Dr. Melanie Garson is cyber and tech geopolitics policy specialist and Director of Knowledge & Insights at ISTARI. She is also an Associate Professor in International Security in the Department of Political Science at University College London where she teaches
course “From Cyberwarfare to Robots: The Future of Conflict in the Digital Age”, and is a public speaker who connects the dots between new and emerging tech and its potential impact on security, foreign policy, diplomacy and the world order.

Dr. Garson worked for four years as the Cyber Policy and Tech Geopolitics Lead at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and is also a lawyer and mediator. Melanie regularly provides commentary in on geopolitics and tech in podcasts, webinars and at major media outlets including Bloomberg, BBC, Sky, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, France 24, and DeutscheWelle.

Jennifer Howard-Grenville is the Diageo Professor in Organisation Studies at Cambridge Judge Business School and Head of its Organisational Theory and Information Systems group. Her research explores organisational change, sustainability, and culture, with in-depth studies
across industries like manufacturing and energy. A Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, she has published extensively and served as Deputy Editor of the Academy of Management Journal.

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.

Professor Danny Ralph is the Director of the Centre for Risk Studies (CRS) for the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He is a world-leading expert on risk management and leads the Business School’s efforts to understand new and emergent risks for corporate leaders. He also acts as the Director of Studies in Management Studies and is a Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge.