Plenary Speakers

Dan Jarratt is a program officer, scientist, and engineer at Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative of Eric and Wendy Schmidt with a mission to find and connect talented people to solve our world’s hardest problems. 

In this keynote address, Dan will introduce innovative funding and portfolio management processes for rapid and agile R&D such as virtual institutes and focused research organizations. He will describe how philanthropy leverages these practices in the Learning Engineering field to develop, test, and disseminate rigorous education technology – plus best practices for strong cohort effects, co-funding, field building, and academic-industry-government collaboration. Dan will show how Schmidt Futures has operationalized these practices in the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute, which spurs deep collaboration across institutes and disciplines to improve middle school math outcomes by developing, scaling and implementing interventions that leverage advanced computational methods. He will also describe prize competitions, code contests, scholarships and fellowships, and other ways that funders can build high-impact portfolios and networks.

Stephen Hendrickson will be speaking about DOE’s work to accelerate clean energy technologies from the lab to market to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. DOE’s Pathways to Commercial Liftoff provide public and private sector capital allocators with a perspective as to how and when various technologies could reach full-scale commercial adoption– including a common analytical fact base and critical signposts for investment decisions. Given the constantly and rapidly evolving market, technology, and policy environment, the Liftoff Reports are designed to be “living documents” – and will be updated as the commercialization outlook on each technology evolves.