Featured Speaker Bios

Philip Beesley is a multidisciplinary Canadian artist and architect. Beesley’s research is recognized for its pioneering contributions to the rapidly emerging field of 'living' responsive interactive architecture and art. His creative projects are widely exhibited and published. He has been featured twice at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (Hylozoic Ground - 2010, Grove - 2021), with numerous publications, sculptures and installations and a series of TED talks. His experimental architecture explores subtle phenomena at the outer edges of current technology, and has led to a diverse array of projects, from haute couture collections to complex electronic systems that can sense, react and learn. This work frequently quotes Teilhard de Chardin's integrative visions.

He directs Living Architecture Systems Group (LASG), an international group of researchers and creators. The work of the LASG evolves through collaborative exchanges with an international network of scientists, engineers, and artists. Beesley is University Professor at the University of Waterloo and a professor at the European Graduate School. For more information: www.lasg.ca; https://www.philipbeesleystudioinc.com/

Dr Shima Beigi earned a BSc, two MSc degrees, and a PhD from the University of Bristol and the University of Oxford. Her area of expertise is in the resilience of complex systems and smart city design. She is CEO and Founder of Triple AI Therapeutics for Mindful Smart Cities and is a senior scientist at Human Energy working on techno-social dilemmas.

Jonathan Blake is Associate Director of Programs at the Berggruen Institute, where he directs the research projects and wider research agenda for the Planetary Program. Blake is the author of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2019) and, with BI Senior Vice President Nils Gilman, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford University Press, expected in 2024). He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation, Columbia Global Policy Initiative, and the Chumir Foundation. His writing on planetary politics, governance, ethnic conflict, migration, and more have appeared in Noema, where he’s Associate Editor, The Atlantic, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and scholarly journals. He holds a B.A. in political science from UC Berkeley and a M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

Johan Bollen is a professor of Informatics and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He is a founding director of the Center for Social and Biomedical Complexity at Indiana University, and a fellow at the Center for Urban Mental Health institute of the University of Amsterdam and the Synergy Program for Analyzing Resilience and Critical transitionS at Wageningen University. He has published broadly on questions at the intersection of social complexity, cultural evolution, collective intelligence, health, and AI. Johan lives in Bloomington, Indiana where he performs as a resident DJ at two of its pre-eminent dance clubs (@deejayangst).

Recently named the Tharseō CEO of the Year by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the #3 CEO in the world by Inc. and a leading Social Capital CEO by International Business Times, Bob Chapman is very intentional about building a better world. Chapman is CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, a $3.6 billion capital equipment firm that he transformed by applying a unique blend of strategy and culture to a struggling $20 million business. Today, Barry-Wehmiller is the combination of 130+ acquisitions and 12,000 teammates in 28 countries. Chapman’s journey from traditional management to “Truly Human Leadership” inspired his WSJ best-seller, "Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family", which has sold 90,000 copies and is available in seven languages. A TEDx Talk and a Harvard case study, now taught at 70 business schools, also profile his leadership philosophy. Chapman is also focused on bringing these principles to education through initiatives with Fordham University, other business schools and several secondary education institutions.

Anne Clin (known on Wikipedia as User:Risker) has been contributing to English Wikipedia as a volunteer since 2005. She has developed featured articles, worked on anti-vandalism campaigns, addressed major paid editing rings, and participated in internal dispute resolution at all levels within English Wikipedia. Ms. Clin has also worked at the global level on specialized committees addressing funding, election management, and developing a global Wikimedia movement strategy. Outside of her Wikipedia and Wikimedia work, she is now retired after a 35-year career in healthcare administration. She resides outside of Toronto, Canada. (Photo credit: Jason Kruger)

John D. Cressler received his PhD from Columbia University in 1990. He is currently Regents Professor, Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics, and the Ken Byers Teaching Fellow in Science and Religion, in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research interests center on silicon-based heterostructure (Si/SiGe) electronic and photonic devices, circuits, and systems. He and his team have published over 800 scientific papers in these areas, and he has graduated 70 PhD students over his 31-year academic career. He has published a number of books, both non-fiction and historical fiction, and he has received a number of awards for both his teaching and research.

Ilia Delio, OSF holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Christian Theology at Villanova University. She is the author of twenty-four books, including The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science and the Human Journey which won a 2022 Gold Nautilus Book Award, Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology and Consciousness, a finalist for the 2019 Michael Ramsey Prize and The Unbearable Wholeness ofBeing: God, Evolution and the Power of Love, for which she won the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award and a 2014 Catholic Press Association Book Award in Faith and Science. She is founder of the Center for Christogenesis, an online educational resource based on the vision of Teilhard de Chardin and, more broadly, the integration of science, religion and culture in the 21^st century.

