Forum Network

Dan Lyons is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. He is currently a co-producer and writer for the HBO series Silicon Valley. Previously, Lyons was technology editor at Newsweek and the creator of the groundbreaking viral blog "The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs" (AKA "Fake Steve Jobs"). Lyons has written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Wired. He lives in Winchester, MA.

Scott Clavenna has 20 years experience in high-tech market research, company leadership, business development and world-class team building. Greentech Media focuses on leading information services company for the emerging greentech/cleantech market.

**Joichi Ito** is the Director of the MIT Media Lab and Chairman of the Board of PureTech Health. He is on the board of The Sony Corporation, The New York Times Company, the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, The MIT Press, MIT Tech Review and co-founder and board member of Digital Garage an Internet company in Japan. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kongregate, Fotonauts/Fotopedia, Kickstarter and other Internet companies. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know (http://weknow.to/). He is a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer, an Emergency First Responder instructor and a Divers Alert Network instructor. Ito was named by Businessweek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008. In 2011, Ito was chosen by Nikkei Business as one of the 100 most influential people for the future of Japan and by Foreign Poicy Magazine as one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers". In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute in recognition of his role as one of the world's leading advocates of Internet freedom. Ito received the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from The New School in 2013 and a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from Tufts University in 2015. Read his article, "[Why Bitcoin is and isn't like the Internet](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-bitcoin-isnt-like-internet-joichi-ito "Linked In Article")", Linked In, January 18, 2015.

With more than ten years of experience in all aspects of commercial energy efficiency programs – design, management, implementation and marketing – as well as a strong understanding of the Energy Efficiency policy and regulatory environment, Lawrence is well versed in the inner workings of the efficiency industry. Lawrence’s broad industry experience runs the gamut, from field auditing to managing relationships with Fortune 100 utility and corporate clients, affording him a unique ability to draw connections between policy driven utility energy efficiency program requirements and bottom line driven business spending.

**Ewald Hesse** leads the GridSingularity venture, rooted in his extensive experience in the energy sector and acute interest in distributed business models. Hesse has served as Regional director for business development and strategy in Southeast Europe at Andritz Hydro, a global supplier in renewable (hydro) energy technology. Earlier in his career, he explored technology transfer and joint ventures in China and European automobile sector at Metzler and ABB power and automation technologies group. Ewald holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering and Project Management from the University in Konstanz, Germany. [**GridSingularity**](http://gridsingularity.com/#/ "") is a new venture that facilitates an Internet-based decentralised energy data management and exchange platform built on the most advanced blockchain technology.

David Hackenberg began keeping bees as a FFA project in 1962 at Mifflinburg Area High School in Pennsylvania, and by the time he graduated high school he had already started his own business maintaining several hundred hives. After serving as the president of the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association and the American Beekeeping Federation and as a member of the National Honey Board, Hackenberg is presently chairman of the Honey Bee Health Advisory Board. He and his son run Hackenberg Apiaries, with 2400 active bee colonies, and own Buffy Bee Honey. Hackenberg Apiaries is involved in the areas of pollination, trucking, honey production, and education in the beekeeping industry. Hackenberg's life's work contributes to the overall pollination of six states: Florida, California, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York.

Danny DeLeon is a spoken word poet, performer, and co-founder of Boston College's first and only performance poetry club, Soul Love And Meaning! He graduated from Boston College in 2015. DeLeon collaborated with Dr. Celeste Wells on an article, "Slam and the citizen orator: Teaching ancient rhetoric and civic engagement through spoken word" (2015), published in the journal \_Communication Teacher\_ and adapted for the [October 2015 issue](https://www.natcom.org/CommCurrentsArticle.aspx?id=6563 "Communication Currents Oct 2015") of \_Communication Currents\_.

Cheryl Della Pietra is a New York City magazine editor, writer, and copy editor. She has published numerous stories in such magazines as \_Marie Claire\_, \_Redbook\_, and \_POV Magazine\_. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she lived with Hunter S. Thompson in Woody Creek, Colorado, for several months in 1992 while she worked as his assistant. She wrote \_Gonzo Girl\_ (2015) as a fictionalized account of her experiences as Thompson's assistant.

Kellian Adams Pletcher loves green doors. She loves doors of any sort, in fact, because they often lead to something interesting. As the CEO and Mastermind of Green Door Labs, Kellian works with some of the most interesting doors in the world: those that lead into museums, libraries and informal education spaces. Previously Institutional Mastermind at SCVNGR, Kellian’s background is in location-based gaming and education technology. She has worked as a senior producer on a number of education games with great organizations including the Met, the Smithsonian, and the Marshmallow Fluff Festival, and she is a mentor at [LearnLaunch](http://learnlaunch.com/accelerator/mentors/kellian-adams-pletcher/ "LearnLaunch Kellian Adams Pletcher"), a Boston-based organization dedicated to expanding education technology.

Amy Robinson Sterling is the Executive Director of EyeWire, a brain-mapping game that began at MIT. EyeWire crowdsources neuroscience, challenging hundreds of thousands of players around the world to solve 3D puzzles which actually map out neurons. Sterling has advised the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the US Senate on crowdsourcing and open innovation. Under her leadership, EyeWire's neuroscience visualizations have appeared at TED and in Times Square in NYC. She helped to create the world's first neuroscience virtual reality experience. Sterling curates the NIH 3D Print Exchange Neuroscience collection, which features several 3D printable neurons discovered by Eyesore gamers. She has written for Vice, the BBC, Nature, and Forbes and writes the Neurotech series for Scientific American in partnership with MIT. Amy Robinson Sterling also founded the TEDx Music Project, a collection of the best live music from TEDx events around the world. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015.

Jason Margaca is a music producer and composer. He started in music and sound design and now composes music for artists around Boston, specializing in film and video game sound production.

Angela Duckworth is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Founder and Scientific Director of the Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development. In 2013, Duckworth was named a MacArthur Fellow in recognition of her research on grit, self-control, and other non-IQ competencies that predict success in life. Prior to her career in research, Duckworth founded a summer school for low-income children that was profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study and, in 2012, celebrated its twentieth anniversary. She has also been a McKinsey management consultant and a math and science teacher in the public schools of New York City, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Duckworth completed her undergraduate degree in Advanced Studies Neurobiology at Harvard. With the support of a Marshall Scholarship, she completed an MSc with Distinction in Neuroscience from Oxford University. As a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, she completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Angela Duckworth has received numerous awards for her contributions to K-12 education, including a Beyond Z Award from the KIPP Foundation. She is also a Faculty Co-Director of Wharton People Analytics and a speaker and consultant to Fortune 100 companies, NFL and NBA teams, the OECD, the World Bank, and several nonprofit organizations including Khan Academy and CASEL. She is the author of \_Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance\_ (2016).