Speakers

	Yewande Akinola Principal Engineer, Laing O’Rourke Yewande is a chartered engineer, an innovator, a dreamer and speaker with passion for the role of innovation, creativity and engineering in our world today. She holds a Bachelors degree in Engineering Design and Appropriate Technology from the University of Warwick and a Masters in Innovation and Design for Sustainability from Cranfield University. Yewande’s engineering experience and responsibilities include the design and management of sustainable water supply systems in the built environment. She has worked on projects in the U.K., Africa, the Middle East and in East Asia.
	Erik Brynjolfsson Director of MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Erik Brynjolfsson is Director of MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, and Research Associate at NBER. His research examines the effects of information technologies on the future of work, productivity and performance, digital commerce, and intangible assets. Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. His published works, with co-author Andrew McAfee, include NYTimes best-seller The Second Machine Age. Brynjolfsson holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Harvard University and a PhD from MIT.
	Otto Cars Professor of Infectious Diseases and Antimicrobial Resistance at Uppsala University Otto Cars is an MD and specialist in infectious diseases trained at the Department of Infectious Diseases at Uppsala University Hospital where he was the head for ten years. In 2003, he was appointed Professor of Infectious Diseases and Antimicrobial Resistance at Uppsala University, and since 2014 he holds a position as Senior Professor. He has been actively involved in numerous European and international initiatives in the area of antimicrobial resistance and has served as an expert to European Commission, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the European Medicines Agency. He is a member of the UN ad hoc Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance (IACG). Otto Cars was the founder of the international network Action on Antibiotic Resistance-ReAct.
	Dennis C. Coyne Cheif Engineer LIGO, California Institute of Technology Dennis Coyne is the Chief Engineer for the LIGO Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. Over the last 23 years he has led the LIGO engineering team’s efforts in design and implementation of first and second generation instruments. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is a first of its kind instrument, capable of measuring the sub-atomic stretching of space due to cataclysmic cosmological events. The LIGO founders were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 for the direct detection of gravitational waves which were predicted by Albert Einstein.
	Aled Edwards Founder and current CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) Edwards is the founding and current CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a public-private charitable partnership that generates research tools and knowledge to support basic science and drug discovery. The SGC is considered a pioneer of open science and open partnerships with the private sector. Since 2003, under Edwards leadership, the SGC has adopted a policy not to file for patents on any of its research output, while over the same period has attracted well over $200M in funding from global pharma, and a similar amount from governments and foundations. Edwards is a Professor at Toronto, Oxford and McGill Universities.
	İdil Gaziulusoy Assistant Professor of Sustainable Design, Aalto University Dr. İdil Gaziulusoy is a sustainability scientist and a design researcher. With this unique expertise combination, she is developing a research and teaching portfolio for imagining sustainable, equitable and resilient future systems through various approaches in design research and developing interventions to achieve these proposals. Her work is concerned with socio-technical and socio-ecological systems with a particular focus on production-consumption systems and cities.
	Ruth Graham Higher education consultant, R H Graham Consulting A Mechanical Engineer by training, Dr Graham specialised in aeronautical fatigue, working with BAE SYSTEMS for a number of years. Dr Ruth Graham has worked as an independent higher education consultant since 2008. Her work is focused on fostering change in higher education across the world; helping to improve engineering teaching and learning worldwide and supporting the emergence of technology-driven entrepreneurship within universities.
	Yuko Harayama Former Executive Member of the Council for Science, Technology and Innovation Dr. Yuko Harayama is the former Executive Member of the Council for Science and Technology Policy, Cabinet Office of Japan. She is the former Deputy Director of the Directorate for Science, technology and Innovation, OECD. She is a Legion D’Honneur recipient (Chevalier), and was awarded honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel. Previously, she was Professor at the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Graduate School of Engineering of Tohoku University. She holds a Ph.D. in education sciences and a Ph.D. in economics, both from the University of Geneva.
