SPEAKERS [2024]

Penrose Steering Committee member, journalist, entrepreneur, and legendary investor Esther Dyson will join us onstage. Esther has had a front-row seat to science commercialization for more than four decades and instinctively understands how to think about what’s next. Esther sees more companies, deals, ideas and IP than anyone we know, and her portfolio spans the world. It is a delight to have her with us.

Arguably the #1 technology journalist in America, Steven Levy, Editor-At-Large of Wired magazine, will be with us at Penrose. Steven’s ongoing work chronicling scientific progress has important lessons for us all. Stephen will not just be asking the questions this time, however. We’ll hear from him about what he’s seen and is seeing, patterns of success, and telling stories that move people. An author of four books on science and technology, Levy’s previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and The New Yorker.

Jamie Beard is a geothermal pioneer and the best kind of rabble-rouser. Jamie was on the cover of Wired last year for her work with Project InnerSpace and what she calls the “geothermal imperative.” Jamie will break her moonshot down into pieces we can accomplish, including how to fund it. And as someone who delights in deliberately provocative terms like “green fracking,” Jamie will also highlight the most important success factor of all: collaboration across ideological lines.

Penrose Steering Committee member Mini Kahlon, PhD, ran the Clinical & Translational Sciences Institute at UCSF and Founding Vice Dean of Dell Medical School. Mini will share her latest research and some very exciting results in the non-clinical intervention space. Mini’s layperson-driven approach upends almost every assumption you likely have about how to deliver transformative care for those struggling with chronic disease. She’ll also talk with us about what’s next, including plans to scale up. Mini will be joined by John Wilbanks.

Author John Markoff will be onstage, not as a moderator but under the microscope, so to speak. No one has told the story of science as well, or as clearly, as Markoff. John is best known for his award-winning work covering technology at The New York Times for 28 years. He is also the author of eight books, most recently a gorgeous biography of pioneer Stewart Brand titled Whole Earth, a must-read if you haven’t already purchased a copy.

Helix Nanotechnologies co-founder and CEO Hannu Rajaniemi, PhD, is an mRNA platform entrepreneur pioneering a new technology with dramatic cross-category potential. This doctor of Mathematics is also an epic storyteller — a sci-fi novelist with a cult following. His novels include The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, The Causal Angel, and Summerland.

Serial founder, innovator, and climate scientist Anna Scott, PhD, will join us to talk about our oceans — the dramatic rise of ocean mining for rare earth materials, what we can actually do about it, and more.

Leader of the Office of Science and Innovation and Executive Vice President at the Allen Institute, Kathryn Richmond, PhD, will explore new models for both funding and executing science. No one in the world has spent more time at the frontier of science and metascience than Kathryn. What are the new roles we need to play? What is the best role for academia? For government? For private institutes and foundations? What can we learn and cross-apply? What’s gone wrong? What absolutely shouldn’t change?

Anastasia Gamick, Co-founder and COO at Convergent Research, will share her organization’s specific contribution to metascience: the Focused Research Organization, or FRO. With that as her anchor, Anastasia is building a decentralized yet cooperative ecosystem of specialized partners working shoulder-to-shoulder. Anastasia is the definition of intersectionality with a background that expands neuroscience, robotics, and COVID-19 response.

Penrose Steering Committee member and President of the Santa Fe Institute, David Krakauer, will join as interviewer and moderator. David’s playful curiosity is one part of his genius (his intellectual courage is certainly another). He is complexity’s chief poet and practitioner, and we can’t think of anyone better to push us to the edge of our thinking and beyond.

Nancy Harvey’s quest for impact and insatiable interest in science has taken her to every corner of the science world - research, university innovation and entrepreneurship, public and private tech company leadership and now deep tech venture investing with Illinois Ventures. Nancy will join us as an interviewer and moderator; her ruthlessly incisive questions helped shape Penrose from the very beginning as the first member of our Steering Committee.

Perhaps best known as a co-founder of 23andMe, and currently co-founder and CEO of Precis.ly, Linda Avey is a brilliant scientist-turned-investor. Linda now sits at the intersection of breakthrough research and translational & venture funding. Linda will join us as an interviewer and moderator who has lived every side of the puzzle firsthand.

John Wilbanks is Head of Data at Astera Institute and former Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks. The leading voice in the field of open science and an advocate for the unrestricted sharing of research data to accelerate scientific progress, he’ll join us onstage to discuss outcomes with data and data science.

Josh Jones-Dilworth, founder of JDI and co-founder of Penrose, is a preeminent storyteller of science across a wide variety of industries and domains. He’ll serve as our co-MC.

Chair of the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas at Austin, Karl Gebhardt, PhD, dispenses craftily with all manner of administrative tasks and mostly spends his time backing brilliant faculty and staff. Karl initiated one of UT’s most famous and consequential projects to date — HETDEX — the current belle of the ball at the McDonald Observatory (though Karl would surely object to that characterization). Karl will join us to discuss dark energy, time machines, how art inspires science (and vice versa), and even aliens.

Erin Cooper, PhD, is a Research Scientist in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas and the Data Manager of the groundbreaking HETDEX project at the McDonald Observatory. As her colleague and department Chair Karl Gebhardt, PhD, has said of Erin: “She doesn’t just run HETDEX, she is HETDEX.” Erin will help get us ready to make the most of our time at the epicenter of the world’s largest dark sky reserve.