Jacob G. Foster is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He aims to understand what makes complex wholes more intelligent than their parts. Jacob studies the social production of collective intelligence, the evolutionary dynamics of ideas, and the co-construction of culture and cognition. Jacob is co-Director of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, a program that aims to build community, collaboration, and creative thinking among early career scholars interested in the study of mind, cognition, and intelligence of diverse forms and formats—from ants and apes to humans and AI. He was originally trained in physics, starting with a BS from Duke University. After studying mathematical physics at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, he received his PhD in statistical physics and complex systems from the University of Calgary. He trained as a social scientist as a postdoctoral scholar and research assistant professor at the University of Chicago. From 2020-2021, he was an Infosys Member at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Zann Gill, former Research Scientist/ Program Developer at NASA, focusing on collaborative intelligence (hybrid human - AI collaboration), M. Arch. Harvard, pivoted to become a sci-fi story-teller. Her books, from ALICE in Cinderland (climate change, fires, violence) to SQUID (our dying ocean lifeline), are sci-fi satires about technology and our future in a generative AI world. A founder of GAIL (Generative AI Lab & Library), she holds patents from the AI division of the US patent office on GAIL, a SaaS network for AI empowering human talent and beneficial uses of AI. See https://zanngill.com/ and https://gail.global and https://pow.earthdecks.com

John F Haught is a leading Teilhard de Chardin scholar. He is Distinguished Research Professor of Theology at Georgetown University. He is the author of 24 books on topics related to science, religion, evolution and ecology. His most recent books are God After Einstein: What Is Really Going on in the Universe? (Yale University Press, 2022) and The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin (Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 2021).

Sheila Hassell Hughes is a scholar, teacher, leader, and poet whose personal and professional mission is to “see, speak, and stitch connections.” Her research, published in peer-reviewed journals such as American Quarterly, Literature and Religion, Literature and Theology, and Studies in American Indian Literature, has focused on the intersections of literature, gender, and religion, with attention to the work of Louise Erdrich, in particular. She holds a BA (UBC) and MA (University of Toronto) in English and was one of the first to earn an interdisciplinary PhD in Women’s Studies (Emory University). Dr. Hughes is a member of the Human Energy Advisory Board, Chair of the organization's Education Steering Committee, and Co-Chair of the N2 Conference. Sheila’s blog, The Labyrinth: Reflections on the Journey, can be found at thelabyrinth-hassellhughes.blogspot.com.

Michael Jacob received his Ph.D. in Neurobiology (2011) and M.D. (2013) from the University of Rochester. He is currently a researcher with Human Energy, an Assistant Professor at UCSF, and Psychiatrist at the SFVA Hospital. His scholarly work incorporates diverse, interdisciplinary threads to develop new perspectives on how mental experience comes to life and how it unravels in mental illness. Drawing from experimental neuroscience, his work is focused on meaning-making, from brain cells to the noosphere. As a clinician, he guides individuals to find their calling in life and the noosphere.

Dr. Jay Jakub is the Chief of Staff of the Economics of Mutuality (EoM) organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, though he is based outside Washington, D.C. He is also the Executive Director of the EoM Foundation and is a founding member of the Board of the Jubilee Economics Foundation, both in Switzerland. Jay serves on the Board of Livanta, a US healthcare advocacy and IT company, is on the Advisory Board of the Thompson Family Office in Richmond, Virginia, and is an advisor to Singapore’s Alliance for Action on Corporate Purpose. He is an international speaker, author, former senior civil servant, and former Senior Director for External Research at Mars, Inc., maker of iconic brands like M&Ms, Snickers, Mars Bar, Wrigley’s gum, Pedigree pet food and more. Jay is the co-author of Completing Capitalism: Heal Business to Heal the World (Berrett-Koehler, 2017 & CITIC Press Beijing in Mandarin, 2018) and is a contributing co-author of Putting Purpose into Practice: The Economics of Mutuality (Oxford University Press, 2021). Jay’s doctorate is from Oxford University, St. John’s College, his MA is from Lancaster University, and his BA is from American University in Washington, DC.

Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a public intellectual; he is the creator, writer and host of Closer To Truth, the PBS/public television series on cosmos (cosmology/physics), consciousness (brain/mind), meaning (philosophy of religion), now in its 22nd Season (www.closertotruth.com). Dr. Kuhn has written or edited over 30 books, including The Mystery of Existence: Why is there Anything At All? (with John Leslie); Closer To Truth: Challenging Current Belief; Closer To Truth: Science, Meaning and the Future; The Library of Investment Banking; How China’s Leaders Think (featuring President Xi Jinping); and The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin (China’s best-selling book in 2005 and in December 2022). An international corporate strategist and investment banker, Dr. Kuhn is a recipient of the China Reform Friendship Medal, China’s highest award for foreigners. He is chairman of The Kuhn Foundation. He has a BA in Human Biology (Johns Hopkins), MBA (MIT), and PhD in Anatomy/Brain Research (UCLA).

