Keynote Speakers

Tessa Charlesworth is an Assistant Professor and Drake Faculty Scholar in Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She leads the Change lab and co-directs a working group on social biases in algorithms and big data. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2021, and has since been recognized with early faculty awards including the APS rising star award, and the Foundation for the Behavioral and Brain Sciences dissertation award. Her research uses diverse methods—from psychology to computer science to history—to understand how and why social stereotypes and attitudes change and evolve, whether in an individual mind or in an entire culture across centuries.

Per Davidsson is Professor in Entrepreneurship at the Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden, and at QUT, Brisbane, Australia. As a pioneer of entrepreneurship research, he has led research centers in Sweden and Australia, chaired the Academy of Management's Entrepreneurship Division, supervised dozens of research students and post-doctoral fellows, authored some of the best-cited works in this field, and served as associate editor of several of its leading journals. For these contributions, he was presented with the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research (2023). He has also received several other prestigious awards as well as an honorary doctorate at Leuphana University, Germany. From his earlier work, he is known for research on firm growth; nascent entrepreneurship, the venture creation process, and entrepreneurial bricolage, among others. He is the main architect behind the External Enablement concept and framework, which is his current focus, and which has triggered a new research stream involving many colleagues around the globe doing research into how environmental changes (technological, regulatory, sociocultural, demographic, macroeconomic, natural-environmental, etc.) can be leveraged in business development.

Joshua Conrad Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He studies how people’s psychologies change as societies become larger, more diverse, more economically developed, and more globalized. He has applied this lens to many different societal changes—from early state formation to the modern rise of robotics and social media—and many different psychological processes—from moral psychology, to emotion, to belief systems. Underlying all these studies is a deeper interest in how our minds adapt to a rapidly changing world. He has published over 60 articles and has won multiple early career awards. Before joining Harvard, he was a Neubauer Assistant Professor at the Booth School of Business at University of Chicago.

Neil Lee is Professor of Economic Geography at the LSE and a Fellow of CIFAR. He leads the LSE International Inequalities Institute’s Cities network and is an Associate Member at Nuffield College, Oxford. His research considers innovation, economic development and place-based policy—including how psychology influences economic geography. He has undertaken advisory work for organisations including the OECD, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. His 2024 book Innovation for the Masses was featured as one of the Financial Times' best new books in economics.

Amber Gayle Thalmayer is a Professor for Personality, Mental Health, and Culture in the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich and a 2026 recipient of a European Research Council Consolidator Grant. She is the principal investigator of the groundbreaking, collaborative Africa Long Life Study, a longitudinal study of personality and mental health development among emerging adults of many backgrounds and lifestyles from throughout Namibia, Kenya, and South Africa, soon expanding also to Nigeria and Ghana. She has influentially led lexical studies of personality trait structure in African languages, and developed a first culturally de-centred personality model and inventory, the Cross Cultural Big Two. Her work has previously been funded by a 5-year professorial fellowship, a 4-year project grant, and an AGORA science communication grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. To share this research with broader audiences, she co-created an award-winning documentary film, “Namibia Up: Being 18 in Africa Today” and writes for Psychology Today at her blog “One World, Many Minds”.