Maria Streshinsky is the Executive Editor at Wired. She’s written about everything from how to find the clean baseload energy we need to save the world, to what Chistopher Nolan’s most recent movie Oppenheimer can teach us about AI. Before Wired, she was the Editor-in-Chief of Pacific Standard, an award-winning magazine she launched in 2012. Streshinsky also served for many years as the Managing Editor of The Atlantic, where she won the Atlantic Media Company award for editing excellence. She has also worked for the Department of the Interior in Washington, DC.

Sanjay Srivatsan, PhD, is a Professor at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle and most recently opened the Srivatsan Lab there. At the lab, he and his team work on developing technologies that use the sequences of molecules like RNA or protein to reveal important biological relationships between molecules and between cells. His vision is to use his data to train models that can then generate new instances of biology so far unexplored by evolution. Srivatsan will be joining Hannu Rajaniemi, PhD, onstage.

Award-winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, Kirk Lynn will be joining us on stage to perform a one-man, one-act show written specifically for Penrose. Kirk is one of five artistic directors of the Rude Mechs theater collective and head of playwriting in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin. He uses scientific research and experimentation in all his productions.

Adam Mastroianni, PhD, will be helping us wrap our time together. As a Doctor of Psychology, Adam studies how people perceive their social world with a specific focus right now on their theories and misperceptions of the changing world around them. He’s a master of improvisation who loves doing stand-up, and he combines all of the above to teach MBA students about negotiation. Check out his immensely popular blog and newsletter at www.experimental-history.com or read a seminal piece here.

New Yorker Writer Carolyn Kormann – who writes about energy, climate change, and the environment — will be moderating our frontier bioscience discussion. She’s been featured in Harpers, Daedalus, Porter, NPR Music, and VQR, and she won a best-food-coverage award from the James Beard Foundation. Carolyn briefly lived in Marfa and uniquely embodies the intersection of art and science that is a pillar of Penrose. Eclectically brilliant, Carolyn will bring a wealth of knowledge and storytelling to our stage.

Amber Case studies the interactions between humans and technology and how technology affects culture. As founder of The Calm Tech Institute, she works on new standards for designing harmonious human-tech interactions that improve our lives – while also working on design, governance, and AI as a Research Director at the Metagovernance Project. A multi-award-winning technologist, Amber, will be joining us on stage to talk more about Positive AI Futures. 

CEO and Executive Vice President at the Society of Petroleum Engineers Simon Seaton will be joining Jamie Beard on stage. Simon is responsible for leading SPE’s efforts in advancing the oil, gas, and energy sectors. With a focus on the evolving energy landscape, his leadership includes overseeing SPE's global operations across multiple regions, including Houston, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, and London.

President, CEO and co-founder of Arcadia Science, as well as Chief of Strategy and Board member at the Astera Institute, Seemay Chou, PhD, leads a team that applies an evolutionary lens to accelerate the purposeful discovery of nature’s greatest innovations. Before starting Arcadia, Seemay was the assistant professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF. She received her PhD in Molecular Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and is especially fond of studying venomous blood-eating parasites. 

S. Craig Watkins is the Executive Director of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, where he researches the equity implications of computer-mediated technologies. With his team, Craig explores the racial equity implications of AI, with a focus on implicit biases. An author and expert in media technology, Craig has also spent time exploring how technological innovation built the hip-hop economy. 

Colin Leyden serves as the Environmental Defense Fund's state director of Texas, where he coordinates and promotes EDF’s political engagement in Texas. He also helps manage the state's power grids, pushing for reform to make them more resilient and less carbon-intensive. Colin will join Jamie and Simon for our discussion on energy transition. 

Chief Technology Officer at the Allen Institute and Penrose Steering Committee member Andy Hickl will be joining us onstage as well. At the Allen Institute, Andy leads teams leveraging computational techniques to accelerate data-driven breakthroughs in bioscience. Andy has spent decades working in natural language processing, AI, machine learning, and computer vision at Intel, Microsoft, Accenture, Vulcan, and more, in collaboration with DARPA, IARPA, and the U.S. Department of Defense. 

Daniel Goodwin, PhD, is the Executive Director and co-founder of Homeworld Collective and will join our metascience talk. His mission is to see synthetic biology reach its industrial potential of creating atomically precise, infinitely scalable tools that define the next era of physical technology. In addition to synthetic biology, Daniel's experience spans neuroscience, computer science, and climate biotech. 

Dakota Gruener is an Astera Climate Fellow in the geoengineering space, with a particular focus on big data modeling and outcomes prediction for novel interventions (tipping points, timing, and efficacy). An omnologist by both nature and training, Dakota’s previous work runs the gamut from privacy-protecting digital identification for the more than 1 billion people in the world who don’t have an official ID, to data management tools for use in the humanitarian sector, to vaccine access and equity, to venture philanthropy. Dakota was also a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur; she’ll join Anna Scott and Nancy onstage to talk about saving the planet in general, and solar radiation modification (SRM) in particular. 

Julie Crabil, co-founder and Chief Communications Officer at Fathom.org, will join Josh Jones-Dilworth on stage as our co-MC. At Fathom, Julie is focused on helping society successfully navigate the transition to a world with AI. A veteran of science-driven and emerging technology ventures in almost every domain, Julie brings energy matched by few and a wealth of strategic experience and knowledge about what it takes to tell the story of science well.

Cate Hall, CEO of the Astera Institute, helps rebuild the machine of science. By incubating high-leverage ideas in their earliest stages, Astera seeks to effect change at a systemic level via entrepreneurial experimentation. Kate is a former Supreme Court attorney and the ex-No. 1 female poker player in the world. Before joining Astera, she co-founded and served as COO and later co-CEO of Alvea, a pandemic medicine company that set the record for the fastest startup to take a drug candidate to a Phase 1 clinical trial.