Matthew Taylor is the Chief Executive of the RSA, an organisation whose mission is ‘to create the conditions for the enlightened thinking and collaborative action needed to address today's most pressing social challenges.’ Matthew is a frequent media commentator on policy and political issues, and has written for publications including The Guardian, The Observer, New Statesman and Prospect.

In December of 2006, Prof. Zajfman became the 10th President of the Weizmann Institute, becoming, at 47, the youngest president the Institute has ever had.

Prof. Zajfman’s research interests focus on atomic and molecular physics and how, under harsh conditions, molecules are formed in the galaxy’s diffuse and dense interstellar clouds. He also investigates the astrophysical conditions found in star-forming regions or supernova remnants and is working to solve the riddle of star formation.

Kevin Warwick is Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University, England. His main research areas are artificial intelligence, biomedical systems, robotics and cyborgs.

Ms. Shani Elitzur is a PhD student at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where she also received her MSc Cum Laude (2013) and BSc (2007) degrees. Her PhD research subject is “Investigation of Aluminum-Water Reaction for Hydrogen Production and Energy Storage”. During the last two years Shani has won 11 prestigious prizes for excellence in studies and research, among them Ministry of Science Fellowship (2016), 1st Prize and Audience Favorite in a student contest for concepts for reducing the use of oil in transportation in the 3rd EcoMotion conference (2015), 1st Place in Falling Walls Lab Israel, Sept. 2015, and 3rd place in the International Falling Walls Lab in Berlin, Nov. 2015.

Karol's forty years experience as an oncologist has taught him that the effectiveness of treatment is more important than the organisation behind its delivery. While he still remains a Consultant Oncologist at Hammersmith Hospital, where he was Clinical Director for over 15 years, he launched Cancer Partners UK, Britain’s largest independent network of innovative cancer treatment centres in 2009. As a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a Dean and Professor of Medicine at Buckingham University, he writes and lectures regularly on the use of biomarkers and surrogate endpoints by using molecular diagnostics to personalise therapy.

Sophie is currently on a self-designed underground research program, to discover extraordinary tech breakthroughs and the social contexts in which they are built and used. The 'curriculum' requires time amongst weirdos and troublemakers in creative communities, new markets and universities – whether satellites in Buenos Aires, eGaming in Scandinavia, drones in China, astropreneurs in LA.

The aim is to map these technologies over shifting demographics, economics, geopolitics, and hopefully provide a richer understanding of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Sophie previously launched and ran WIRED magazine’s consulting business, bringing the entrepreneurs building the future into boardrooms. She spent two years in Silicon Valley working at Singularity University, a group based at a NASA research park tasked with understanding and harnessing exponential technologies. Prior to California, she worked at Oxford University, bringing more than $120m of investment to a futures research group called the Oxford Martin School. She speaks regularly for corporate audiences on our explosive tech future.

Giles is the CMO of a 15 person tech startup trying to change the world for the better by addressing it all with just 3 words. He has helped take what3words from a quirky idea to a globally recognised brand used by organisations, individuals and governments in over 170 countries. Along the way they have won a Cannes Lion Grand Prix and a D&AD black pencil, and have being covered by the BBC, Huffington Post, CNBC, Wired, The Economist, The Times of india and almost every marketing publication in the world.

Nick Goldman has a first degree in mathematics and received his PhD in molecular evolution from the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, in 1992. He has worked at London's Natural History Museum, the UK Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research (London) and the University of Cambridge before joining the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in 2002. He leads a research group devising novel data analysis techniques for molecular evolution, and has published approximately 100 scientific papers. Nick is also an EMBL Senior Scientist, and a member of EBI's Executive and Strategy Management Committees.

Professor Alexander M. Seifalian works with the Nanotechnology & Regenerative Medicine Commercialisation Centre &
The London BioScience Innovation Centre. He is a professor of Nanotechnology & Regenerative Medicine.

Dr Aurélien Lathuilière is a clinician-scientist in clinical Neurology at the Geneva University Hospital. He received his medical degree from the Geneva University and his PhD in Neuroscience from Patrick Aebischer’s lab at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is engaged in applied research focusing on innovative therapeutic modalities, with a strong emphasis on neurodegenerative disorders.

John Parrington is an Associate Professor in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow in Medicine at Worcester College, Oxford. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles in science journals including Nature, Current Biology, and Journal of Cell Biology. He has extensive experience writing popular science, having published articles in The Guardian, New Scientist, Chemistry World, and The Biologist. He has also written science reports for the Wellcome Trust, British Council, and Royal Society. He is the author of The Deeper Genome, (OUP, 2015).

A native New Yorker, Christopher Choa is based in London and leads the urban development practice for AECOM, the international land-planning and infrastructure consultancy. He speaks frequently about the comparative advantages of cities, and works with city and national governments to develop regional-scale strategies. A graduate of both Harvard and Yale, Christopher serves on the UK executive board of the Urban Land Institute, and is on the external advisory board for the Sustainable Urban Development program at Oxford. He is an appointed member of the Mayor of London’s Infrastructure Delivery Board.

Prof. Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiology researcher based at the University of Westminster, studying how microbial life, and signs of its existence, might persist on the surface of Mars. His third book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch was a Sunday Times Book of the Year.

Tim Spector is a Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College, London and has recently been elected to the prestigious Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 1992, he founded the UK Twins Registry, of 13,000 twins, which is the richest collection of genotypic and phenotypic information worldwide. He held a prestigious European Research Council senior investigator award in epigenetics and is a NIHR Senior Investigator and is ranked as being in the top 1% of the world’s most cited scientists by Thomson-Reuters.

Chris Goodall is a consultant and adviser to investors and companies across the fields of low-carbon energy and the circular economy. He is an academic referee for the journal Biomass and Bioenergy and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Ecologist and Abundance Generation. He is author of four books on energy and the environment, including Ten Technologies to Fix Energy and Climate, The Green Guide for Business and How to Live a Low-carbon Life.

Gero Miesenböck is Waynflete Professor of Physiology and founding Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford in 2007, he held faculty appointments at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Yale University. Gero has received numerous international awards for the invention of optogenetics. He is an external member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Born in Petach Tikva, Israel in 1966, Prof. Asaph Aharoni earned a BSc in agronomy (1994) and an MSc (1996) in agricultural sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD (2002) in plant sciences from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where he also did postdoctoral research. He joined the Weizmann Institute's Department of Plant Sciences in August of 2004.

Prof. Aharoni focuses on the remarkable diversity of chemicals—such as sugars, fatty and amino acids, and vitamins—produced by plant species worldwide that help plants cope with a changing environment. His insights may one day be translated into methods for increasing the nutritional and health value of plants, of particular interest for developing countries where daily sustenance largely depends on plants. In 2010, Dr. Aharoni participated in an international collaborative effort involving 74 researchers from 38 research institutes that produced the full genome of a wild strawberry plant. Prof. Aharoni received the James Heineman Research Award for Biological and Biomedical research in 2010 and the Levinson Prize in Biology in 2008

Mark has been working in the creative software development industry for fourteen years and has worked on big franchises and brands. Joining Lift from its inception – in 2012 – and working as CTO, Mark has built a world class engineering team of many disciplines. Microsoft’s Lift London is a global collective of world-class artists, designers and creative technologists, based in London, designing and developing the future of how people interact with Microsoft’s services and devices. Mark’s work involves architecting long term software to lock business opportunities, driving creative solutions with technology and evangelising Lift’s values.