military in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, looking particularly at how and why the institutions handle (or mishandle) cases of sex abuse and sexual assault as they do, and whether and, if so, how the state and civil society call the institutions to account.

Senator Jon Kyl, JD, serves as senior advisor at Covington and Burling, LLP, and is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a distinguished fellow in Public Service in Arizona State University’s College of Public Programs, and Distinguished Scholar in the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. In September 2018, Senator Kyl announced he would be filling the Arizona Senate seat of the late John McCain. Previously, Kyl served eighteen years in the US Senate after serving for eight years in the House of Representatives. He was elected unanimously by his colleagues in 2008 to serve as Republican Whip, the second-highest position in the Senate Republican leadership, a position he held until 2013.

As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he helped write reforms to US patent law, the landmark Crime Victims’ Rights Act, as well as important provisions of the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and other anti-terrorism laws.

As a member of the Finance Committee, he was a chief advocate of pro-growth tax policies, including low tax rates on income, capital gains, dividends, and estates. He was a member of the Joint Select Committee for deficit reduction, the so-called “Super Committee.”

Professor Irene J Higginson is Head of Department, Head of Division and Director of Cicely Saunders Institute, the first purpose built institute for research into palliative care. Professor Higginson has research interests and publications in the following areas: quality of life and outcome measurements, evaluation of palliative care especially of new services and interventions, epidemiology, clinical audit, effectiveness, psychosocial factors and care, symptom assessment, cachexia/anorexia, and elderly care.

Martin Prince is Professor of Epidemiological Psychiatry at the IoPPN and joint Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health, a collaboration between King’s and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research focuses on mental health priorities in developing countries, with a strong focus on capacity building in policy, prevention, treatment and care of mental illness worldwide. He coordinates the 10/66 Dementia Research Group, a network of researchers from around the world, working together to promote research into dementia in low and middle income countries.

Amber Wutich, PhD, is an associate professor of anthropology at Arizona State University. Professor Wutich also is an affiliated faculty member for the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes and senior sustainability scientist for the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability.

Wutich’s research deals with the cultural, economic, and ecological dimensions of resource insecurity. She examines how inequity and injustice in social systems produce food and water insecurity. She also studies how people cope with resource insecurity, and what happens when they can no longer cope. Wutich’s research is based on rigorous ethnographic fieldwork, often based in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Phoenix, Arizona. She also directs the Global Ethnohydrology Study, a long-term, collaborative, multi-site project that investigates water knowledge and management across cultures.

Wutich earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and Chinese language and literature and her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Florida. In 2013, Wutich was the recipient of the Carnegie CASE Arizona Professor of the Year and the ASU Parents Association’s Professor of the Year.

Flavio F. Marsiglia, PhD, is Regents' Professor and the distinguished Foundation Professor of Cultural Diversity and Health at the Arizona State University’s School of Social Work. Professor Marsiglia is also the director of the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center (SIRC), an exploratory center of excellence in minority health and health disparities research.

Marsiglia’s research interests include minority health and health disparities, youth drug abuse and HIV/AIDS prevention, and cultural diversity and social work. He has been the principal investigator of numerous clinical research studies, such as Familias Sanas/Healthy Families, a hospital-based intervention study aimed at improving the interconception care of Latina mothers funded by the Centers of Medicare/Medicaid Services. In partnership with several Arizona school districts and with support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the NIH, he and his collaborators developed and tested keepin’ it REAL – a substance abuse prevention model program for middle school students, which is now implemented across the US and internationally. The manualized and ASU-licensed intervention is now being implemented across the US and internationally.

Heather Bimonte-Nelson, PhD, joined the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU in 2005 and is a Professor and behavioral neuroscience program director for the Department of Psychology. Her laboratory focuses on the cognitive and brain changes that occur during aging, develops strategies to attenuate mnemonic and neurobiological age-related alterations, and researches the role sex and hormones play in the brain and cognition during aging and neurodegenerative disease.

Bimonte-Nelson is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium and has received numerous awards, including the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium Outstanding Young Investigator Award and the Outstanding Teacher Award from the City of Phoenix for mentoring high school students in the laboratory.

Elizabeth Wentz, PhD, is Dean of Social Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Professor Wentz also serves as a Professor and director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and President of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science.

In 1997, she came to ASU to focus on the design, implementation, and evaluation of Geographic Information Science technologies, such as geographic information systems, remote sensing, and spatial analysis. Wentz's most current projects concentrate on water resource management and urban remote sensing.

Kerry Smith, PhD, is an emeritus regents’ professor and emeritus professor of economics for the W.P. Carey School of Business as Arizona State University and is a distinguished sustainability scientist for the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. Professor Smith also directs the Center for Environmental Economics and Sustainability Policy in the L. William Seidman Research Institute, which serves as a link between the local, national, and international business communities and the W.P. Carey School of Business.

Before joining ASU in 2006, Smith was a distinguished professor and the director of the Center for Environmental and Resource Economic Policy at North Carolina State University.

Smith is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a university fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C. He is also a fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and of the American Agricultural Economics Association.

Smith has a bachelor’s degree and doctorate from Rutgers University. His research interests include economics, modeling and simulation, land use and land cover, econometrics, climate change and adaptation, and conservation policy.

Christiana Honsberg, PhD, joined the electrical engineering faculty at Arizona State University (ASU) in 2008 and is a professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at ASU. Professor Honsberg also is a senior sustainability scientist for the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute for Sustainability at the university.

