Dr. Lisa Amini is a Distinguished Engineer and first Director of IBM Research’s Smarter Cities Technology Centre (SCTC) in Dublin, Ireland. SCTC Researchers focus on advancing science and technology for intelligent urban and environmental systems, with a current focus on analytics, optimizations, and knowledge representation systems for sustainable energy, water, and transportation. Previously, Lisa was a Senior Research Manager at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center for 12 years, and was founding Chief Architect for IBM’s InfoSphere Streams product (System S research project) for continuous, high performance mining of sensor data. She received her PhD degree in Computer Science from Columbia University in New York.

Aaron Bernstein, MD, MPH, is on faculty at Harvard Medical School and is the Associate Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment.  His work examines the human health dimensions of global environmental change, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, with the aim of promoting a deeper understanding of these subjects among policy makers, educators, and the public. Along with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Eric Chivian, he co-authored the Oxford University Press book Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity.  The book has been widely acclaimed, including by Al Gore, Kofi Annan, and Gro Brundtland, and was named the best biology book of 2008 by the Library Journal. Dr. Bernstein is a past recipient of a Harvard University Zuckerman Fellowship (2008) and has received Stanford University’s Firestone Medal for Research. He is course director for Human Health and Global Environmental Change, offered jointly at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, the only such course offered at a medical school in the US.

Dr. James Cunningham is the Director of the Institute for Business, Social Sciences and Public Policy and is a senior lecturer in Strategic Management at the J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics. He previously held the positions as the Executive MBA Programme Director and the Head of the Strategy Group. Prior to joining NUI Galway James worked as a strategy consultant and also held a lecturing position in the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business at University College Dublin. He has published extensively and his publications include books, book chapters, journal papers, case studies and refereed conference papers. He has received several awards for his research including three best paper awards at the British Academy of Management Conferences (2002, 2005 and 2010), a best paper award at the Irish Academy of Management Conference (2003) and his co-authored case studies have won national and international competitions. He is co-editor of the Irish Journal of Management. His main research interests focus on commercialisation, technology transfer, academic entrepreneurship, business failure and strategy as practice. Currently, he is co-principal investigator of a major study of publicly funded principal investigators in science,technology and engineering which is being supported by Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences RDI Grant and in collaboration with Paul O’Reilly, Dublin Institute of Technology and Professor Vincent Mangemetin, Grenoble School of Management in France.

Dr. Kristina M. Johnson was Under Secretary for Energy at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. until end-2010. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Johnson was Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The Johns Hopkins University. She received her B.S. (with distinction), M.S., and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. After a NATO post-doctoral fellowship at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, she joined the University of Colorado-Boulder’s faculty in 1985 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to full Professor in 1994. From 1994 to 1999 Dr. Johnson directed the NSF/ERC for Optoelectronics Computing Systems Center at the University of Colorado and Colorado State University, and then served as Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University from 1999 to 2007.

Dr. Niall McDonough is Executive Scientific Secretary of the European Marine Board and Head of Marine Sciences at the European Science Foundation. The Marine Board is Europe’s foremost marine science policy think-tank, delivering strategy and foresight to advance European research focused on seas and oceans. Niall originally trained as a marine biologist, obtaining a first class honours degree from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast. He has previously served as Development Manager with the Environmental Change Institute at NUI Galway, and Manager of the Centre for Marine Resources and Mariculture at Queen’s. In the latter role, he provided scientific advice to the Northern Ireland Government and chaired the Northern Ireland Review of Inshore Fisheries in 2005-2006. From 2007 to 2009 he worked with the Irish Marine Institute’s International Co-operation Programme to develop Ireland’s international collaborative research efforts in marine science and technology.