	Darja Isaksson Director General at Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency Darja has been working with digitalisation since the 1990-ies, she is the founder of two successful agencies, working with business- and product development for clients such as Sony Ericsson, IKEA and Husqvarna. In her work, she has led teams where the results have been innovative services and products used by millions of customers, as well as new ways of working with innovation. Apart from being executive advisor and board member of multiple companies, she has served as advisor to the Swedish Government in the Digitalisation council as well as the Swedish Prime Ministers Innovation Council, evaluated national research and innovation programmes and served on the board of Swedish research institutes RISE ICT and RISE Interactive. As a result of her work, she has been awarded "Most powerful opinion maker in Sweden", and is listed as one of the "Worlds' 100 most influential people in digital government."
	Rajni Hatti Kaul Professor in Biotechnology, Lund University Rajni Hatti Kaul is a Professor in Biotechnology  at Lund University. She got her PhD in Biochemistry from University of Bombay, India in 1984. She has more than 25 years of experience in enzyme and microbial technology, green chemistry, and downstream processing for applications in food and chemical industry and for valorization of waste streams. She has received the Swedish Chemical Engineers Association award in 2010 for contribution in green chemistry.
	Hideaki Koizumi Executive Vice President Hideaki KOIZUMI, Prof., Ph.D. Executive Vice President/Chair of the International Committee on International Affairs, The Engineering Academy of Japan (EAJ) Fellow/Board Member, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo Honorary Fellow, Hitachi, Ltd. Graduated from the University of Tokyo, Department of Pure and Applied Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences Joined the Instruments Division of Hitachi, Ltd., and discovered the principle of the polarized Zeeman effect atomic absorption (PZAA) method (doctoral dissertation, patent). Commercialized the PZAA spectrometer in 1976 with more than 10,000 products shipped in Japan and overseas. The product has been sold for more than 40 years mainly in the environmental measurement field. The PZAA spectrometer received the Analytical and Scientific Instrument Heritage certification in 2013.
	Olaf Kolkman Chief Internet Technology Officer, the Internet Society As Chief Internet Technology Officer, Olaf has responsibility for leading Internet Society’s Strategic Technical activities, particularly as they pertain to issues and opportunities for enhancing the Internet’s evolution.  Olaf has been actively involved with Internet technologies since his astronomy studies during the early nineties. Internet became his professional focus in 1996 and since then he has been involved in research on technical issues with global impact, contributed actively to regional and global collaborative standard and governance bodies, directed the development of open-source software deployed in critical Internet infrastructure, and 'pushed the needle' on the development and deployment of DNSSEC.
	Jinghai Li President of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) From 2004 to 2016, he was the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in charge of strategic study and member election. He is also the vice president of International Science Council (ISC), the vice chairman of China Association for Science and Technology (CAST). Currently, he is devoted to promoting the concept of mesoscience based on the EMMS principle of compromise in competition as an interdisciplinary science.
	Linda Liukas Authour and Illustrator Linda is the author and illustrator of Hello Ruby, a children’s picture book about the whimsical world of computers, as well as the founder of Rails Girls, a global movement to teach young women programming in over 260 cities. She loves Muji, Zelda Fitzgerald, software and sparkly things. Further, she believes that code is the 21st century literacy and the need for people to speak the ABC of programming is imminent. She believes our world is increasingly run by software and we need more diversity in the people who are building. In 2018 she was listed as one of Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech Europe.
	Kaveh Madani Henry Hart Rice Senior Fellow, Yale University. Kaveh Madani is an environmental scientist, educator, and activist, working at the interface of science, policy, and society. He has previously served as the Deputy Vice President of Iran (as the Deputy Head of Iran’s Department of Environment), the Vice President of the UN Environment Assembly Bureau, and Chief of Iran’s Department of Environment’s International Affairs and Conventions Center. He is an expert in developing and applying mathematical, economic and systems analysis models to complex problems involving water, energy, food, climate and environment to derive policy and governance insights. He is currently a Henry Hart Rice Senior Fellow at Yale University and a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London.
