Previously the Director of the University of Cambridge’s MBA Programme, Dr Simon Learmount is also a Lecturer in Corporate Governance, a Fellow of the Centre for Business Research (CBR) and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has published extensively on the convergence of national systems of corporate governance, organisational trust and cooperation and is a world-renowned expert and lecturer on effective corporate governance of risk.

Dr Manuel Hepfer leads research at ISTARI and is a Research Affiliate at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. Before joining ISTARI, he completed a PhD in cybersecurity and Strategic Management at the University of Oxford. His research won several awards and appeared in academic and practitioner journals such as MIT Sloan Management Review and was covered by the Financial Times.

David White is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and Co-founder at Axio— a company with an innovative methodology and software that provides companies visibility to their cyber risk and enables them to prioritize investments to protect their business and employees. 

David leads Axio’s federal and academy team and consults with various critical infrastructure clients on cyber risk.

He is an expert in cybersecurity frameworks and maturity models, cyber risk quantification, and cyber insurance, and he works with clients across multiple sectors, from energy to entertainment. Before Axio, David worked in the CERT Program at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, a cybersecurity research program primarily funded by the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. He provided technical leadership for a portfolio of cybersecurity maturity models, diagnostic methods, research, and training.