Anna Marie Wagner is the SVP, Head of AI and Head of Corporate Development at Ginkgo Bioworks. In her roles, she oversees Ginkgo’s strategy, partnerships, and commercial execution in AI as well as Ginkgo’s capital markets and M&A functions.  Anna Marie led Ginkgo’s nearly $300 million partnership with Google Cloud in 2023 and Ginkgo’s public offering in 2021, raising over $1.6 billion for the company in what was the largest ever public debut in biotech (NYSE:DNA).  

Ginkgo is the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, providing flexible, end-to-end services that solve challenges for organizations across diverse markets, from food and agriculture to pharmaceuticals to industrial and specialty chemicals. Ginkgo’s biosecurity and public health unit, Concentric by Ginkgo, is building global infrastructure for biosecurity to empower governments, communities, and public health leaders to prevent, detect, and respond to a wide variety of biological threats.  The company operates has partnerships with companies including Bayer, Biogen, Pfizer, Sumitomo, Novo Nordisk, Syngenta, Merck, and Corteva as well as with governments around the world.

Prior to joining Ginkgo Bioworks, Anna Marie was a technology investor at Bain Capital Private Equity.  She holds a B.A. in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Harvard and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar.

Alexi Lapkin graduated with an MChem from Novosibirsk State University, specializing in membrane gas separation. He then worked at Boreskov Institute of Catalysis (Russia) prior to moving to the University of Bath (UK) where he was employed as a research officer, which allowed him to complete his Ph.D. in the area of multiphase membrane catalysis. After first teaching at the University of Warwick, he began his current position as professor of sustainable reaction engineering in the department of chemical engineering and biotechnology at the University of Cambridge.

Alexi’s research group is developing clean, intensive processes for manufacture of molecules, formulations or functional materials. They are working on methods of modelling chemical processes, starting from molecular modelling methods and extending to multi-objective process optimization and life cycle assessment. They have pioneered methods of machine learning for automated process optimization, and are exploring methods of Big Data in application to chemical reaction networks. They are working with many industry sectors and have an international network of collaborations.

Federico Bella is Full Professor of Chemistry at Politecnico di Torino in Italy and Vice-President of the Italian Chemical Society. His main scientific activity covers post-lithium batteries and electrochemical ammonia production, through sustainable chemistry-oriented and multivariate approaches. He has published more than 120 papers and counts a h-index of 72. He has received awards from the most important worldwide scientific associations, such as the International Society of Electrochemistry (2023 Tajima Prize), the Royal Society of Chemistry (2021 Horizon Prize), the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2019 Piontelli International Award), etc. He is coordinating an ERC Starting Grant project (SuN2rise), with an overall fund of 1.5 M-eur to develop fertilizer production under mild conditions, and has recently launched the first Italian research laboratory on potassium-based batteries.

Marta Hatzell is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Hatzell’s research group explores how to electrify catalytic and separation-based processes to enable sustainable systems. Hatzell completed her BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Penn State University and an M.Eng in Environmental Engineering from Penn State University. Hatzell received the Outstanding Award for early career research at Georgia Tech in 2023. In addition, Hatzell received the Moore Inventor Fellowship (2021), ONR Young Investigator Award (2020), Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Chemistry (2020), and the NSF Early CAREER award (2019). Hatzell currently serves as a Senior Editor of the Journal ACS Energy Letters.

Professor Hui Zhou of Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) is being honored for his visionary approach to sustainable energy and green chemistry (7-9). His interdisciplinary expertise encompasses biomass resources, waste management, hydrogen energy, CCUS, heterogeneous catalysis, and 2D materials. He pioneered advancements in carbon dioxide hydrogenation technology, and developed an innovative biomass hydrothermal conversion process. He also established the concept of combustible solid waste primitives, and proposed a characterization system for these primitives. Currently, this theoretical framework has been applied in over 300 publications and industrially implemented in solid waste pyrolysis and incineration facilities. He earned his B.S. and Ph.D. in thermal engineering from Tsinghua University.