DR.  RICARDO
KOMOTAR
MD, FAANS, FACS

Dr. Bob Hariri is an accomplished surgeon, biomedical scientist, and serial entrepreneur in two technology sectors, biomedicine and aerospace. He is the chairperson, founder, and chief executive officer of Celularity, Inc., one of the world’s leading human cellular therapeutics companies. Dr. Hariri was the founder and CEO of Anthrogenesis Corporation, and after its acquisition by Celgene Corporation, served as CEO of Celgene Cellular Therapeutics. Dr. Hariri also co-founded the genomic-based health intelligence company, Human Longevity, Inc. Dr. Hariri has served on numerous public boards including Cryoport. Dr. Hariri pioneered the use of stem cells to treat a range of life-threatening human diseases and continues today to make transformative contributions in the fields of immuno-oncology and cell therapeutics along with tissue engineering and functional regeneration. He is widely acknowledged for his discovery of pluripotent stem cells derived from the human placenta, and as a member of the team that discovered the physiological activities of tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Dr. Hariri and his team of scientists were the first to obtain FDA approval to use its cryopreserved allogeneic, off-the-shelf Natural Killer (NK) cell therapy to treat COVID-19 infected adults. He holds over 170 issued and pending patents for discoveries including placenta-derived stem cells, which Nature recognized as one of the ten most important patent estates in the field. He has authored over 150 published chapters, articles, and abstracts.

As President of the University of Miami and CEO of UHealth, Joe Echevarria leads more than 20,000 professionals whose focus is transforming lives through education, research, and patient care. A seasoned chief executive, Mr. Echevarria served as the CEO of Deloitte LLP, a global provider of professional services, from 2011 until his retirement in 2014. During his 36-year tenure with the firm, he served in various leadership roles, including Deputy Managing Partner, Southeast Region, Audit Managing Partner, and U.S. Managing Partner and Chief Operating Officer. His leadership responsibilities extended to approximately 70,000 professionals in nearly 90 U.S. cities and India, as well as the firm’s US-owned consulting businesses in Germany, Mexico, China, and Brazil. Mr. Echevarria has a long history of service to the University of Miami, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1978. Following his retirement from Deloitte and seven years of service on its Board of Trustees from 2012 to 2019, Echevarria brought his expertise to the University of Miami Health System as a Senior Advisor to former President Julio Frenk, Interim Chief Financial Officer, Chief Administrative Officer, and Interim Chief Executive Officer. He became Chief Executive Officer of UHealth in 2020 and his responsibilities as CEO grew to include the entire University in 2022. On June 12, 2024, the University of Miami Board of Trustees appointed him Acting President of the University.

One of the nation’s most prominent scholars, Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., is a passionate educator, author, political commentator, and public intellectual who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His writings, including “Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul”, “In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America”, and his most recent, the New York Times bestseller, “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own”, takes an exhaustive look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy. Of Baldwin, Glaude writes, “Baldwin’s writing does not bear witness to the glory of America. It reveals the country’s sins and the illusion of innocence that blinds us to the reality of others. Baldwin’s vision requires a confrontation with our history (with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, with whiteness) to overcome its hold on us. Not to posit the greatness of America, but to establish the ground upon which to imagine the country anew.” A highly accomplished and respected scholar of religion, Glaude is a former president of the American Academy of Religion. His books on religion and philosophy include “An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion”, “African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction”, and “Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America”, which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize.

Educated at the Universities of Keele and London, Professor Tipton joined the University of Surrey in 1986. After 12 years at the Robens Institute and European Institute of Health and Medical Science he moved to the University of Portsmouth in 1998. In addition to his University positions, Professor Tipton was based at the Institute of Naval Medicine (INM) from 1983 to 2004 and was Consultant Head of the Environmental Medicine Unit of the INM from 1996. He has spent over 30 years researching and advising in the areas of thermoregulation, environmental and occupational physiology and survival in the sea. He has published over 400 scientific papers, reports, chapters and books in these areas. Professor Tipton is a consultant in survival and thermal medicine to the Royal Air Force and UKSport; he sits on the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s Medical & Survival Committee, Surf Lifesaving GB’s medical and research advisory panel and the Ectodermal Dysplasia Society’s medical advisory board. He Chairs UKSport’s Research Advisory Group which oversees all medical and technological research undertaken with and for Team GB’s athletes. Prof Tipton is Patron of the SARbot charity, a Trustee of Surf Lifesaving GB and section editor of the journal Extreme Physiology and Medicine. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. Prof Tipton provides advice to a range of universities, government departments, industries, medical, search and rescue and media organizations.

Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies. Renée investigates the spread of narratives across social and media networks, with an interest in understanding how platform algorithms and affordances intersect with user behavior and factional crowd dynamics. She studies how actors leverage the information ecosystem to exert influence, from domestic activists promoting health misinformation and conspiracy theories, to the full-spectrum information operations executed by state actors. She was a 2021 Emerson Fellow and 2018-2019 Mozilla Fellow, a 2017 Presidential Leadership Scholar, a Council on Foreign Relations term member, and a Truman National Security Fellow. She is the author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand and has degrees in Computer Science and Political Science from Stony Brook University.

Daniel Corbett III served as an elite Navy SEAL operator, part of SEAL Teams 5, 6, and 17. He’s now an ex-military operator for hire. He joined the navy shortly after graduating high school in 2002 and was deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2005 with SEAL Team 5. He joined SEAL Team 6 in 2007, deploying to various locations around the world. In 2010, Daniel returned to the West Coast and began instructing at the Naval Special Warfare Basic Training Command (NSWBTC). Daniel ended his active-duty career after two years with NSWBTC and quickly fell into the world of private military contracting. Daniel joined the active reserves in 2014 and maintained his active reserve status until 2019. In 2017, Daniel made international news when he was thrown in jail in Belgrade, Serbia, for eighteen months after traveling there as a private contractor to track a terrorist financier. Daniel still monitors international news and continues to entertain phone calls and meetings with those who need unique solutions to unique problems.