We’re starting the conference off right with an opening keynote by Dame Vivian Hunt.
Dame Vivian Hunt is a Senior Partner for McKinsey & Company. Vivian previously served as Managing Partner for the UK and Ireland for seven years and led the Pharmaceutical and Medical Products Practice in EMEA. She advises corporate, public, and third sector clients on the topics of performance improvement, productivity growth and leadership. She has been named “the most influential black woman in Britain”, “one of the top 25 consultants in the world”, and “one of the 30 most influential people in the City of London”.
Vivian has co-authored some of McKinsey’s most influential publications, including McKinsey’s Solving the United Kingdom’s productivity puzzle in a digital age, showing that both human capital and technology are at the heart of improving productivity. Her pioneering work tying diversity to strong financial performance includes: The Power of Parity (2016), Delivering through Diversity (2018), Diversity Wins: how inclusion matters (2020) and Diversity still matters. More recently, Vivian’s co-authored articles include COVID-19 in the United Kingdom: Assessing Jobs at Risk and the impact on people and places and The case for stakeholder capitalism.
Vivian is on the board of several significant business groups, charitable and education bodies including the Prime Minister’s Build Back Better Council, the Confederation of British Industry, and the Harvard Board of Overseers. Vivian is Chair of Teach First, the UK’s leading education charity, Trustee of The British Museum and sits on the governing board of the Southbank Centre and the US-UK Fulbright Commission.
Vivian is an inspirational speaker and a powerful advocate for non-traditional voices in the corporate world. In October 2020, she delivered a TED Talk on How businesses can serve everyone, not just shareholders.
In 2018, Vivian was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the economy and women in business.
Vivian is an alumna of Harvard College and received her MBA from Harvard Business School.
Then ending with a thoughtful message from Dr. Marcius Extavour
Dr Marcius Extavour is interested in the power of technology innovation to unlock and support deep social change in the direction of equity and justice. He is Vice President of Energy & Climate at XPRIZE Foundation, where his work includes global incentive prize competitions to support and evaluate communities of entrepreneurs and innovators, such as the $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal funded by Elon Musk. He was named a 2019 VERGE Vanguard Fellow as one of 20 dreamers, pioneers, entrepreneurs and others leading the clean economy.
He previously served in the Obama administration as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the U.S Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. His work has spanned the private sector in the electricity industry, semiconductor and telecom research and development, science policy, and fundraising. He earned a PhD and MSc in quantum optics and atomic physics, and a BASc in engineering science from the University of Toronto.
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