Ethan Mollick is the bestselling author of Co-Intelligence, a New York Times bestseller and a best book of the year from The Economist and Financial Times, and the forthcoming Co-Existence (on sale in October). He is the Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar, Rowan Fellow, and Associate Professor at the Wharton School, where he directs the Generative AI Lab and studies the effects of AI on work, entrepreneurship, and education. He was named one of TIME Magazine’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence.

In addition to his research and teaching, Ethan is the Co-Director of the Generative AI Labs at Wharton, which build prototypes and conduct research to discover how AI can help humans thrive while mitigating risks. Prior to his time in academia, Ethan co-founded a startup company, and he advises numerous organizations. 

Mollick received his Ph.D. and MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.

Andrew McAfee (@amcafee) studies how technological progress changes the world. He is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-founder and co-director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, the inaugural Visiting Fellow in Google’s Technology and Society group, and cofounder of the AI startup Workhelix. His most recent book is The Geek Way. His previous books include More from Less and, with Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age. He and Brynjolfsson are the only people named to both the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top management thinkers and the Politico 50 group of people transforming American politics.

McAfee was educated at MIT and Harvard and lives in Cambridge Massachusetts.

Denise Koessler Gosnell is a computer scientist, technology executive and builder who has spent her career turning hard technical problems into transformational products, including uncovering a $20M Medicare fraud case with a graph database and managing a nine-figure AWS cloud service used by Fortune 100 companies worldwide. She pioneered social fingerprinting, founded Systers (UT’s women-in-EECS organization) and authored two books, including the “The Practitioner’s Guide to Graph Data.” Today, Gosnell leads Data Driven Intuition, an AI education venture. She is also a 2026 UT 40 Under 40 awardee. Gosnell holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UT.

Shaun S. Gleason is an experienced senior leader of science and technology organizations with a focus on research and development, innovation, technology transfer, leadership development and education. He has 37 years of service at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) across three different directorates (Energy Science and Technology, Computing and Computational Sciences and National Security Sciences) and has experience as R&D staff, Group Leader, Institutional Planning Director, R&D Division Director and Interim Associate Laboratory Director. He has an extensive professional network across the DOE laboratory system, academia, industry and government agencies.

Shaun is currently the Director of Partnerships at ORNL, responsible for mission areas including technology transfer, commercialization, economic development, industry and government partnerships and research security. He previously served as the Director of Science-Security Initiative Integration within the Lab Director’s S&T Office. In that role, he led lab-wide integration efforts for some of ORNL’s strategic initiatives such as quantum, AI, self-driving labs and institutional computing. From 2018 to 2023, he was the founding Director of the Cyber Resilience and Intelligence Division at ORNL. In this role, he was responsible for an R&D portfolio focused on Advanced Intelligence and Resilient Cyber-physical Systems. From 2013 until 2018, Shaun was the Director of the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at ORNL. From 2011 to 2013, he was Director of ORNL’s Office of Institutional Planning and was responsible for ORNL’s strategic planning process and discretionary R&D investment.

Shaun has 30 years of experience in applied image processing, data science and machine learning for energy, industrial, security and medical imaging applications. In 1998 he co-founded and became the VP of a preclinical medical imaging company, ImTek, Inc., that successfully transferred ORNL-developed technology into the commercial sector. After ImTek, Inc. merged with Siemens Medical, he became the Director of the Preclinical Research Division of Siemens Medical until 2008, when he returned to ORNL. He has authored and coauthored 120 publications and four book chapters and has been issued 10 patents. He is a Fellow of AAAS and a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Stephen L. Mangum is the dean of the Haslam College of Business and the Stokely Foundation Leadership Chair at the University of Tennessee. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in human resource management from the University of Utah. He earned a doctorate in economics from George Washington University.

Prior to joining the University of Tennessee, Mangum was senior associate dean of the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. He joined the faculty of Ohio State in 1983 and taught in the Department of Management and Human Resources for several years before managing the department. Before joining Ohio State, he taught and conducted research at George Washington University.

Mangum’s areas of research expertise include labor market analysis, social legislation, workforce development and international economic/ human resource development. His research addresses issues of national training policy, returns to post-school occupational training, international human resource development, contingent employment and poverty. He has published five books and more than 50 book chapters and articles in academic journals including the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development Quarterly and the Journal of Business Ethics. He has taught classes in labor economics, human resource policy, human resource planning and organizational economics, among others.

Randy Boyd has served as UT’s 26th president since November 2018 and serves as the chief executive officer of the statewide UT System.

The UT System includes campuses in Chattanooga, Pulaski and Martin; the Health Science Center in Memphis; and the Institute of Public Service. Additionally, it includes the flagship campus in Knoxville, which is also comprised of the Space Institute in Tullahoma and the statewide Institute of Agriculture. The UT System also manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory through its UT-Battelle partnership, where Boyd serves as chairman.

In 1991, Boyd founded Knoxville-based Radio Systems Corporation (now PetSafe Brands), a company that produces over 4,000 pet-related products under the brand names PetSafe, Invisible Fence, ScoopFree and SportDOG. The company employs more than 1,400 people with offices in six countries around the world. Boyd also owns Boyd Sports, LLC, which owns six minor league baseball teams, including the Tennessee Smokies.