Elizabeth Lee is a seasoned professional with nearly two decades of experience in the field of cultural heritage. She currently serves as the Vice President for Programs and Development at CyArk, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using digital technologies to empower connections to historic places. In her role at CyArk, Elizabeth leads the development of international partnerships and technology-driven solutions for cultural heritage protection, education, and appreciation. Her work is focused on advancing CyArk's mission to create more equitable and respectful access to places and to lift up new voices to increase understanding of our shared human experience. She is a proud graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the US Chapter of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS).

Marta Lenartowicz is an interdisciplinary researcher and educator based at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and Buckminster College in Belgium. At the VUB, where she has initiated and led the programme called the ‘School of Thinking', she works as the director of education and a senior researcher at the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies (CLEA). At Buckminster College, she serves as the principal, curating learning trajectories suitable for broadly-thinking, sensitive, demanding learners. Marta holds a PhD in humanistic management, with backgrounds in social epistemology, theory of language, and educational leadership. She is interested in philosophy of cognitive science and in theoretical approaches to the evolution of intelligence, cognitive development, and distributed cognition. In her work, she is seeking to advance the conceptual underpinnings that govern the evolution of intelligence in human cognitive systems at multiple scales.

Professor at Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence, at the University Paris-Nanterre and at the UM6P (Morocco), Raphaël Liogier ran the Observatoire du religieux from 2006 to 2014, the main institution to have studied the new groups of young people using Islam as an anti-social flag to justify violent behaviours. He was the first expert to be interviewed by the French Parliament after the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. He has been visiting professor in European, American and Australian universities, and has written numerous books on the mutation of beliefs and paradigms, on transnational identities and on the need for metaphysics. His recent research focuses on the impact of new technoscience, specifically AI, on human narratives. His last book, Khaos: The Betrayed pPomise of Modernity, raises the question of the meaning and necessity of trans-cendence in our present world, radically renewing the old debate between faith and knowledge.

Manasvi Lingam completed his BS in engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay), and his PhD in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin. He subsequently pursued postdoctoral research in astronomy and physics at Princeton University, Harvard University, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Manasvi is currently an Assistant Professor in Aerospace, Physics, and Space Sciences; Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology, and an affiliate Research Fellow at UT Austin. In the broadest sense, his research is concerned with life in the Universe and humanity's place within it. In addition to many journal publications in these areas, Manasvi is the lead author of "Life in the Cosmos: From Biosignatures to Technosignatures". He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS) in 2022.

Wolfgang Leidhold graduated in political science, philosophy, and East Asian studies in Bochum, Germany, with a thesis on Descartes (1975). After studies at Stanford University, he wrote his dissertation on Francis Hutcheson. In 1982, he became assistant professor at the University of Erlangen, and later a research fellow at Georgetown University and the University of Hawaii, working on the Pacific Island Region. Since 1992, he is full professor at the University of Cologne. He works on the history of ideas, philosophy, religion, and ecology from the Paleolithic to the present. His most recent book is "The History of Experience" (2023). Besides his scientific activity he works as an artist in painting, represented by galleries in New York and Germany.

Kieth Lemna is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology. Dr. Lemna is the author of The Apocalypse of Wisdom (Angelico Press, 2019). He has published scholarly articles in numerous journals, including The Heythrop Journal, Nova et Vetera, Communio: International Catholic Review, International Philosophical Quarterly, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, The Gregorianum, and Antiphon

Jennifer Morgan, president and founder of the Deeptime Network , is an award-winning author, storyteller, and educator inspired by the work of Teilhard de Chardin, Maria Montessori, Thomas Berry, and Brian Swimme. Her Universe Story Trilogy — Born With a Bang, From Lava to Life, and Mammals Who Morph — is used in classrooms around the world, particularly in Montessori schools as part of the Cosmic Education Curriculum, and have received the Teachers Choice Award, Nautilus Semi Finalist, highest ratings from AAAS and endorsements from Jane Goodall, Neil de Grasse Tyson, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and others. She is Vice President of the American Teilhard Association. Her life inspiration is to foster emergence by helping to link a planetary nervous system of people immersed in this radical new understanding. The Deeptime Network offers a nine-month Deeptime Leadership & Wellbeing Program .

Parham Pourdavood completed his undergraduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, where he studied computer and cognitive sciences. While at Berkeley, he engaged in theoretical neuroscience research at various labs, studying biologically inspired deep neural networks and the emergence of goal-directed behavior in brains. Currently, he is a cognitive and geospatial data scientist, software developer, and researcher at Human Energy engaged in projects centered around the exploration of planetary intelligence. His ongoing research involves developing computer simulations of novel genetic and neural networks, as well as reconstructing neurological and societal data as high-dimensional strange attractors. The overarching aim of his research is demonstrating how geometric patterns of communication can give rise to meaning in biological organisms and the noosphere.

