Jad Abumrad
Abumrad is a Lebanese-American radio host and producer. He founded and cohosts the National Public Radio program Radiolab, a show about curiosity, ideas, science, philosophy, and the human experience. Before Radiolab, he studied creative writing and music composition at Oberlin College. He wrote music for films, and reported and produced documentaries for local and national public radio programs.
Rakesh Agrawal (NAE)
As Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University, Agrawal’s interest and passion are in energy production. Previously, he worked at Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., for over two decades, and was selected for the company’s highest technical position, Air Product Fellow.
David Agus
Agus is one of the world’s leading cancer doctors and a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and Viterbi School of Engineering, where he leads the university’s Westside Cancer Center and Center for Applied Molecular Medicine. He advocates for new technologies and approaches for personalized health care, and cofounded Navigenics and Applied Proteomics with these goals in mind. He is the author of #1 New York Times bestseller The End of Illness.
Franz Aliquo
As a creative director/strategist at RPMGRP, Aliquo is “getting [his] hands dirty . . . developing branded film and TV content, and waxing poetic on brand consulting and marketing strategies. . . .” As the owner of ShadowGov, he cofounded StreetWars, a 3-week-long, 24/7 “watergun assassination tournament.”
Ryan Bailey
Bailey is associate professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also affiliated with the Institute for Genomic Biology. His research interests involve bioanalytical and biomaterials chemistry. His research group is developing chip-integrated arrays of photonic sensors that detect signatures of diseases at their earliest stages, thus helping clinicians choose the best personalized treatment plans.
Laurie Dean Baird
Baird is a strategic consultant in media and entertainment and focuses on emerging technology, social practices, and business models in the changing media landscape. She is a research fellow at the Futures of Entertainment and a strategic consultant at the Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology.
Sundaresh (Sundu) Brahmasandra
Brahmasandra serves as president of NeuMoDx Molecular. Previously, he was the president of Life Magnetics, Inc., a University of Michigan spinout that developed a novel, nonmicroscope-based platform for real-time monitoring of cell growth, death, and other binding events. He was a cofounder and vice president of product development at HandyLab, Inc., which was acquired by BD for more than $275 million.
Yoram Bresler
Bresler is a professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Bioengineering, and research professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He founded InstaRecon, Inc., a supplier of technology and services to imaging scanner equipment makers and supply chain partners.
Paul Camuti
Camuti was named senior vice president, innovation, and chief technology officer of Ingersoll Rand in 2011. He was previously president of Smart Grid Applications for Siemens Energy Inc. and president and CEO of Siemens Corporate Research. He founded the industrial software business at Siemens Energy and Automation.
Dean Chang
Chang is the founding associate vice president for the University of Maryland’s new Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and was previously director of UMD’s tech ventures startup programs in the engineering school. He was CTO and vice president, Gaming Business at Immersion Corporation, a company he guided over ten years from a four-person Stanford startup to a publicly traded, world-leading licensor of haptics technology.
Uma Chowdhry (NAE)
Chowdhry is the chief science and technology officer emerita at Dupont, cochair of the National Research Council’s Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable Council, and a member of NAE’s governing council, NIST’s advisory board, MIT Corporation’s visiting committee, and the boards of directors for Baxter International and LORD Corporation. Prior to her retirement, she oversaw DuPont R&D globally and was responsible for formulating the strategy for R&D programs, policies, and procedures to advance DuPont’s vision, competitive position, and profitability.
Tim Cook
Tim Cook is Apple’s CEO and serves on its board of directors. As CEO, he has encouraged greater collaboration and creativity among Apple’s team, which is widely regarded as the most innovative in the world. Before being named CEO in August 2011, he was Apple’s chief operating officer and was responsible for the company’s worldwide sales and operations. In his time at Apple, he has helped improve conditions for workers who make the company’s products, and is today leading a companywide effort to use 100 percent renewable energy at all Apple facilities.
R. Graham Cooks
Cooks is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Purdue University. His interests involve construction of mass spectrometers as well as studies of their fundamentals and applications. His work on ionization methods has contributed to the ambient method of desorption electrospray ionization, which is used in tissue monitoring, forensics, and pharmaceutical applications.
Robert Dennard (NAE)
Dennard is a retired IBM Fellow known for inventing dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and formulating the scaling theory, making it possible to miniaturize the channel lengths of metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors, or MOSFETs, down to just nanometers.
Regina Dugan
Dugan is senior vice president of engineering at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP), a small band of makers and believers charged with achieving breakthrough innovations in mobile computing and accelerating the development of promising technologies to market. Prior to joining Google, she was director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the principal agency in the US Department of Defense for research, development, and demonstration of high-risk, high-payoff capabilities.
