Ryan Walters is a distinguished former US Army aviator who is now a Senior Business Development Manager at Thales.

Mr. P. Len Orlando III is a Senior Business Development Executive within the Ansys Government Initiatives (AGI) business unit of Ansys.  Mr. Orlando joined Ansys in January of 2023 to lead semiconductor efforts related to the Federal, Aerospace, and Defense marketplace.  Prior to joining Ansys, Mr. Orlando served 21 years at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Sensors Directorate as a Senior Scientist.  Mr. Orlando received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Ohio State University and his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton.  His work has spanned several diverse areas of trust, assurance, RF MMIC and AMS design, EDA infrastructure, and scalable cloud deployment.

Ryan Hays is Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer at the University of Cincinnati. He leads the Office of Innovation, including the 1819 Innovation Hub and the Cincinnati Innovation District. He oversees the University’s Department of Marketing + Communications, in addition to serving as Senior Advisor to the President and the Board of Trustees.

Alan Pellegrini has served as Thales North America's CEO since 2017, leading the company's 6,000 employees in engineering innovative solutions. Thales North America's global capabilities across Digital Identity and Security, Aviation, Space, and Defense support their customers' most challenging missions at a time of rapid transformation in the United States and Canada.

Previously, Dr. Mears was a senior advisor at Covington and Burling, where he advised companies in the aerospace, defense, and national security sector navigate policy and regulatory challenges involving the U.S. Congress and Executive Branch.

Dr. Mears has extensive experience in U.S. national security and defense strategy, planning, and resourcing, most recently serving as Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and Deputy Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Mears also advised the Defense Innovation Unit, which is building bridges between the Pentagon and the high technology centers in Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin. His substantive areas of expertise include strategic planning, risk assessment and management, and advanced technologies.

Dr. Mears is a graduate of The Ohio State University where he earned a Doctorate of Philosophy degree in political science.

Kevin Haworth currently serves as an Associate Dean for the College of Medicine's Medical Sciences Baccalaureate Education, where he teaches and serves as the Director of Data and Analytics. Additionally, he teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate level in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He is an Associate Professor in the Division of Cardiovascular Health and Disease within the Department Internal Medicine, College of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati. He also maintains a secondary faculty appointment within the Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Kevin Haworth’s research interests broadly include biomedical ultrasound imaging and therapy. In particular, he is currently directing and conducting research in medical ultrasound including the use of bubbles for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. His work includes studies of cavitation imaging and acoustic droplet vaporization for gas scavenging and imaging.

Kevin Haworth received a B.S. degree in physics from Truman State University in 2003 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied physics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, in 2006 and 2009, respectively.

Ryan J. White is Professor and Ohio Eminent Scholar in the Department of Chemistry with a complimentary joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has served as Head of Chemistry since Fall 2022. He also serves as interim Dean for the College of Arts & Sciences.

Ryan received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina (2003) and earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Utah (2007).

Dr. Claudia B. Rebola is Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs, Director of the Center for DAAP Research and Innovation, and Professor of Industrial Design at the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati (UC). Dr. Rebola was also an Associate Professor in the Industrial Design Department at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the School of Industrial Design and head of the D-Matters Studio Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Rebola’s work brings together design, art, science, and technology to experiment, design, and prototype innovative interactive products in the realm of health. Her specific interests are in collaborative, transdisciplinary research and design methods in areas related to design for vulnerable populations—aging, addiction, and disability in areas related to universal design, social innovation, social connectedness, tangible embedded interactions, and robotics. Her ultimate goals are on humanizing technology, empowering users, engaging communities, and celebrating the value of simplicity and tangibility in user-product interactions by design.

Susana Luzuriaga Voight serves as the University of Cincinnati’s Vice Provost for Academic Analytics. She leads strategic academic data analytics initiatives, including predictive analytics, to inform institutional decision-making and effectiveness, and institutional reporting.

Susana also oversees the Academic Analytics and Institutional Research unit which collects, analyzes and delivers university data and information to key stakeholders as well as state and federal agencies including the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), NCAA, AAUP, CUPA, and U.S. News & World Report.

Dr. John (Marty) Emmert is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also Director of the NSF Center for Hardware and Embedded Systems Security and Trust (CHEST) IUCRC. He has seven United States patents and has directed over $9M in research funding. In addition, he and colleagues have been awarded five phase II Small Business Innovative Research contracts from the Department of Defense. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and he has received the IEEE Harold Nobel Award and the AFRL Sensors Directorate James B. Tsui Award for best patent.

Frank Gerner serves as the interim Vice President for Research at the University of Cincinnati. He is an emeritus professor and former Associate Dean for the College of Engineering and Applied Science. 

Dr. Shaun S. Gleason is an experienced senior leader of science and technology organizations with a focus on research and development, innovation, technology transfer, leadership development, and education. He currently serves as the Director of Partnerships at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), responsible for mission areas including technology transfer, commercialization, economic development, industry and non-Department of Energy partnerships, and research security.

Prior to that he served as the Director of Science-Security Initiative Integration within the Lab Director's S&T Office. In that role, he led lab-wide integration efforts for some of ORNL's strategic initiatives such as quantum, AI, self-driving labs, and institutional computing. 

From 2018 to 2023, he was the founding Director of the Cyber Resilience and Intelligence Division at ORNL. In this role, he was responsible for an R&D portfolio focused on Advanced Intelligence and Resilient Cyber-physical Systems.

He earned his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with a research focus on x-ray computed tomography and 2D and 3D model-based medical image segmentation.

