Geography: North America

  • Sahar Danesh

    Sahar Danesh is the Senior Government Engagement Manager at BSI, the UK’s National Standards Body. As a key member of BSI’s Standards Policy team, she leads engagement with government on digital and technology policy, identifying opportunities where standardization can deliver tangible benefits for UK businesses and society.

    Sahar plays a central role in defining the governance frameworks of the future, ensuring that technology—especially AI —is developed, implemented, and adopted in ways that is safe, transparent, and inclusive. Her work focuses on embedding transparency and public trust at the heart of technological progress, so that innovation benefits everyone and no community is left behind.

    A Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the IET, Sahar’s career spans private consultancy, central government policy, and leadership roles in professional institutions such as The Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Her fellowship reflects her outstanding contributions to engineering, tech policy, and governance.

  • Ella Shoup

    Ella is AI Policy Strategist for the Responsible AI team in GSK’s AIML department. She focuses on policy that can preserve AI’s scientific benefit while adequately managing its risks. Her work at GSK includes managing internal AI governance and analysing external AI policy that touch on science. She has a background in digital rights, during which time she worked to make content moderation appropriate for local contexts.

  • Eliz Peck

  • Emma Dunn

    Emma Dunn is the co-founder of Friday Initiatives, a data company building practical tools and strategies that help organisations understand, govern and get value from their data. Friday works across the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia, supporting clients from government bodies to high-growth startups. Emma’s work focuses on shaping Friday’s direction, translating complex data and regulatory issues into clear narratives, and guiding how the company engages with partners and stakeholders as it scales.

  • Gisella Lomax

    Gisella Lomax is the Senior Advisor on Information Integrity at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, leading a ‘Digital Protection’ capacity to address the harmful impact of information risks such as misinformation, disinformation and hate speech on refugees and people forced to flee, and on humanitarian action.

    Following a career in journalism with global media organisations, Gisella joined the UN in 2011: a year of global disruption to the information ecosystem driven by digital platforms. She has worked in partnerships, external engagement, digital and strategic communications roles across various parts of UN, including on climate action, human rights, peace-building, disarmament, and trade and development.

  • Amy Jordan

    Amy is Director of Strategy and Delivery in the Infrastructure and Connectivity Group at Ofcom. She previously set up Ofcom’s first tech policy team and spent a number of years leading the development of Ofcom’s approach to Online Safety policy and supervision. Prior to Ofcom she spent over a decade in the UK Goverment leading a range of national security, cyber and technology issues , and two years at the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity.

  • Laura Contin

    Laura leads Monzo’s public policy work with a focus on the fintech’s international expansion in the EU and the US. She also leads on Monzo’s work on AI and innovation, with a focus on engagement with UK regulators. Monzo can have to Prior to joining Monzo, Laura was Director of European Affairs at Whitehouse Communications where she advised companies on how best to engage with policymakers to achieve meaningful policy change.

  • Imogen Stead

    As AI Policy Manager at the Centre for Long-term Resilience (CLTR), Imogen researches and advocates for the most effective policy levers to improve societal resilience against extreme AI risks.

    Imogen joined the CLTR from a leading tech-specialist global advisory firm, where she provided cross-jurisdictional AI policy, regulatory and geopolitical advisory expertise to a range of clients including frontier labs and a government-led AI security partnership. Before that, she co-launched and led the analysis for a new “emerging technologies” product at a European political risk advisory firm, specialising in political and regulatory analysis of UK, EU and multilateral AI policy initiatives.

    She is especially interested in the geopolitics of AI and is driven by the pressing challenge of how effective global AI governance strategies can be put in place against the backdrop of an increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape.

    Imogen holds an MA, MPhil and DPhil in Classics from the University of Oxford, and is working towards an Executive Master’s degree in EU Studies from the Centre International de Formation Européene (Cife).

  • Leonie Maria Tanczer

    Leonie Maria Tanczer is an Associate Professor in International Security and Emerging Technologies at University College London’s (UCL) Department of Computer Science and a grant holder of the prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF). She is part of UCL’s Information Security Research Group and initiated and heads the “Gender and Tech Research Lab”.

    Tanczer is also a member of the Advisory Council of the Open Rights Group (ORG), a Steering Committee member for the Offensive Cyber Working Group, and a voting member of the IEEE Working Group P2987 “Recommended Practice for Principles for Design and Operation Addressing Technology-Facilitated Inter-personal Control”.

    She was formerly an Association of British Science Writers (ABSW) Media Fellow at The Economist and a Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) in Berlin. Her research focuses on questions related to Internet security, and she is specifically interested in the intersection points of technology, cybersecurity and gender.

  • Dina Rickman

    Senior director at GoFundMe, the world’s largest fundraising platform.
    Also launched two national news sites.