Robert Fischell (NAE)
Fischell is a physicist, inventor, and holder of more than 200 US and foreign medical patents. He has had two pioneering careers. His current career is characterized by forming several biotechnology companies to develop and refine his inventions and innovations
so that major medical companies may acquire them. Examples of his inventions are coronary stents, the implantable heart defibrillator, and a cranial implant for treating epilepsy. In his former career he helped create the modern era of space satellites.
Michael Frenkel
Frenkel is fellow and director of the Thermodynamics Research Center (TRC) at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder. He is also Honorary Professor at the Colorado School of Mines, École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, and Changsha University of Science and Technology (China). His research interests cover a broad range of scientific areas such as phenomenological and statistical thermodynamics, information management and communication, and software expert systems. In the last 15 years, he led the effort at TRC in the development and software implementation of the concept of global information systems in science in application to the field of thermodynamics.
Ashifi Gogo
Gogo is the CEO and founder of Sproxil, Inc. Under his leadership, the company developed its award-winning mobile product authentication (MPA) technology. He earned a PhD in electrical engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, and is Dartmouth’s first-ever PhD Innovation Fellow.
Anoop Gupta
Gupta is a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research and works on cross-disciplinary research that has potential for large business or societal impact. Before joining Microsoft, he was a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University for 11 years; while there, he and his students founded VXtreme Inc., a Microsoft-acquired company.
Kalyan Handique
Handique cofounded HandyLab, a startup whose “Jaguar” technology revolutionized the speed and accuracy at which infections are detected. He is now CEO of DeNovo Sciences, whose cancer research and diagnosis platform offers an alternative to painful and invasive biopsies and could one day make it possible to detect cancer before primary tumors are discovered.
Doug Hart
Hart is an MIT professor of engineering and a principal investigator in the Hatsopoulos Microfluids Laboratory. He is an inventor, cofounder, and board member of three venture-funded companies, and has a long history of successful inventions both in and outside of academia. His research interests include image processing and optical diagnostics relating to health and the environment.
John Hennessy (NAE)
Hennessy serves as president of Stanford University and is well known for pioneering the RISC processor architecture and for leadership in computer engineering and higher education. He is one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems Inc. As provost of Stanford University, he was instrumental in fostering interdisciplinary activities in the biosciences and bioengineering, and oversaw improvements in faculty and staff compensation.
Brian Hinman
Hinman is a venture partner at Oak Investment Partners, where he focuses on investments in information technology and clean energy. He cofounded PictureTel, Polycom, 2Wire, and Mimosa Networks, where he currently serves as CEO. Having attended the University of Maryland as an undergraduate, he now sponsors the university’s Hinman Campus Entrepreneurship Opportunities (CEO) Program.
David Hornik
Hornik is a general partner at August Capital. He invests broadly in information technology companies, with a focus on enterprise application and infrastructure software and consumer facing software and services. He was previously an intellectual property and corporate attorney who represented high-tech startups in all aspects of their formation, financing, and operations.
Alan Heeger
Heeger is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and is known for his pioneering research in and cofounding of the field of semiconducting and metallic polymers. He has more than 800 publications in scientific journals and more than 50 patents. He founded and cofounded several companies, one of which, UNIAX, was acquired by DuPont in 2000.
Jack Hughes
Hughes is the founder of TopCoder, which was acquired by Appirio in 2013. He founded TopCoder on the premise that talent and skill are the determinant factors in the quality and utility of software, which is central to the global economy. Previously he served as chairman at Tallan, which under his lead was recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America four years in a row by Deloitte & Touche.
Prashant K. Jain
Jain is an assistant professor in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, affiliated with the Materials Research Lab, the Department of Physics, and the Beckman Institute. His research interests are in nano-optics and molecular imaging with the goal of understanding and controlling energy transport, light-matter interactions, and chemical transformations on nanometer-length scales.
Mary Lou Jepsen
Jepsen is head of the Display Division at Google X. She is also the founder and former CEO of Pixel Qi, a manufacturer of high-performance, low-power, sunlight-readable screens for mobile devices, and cofounder and former CTO of One Laptop per Child.
Frans Johansson
Johansson is an innovation speaker, entrepreneur, and author of the book The Medici Effect, on innovation. He also founded the Medici Group, an innovation and strategy consulting firm that seeks to help companies drive growth, transform leaders, and create a self-sustaining culture of innovation that can withstand even the most volatile markets.
