For the past twenty-five years, I have worked at the intersection of foresight, emerging technology, social change, and resilience.

I currently serve as the Chief Impact Officer at Planet, a breakthrough space and AI organization that has deployed the largest constellation of Earth-observing satellites in history. These satellites image our whole planet every day in high resolution, and my team makes sure this data is ethically used to its highest and best purposes to accelerate climate action, monitor the world’s ecosystems, improve humanitarian action and disaster response, protect human rights, transform sustainable development, conserve biodiversity, and advance scientific discovery and artistic expression. We’re even exploring how these tools can inform the next iteration of capitalism, where social and environmental externalities are more effectively measured and valued. I also currently serve on the International Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch.

In parallel, from 2015-2017, I also served as the Chair and Interim President of the Garrison Institute. Headquartered on the Banks of the Hudson River, in a former monastery, the Institute is a not-for-profit, non-sectarian organization committed to harnessing the power of contemplative wisdom and practices — from many traditions, and in many contemporary contexts — to build a more compassionate and resilient future for all.

I also spend much of my time advancing a global dialogue on resilience – how to help people and systems persist, recover and thrive amid disruption. For several years, my colleague Ann Marie Healy and I traveled from the coral reefs of Palau to the back streets of Palestine, exploring the dynamics of resilience in many contexts. The results are encapsulated in Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, published by Simon and Schuster in the U.S., and in many other languages and territories around the world.

Since the book’s publication, my resilience work has focused on bringing together coalitions of interested practitioners and leaders from many related fields, developing new, interlocking strategies for personal, urban, community, climate, and organizational resilience.

From 2003-2014, I was the primary creative and curatorial force behind PopTech, a well-known innovation, and social change network.  The organization brings together a community of innovators from many different fields — artists, scientists, technologists, social change agents, entrepreneurs, and unconventional ‘weirdos’ — to share ideas and to work on new approaches to some of the world’s toughest problems. PopTech identifies and trains some of the most amazing people you’ll ever meet, doing things you cannot believe humanity is up to. Once a year the organization convenes much-beloved gatherings of these innovators on the coast of Maine.

I’ve been honored to serve as a Fellow of the National Geographic Society, an organization I have loved since I was a child. I also strategically advise and speak regularly to a wide array of leading companies, governmental organization, NGOs, startups and cultural and civil society groups. I have served on the Boards of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (a vanguard contemporary performing arts center) and Blurb (a breakthrough personal publishing platform). I serve as an advisor to OneConcern, an organization using AI to transform disaster response, CureViolence, which is using revolutionary approaches, grounded in public-health, to arrest the spread of violence, and the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania, which advances ecological design in the places most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

I regularly keynote (and sometimes convene!) conferences and work closely with the leadership teams of major corporations, nonprofits, governmental bodies, and leading foundations. I’m honored that my work and ideas are sometimes covered in the media, and humbled to have been recognized in places like Vanity Fair’s “Next Establishment” to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of “Innovators to Watch“.

In my office is this poster, by the talented Joey Roth. I aspire to the third category.