Alison has been a passionate advocate for mainstreaming disability since developing rheumatoid arthritis aged 21. She worked with Rough Guides and BBC Holiday on travel and disability, later joining Channel 4 where she was instrumental in moving on-screen disability portrayal from specialist disability strands and documentaries to much broader inclusion of disabled people across everything from Big Brother to How to Look Good Naked, Hollyoaks and Come Dine With Me, Location Location Location and The Sex Education Show. Alison works closely with commissioners and producers, encouraging them to see that disability can add to the creative process. She develops disabled talent on screen and in production, managed a national talent search and the training of 12 disabled presenters and reporters to front the London 2012 Paralympics coverage, and is now in charge of a £250k fund to develop presenters and reporters for the Rio 2016 Paralympics as well as other genres.

Caspar is CEO of the Rationalist Association, a 125-year-old charity promoting rationalism, science and humanism, and the editor of New Humanist magazine. He has a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths College and is the author of Taking Offence (Seagull Books).

Cathrine is a Danish national and leading authority in the budding field of constructive news reporting. She has 13 years’ experience as an investigative reporter, US correspondent and current affairs anchor on TV and radio. Since 2011, she has been working to innovate solid, critical news reporting through the science of positive psychology. Cathrine teaches courses on constructive news and investigative reporting, is currently writing two textbooks on the topic and has co-founded an international organization focusing on professionalizing constructive news. She holds a Masters Degree of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Martine has been a pioneer in the field of the entertainment-education (EE) strategy since the late eighties. In 1999 she published her groundbreaking research into the dynamics of EE collaborative partnerships in television productions in her book called ‘The Turtle and the Peacock’. As an entertainment-education scholar and consultant she contributes to western and non-western entertainment-education projects for social change around the world. In 2010 she received as the first European the international Everett M. Rogers Award for achievement in Entertainment-Education.

Jeremy founded Ideal Media in 2001 seeking to leverage the potential of media and communications to help us reach our collective potential and solve social, environmental and economic challenges. He is passionate about storytelling and media that helps us realise our individual and collective potential. He organises the annual Transformational Media Summit and is a co-founder of the Transformational Media Initiative, a global network of changemakers and media professionals supporting the creation of media that serves humanity and the planet. He is interested in the foundations for creating media content from a space of creativity, wisdom, and compassion; and how media professionals become empowered to create such content.

Jon is a keen and sometimes outspoken proponent of the moral responsibility of the individual, and believes we should all be asking what our own opportunity is to make things better rather than wondering who has responsibility for the status quo. He has helped develop award-winning initiatives and campaigns for the National Trust on subjects including sustainable food and energy production, children and nature, and government planning reforms. The formative years of his career were spent in advertising, an industry he left after co-authoring ‘Think of me as evil? Opening the ethical debates in advertising’ with Tom Crompton of the WWF.

Jonathan is Head of Newsgathering at Sky News and is responsible for its home and international news coverage. He was at the forefront of Sky’s campaign for Prime Ministerial debates to be held in the UK and was a member of the broadcasting team that successfully negotiated the debates ahead of the 2010 general election and for which he was jointly awarded the prestigious Royal Television Society judges award. Jonathan ran Sky News’ political unit for 6 years and has worked on some of the biggest domestic stories of the past decade. He began his career with NBC News.

Prior to joining Aegis, Luca worked in marketing and communications and was a journalist for several years. He decided to follow his passion for advertising and the appetite for culture and creativity, embarking on master research between Milan, Paris and Harvard University. More specifically, his research is concerned with cultural industries, social ethics and mass communication, analysing the growing phenomenon of piracy in a new media context. He tried to go beyond legal issues, redefine piracy in an original and enlarged sense, reading it as a fresh, critical thinking attitude of today’s media consumer. Luca is also a passionate volunteer for a Clown-Care Association in Milan.

