An apparel, hospitality, and real estate entrepreneur, Eric Dayton started a movement to reimagine the identity of America's north as one of adventure, creativity and the embrace of cold winters. His company is on a mission to keep the north cold by donating 110% of its own carbon impact to organizations leading the fight against climate change. Prior to founding Askov Finlayson, he was a member of Arctic Transect 2004, a six-month, 2,000 mile dogsled expedition focused on climate research and education.

Born and raised in Ethiopia, Alfa now lives in New Jersey with her husband and two little boys. She is also the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Rising Tide Capital, a non-profit organization that provides underserved entrepreneurs with the resources needed to grow successful businesses. Over the past 15 years, the organization has run hundreds of Community Business Academies, which provide intensive business management training coupled with year-round coaching and mentorship to over 1,000 entrepreneurs annually. Corporate, foundation and governmental funders underwrite the cost of tuition for all participants. By building successful businesses, these entrepreneurs meet their families’ basic needs, create opportunities for social mobility and help transform their local communities into thriving economies.

Alfa is also the co-founder of Future Tide Partners, which equips cross-sector leaders to shift capital, policy and culture to respond to a new world of work in service to a flourishing future economy. She was named Young Global Leader in 2015 and has appeared in leading media outlets, such as CNN, the Suze Orman show, O the Oprah Magazine, Essence Magazine, Bloomberg, Inc Magazine, BusinessWeek and Entrepreneur Magazine. Recipient of honours and awards, including: recognized by President Barack Obama; named a CNN Hero; named one of the Most Powerful Women Changing the World, Forbes.

For over two decades, I have advised corporate, NGO and government leaders in dozens of markets across the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East around: corporate and executive positioning, public diplomacy, organizational design, digital strategy, crisis & issues management, sustainability & ESG.

At Weber Shandwick, Lead the Weber Shandwick Collective's 600+ professionals, globally, in corporate & public affairs, management consulting and research & insights businesses, advising clients at the intersection of organizational strategy, societal engagement and public positioning.

Prior to joining Weber Shandwick, at Teneo, the global CEO advisory firm, I advised Fortune 500 CEOs on formulating and implementing their agendas related to corporate reputation, organizational transformation and financial performance. I also worked with colleagues to establish Teneo’s Digital practice which advised clients on content & engagement strategies, digitizing their organizations and using data and analytics to produce insights specifically designed for the C-Suite.

Previously, I was the President of WCG, a full-service communications, digital marketing and analytics firm with 180 employees in seven U.S. and European offices. Before that, I was Burson-Marsteller’s Market Leader in China, overseeing the agency’s operations across its five offices in Mainland China. At Burson, I launched the Burson-Marsteller Leadership Institute, a first-of-its-kind communications leadership training offering in China; and I spent a decade at Edelman, where I co-incubated and led the global Corporate Responsibility & Sustainability practice which grew to 110 practitioners in 15 offices around the world.

Earlier in my career, I led fundraising in the Northeast for Al Gore's 2000 Presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee; and before that, I was the Director of Institutional Affairs for the National Minority AIDS Council, an advocacy and training organization representing 1000's of local community-based AIDS service providers.

I was also a Young Global Leader in the World Economic Forum; and I served as a Term Member in the Council on Foreign Relations (2003 – 2008).

David de Rothschild is a British adventurer, ecologist and environmentalist. He is the Founder of the Sculpt the Future Foundation, which promotes positive environmental change towards global sustainability. He is also the author of several books, numerous documentaries and TV show, and a regular contributor to media outlets such as Treehugger, CNN and the Huffington Post. He has been recognized by UNEP as a Climate Hero and Nat Geo's Emerging Explorer programme for his exploration, which has seen him undertake adventures in some of the planet's most fragile ecosystems - from crossing the Arctic Ocean from Russia to Canada with 16 dogs to sailing a boat kept afloat with 12,500 reused plastic bottles across the Pacific to raise awareness about plastic pollution.