Honsberg holds a BS, MS, and PhD from the University of Delaware. Prior to joining the ASU, she was an associate professor and director for the high performance solar power program at the University of Delaware. Honsberg’s research interests include solar energy systems, semiconductors and photodetectors. She currently holds one patent in the US, Japan, and Europe and three patents are pending.

Gary Dirks, PhD, is the director of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University and director of LightWorks, an ASU initiative that capitalizes on the university’s strengths in solar energy and other light-inspired research. Dirks is also the Julie Ann Wrigley Chair of Sustainable Practices, professor of practice in the School of Sustainability, and a distinguished sustainability scientist.

Dirks received his PhD in chemistry from ASU in 1980, and returned to ASU as the director of LightWorks in 2009. His expertise includes but is not limited to energy efficiency, conservation, and policy, bioenergy, alternative fuels and vehicles, renewable energy, and artificial photosynthesis. He was the first doctorate student to work in the Center for the Study of Early Events in Photosynthesis (now the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis). 

Dirks is the former president of BP Asia-Pacific and president of BP China. In China, Dirks grew BP from an operation of fewer than 30 employees and no revenue to more than 1,300 employees and revenue of about $4 billion in 2008. He has served on the boards of the India Council for Sustainable Development, the US/China Center for Sustainable Development, and the China Business Council for Sustainable Development.

In 2003, Dirks received China’s “Friendship Award” and an honorary CMG (Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George) from the United Kingdom in 2005. In 2008, he was recognized by the People’s Daily as one of the 10 most influential multinational company leaders of the last 30 years of China’s economic development. 

Professor Evelyn Welch is Vice-Principal (Arts & Sciences) and Professor of Renaissance Studies in the Department of History, School of Arts& Humanities. Her early work centred on Renaissance Milan and fifteenth-century court culture. She later became interested in issues of consumption and went on to work with colleagues in Economic History and Cultural History, resulting in my publications on shopping, marketplaces and pedlars. Her current research interests include Renaissance and Early Modern Material culture, consumption in Early Modern Europe dress and fashion in Early Modern Europe and smell and the senses in Early Modern Europe.

Professor Sir Robert Lechler is Vice-Principal (Health) and is Executive Director of King’s Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre. His research interests revolve around transplantation tolerance; the central aim of his research is to persuade the immune system to “tolerate” the foreign organ while retaining full capability to fight off infections and cancer. He is Chair of the Clinical Trials Expert Advisory Group, as well as a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Schools Council.

Professor Les Field is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) & Vice-President at UNSW Sydney .  He took up his current post at UNSW in 2005. Prior to that, at the University of Sydney, Professor Field was Professor of Organic Chemistry (1990-2005); Head of the School of Chemistry (1997-2001); Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Science (1998-2001); and Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) (2001-2003).  He was the recipient of the Organic Chemistry Medal of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute in 1994 and was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1996.  He has served as a member of the Council of the Australian Academy of Science (2004-2006) and he is currently a member of the Academy Executive as the Secretary for Science Policy.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW and he has served on the Council of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (2004-2008).  He was appointed as Member of the Order of Australia in 2011 for his services to Chemistry and to Higher Education.  Academic Awards include:  The Rennie Medal (1983); The Edgeworth David Medal (1986); The Organic Chemistry Medal (1992); the Centenary of Federation Medal in 2003; and the Leighton Medal of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute in 2010.  Professor Field is the Director of a number companies including Chair of UNSW Innovations Pty Ltd, UNSW’s technology transfer company.

Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan was the founding director of the School of Computing and Informatics and was instrumental in founding the Biomedical Informatics Department at ASU. He also served as the chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. He founded the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC) at ASU. CUbiC’s flagship project iCARE, for individuals who are blind and visually impaired, won the Governor’s Innovator of the Year-Academia Award in November 2004.

In 2014, Panchanathan was appointed by President Barack Obama to the U.S. National Science Board (NSB). He has also been appointed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker to the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE).

Professor Ian Jacobs BA, MA, MBBS, MD, FRCOG is President and Vice-Chancellor of UNSW Sydney Professor Jacobs came to Australia from the UK, where he had a distinguished career as a leading researcher in the area of women’s health and cancer and in university leadership. Immediately prior to joining UNSW he was Vice President and Dean at the University of Manchester and Director of the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, a partnership linking the University with six healthcare organisations involving over 36,000 staff. He was previously at University College London, where he created and led the Institute for Women’s Health, was Research Director of UCL Partners and Dean of the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences.  Professor Jacobs is the Principal Investigator for the Cancer Research UK and Eve Appeal funded PROMISE (Prediction of Risk of Ovarian Malignancy Screening and Early Detection) programme and on several large multicentre clinical trials including the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening involving 202,000 participants in 13 collaborating UK centres and the UK Familial Ovarian Cancer Screening Study.  In 2005 Professor Jacobs established the Uganda Women’s Health Initiative, which he still chairs and which conducts a series of projects in Uganda including a cervical screening programme. He has been President of the British Gynaecological Cancer Society (2001-2004) and of the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology (2005-2007). He is Medical Advisor to the Eve Appeal charity (also known as the Gynaecology Cancer Research Fund) which he founded in 1985, a Patron of Safehands for Mothers, founder and non-Executive Director of Abcodia Ltd and patent holder of the ROCA (Risk of Ovarian Cancer Algorithm).