Dr. Michael Knopp is professor of radiology and endowed chair of Radiologic Sciences in the UC College of Medicine. With over 30 years of experience, Dr. Knopp pioneers precision imaging and targeted radiation therapy to improve patient outcomes. His work includes the development of molecular imaging techniques that allow clinicians to visualize biological processes at the cellular level and theranostic approaches that integrate diagnosis and treatment in a single platform.

Mark Muro is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro, focusing on the interplay of technology, people, and place as they are altered by positive and negative disruptions.

Muro’s recent work has focused on the embrace by the U.S. federal government of what Muro calls “place-based industrial strategy,” including through the government’s Regional Tech Hubs initiative. This work has drawn on Muro’s work on regional “growth centers,” a strategy by which the nation seeks to unlock innovation and growth in new places across America. Muro’s work on these issues looks closely at the interplay of federal strategy and state and regional delivery.

Current work from Muro explores the geography of the AI economy and inclusive tech, building on earlier reports such as: “What jobs are affected by AI?,” “Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How machines are affecting people and places,” and “Digitalization and the American workforce.”

Jack Wells is the director of higher education and research computing at NVIDIA, where he engages thought leaders across the computing ecosystem, focusing on aligning the NVIDIA platform research requirements. Jack joined NVIDIA in 2021 following 23 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was director of science for the team that delivered three world-leading supercomputers at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a Department of Energy national user facility. He has authored or coauthored more than 100 scientific papers and edited two books. He is serving as president of OpenACC, a consortium dedicated to the research community’s advancement by expanding accelerated and parallel computing capabilities. Previously, Jack served as chair of the Division of Computational Physics of the American Physical Society and as science advisor to U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander. Jack has a Ph.D. in physics from Vanderbilt University.

Ou Ma serves as the Alan B Shepard Chair Professor in the UC College of Engineering and Applied Science. He directs the Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Systems lab at UC. His current research projects involve system dynamics and intelligent control of multi-spacecraft and robots for In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing.

Patrick W. Binning is a Whiting School of Engineering instructor in the Space Systems Engineering program. He is the mission area executive for National Security Space at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. In this role, he is responsible for APL programs that focus on space solutions to critical national security challenges. National Security Space, one of 13 mission areas at APL, provides innovative engineering, advanced technology development, and technical advice to organizations in the national security community.

Gordon Roesler is the president of Robots in Space LLC. He advises investors, government organizations, universities, and companies in ways to expand the space economy, increase the security of our space assets, and revolutionize the way we do business in space.

Dr. Roesler was the Program Manager for the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Prior to that, he was a Senior Physicist at the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research at the University of New South Wales.

In a previous term at DARPA, he created the SUMO program, which demonstrated autonomous robotic grappling of a spacecraft in the laboratory. He also initiated the FREND program, which developed a flight prototype robotic arm for space servicing missions, now being used on both RSGS and NASA’s Restore-L mission. He has held research and management positions in government, industry and academia. He holds a PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bob Friend is a retired Chief Engineer for Boeing's Small Satellite Programs which encompass company efforts to develop spacecraft avionics and software incorporating plug and play features and topologies. Prior to this position, he was Director of Platform Engineering for the Boeing Southern California REgion, where he was responsible for overseeing the Mechanical, Structural, Tooling, Configuration Design, Aerodynamics, GN&C, Acoustics, Aerothermal, Mass Properties, and Propulsion engineering and technology development efforts at four sites.

Andrew Kwas has 44 years with Northrop Grumman, working in advanced space programs specializing in space, advanced manufacturing (AM), AI, astrophysics projects, and in-space manufacturing. He is considered one of the prominent AM experts in the country and has produced numerous papers in AM, as well as advanced satellite technology, in-space manufacturing using advanced additive manufacturing techniques, unique logistics solutions, and miniatruization of spacecraft components.

Andrew is an appointed Research Professor at the University of New Mexico and is on the faculty in the Electrical and Computing Engineering Department, supporting satellite and space research. He is on the Technical Advisory Boards for Virginia Tech, U of Michigan, Cornell, and U of New Mexico. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1978 with two degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Applied Mechanics, and received a Masters degree in 1980 from the University of Missouri Science and Technology in Astrophysics.

Dr. Harknett is Professor, School of Public and International Affairs and Director of the Center for Cyber Strategy and Policy and Co-Director of the Ohio Cyber Range Institute at the University of Cincinnati. He holds an afffilate faculty position with the School of Information Technology at UC and a professorial lectureship at the Diplomatic Academy Vienna, Austria, where he served as Fulbright Professor in 2001. In 2017, he served as inaugural Fulbright Professor in cyber studies at Oxford University, UK and in 2016 as the first Scholar-in-Residence at United States Cyber Command and NSA. His publications and research interests focus on international relations theory and international security studies with particular focus on cyber strategy. He also regularly advises at the US government and state of Ohio levels. He is the co-author of Cyber Persistence Theory: Redefining National Security in Cyberspace (UK: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Bante received her PhD in bioethics and healthcare ethics from St. Louis University, where she also received her master’s in public health with a focus on community health. Her other areas of expertise include nutritional sciences, biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology. An alumna of the UC Women Lead leadership development program, Bante serves as the Associate Vice President for Research for the Research Security & Ethics Office. In addition, she has overseen the review and management of financial conflicts of interest in research at the university and even co-authored a research casebook focusing on the responsible conduct of research at UC.

Neville G. Pinto serves as the 30th President of the University of Cincinnati. A university teacher, researcher and administrator with 40 years of experience in higher education, he became UC’s chief executive on February 20, 2017. He is the first UC president to rise from the ranks of UC’s faculty since Herman Schneider, the founder of cooperative education (1928–1932).

He earned his MS and his PhD in chemical engineering at Penn State University.