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Tom has worked in fire and emergency for nearly 10 years and has recently got to work combining that experience with his knowledge of Cultural Heritage to lead protection of these special places in the field during emergencies.

Trisha L. Wolford is the Fire Chief of the Anne Arundel County Fire Department in Maryland, one of the largest combination fire departments in the country. She has an extensive background in fire service leadership, law enforcement, and emergency management, serving as President and Board Chair of the IAFC.

Yasmin King is Chief Executive Officer of SkillsIQ and Director and Co‑Founder of SkillsAware, a human‑centred AI platform that helps organisations recognise, trust, and mobilise workforce skills developed through real‑world experience. Her work focuses on making skills visible in advance, particularly those gained through volunteering, community service, lived experience, and prior roles that are often invisible in conventional workforce systems. Yasmin is passionate about helping organisations managing decentralised and volunteer‑enabled workforces to strengthen preparedness, deployment, and long‑term resilience and provide those individuals with digital certification of their skills. Through SkillsAware, she has led initiatives that enable individuals to describe and evidence what they can do once, align that evidence to recognised standards, and hold a portable digital record they control, supporting better planning, role matching, and retention without replacing existing HR or training systems. She is a member of CEDA’s NSW/ACT Advisory Committee and Inaugural Chair of Deakin University’s CREATE Industry Advisory Board. Yasmin has led work on skills standards across ASEAN and APEC, including in logistics, transport, and tourism globally. A former NSW Small Business Commissioner and Associate Commissioner at the ACCC, Yasmin is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and a Fellow of CPA Australia.

Joshua Marinovic is a senior program manager with the NSW SES specialising in technology-enabled transformation. He currently leads the Stay Safe Keep Operational program dedicated to operational communications, focused on improving safety, situational awareness, and decision-making through modern connectivity and capability uplift. With a background spanning business development, business analysis, and program delivery, Joshua brings a pragmatic, outcomes-driven approach to complex environments. His work integrates strategic intent with frontline operational needs, ensuring that technology solutions are not only innovative, but usable, scalable, and embedded into day-to-day practice. Joshua has led the team responsible for design and deployment of tactical internet capabilities, vehicle-based connectivity platforms, tracking capabilities and statewide communication improvements, delivering resilient, field-ready solutions that operate in degraded and disaster environments. He is passionate about leadership, continuous improvement, and shaping the future of emergency service operations through technology.

Professor Jenny George is an experienced Dean, CEO and Company Director, shaping leadership in modern Australia. With a career spanning leadership in industry and academia, she has a track record of driving operational, digital and cultural transformation and using data, analytics and AI in new ways to drive innovation and outcomes. As Dean of Melbourne Business School (MBS) and Co-Dean of Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne, she heads Australia’s leading business school, home to a world-ranked MBA program and the largest executive portfolio in the Southern Hemisphere. Prior, she was CEO of mental health provider Converge International for more than seven years, leading significant business growth and digital transformation, improving psychological safety and culture in many of Australia’s largest organisations. Earlier, in her first tenure at MBS as the inaugural Director of the Master of Business Analytics, she co-designed and ran the Master of Business Analytics program, ranked in the global top 15 today. Professor George holds a PhD in Operations, Information and Technology from Stanford University and has served on the boards of a wide range of organisations.

Annette Plowman is an accomplished, emergency management and community resilience leader with two decades of experience across health and humanitarian sectors. Her career includes senior roles with Australian Red Cross and St John Ambulance Northern Territory, with experience spanning executive leadership, emergency management, remote operations, and interagency coordination. Annette has led and contributed to complex emergency management and recovery work across Australia, including flood and cyclone recovery, disaster response to assist remote First Nations communities, pandemic operations, emergency workforce deployment and long-term resilience initiatives. Her current work in Far North Queensland local government focuses on recovery, resilience and disaster risk reduction following Tropical Cyclone Jasper and subsequent events. This includes developing practical tools and frameworks that support place-based recovery governance, community-led resilience and locally informed decision-making. Her practice is grounded in trauma-informed, culturally responsive and community-centred approaches with a focus on building and strengthening systems shaped by local knowledge, lived experience and community capability.

BurnBot is reimagining prescribed fire through robotics. We design, deploy, and operate autonomous platforms purpose-built for safe, precise, scalable fuel reduction.

Melinda McDonald CF is a Senior Firefighter with Fire and Rescue NSW, President of Women and Firefighting Australasia, and a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney. Her work sits at the intersection of operational practice, organisational culture, and community risk reduction.

Research Fellow at the University of the Philippines Resilience Institute

Olympian, Commonwealth Games gold medallist, practising lawyer, and founder of Hosking Bikes. Known for advocating for gender equity in professional cycling and challenging inequitable systems.

Karen trained in Medicine. Her PhD sparked a lifetime passion for health and work research. She was former Director of a UK National Centre for Health and Work and migrated to Australia in 2021 to become Professor of Occupational Rheumatology and Director of the Monash Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health (MonCOEH) in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine (SPHPM) at Monash University. The Centre mission is to improve the likelihood that working in any job, employment or capacity anywhere in the world will be safer, healthier and more inclusive. Her main research areas include prevention of harm to health in workplace settings and promotion of healthy work for all workers. She has long held an interest in women's health in the workplace and has ongoing studies of menopause and work.