	Brian Mwenda Founder and CEO, Hope Tech Plus Limited Brian Mwenda is passionate about the inclusivity of disadvantaged groups into societies especially the disabled. He believes a healthy society accepts and appreciates the input of everyone regardless of their physical challenges. He is working with a great team with members from across 4 continents to solve the challenge of mobility for visually impaired people by the use of an assistive device called The Sixth Sense. Brian also runs a non-profit which through a program called The Blind Learner has set up computer hubs in schools across Africa that teach blind students between the ages of 7 and 20 how to use computers and create software.
	Johan Norberg Author, lecturer and documentary filmmaker Johan Norberg is an author, lecturer and documentary filmmaker. He is a native of Sweden, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. and the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels. Norberg has written 20 books covering a broad range of topics, including global economics and popular science.
	Kevin Outersson Executive Director and Principal Investigator, CARB-X. Professor Outterson teaches health care law at Boston University, where he co-directs the Health Law Program. He serves as the Executive Director and Principal Investigator for CARB-X, a $540M international public-private partnership to accelerate global antibacterial innovation. His research work focuses on the law and economics of antimicrobial resistance. Professor Outterson was a founding member of the Antimicrobial Resistance Working Group at the CDC. He was a senior consultant on the Eastern Research Group study on antibiotic markets for FDA/HHS. Professor Outterson also serves on the Advisory Panel for the Longitude Prize for an inexpensive rapid point-of-care antibiotic diagnostic.
	Edgar Pieterse Founding Director of the African Centre for Cities Professor Edgar Pieterse is founding director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. He is the consulting editor for Cityscapes—an international occasional magazine on urbanism in the global South. He is co-author of: New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times (2017) and recent co-edited books include: African Cities Reader III: Land, Property & Value (2015), Africa’s Urban Revolution (2014) and Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities (2013). He serves on the Advisory Boards of: Indian Institute for Human Settlements (Bangalore), LSE Cities (London), the Gauteng City-region Observatory (Johannesburg), Pathways to Sustainability at Utrecht University, the International Panel on Social Progress (Paris), and the Coalition for Urban Transitions.
	Jesse Reynolds Frankel Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy, University of California, Los Angeles School of Law Dr. Jesse Reynolds is a scholar of international environmental policy. He researches and teaches how society can develop norms, rules, procedures, and institutions to manage environmental opportunities and challenges, particularly those involving new technologies. While his approach is centered within international environmental law, he draws upon other disciplines, including international relations and economics. Dr. Reynolds has extensively researched geoengineering (climate engineering), a group of proposed methods to intentionally intervene in earth systems at large scales in order to counterbalance anthropogenic climate change. His book The Governance of Solar Geoengineering: Managing Climate Change in the Anthropocene was recently published on Cambridge University Press. Dr. Reynolds is also currently exploring the roles of new biotechnologies, such as gene drives, and artificial intelligence in the conservation of biodiversity and facilitating sustainability more generally.
	Alton (Al) D. Romig, Jr. Executive Officer, National Academy of Engineering Alton D. Romig, Jr. is the executive officer of the National Academy of Engineering. Under Congressional charter, the Academy provides advice to the federal government, when requested, on matters of engineering and technology. As executive officer, Dr. Romig is the chief operating officer responsible for the program, financial, and membership operations of the Academy, reporting to the NAE president.
	Anna Sandström Science Policy and Relationship Director Europe at AstraZeneca A physicist by training, with a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from Karolinska Institutet and a career at Government Agencies such as Vinnova and the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, Anna Sandström is today Head of Science Policy and Relations for Europe at AstraZeneca. Her role includes to catalyse new R&D collaborations and to contribute to Life Science polices spurring a vibrant innovation system. She is member of the Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences and board member of e.g. the Royal Institute of Technology, the MaxIV synchrotron X-ray source and the Drug Discovery platform at the Science for Life Laboratory as well as heading the SwedenBIO R&D committee.
