André de Ruyter is the former chief executive officer at Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned electricity company. A seasoned executive with a career spanning 34 years, de Ruyter has experience both in South Africa and internationally in various portfolios in the energy business, including the management of coal, oil, chemical and gas businesses, the marketing of export coal to international utilities and managing operations of mega coal and gas conversion plants, including electricity generation and manufacturing. While at Eskom, de Ruyter focused on decarbonizing the company’s generation fleet, and reducing water consumption and environmental impact. A strong believer in the importance of good business ethics and strong governance, he has written a best-selling memoir about his time at Eskom, coming out strongly against corruption, malfeasance and poor policy choices and integration.

Beth Goldberg is the head of research & development at Jigsaw, a Google unit that explores threats to open societies. She leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers who investigate online harms from disinformation to violent extremism. Beth works closely with academics, civil society, and technologists to advance applied research on how cognitive and behavioral interventions can mitigate harms online. Alongside anthropologists, she conducted a series of digital ethnographies of conspiracy theorists, harassers, Islamists, and former white supremacists to inform safer tech products and policies.

Prior to joining Jigsaw, she managed programs for the U.S. Department of State with Freedom House focusing on digital security, investigative journalism and information access in authoritarian regimes. She previously worked with Amnesty International and Namati to map human rights abuses and provide legal aid. 

David Leonhardt is a senior writer for The New York Times. He writes The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter. He has worked at The Times since 1999 and has previously been an Op-Ed columnist, Washington bureau chief, co-host of The Argument podcast, founding editor of The Upshot section and a staff writer for The Times Magazine. He also led a strategy group that helped Times leadership shape the newsroom’s digital future. Leonhardt has received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. In the fall of 2023, Random House will publish his first book, "Ours Is the Shining Future: The Rise and Fall of the American Dream." At Yale College, he was a member of the class of 1994 and spent a decade as a member of the Yale University Council.

Andy Makridis retired from the Central Intelligence Agency at the end of 2022 after four years as its chief operating officer, culminating a 37-year career at the center of the key national security challenges facing our nation. 

Makridis started his career as a graduate fellow in the Directorate of Science and Technology, and has worked in the Directorate of Operations and in the Directorate of Intelligence. After 9/11, he served as President Bush’s daily intelligence briefer, and in 2004, he was chosen to lead the agency’s worldwide nuclear threat analysis. He led the agency’s East Asia, Africa and Latin America analysis office and ran its foreign weapons analysis center. He was the first director of the Weapons and Counter Proliferation Mission Center and led the agency’s response to the CIA WikiLeaks data breach. In 2018, he was named chief operating officer, responsible for planning and managing CIA’s budget, personnel, resources, security, information technology, and its multi-year strategy. 

Robert Malley is on leave from the U.S. State Department where he had been serving as Special Envoy for Iran since January 28, 2021. Prior to that, he served as President and CEO of the International Crisis Group.

Under President Barack Obama, he served as Special Assistant to the President, Senior Advisor to the President for the Counter-ISIL campaign, and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf Region in 2015-2016 and, before that, as Senior Director for the Gulf Region and Syria.

Before joining the National Security Council staff in February 2014, Malley founded and directed the International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program from January 2002. Prior to that, he was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Until January 2001, Malley was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. 

Duvvuri Subbarao served as governor of the Reserve Bank of India for five years (2008-13). Prior to that, he was finance secretary to the government of India (2007-08) and secretary to the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council (2005-07). As a career civil servant in India for over three decades and as a lead economist in the World Bank for five years, Subbarao acquired vast hands-on experience in public finance management. Subbarao’s book, “Who Moved My Interest Rate,” chronicling his experiences in leading the Reserve Bank of India through five turbulent years is best known for the way he explained the policy dilemmas confronting an emerging economy central bank in a globalized world.

Leslie Tsou retired from the U.S. Department of State in April 2023 after more than 30 years of service. Her final tour of duty was as U.S. ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman. She was the first deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem from 2017 to 2019, and the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv from 2016 to 2017. She served as senior advisor for Iran from 2015 to 2016, and director of the Office of Iranian Affairs from 2012 to 2015 in the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau at the Department of State. She was deputy political counselor at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad from 2011 to 2012, and Arabian Peninsula director on the National Security Staff at the White House from 2010 to 2011.

Alix Peterson Zwane is chief executive officer of the Global Innovation Fund. She has 20 years of experience advancing the agenda of evidence-based aid and international development as an investor, a social entrepreneur, and an innovator herself. Zwane has worked at the intersection of the evidence and innovation agendas from a diverse set of posts. She was the first employee and executive director at Evidence Action, a non-profit that develops service delivery models to scale evidence-based programs. Zwane launched Evidence Action Beta, an incubator for innovations in development. Zwane has also advocated for evidence-based philanthropy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google.org, where she set strategy and made investments to support new public service models that work for the poor and developed models for outcome-based grant-making. She began her career in management consulting and was a member of the faculty of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at University of California, Berkeley.