In the year 2000 founded Hoteles.com, one of the leading hotel reservation sites targeting Spanish speaking users around the world, now owned and operated by Expedia. In 2003 he co-founded and led as CEO ClickDiario Network, at the time, the #1 Internet advertising network in Latin America, acquired by FOX International Channels (Newscorp) in 2006. From 2008 to 2011, de Tezanos led BrokersWeb as CEO, an online insurance marketplace in the United States, which became the 20th fastest growing company in the US in the INC 500 ranking of 2011.

Matias de Tezanos was Honored Young Global Leader by the WEF in 2009 and named one of the top 10 Hispanic entrepreneurs by INC Magazine during 2011 and 2012.

In 2012, founded PeopleFund, a private holding company that invests in tech-startups around the world, including several top INC 500 ranked companies like Healthcare.com, AutoWeb.com (merged with Nasdaq: ABTL), DiamondFoundry, Orionis Biosciences, GetAround, Bluekite (Acquired by Nasdaq: Xoom), among 30+ other companies and social impact projects like KingoEnergy.

BSc in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, MIT; 2013, PhD in Nuclear Engineering, MIT, with a research focus on computational nuclear materials. Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Transatomic Power, a nuclear reactor design company developing sustainable, fuel-efficient power plants. Member, MIT Corporation, MIT’s board of trustees. Named; a TIME Magazine 30 People Under 30 Changing the World; MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35; National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

Michael Drexler is the Chief Strategy Officer and Managing Director at Brightstar Capital Partners. He currently serves on the boards of America's Group and REMarkets, both Brightstar portfolio companies.

Prior to Brightstar, Michael was Managing Director and Global Head of Strategy and Business Transformation at J.P. Morgan Asset Management based in New York. He was a member of the division’s Operating Committee and worked with all business lines on strategic initiatives, including M&A, business efficiency, and decision making.

Previously, he worked for nearly a decade in a senior leadership role at the World Economic Forum as Member of the Executive Committee responsible for partnerships and content in the Alternative Investment industry and later the Forum’s content initiatives across the financial sector, infrastructure, and long-term investing. Michael also spent nearly a decade at Barclays Capital in London, as the Global Head of Strategy and Planning for the majority of his time there, following his role as a consultant at McKinsey & Co and a post-doctoral position at Stanford University.

Michael holds a doctorate in Mathematics from Oxford University and an M.Sc. in Engineering from the Technical University at Munich.

Joy Dunn is the Head of Operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a clean energy startup based in Boston, where she is responsible for the company’s day-to-day operations including manufacturing, construction and facilities, safety, and quality. CFS was spun out of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and works collaboratively with MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center to combine decades of government and academic research with the innovation and speed of the private sector. Supported by the world's leading investors, the CFS team is driven by the climate change crisis to develop the fastest path to commercial fusion energy. Before joining the CFS team in early 2019, Joy spent a decade at SpaceX developing and manufacturing the Dragon spacecraft to deliver cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. She was heavily involved with the manufacturing of the Dragon 1 spacecraft and played an integral role in SpaceX's achievement of being the first private company to launch a spacecraft in orbit and also dock with the International Space Station. She managed the manufacturing engineering team responsible for substantially reducing overall spacecraft build hours and cost while overseeing Dragon's annual budget and construction of a high-tech production facility for the Crew Dragon vehicle. Joy also co-founded both the Women's Network and LGBTQ employee interest groups at SpaceX and she is actively involved in STEM outreach events, including sitting on the Board of Directors for Out For Undergrad, a non-profit that helps LGBTQ students reach their full potential. She was also named to Business Insider's list of the Most Powerful Female Engineers of 2017. Joy received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Re-elected to the Crescenta Valley Town Council in November 2018 to a second 3-year term, encompassing more than 22,000 residents in unincorporated Los Angeles County, California, and currently serving as its Corresponding Secretary, Sophal Ear, PhD, is a tenured Associate Professor of Diplomacy & World Affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles where he lectures on political economy, security, development, and Asia. Previously, he taught how to rebuild countries after wars at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and international development at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He consulted for the World Bank, was Assistant Resident Representative for the United Nations Development Programme in East Timor, Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Advisor to Cambodia's first private equity fund Leopard Capital, and Audit Chair of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. A TED Fellow, Fulbright Specialist, and Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he sits on the Boards of Refugees International (Washington, DC), Partners for Development (Silver Spring, MD), International Public Management Network (Washington, DC), the Southeast Asia Development Program (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), and the Center for Khmer Studies (Siem Reap, Cambodia). He is the author of Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2013, http://amzn.to/UXhoWc) and co-author of The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest is Reshaping the World (Routledge, 2013, http://amzn.to/WkxCEf). He wrote and narrated the award-winning documentary film "The End/Beginning: Cambodia"​ (47 minutes, 2011, news blurb http://youtu.be/QwsSDPRI25E) based on his 2009 TED Talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/sophal_ear_escaping_the_khmer_rouge) and has appeared in four other documentaries. He is an Executive Producer of In the Life of Music (92 minutes, 2018) and Some of My Best Friends Are Kimchi: A True Documentary (Coming soon!). A graduate of Princeton and Berkeley, he moved to the US from France as a Cambodian refugee at the age of 10.

