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.
Tyler Dinwoodie is President and Executive Director of Innovation Metals Corp., a critical-materials technology company based in Toronto, Canada. A senior corporate strategic advisor with an extensive background in market and industry analysis for the global critical-materials supply chains, Mr. Dinwoodie specializes in rare earths (rare-earth elements, rare-earth oxides, rare-earth metals, and rare-earth permanent magnets) and Li-ion battery materials (lithium, graphite, manganese, nickel, and cobalt) — with a particular focus on North American security of supply and downstream transformational installed capacity. He has served as an executive officer and senior advisor for several private and public technology and advanced materials companies, including IMC — in North America, Europe and Australia.
Previously, Mr. Dinwoodie served as President and Corporate Secretary of TSXV-listed Alabama Graphite Corp. prior to arranging, negotiating and overseeing the company's acquisition by a NASDAQ-listed company in 2018. He also served as Chief Marketing Officer for additive-manufacturing metal-powders producer Equispheres Inc., where he was instrumental in the company's founding, development of its business strategy and commercialization of its proprietary atomization technology. Mr. Dinwoodie is the Chairman of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence's annual Benchmark Summit in Washington D.C., sits on the Board of Directors of the National Alliance for Advanced Technology Batteries (NAATBatt International) and is an active member of REIA (Rare Earth Industry Association), the Canadian Rare Earth Elements Network (CREEN)/the Canadian Critical Minerals & Materials Association (C2M2A), the United States Energy Association (USEA), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM), the Governance Professionals of Canada (GPC), the Canadian Investor Relations Institute (CIRI), and the U.S. based National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI).
Alireza Haghighat is a Professor of Nuclear Engineering at Virginia Tech, a Fellow at the American Nuclear Society, Director of the Nuclear Engineering Program, and Director of the Mechanical Engineering Program at the Greater Washington Metro Area Campus.
Sonja Schmid is an associate professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and serves as the co-director of the STS graduate program in Northern Virginia. For her first book, she studied the history and organization of the emerging Soviet nuclear industry. In other research, she traced the results of Soviet nuclear technology transfer to Central and East European nations that have since joined the European Union. She is particularly interested in examining the interface of national energy policies, technological choices, and nonproliferation concerns. For her most recent NSF-supported research project on the challenges of globalizing nuclear emergency response, she has worked with postdoctoral scholars Davide Orsini (2015-16, Ph.D. University of Michigan) and Başak Saraç Lesavre (2017-18, Ph.D. École des Mines, Paris), and has hosted a monthly speaker series (SIREN) that is now available as an online archive. She teaches courses in social studies of technology, science and technology policy, socio-cultural studies of risk, energy policy, and nuclear nonproliferation. Together with the Nuclear Engineering Program and the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, she developed and launched an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in "Nuclear Science, Technology, and Policy".