Karen Kerr
Kerr is the senior managing director for advanced manufacturing at GE Ventures, General Electric, where she is leading a team focused on supporting the advanced manufacturing ecosystem and making strategic investments and developing partnerships in this area. Previously, she served as senior director of new ventures and alliances at the University of Southern California Stevens Center for Innovation, where she was responsible for accelerating the formation of startups out of university research. She founded Agile Equities LLC, a venture development company specializing in emerging technology companies.
Aaron Koblin
Koblin is best known for his innovative uses of data visualization and crowdsourcing. He currently holds the position of creative director of the Data Arts team in Google’s Creative Lab. His team worked with Arcade Fire to produce an online music video that allows viewers to incorporate images of their home neighborhood into the experience using Google Street View.
Robert S. Langer (NAE)
Langer is the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member, and one of the few people elected to all three US National Academies (the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine). His research is at the interface of medicine, materials science, and chemical engineering. He has authored more than 1,200 articles and has over 1,000 issued and pending patents worldwide.
Yo-Yo Ma
Ma is an American cellist. He began to study the instrument at the age of 4, and his discography numbers over 90 albums, including more than 17 Grammy Award winners. One of his goals is the exploration of music as a means of communication and as a vehicle for the migration of ideas across cultures throughout the world. To that end, he founded Silkroad, a nonprofit organization that, through performance, the creation of new music, cultural partnerships, education programs, and cross-disciplinary collaborations, seeks to create meaningful change at the intersection of the arts, education, and business.
Mary Ann Meador
Meador is senior chemical engineer at the NASA Glenn Research Center in the Materials and Structures Division. She is also an adjunct professor of polymer engineering at the University of Akron and an editor for ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.
Robert Metcalfe (NAE)
Metcalfe is professor of innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise in the University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering. He invented Ethernet, founded 3Com Corporation, was CEO of IDG’s InfoWorld Publishing Company and wrote a weekly column for 10 years, and is a partner emeritus at Polaris Partners.
Bernard Meyerson (NAE)
Meyerson is an IBM Fellow, IBM’s vice president for innovation, and drives corporate initiatives in IBM’s Corporate Strategy Function. He has been part of the IBM family since 1980, led the development of silicon germanium and other high-performance semiconductor technologies, and held a wide range of positions in broad executive management.
Richard K. Miller (NAE)
Miller is the president and first employee of Olin College of Engineering. Previously, he was dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Iowa. He has consulted to the World Bank for establishing new universities and served on several academic, federal, and industrial advisory boards and committees. He is interested in innovation in higher education and is a frequent speaker on engineering education.
Thomas Miller
Miller is executive director of the Entrepreneurship Initiative, initiator of the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program, and vice provost for Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA) at North Carolina State University, where he is also a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Chad Mirkin (NAE)
Mirkin is director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, and professor of chemical and biological engineering, biomedical engineering, materials science and engineering, and medicine at Northwestern University. He is best known for his discovery, synthesis, and development of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) and the biodetection schemes and therapeutics approaches that have derived from them, the invention of Dip-Pen nanolithography, and contributions to supramolecular chemistry and nanoparticle synthesis. He has founded multiple companies, which have commercialized over 1,700 nanotechnology products for the life science and semiconductor industries.
Katherine T. Moortgat
Moortgat is passionate about enabling innovation. As a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and as the founding director of UC San Francisco’s hub for entrepreneurship, she has led initiatives fostering the commercialization of technologies originating in universities and national labs. She has served on the board of councilors for the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, and has mentored other universities in spurring innovation. She currently advises growth-stage startups as a business consultant.
David Morse (NAE)
Morse is the executive vice president and chief technology officer at Corning, managing 3,000 scientists and engineers and a budget of $800 million. He is a member of the National Chemistry Board and the Dow-Corning Board of Directors. He started at Corning Incorporated in 1976 as a glass composition scientist and has developed and patented many products in ophthalmics, optics, and technical glass.
Rodney Mullen
Mullen is considered the most influential skateboarder in the history of skateboarding. He invented the majority of flatground ollie and flip tricks, including the kickflip and 360-flip. He is also an entrepreneur, inventor, and public speaker who articulates what it means to be a skateboarder and push the limits of one’s craft.
Beth Simone Noveck
Noveck directs the Governance Lab and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. She is the Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professor at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab, and a professor of law at New York Law School. She served in the White House as the first United States deputy CTO and director of the White House Open Government Initiative. Among projects she’s designed or collaborated on are Unchat, the Do Tank, Peer to Patent, Data.gov, Challenge.gov, and the Gov Lab’s Living Labs and training platform.
Alyssa Panitch
Panitch is the Leslie A. Geddes Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue, where she led a team that discovered a class of biomimetic molecules that promote healthy tissue healing and regeneration. She was previously associate professor of bioengineering at Arizona State University and has launched three successful startups.
Stuart Parkin (NAE)
Parkin is an IBM Fellow and manager of the Magnetoelectronics group at IBM Research–Almaden as well as a consulting professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University, where he is also director of the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center. He is researching new structures for use as spin transistors and spin-logic devices that may enable a new generation of low-power electronics.
Mark Randall
Randall is chief strategist, advanced technology, at Adobe. He speaks and teaches frequently on entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategy. He is a serial entrepreneur whose nearly 20-year career includes three high-tech startups and over a dozen products that have together sold over a million units and are used by half the Fortune 500 companies, all branches of the US government, and thousands of schools around the world.
Carmichael Roberts
Roberts is a general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, where he predominantly invests in companies that make products involving chemistry, materials science, and materials engineering. He is also the cofounder and chair of the board of Diagnostics for All and 480 Biomedical, Inc., and cofounder and lead director of Arsenal Medical.
John Rogers (NAE)
Rogers holds a primary appointment with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he directs the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory and holds the Swanlund Chair, the highest chaired position at the university. His research includes fundamental and applied aspects of nano- and molecular-scale fabrication as well as materials and patterning techniques for unusual electronic and photonic devices, with an emphasis on biointegrated and bioinspired systems.
Donald R. Sadoway
Sadoway is the John F. Elliot Professor of Materials Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research seeks to establish the scientific underpinnings for technologies that make efficient use of energy and natural resources in a sound manner. He is an expert on batteries, and the overarching theme of his work is electrochemistry in nonaqueous media.
Amy Salzhauer
Salzhauer founded Ignition Ventures, a firm that matches a network of world-class researchers with a select group of business strategy consultants who focus on technology strategy and new venture creation. She is a specialist in technological innovation and entrepreneurship, and has served as CEO of multiple startup companies.
Maria Scileppi
Scileppi leads 72U, a 72 and Sunny program designed to cultivate the next generation of leaders for the creative industry. She has served as art director at Y&R NY and director at the Chicago Portfolio School, and worked on a collaborative storytelling project, “Journey Home,” based on shared experiences.
Ivan Seidenberg
Seidenberg is the former chair and CEO of Verizon Communications. He worked in the communications industry for more than 45 years, and is known for steering the merger of Bell Atlantic and NYNEX in 1997 and the Bell Atlantic merger with GTE in 2000. He also led efforts to form Verizon Wireless.
Varun Soni
Soni is the dean of religious life at the University of Southern California and the first Hindu to serve as the chief religious leader of an American university. He is also an adjunct professor in the USC School of Religion and a University Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Public Diplomacy. Before joining USC, he taught in the Law and Society Program at UC Santa Barbara.
Dwayne Spradlin
Spradlin is head of the Health Data Consortium, a major nonprofit private/public initiative supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, US Department of Health and Human Services, and others. He was previously president and CEO of InnoCentive, president of Hoovers Online, president and COO of StarCite Inc., senior vice president at VerticalNet Inc., and director at PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Nina Tandon
Tandon studies electrical signaling in the context of tissue engineering. She is an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at the Cooper Union, and works as an electrical and biomedical engineer at Columbia University’s Laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering. She is cofounder and CEO of EpiBone, a company that uses scans of patients’ bone defects and their own stem cells to engineer personalized bone grafts.
Richard Tapia (NAE)
Tapia, a professor in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University, is best known for his computational and mathematical science research and as a national leader in education and outreach programs. For these sustained efforts, he was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest honor bestowed by the US government on scientists, engineers, and inventors.
Herbert Holden Thorp
Thorp is a chemist, entrepreneur, inventor, musician, and professor and has cofounded multiple biotechnology startups. He is provost at the Washington University in St. Louis, and was previously chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an inaugural member of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship and serves on the US Manufacturing Competitiveness Initiative for the Council on Competitiveness.
Luis von Ahn
An entrepreneur and associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, von Ahn is considered one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing, or as he calls it, human computation. His goal is to build systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. His projects include CAPTCHA, the ESP Game, GWAP, reCAPTCHA, and Duolingo.
Andy Walshe
Walshe is Red Bull’s High Performance Director, and he seeks to develop a greater understanding of the “human potential” construct and its application toward the betterment of society. He specializes in human performance at the highest levels of execution and the development of talent in a strategic framework to optimize the potential of individuals, teams, and organizations.
George Whitesides (NAE)
Whitesides is a chemist and the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University, where he has been a faculty member since 1982. His current research spans many areas, including molecular self-assembly, surface and nanoscience, low-cost diagnostics, water, simplicity, and the origin of life.