	Marie-Noëlle Semeria Chief Technology Officer at Total Semeria is the Chief Technology Officer of Total since November 2017. She was previously CEO of CEA-Leti and President of the Network of Carnot Institutes. Her professional experience ranges from public research to start-up and high tech industry. She began her career at Sagem (Safran) in magnetic storage, then she served in the start- up Pixtech as field emission display architect before joining CEA-Leti where she launched an internal contest to promote start-up creation and signed leading partnerships with semiconductor industrial majors. She received a doctorate of science in solid state physics from Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble and a degree from IHEST to bridge science and society.
	Robert-Jan Smits Open Access Envoy of the European Comissions Robert-Jan Smits is the Open Access Envoy of the European Commission, based at the European political Strategy Centre (EPSC) of the European Commission. In this capacity, he has proposed concrete policy recommendations (Plan S) to ensure that by 2020 all publicly funded scientific publications are available in Open Access. Before this, he was from 2010-2018 the Director-General of DG Research and Innovation (RTD) at the European Commission. In this capacity, he was responsible for defining and implementing the EU policy and programmes in the field of research and innovation.
	Carl-Henric Svanberg Chair of the European Round Table and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences Carl-Henric Svanberg is Chair of The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), Chairman of AB Volvo, Chairman of BP and Chairman of European Round Table (ERT). He is a Member of the Advisory Board of Harvard Kennedy School. Mr. Svanberg was CEO of Ericsson from 2003 to 2009, and was CEO of Assa Abloy Group from 1994 to 2002. He holds a Master of Science in Applied Physics from the Institute of Technology at Linköping University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Uppsala University. He also holds honorary doctorates at Luleå University of Technology and Linköping University in Sweden. Mr. Svanberg is the recipient of the King of Sweden's medal for his contribution to Swedish industry.
	Tuula Teeri Chair of CAETS and President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences Tuula Teeri is the Chari of CAETS and the President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA). She has held research and leadership positions at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (1988-1998) and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden (1996-2009) where she was appointed Deputy President in 2008. During 2009-2017 she led the merger of three universities in technology, business and design into the interdisciplinary Aalto University as its first President.
	David Thomlinson International Secretary, Royal Academy of Engineering David Thomlinson is a Chairman of Moixa Energy and an Advisor to Arup Consulting Engineers. He is a member of the Business Leaders council for TeachFirst and the Global Advisory Council for Teach For All. He retired in 2014 after a 28-year career with the Global Management Consulting and Technology firm, Accenture. He was a member of their Global Executive Committee for 11 years, including as Group Chief Executive for the Global Resources Operating Group (Energy, Utilities, Chemicals and Natural Resources), Managing Director for UK and Ireland and Chief Geographic Officer. In his last role, he was responsible for strategy and operations across 54 countries and was based in Shanghai, China. He is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Chartered Engineer - being a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and Structural Engineers.
	Sanja Vraneš Director General Prof. Sanja Vraneš, PhD is jointly appointed as the Director General of the Institute Mihajlo Pupin and as a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Belgrade. Before that, she was the Scientific Director of the Institute for 10 years. From 1999 she has been engaged as a United Nations Expert for information technologies, and from 2005 as an expert evaluator and reviewer of EC Framework Programme Projects and H2020 projects. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, semantic web, linked data web, knowledge management, decision support systems, etc. In these areas she published over 200 scientific papers.
	Dan Work Professor, Vanderbilt University Dan Work is an associate professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. His research on transportation systems has appeared in numerous media outlets including Good Morning America, Wired, and MIT Technology Review. Prof. Work was named a recipient of the 2018 Gilbreth Lectureship by the US National Academy of Engineering.