Andrew Goldsmith was Vice President of Global Marketing at Rapiscan Systems and is now CEO of AGX Marketing (agxmarketing.com), a consulting firm focused on the homeland security technology sector.
Brock Long is the former Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Confirmed in June 2017 by the U.S. Senate with strong bipartisan support (95-4), Brock served as the nation’s principal advisor to the president responsible for coordinating the entire array of federal government resources down through 50 states, 573 tribal governments, and 16 island territories to assist them with executing disaster preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. Brock is the 10th Administrator and the youngest to hold the office. While serving as Administrator, Brock coordinated the federal government’s response to over 144 presidentially declared disasters and 112 wildfires, including three of the nation’s most devastating hurricanes and five of the worst wildfires ever experienced. During this time, nearly $44 billion of disaster activity occurred under the various federal recovery programs.
As the FEMA Administrator, Brock led major initiatives that will have long-lasting impacts on the emergency management community. He rapidly transformed the agency’s business enterprise by implementing innovative Community Lifeline and FEMA Integration Team concepts to strengthen public-private partnerships and permanently embed full-time staff within the offices of state and tribal governments to better meet constituent needs. Further, as the result of his effective advocacy and eight influential congressional testimonies, the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (DRRA) became law in October 2018, making pre-disaster mitigation a national priority with the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program. The DRRA also provided meaningful changes to the FEMA workforce and bolstered state and local emergency management capabilities.
From 2008-2011, Brock served as Director of Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency (AEMA) under Governor Bob Riley. As Director, he served as the State Coordinating Officer for 14 disasters, including eight presidentially declared events. Brock also served as an on-scene State Incident Commander for the Alabama Unified Command during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Dr. Igor Mezić is Chief Technology Officer and Chief Scientist at MixMode AI. Mezic works on operator-theoretic methods in nonlinear dynamical systems and control theory and their applications in fluid dynamics, energy efficient design and operations and complex systems dynamics. He did his Dipl. Ing. in Mechanical Engineering in 1990 at the University of Rijeka, Croatia and his Ph. D. in Applied Mechanics at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Mezic was a postdoctoral researcher at the Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, UK in 1994-95. From 1995 to 1999 he was a member of Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he is currently a Professor. In 2000-2001 he worked as an Associate Professor at Harvard University in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He won the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award from NSF and the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award on "Control of Mixing" from IEEE. He also won the United Technologies Senior Vice President award for Science and Technology Special Achievement Prize in 2007. He was an Editor of Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Mechanics and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. Dr. Mezic is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), Fellow of Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Director of the Center for Energy Efficient Design and Head of Buildings and Design Solutions Group at the Institute for Energy Efficiency at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Claire Zulkey is an experienced professional writer based in her home town of Evanston, IL. The author and co-author of numerous books, she began her freelance career in 1998 and since then has had bylines in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Entrepreneur and Vice.
Ken Walker is the Chief Technology Officer for Owl Cyber Defense. He joined Owl in August 2019 following the merger of Owl and Tresys Technology, having spent 13 years at Tresys. Bringing nearly 30 years of experience in information systems security, he is responsible for the planning, creation, maintenance, and support of all Owl packaged solutions and products. Before Tresys, Ken was the Co-founder and Chief Architect for Secure Methods, Inc. where he was responsible for the development of the company's product suite. Ken was a senior security engineer for Trusted Information Systems, Inc. where he worked on a variety of security projects including the Gauntlet firewall, Domain and Type Enforcement, key escrow, and Trusted Xenix. In addition, Ken held related technical positions with DynCorp and Booz-Allen Hamilton.
Dan Conrad is Federal CTO, Field Strategist, and Identity and Access Management Specialist at One Identity. He has been with One Identity/Quest Software since 2007 where his roles have included Systems Consultant and a Solutions Architect for Compliance Solutions. He retired from the USAF in 2004 and returned to government IT as a contractor where his primary focus was Active Directory design, migration, and sustainment. He holds many certifications, the highlights include CISSP, MCITP, and MCSE/MCSA.