Ellen M. Rigsby received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric in 2001 at UC Berkeley, after earning a B.A. in Political Philosophy from Johns Hopkins in 1991. She is a Professor in Communication at Saint Mary's College of California. Her areas of expertise are at the intersection of theories of the public sphere (Habermas, McLuhan, Warner) and media law. Her areas of interest are political and rhetorical theory, and the intersection of speculative fiction with politics, and has published on theories of time and politics, on The Hunger Games Trilogy, and more recently on aspects of qualitative research methods and the benefits of teaching mixed research methods to undergraduates. I have been consulting for Human Energy on their education track since 2020.

Louis M. Savary, holds one doctorate in mathematical statistics applied to the behavioral science and a second in theology and spirituality. For twenty years, he served as senior trainer and writer for Educational systems for the Future. He was a Jesuit for thirty years and has studied, taught and written about Teilhard for the past forty years. Among his many books are Teilhard de Chardin on Morality, Teilhard de Chardin on Love, and The Human Phenomenon Explained. He is a board member of the American Teilhard Association.

Jeff Schloss is the Distinguished Professor Biology and Walker Chair of Natural & Behavioral Sciences at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and is Senior Scholar of BioLogos. He received his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Boris Shoshitaishvili is a USC-Berggruen Fellow with a background in evolutionary biology, comparative literature, and classical studies. His research focuses on interconnections among the Earth sciences, globalization, and collective identity. He has published academic and public-facing articles on planetary thought in Anthropocene, The Anthropocene Review, Earth’s Future, and Noema, and co-authored scientific papers in Ageing Research Reviews and The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. His chapter on Homeric epic and the origins of the Greek philosophical tradition is forthcoming in Sublime Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity: Intersections of Myth, Science and History (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing). He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department after earning his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, M.A. in Classics from the University of Arizona, and Sc.B. in Biology and A.B. in Classics from Brown University. He currently heads an interdisciplinary project on “planetary metaphysics” for the Berggruen Institute.

Dr. Stock is the founder and CEO of Socratic Sciences which has a question-centered communications platform to catalyze understanding, community and social connection at scale. He’s an adjunct Professor, Dept of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, where he co-founded the Harris Center for Precision Wellness. He founded the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine, started and led two biotech companies, is the author of eight books including Redesigning Humans (winner of the Kistler Science Prize) and The Book of Questions, the first in a series on ethics and values that has sold 5 million copies, been translated into 25 languages, and is powering Socratic Sciences. He has 1,000+ media appearances, including Nova, PBS, NPR, Larry King, and Oprah, and multiple broadcasted one-on-one policy debates with figures such as Ray Kurzweil, Jeremy Rifkin, Daniel Callahan, and Francis Fukuyama about emergent technology and the human future. He has a PhD in Biophysics from Johns Hopkins and an MBA from Harvard.

is Emeritus Professor of Physics in residence at Virginia Tech, and was formerly Professor of Physics at Yale University. He received hi Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago and his research specializes on Theoretical Particle Physics

Dr. Clément Vidal is a philosopher with a background in logic and cognitive sciences. He has published on topics such as the noosphere, ethics, and the search for technosignatures. He is involved in several research projects for Human Energy. In 2014, he authored The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective and he is always eager to tackle big questions, bringing together areas of knowledge such as cosmology, physics, astrobiology, complexity science or evolutionary theory. More info: www.clemvidal.com

Claire Isabel Webb directs the Berggruen Institute’s Future Humans program that investigates the histories and futures of life, mind, and outer space. With the advent of invented life, computational intelligences, and extraterrestrial exploration, what will it mean to be human in the future? How will humans relate to multifarious entities from microbes, to rhizomes, to sperm whales, to AIs, to possible alien life forms? Future Humans projects address these questions in several registers: in the science and speculative fiction writing workshop Vaster than Empires; in Embodied Machines that considers the slippage between increasingly unstable categories of the mechanical and the biological; and Life Otherwise, a imaginative exosolar system in which leading exoplanetary astronomers and astrobiologists simulate life and worlds beyond Earth. Webb earned her Ph.D. from MIT’s History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program in 2020. Her book project, Reflexive Alienation, explores how scientists since the Space Age, despite alien life forms’ perpetual and perhaps permanent unknowability, have designed sophisticated experiments of expectation that anticipate Other biologies and intelligences

Robert Wright is the author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction), The Moral Animal (named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of the year), Why Buddhism Is True (a New York Times bestseller that has been published in more than 20 languages), and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. His awards include the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism. He has taught in the psychology department at Penn and the religion department at Princeton and was visiting professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary from 2015 to 2018. He publishes the Nonzero Newsletter and hosts the Nonzero Podcast.