One of President Obama’s longest-serving speechwriters, Terence Szuplat was the deputy director of the White House Speechwriting Office during Obama’s second term. Before the White House, he served as chief speechwriter to the Secretary of Defense and a professional staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and worked as a freelance speechwriting consultant. As the founder of Global Voices Communications, Szuplat now shares his speechwriting expertise through multimedia keynote presentations and hands-on workshops. He has served on the Biden for President National Finance Committee, as an advisor to National Security Action, and as a board member for Legacies of War.

Established in 1872, The Boston Globe is Boston and New England’s leading source for breaking news and analysis, with coverage from across the world. The Boston Globe has been awarded 26 Pulitzer Prizes throughout its history.

Anne Bahr Thompson is a leader in the branding field who has spent more than two decades working with some of the best-known brands in the world. She is the founder of Onesixtyfourth, a boutique research, trend, and brand consultancy based in New York City and former Executive Director for Strategy and Planning at Interbrand, the leading global brand consultant.

James Timpson (Baron Timpson of Manley, OBE) is Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending, and was previously Chief Executive of the Timpson Group for twenty-two years. His book, The Happy Index: Lessons in Upside-Down Management (2024), was a Sunday Times bestseller.

As CEO of the Timpson Group, he helped the business grow to over 2,100 shops and pioneered the recruitment of ex-offenders. He has served as Chair of the Prison Reform Trust and supports various prison charities and support groups. He was presented with an OBE in 2011 for the training and employment of disadvantaged people. He is also a Tate Trustee, a Deputy Lieutenant of Cheshire and an Albert Medal winner from the RSA.

He lives in Cheshire with his wife Roisin and their 3 children.

Noa Tishby is an Israeli actress, producer, and activist. She starred on the hit Israeli television show Ramat Aviv Gimmel, and created a pathway for Israeli content to be sold into the United States entertainment industry. An unofficial ambassador for the State of Israel, Tishby helped found “Act for Israel,” the first online rapid-response advocacy group devoted to correcting misinformation about Israel and the Middle East.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas is an Associate Professor of Management at Babson College, in Greater Boston. She has recently authored a textbook, Organizational Behavior: Developing Skills for Managers (with Eric Lamm, Pearson, 2020), edited a careers research compendium, Handbook for Research Methods in Careers (with Wendy Murphy, Edward Elgar, 2021), and finished her fifteenth year teaching people, among other things, how to get what they want from their work.

Anjani Trivedi is the Economist's global business correspondent, reporting on global industry trends. Previously, she covered industrial companies across Asia-Pacific for Bloomberg Opinion, and was a columnist for ‘Heard on the Street’, the Wall Street Journal's financial market analysis and commentary column.

Terence Tse is a globally recognised educator, author, and speaker. He is a co-founder and Executive Director of Nexus FrontierTech, an artificial intelligence company. Terence is also a Professor of Entrepreneurship at ESCP Business School.

Jing Tsu is Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature at Yale University, where she is the chair of the Council on East Asian Studies. Tsu is a 2016 Guggenheim fellow and the author of two scholarly books, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937 (Stanford University Press) and Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Harvard University Press).

Deborah Tuerkheimer is a professor of law at Northwestern University where she teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law, evidence, and feminist legal theory. Tuerkheimer is a leading authority on sexual violence and a frequent media commentator who’s often quoted in high-profile publications such as the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post and The Atlantic and frequently appears on national television and radio.

Steven Ujifusa is the author of Barons of the Sea, an LA Times bestseller, and A Man and His Ship, chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of 2012. He received his B.A. in History from Harvard College and his Master’s in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.

Award-winning former editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine, and a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair, Unger is the author of the New York Times bestseller House of Bush, House of Saud. His work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, Esquire, New York, and elsewhere.

Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh was born in Singapore in 1977. He is currently Editor-in-Chief at Jom, a new weekly digital magazine covering arts, culture, politics, business, technology and more in Singapore, and is a freelance contributor to the Economist’s Intelligence Unit.

From 2006-13 he worked for the Economist in Singapore, first as Associate Director at the Economist Corporate Network, then Senior Editor at Economist Insights. He has written for a variety of publications, including the Economist and the Straits Times.

Georgios Varouxakis is Professor of the History of Political Thought in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London, and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought.

His work to date has focused primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century political thought (British and French). He has also written on political thought on nationalism and cosmopolitanism, empire, and on the intellectual history of ideas of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ and attitudes towards the EEC/EU. Previously, he has been Research Fellow at University College London, Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University and Senior Research Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

He grew up in Crete and was educated at the University of Athens (BA) and University College London (MA and PhD).

Jeevan Vasagar is a writer and award-winning journalist, and Contributing Editor at Tortoise Media. From 2015 to 2017, he was Singapore and Malaysia correspondent for the Financial Times, travelling the region to report on demands for political reform, technological innovation and the growing influence of China.

Before that he was the FT’s Berlin correspondent, reporting on a period in which a vast influx of refugees transformed German politics and society. He also led coverage of the German backlash against Silicon Valley. He spent 12 years at the Guardian, in a range of roles including East Africa correspondent in Nairobi, and education editor in London. His reporting on undergraduate admissions at Cambridge University won a CIPR Education Journalism award.

His writing has also appeared in the Economist, the LA Times and the New Statesman.

Michael Veltri helps organizations and individuals perform at their best, deliver high-impact results without burnout, and drive transformation in their businesses and lives.

Sam Venis is a journalist and an independent strategist working with startups and executives on their narrative strategy, brand positioning, cultural manifestos and growth.

He has written on technology, art and culture for publications including the Guardian, the New Republic, Spike Art Magazine, The Block, Airmail, and Document Journal. His work with executives and startups focusses on the ways that economics, technology and cultural systems intersect, and he also writes the newsletter Technical Personae.

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He is based in Brooklyn.

Lee Vinsel is a professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, and a co-author, with Andrew Russell, of The Innovation Delusion (Crown, 2020).

U.S. Army Colonel Tom Vossler (retired) taught military history, strategy, and leadership at the U.S. Army War College and is a former director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, PA. He has published several books on the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam, and has acted as a consultant to the History Channel and other media companies, advising them on Civil War history.With Jeffrey D. McCausland, he is the author of the forthcoming book Battle Tested.

Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD (Lausanne, Switzerland) and holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. He is the author of Digital Vortex and Orchestrating Transformation.

A globally recognized voice in education, Tony Wagner is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute; prior to this appointment, Tony held a variety of positions at Harvard University for more than twenty years, including four years as an Expert in Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab. Tony’s influential and widely read books on schools and education include The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators.

Paul Waldman is an opinion writer at the Washington Post and the author or co-author of four books about media and politics.

Jesse Walker is an editor at Reason magazine who has written on topics ranging from pirate radio to copyright law to political paranoia. Walker has also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon, The New Republic, L.A. Weekly, and National Review.

Owen Walker is the Financial Times’ European Banking Correspondent, and an award-winning journalist, who has covered business and investment issues in the US, UK and continental Europe.

He was formerly Managing Editor of Agenda, a Financial Times publication for US corporate directors, and Asset Management Correspondent. He was named joint business journalist of the year by the London Press Club in 2020, and in 2021 won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers award.

Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, an international social justice philanthropy with a $13 billion endowment and $600 million in annual grant making. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been included on numerous annual media lists, including Time’s annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, Rolling Stone’s 25 People Shaping the Future, Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative People, and OUT Magazine’s Power 50.

Wanda Wallace is the President and CEO of Leadership Forum, Inc., an international consulting group that works with organizations on issues of talent acquisition, retention and strategic thinking. Prior to founding LFI, she spent was Associate Dean of Executive Education at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and Executive Vice President of Duke Corporate Education, Inc.

Named by House leadership as the Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, Wasniewski is the fourth person to serve in the role. He previously served nearly a decade in the House Clerk’s Office of History and Preservation.

John Wass is the CEO of Profit Isle, a trusted partner whose unique, proprietary profit analytics have produced 10-30% year-on-year profit increases on over $100 billion in client revenues. He was a key member of the management team that grew Staples from three stores to over 1,000, serving as SVP, and he was CEO of WaveMark, an RFID (Internet of Things) company that Cardinal Health acquired to spearhead its hospital strategy. He is a graduate of Princeton and MIT, and with Jonathan Byrnes, he is the author of Choose Your Customer, from McGraw-Hill.

Luc Wathieu is a behavioral economist, professor of marketing at Georgetown University, and renowned expert on consumer behavior, analytics, and marketing innovations. He enjoys a global academic career that brought him from Brussels to Paris, Hong Kong, Boston, Berlin, and now Washington, D.C., where he lives on a small farm with his large family, two horses, and a dog.

Justin Webb is the longest serving presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programme, ‘Today’, and presents the hugely popular 'Americast' podcast.

He has worked for the BBC since 1984, previously serving as a reporter for 'Today', Foreign Affairs Correspondent, presenter of 'Breakfast News', Europe and Washington Correspondent, and as North American Editor. He regularly writes for The Times (London) and the Radio Times.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is the co-author of Innovation As Usual and author of What's Your Problem?, both from a Harvard Business Review Press. An expert on innovation, problem-solving and thinking, Thomas has worked with managers in nearly all parts of the globe and his research has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, BBC Radio, Bloomberg Businessweek and the Financial Times.

Jesse Wegman joined the editorial board of the New York Times in 2013, and has since written close to 600 signed and unsigned editorials on the Supreme Court, politics, law, and justice. He was previously a senior editor at The Daily Beast and Newsweek, a legal news editor at Reuters, and the managing editor of The New York Observer.

A leading Middle East scholar, Wehrey’s writings on failed states, the Islamic State, and U.S. policy have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and Foreign Affairs. He has been among the few Western researchers and journalists to visit Libya continuously since the 2011 revolution, reporting from the front-lines of the battle against the Islamic State’s strongholds in Sirte and Benghazi. A twenty-one year military veteran, he has served across the Middle East and North Africa. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and currently works as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC.

Julie Wernau is a journalist and audio producer whose work explores the intersections of health, policy, business, addiction, mental illness, and public safety. She is a reporter and producer for the health policy podcast Tradeoffs. Previously, she reported for The Wall Street Journal, where she traveled across the U.S. covering mental illness and addiction, and worked as a business reporter at The Chicago Tribune and a crime reporter at her hometown newspaper, The Day. Her reporting on the fentanyl crisis and psychosis has earned two Pulitzer Prize nominations, as well as awards from the New York Press Club and the Newswomen’s Club of New York. She lives in Georgia, where she is also co-founder of Steel Pioneer Fire Cooking, an outdoor cooking school.

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A graduate of Yale and the University of Virginia School of Law, Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) was nominated by President Bill Clinton to be Rhode Island’s US Attorney in 1994. Her served as Rhode Island’s US Attorney until 1998, when he became State Attorney General. He was elected to the United States Senate in 2007.

Lis Wiehl is a former legal analyst for Fox News. She is also the former co-host of WOR radio's “WOR Tonight with Joe Concha and Lis Wiehl,” has served as legal analyst and reporter for NBC News and NPR’s All Things Considered and as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office, and was a tenured professor of law at the University of Washington. Today, she appears frequently on CNN as a legal analyst.Lis Wiehl is considered one of the nation’s most prominent trial lawyers and highly regarded commentators. She earned her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and her Master of Arts in Literature from the University of Queensland.Wiehl is the author of 19 books including Hunting The Unabomber, Hunting Charles Manson, The 51% Minority, which won the 2008 award for Books for a Better Life in the motivational category, and Winning Every Time.

Robert Wilkinson is a Senior Lecturer on Public Policy and Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he teaches graduate courses on negotiation and leadership effectiveness. In 2023, he won the Harvard Kennedy School Carballo Award for Excellence in Teaching. Rob's non-profit and public sector clients include the United Nations,World Bank, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Red Cross and several others. Corporate clients include IBM, Merck, ExxonMobil, Bank of America and many more. Since 2011, Rob has regularly consulted for the White House, supporting the Leadership Development Team within the White House Presidential Personnel Office. Previously, Rob worked overseas for 15 years, spending three years in Rwanda working with Hutu and Tutsi communities, two years working with the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Angola, and 18 months in Laos, consulting on a variety of community development programs. Rob also led a 2-year Security Sector Reform
project in Burundi, bringing together government and rebel forces to support the formation of a unified military and police force. He began his overseas work in Nicaragua, in both Sandinista and Contra areas. Rob earned his Masters of Science (MS) from Stanford University, and Bachelors of Science (BS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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Tom Wright is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a regular contributing writer at The Atlantic, and the author of the book All Measures Short of War (Yale University Press, 2017). His book with Colin Kahl, Aftershocks, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press.

Ben Wright has been a Political Correspondent for the BBC since 2008. After two years leading the political coverage for BBC Breakfast and the One O'Clock News, Ben became the Chief Political Correspondent for Radio 4 in 2012, appearing daily on the Today Programme, World at One and PM.

He has covered a general election, budgets, Presidential visits, Prime Ministerial trips and an expenses scandal. Wright is the author of Order! Order! The Rise and Fall of Political Drinking which was published by Duckworth in 2016.

A longtime food and travel journalist, Wulfhart writes the “Carry-On” column for the New York Times. Her work has also been published in Travel + Leisure, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, the Wall Street Journal Magazine, and elsewhere.

Ron Wyden is the United States Senator from Oregon, first elected in 1995, and is Chair of the Senate Finance Committee. CHUTZPAH NATION is his first book.

Deputy national editor at the New York Times, Jia Lynn Yang has edited and published stories about economics, immigration, China, business history, and political history. She was previously the deputy national security editor for the Washington Post, her writing has appeared in the Post and in Fortune, and she has been a guest on NPR’s Morning Edition, The Diane Rehm Show, and PBS Newshour.

Jonathan Yates is Executive Director of the Youth Endowment Fund, a £200m charitable fund focused on integrating young people into society, and designed the UK’s National Citizen Service. He has appeared on BBC News, Sky News, ITV News, Radio 4’s ‘The Moral Maze’, Radio 4’s ‘You and Yours’, BBC London Radio, LBC, local BBC Radio stations, and has been featured in the Independent, the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

Mitch Yockelson is a professor of military history and the chief historian for the United States World War One Centennial Commission. He leads the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Archival Recovery Program and investigates the theft of historical documents. He has taught at the United States Naval Academy and is currently a professor in Norwich University (Northfield, VT) Military History master’s program. He is the author of five books and has written numerous book reviews and articles published in professional journals, popular magazines and newspapers including The Washington Post and The New York Times. He lectures internationally as one of the foremost authorities on military history and has served as an on-screen consultant to the History Channel, PBS, and the Pentagon Channel.

Tomoko Yokoi is a writer, management researcher and entrepreneur. She is a regular Forbes.com contributor on digital transformation and innovation. With a background in international affairs and business, she focuses on stories at the intersection of business, technology and society.

Howard Yu is a professor of strategic management and innovation at the prestigious IMD Business School in Switzerland, as well as the director of IMD’s signature program, the Advanced Strategic Management executive education course. He also develops customized training programs for large companies, and his clients include Mars, Maersk, Proctor & Gamble, Nestle, Sanofi, Novartis, and Lego, among many others. He writes regularly for Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and the South China Morning Post.

A Washington Post reporter since 2005, Zak has covered subjects ranging from from the Vanity Fair Oscar party to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the military drawdown in Iraq. He’s previously written for Entertainment Weekly and for the Buffalo News in his hometown of Buffalo, New York.

Born in Iran and raised as a member of the Baha’i faith, Payam Zamani is the founder, chairman, and CEO of One Planet, a socially responsible hybrid tech firm that owns and operates a suite of online technology and media businesses and is an early stage investor. He is also the Founder and the Editor-in-Chief of BahaiTeachings.org.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the President of Ukraine, a position he has held since 2019. He was named the Financial Times' and Time's Person of the Year for 2022, and amongst many international honours was most recently awarded the 2023 Chatham House Prize.

Previously, he studied law at the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics and went on to pursue a career in entertainment, creating the production company Kvartal 95 and portraying a fictional Ukrainian president in the series Servant of the People.

James Zogby is founder and president of the Arab American Institute and a senior advisor to the polling firm Zogby International. He writes a weekly column That appears in twenty Arab newspapers and hosts a weekly program on Abu Dhabi television. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Democratic National Committee, and co-chair of the DNC’s Resolutions Committee, he is the author of Arab Voices (Palgrave).

Justin Zorn is a writer, policy maker, and mindfulness teacher. A Harvard and Oxford-trained specialist in economic and environmental policy, he has served as legislative director to three Members of Congress, a Fulbright Scholar, a Truman National Security Fellow, a Senior Adviser to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and has written for The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and CNN.