Matti is the Editor-In-Chief of the most northern daily newspaper in the world, Lapin Kansa, which is published in Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland. Among the paper’s unique features are its regular publications in Lapland’s original Sami language. He is an experienced and internationally well-connected journalist, having worked both in Russia and the United States. He has held various journalism and newsroom management positions at Aamulehti, the second largest Finnish daily paper in Tampere, before taking up his current tenure in the fall of 2012. Matti has more than 20 years of experience in newspaper reporting, editing and other activities related to professional journalism. During his 15 plus years with Alma Media, Matti has also worked as a Moscow correspondent for the national business daily Kauppalehti, helped create and produce two ground-breaking Sunday magazines, as well as introduced several other innovative projects for both print and online. He widened his skills during a Stanford / Hearst fellowship in 2010. Before moving to the Arctic Circle, he edited the Editorials and Culture sections of Aamulehti. Matti spoke at TEDxHelsinki in 2011.

Mike is the editor of Taxation magazine which is published by LexisNexis. He has worked in the tax departments of regional, national and international accountancy firms. Prior to his appointment as Taxation editor in 2004, he was a freelance writer and lecturer on tax. Mike became a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Taxation in 1996 with a prize-winning thesis on the law of residence for tax purposes. He gave the 2007 Hardman Memorial lecture for the ICAEW Tax Faculty, asking the question ‘Can a fair tax system ever be simple?’ Mike frequently commentates on tax matters in the press, on TV and on the radio, chairs the judges for the Taxation Awards, and was on the panel for HMRC’s first two annual External Engagement Awards.

Justin is Dean of Research in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He has written and edited many books about communication, the cultural industries, news and politics, including Constructing Public Opinion and Citizens or Consumers: The Media and the Decline of Political Participation and Climate Change and the Media. He is in the editorial board of nine journals and his latest book, Beyond Consumer Capitalism: Media and the Limits to Imagination will be published this autumn. He has led a number of research projects for the BBC, the BBC Trust, Channel 4, the Office of Science and Innovation, the AHRC, the ESRC and Rowntree. He is a regular commentator on media and politics. In 2012, he spoke at TEDxCardiff.

Stewart is regularly used as a media commentator and is currently working on a book called 'When Reporters Cross the Line' with Jeff Hulbert. His career is probably unique in its range across journalism, management and regulation. He was chosen as one of the BBC's first three News Trainees in 1969 and moved to ITN in 1972 where he became Editor-in-Chief and then Chief Executive. In 2003 he became City's first Professor of Television Journalism and a Visiting Professor at Oxford University. He was on the panel set up by the BBC Governors to report on the BBC's coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He was also a regular broadcaster on media matters and a columnist in the Financial Times and the London Evening Standard. Later he became Ofcom's Partner for Content and Standards and also chaired the UK Government's Media Literacy Working Group. Among the multiple honours and awards he has received, in 2000 he was made a CBE for services to broadcast journalism.

Thomas is an author, speaker and founder of The Goodvertising Agency and WhereGoodGrows. He is the author of the book “Goodvertising” and believes that the communication industry has a pivotal role to play in promoting a more sustainable mindset and behaviour, and that by making advertising better we can make the world better. It’s the most comprehensive book to date exploring communication for good. As the Director of the Goodvertising Agency, he’s helping companies, non-profits and agencies understand this new reality. Thomas is also the founder of WhereGoodGrows; the world’s first best-practice collaborative platform that aims to share sustainable communication solutions. He is an experienced keynote speaker and was recently dubbed an “Inspirational Leader” by The Huffington Post.

Tom has worked in the environment movement for fifteen years, initially on environment policy. He became frustrated at the lack of political commitment to adequately address environmental challenges and began working with social scientists, exploring the importance of cultural values in underpinning public expressions of social and environmental concern. His report Common Cause: The Case for Working with Our Cultural Values has led to extensive debate across the third sector in many countries, and its recommendations are now being incorporated into the strategies of many NGOs across the world. Tom holds a PhD in the evolution of altruism.