Speaker & Programs Committee

SPEAKER & PROGRAMS COMMITTEE

Larry Christenson,
Co-chair

Don MacKenzie,
Co-chair

Our speakers hail from a broad spectrum of professionals, artists, civic leaders, journalists, authors, entrepreneurs, and scientists.

Past Speakers

Ban Ki-moon

Ban Ki-moon is a South Korean politician and diplomat who served as the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 2007 to December 2016. Before becoming the Secretary-General, Ban was a career diplomat in South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the United Nations.

Robert S. Spalding III

Robert S. Spalding III is a retired United States Air Force brigadier general. He currently, serves as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His work focuses on U.S.–China relations, economic and national security, and the Asia-Pacific military balance.

Katrine Joensen

CEO, Innovation Centre Denmark, Consul General.

Krutika Kuppalli, M.D.

Krutika Kuppalli, M.D., is assistant professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina, vice chair of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Global Health Committee, and Emerging Leader in Biosecurity Fellow at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She has worked in Ethiopia, India, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Haiti.

Jeremy Schwartz

Jeremy Schwartz is the Lead Flight Software engineer at Zipline. Jeremy started his career with a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, with a focus on robotics. From there, he spent several years working on autonomous vehicles of all types — on the ground, in the water, in the air, and in space. For example, he took part in the DARPA Urban Grand
Challenge, and the DARPA F6 project to develop cluster flight control algorithms for a swarm of satellites in orbit. Jeremy joined Zipline about six months after the company began, and is responsible for all the code that runs onboard the vehicle.