A serial founder, Salimah got her start in building communities by co-founding the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition to help protect BC’s endangered Spirit Bear and its habitat in the Great Bear rainforest. Under her stewardship the Coalition - which started with just two members and grew to a network of over 6 million members in 64+ countries. Their campaign to save the spirit bear – named the official mascot of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver – was recently recognized as one of the most supported conservation initiatives in Canadian history.

After beginning her international journalism career in the alleyways of Cairo, Salimah spent years filling on culture and politics from the Middle East, covering the war in Iraq and reporting on environmental security challenges in Africa. She also was on the trail for the historic 2008 US presidential campaign, and for a time was based in DC covering the White House. She has worked on assignment for Reuters, A&E, CBC Television, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus Magazine and the Cairo Times.

A fellow and graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York, Ebrahim also holds an honours degree in Middle Eastern History and International Relations from Trinity College, University of Toronto. She has been awarded and recognized for her work as both journalist and community builder, having been chosen and profiled by CBC Television as one of 25 Canadians who are changing the world; named by Chatelaine magazine one of its 80 amazing Canadian women to watch; and honoured by the World Economic Forum in 2009 as a Young Global Leader.

Her latest adventure: co-founding Artery.is and Bramble.live and thinking about how technology can facilitate our humanity online and off.

Suzanne Ehlers is the Executive Director and CEO of USA for UNHCR (effective 1/17/2023) where she is working toward a world where refugee crises would cease and people fleeing are welcomed into new communities with dignity and security.

Prior to this appointment, Suzanne served as CEO of Malala Fund and, in this role, she provided leadership to a global staff of experts and advocates who are breaking down barriers that prevent girls from going to school. Suzanne worked closely with co-founders Malala and Ziauddin Yousafzai and a highly regarded board of directors and professional team to advance progress toward girls’ education around the world.

Previously, Suzanne served as President & CEO of PAI, a global leader in the effort to protect and promote the reproductive rights of women and girls. Suzanne led the organization for 10 years, and was at PAI for 16 years. Under Suzanne’s leadership, PAI’s budget almost quadrupled and the organization dramatically expanded its work to more countries, spreading more shared wealth, technical assistance and capacity building.

Suzanne repeatedly served on the U.S. government delegation to the United Nations’ Commission on Population and Development under President Obama. She currently serves as a board member for Ibis Reproductive Health in Boston and the Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School in Washington, DC; she was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2012; and she has served on the boards of the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign, the Global Health Council, the Janelia Family Foundation, The Biodiversity Project, and the Asia Pacific Alliance.

Earlier in her career, Ms. Ehlers was a grantmaker at the Wallace Global Fund. At WGF, she supported a grants portfolio that broke new ground in the fields of sustainable forestry and laid the early foundation for philanthropic engagement on climate change.

Ms. Ehlers served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic following her graduation from Cornell University with a degree in Government. Suzanne speaks French, Spanish and Sango at various levels of proficiency. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and two daughters.

Dr. Elisseeff is the Morton Goldberg Professor and Director of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center at Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Wilmer Eye Institute with appointments in Chemical and Biological Engineering, Materials Science and Orthopedic Surgery. She was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and is a member of the National Academy of Inventors, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine. She is committed to the translation of regenerative biomaterials and has founded several companies and participates in several industry advisory boards including the State of Maryland’s Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO).