Speakers

Samuel received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1991. He spent 10 years at Florida Atlantic University, reaching full professor status before retiring to become an entrepreneur.

Dr. Smith is a serial entrepreneur and an active participant in open standards development and governance. 

Phil Feairheller is the CTO and Co-Founder of healthKERI, healthcare’s only True Zero-Trust Data Exchange. Prior to starting healthKERI he was the vLEI Architect at GLEIF responsible for the technical architecture and development of the Verifiable LEI (vLEI) ecosystem.

Daniel is the CTO and CISO at Provenant, a startup working on verifiable communications based on KERI and ACDCs. He is a co-inventor of DIDComm, a contributor to the W3C DID and VC specs, and is currently consulting on an eIDAS-centric citizen wallet initiative that uses SD-JWT and ISO mDL.

George McEwan is a multi-disciplined engineer, inventor, and the Privacy Architect for the State of Utah. Drawing on his diverse background as a soldier, pilot, and published author, George works to unlock the value of digital government.

He previously served as Chief Strategy Officer for Utah’s Division of Technology Services and as IT Director for the Department of Health during the pandemic, where he saw the impact of the digital divide firsthand.

Ari Argoud is a full-stack machine learning engineer focused on building KERI-secure, production systems at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, healthcare, and health science.

Thomas A. Mayfield is the Head of Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions at the Cardano Foundation and holds a BSc. Honours Degree in Computer Security and Digital Forensics.  Thomas is currently a PhD candidate specialising in decentralized technologies with his novel research contribution Edge Layer IoT Trustless Environments.  

At the Cardano Foundation, his team is actively developing Veridian, an innovative open source decentralized identity solution designed for individuals and organisations leveraging protocols and technologies including Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI), and Trust Over IP’s Authentic Chained Data Container (ACDC).

Jonathan began his career at Motorola, where he developed his expertise as an engineer and engineering manager. In 2018, he joined Evernym, eventually serving as Head of Engineering and Technical Operations and acting CISO. At Evernym, he led the development of Verity, an early decentralized identity platform, and contributed to key SSI libraries like Hyperledger Indy and Aries.

Following a successful exit from Evernym, Jonathan led engineering efforts at Avast (now Gen) as Head of Technology in the US for digital identity, where he oversaw the development and launch of the Midy digital wallet.

Kent Bull is The Identity Bull, a vLEI and KERI Evangelist, software developer with significant expertise in KERI, ACDC, CESR, and the current GLEIF and WebOfTrust codebase for the vLEI and KERI. As a husband and a father of two Kent enjoys playing piano duets with his wife and wrestling with his two adorable sons. Based in St. George, Utah, Kent enjoys the beautiful red rocks of the desert and the multiple national parks within driving distance, and the cleanest air Utah has to offer.

Ned is a prolific inventor, author, and industry expert in trusted computing. He has over 35 years industry experience at Sequent and Intel in trusted systems, cryptography, virtualization, manageability, and hardware roots of trust. He has more than 500 granted US patents and 9 Intel Top Inventor awards. He co-authored “Demystifying Internet of Things Security” and published papers related to hardware virtualization, disk encryption, decentralized trust, public key infrastructure, and attestation.

A legal entrepreneur with expertise in corporate law, media and entertainment, and emerging technology, Cole Davis seamlessly bridges the gap between law and innovation. As the founder and CEO of Switchchord, a legal technology and digital identity company, he pioneered solutions that streamline rights management and automate legal workflows in the music industry.

Alan Davies is a seasoned entrepreneur, founding several IT businesses, including publicly-listed Gresham in the UK, Credential Master (acquired by Salesforce), and now Digital Trust Foundry, a platform based on the KERI and ACDC specifications, designed to make any digital content trustable.

Fergal is the Identity Solutions Lead Architect at the Cardano Foundation. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and has a background in developing industrial IoT gateway devices. He is passionate about delivering secure and reliable software.

Scott Stuewe is President and CEO of DirectTrust, a non-profit trade association advancing trust, identity, security, and interoperability across U.S. healthcare. With more than 30 years in health IT and cybersecurity, he has helped build scalable trust frameworks supporting secure identity assured exchange among providers, payers, and public health.

Jay-Alexander Elliot is a software engineer focused on KERI infrastructure, deployment, and builder-facing integration. His work centers on making open KERI infrastructure practical through witness deployment, watcher sequencing, and consumer integration paths that preserve openness for developers and adopters.

Mark Scrimshire is Chief Interoperability Officer at Onyx where he steers the development of OnyxOS, the market-leading HL7 FHIR Interoperability Platform. He was previously the CMS Entrepreneur-In-Residence responsible for the development and launch of CMS Blue Button 2.0 API for 60 million Medicare beneficiaries. The largest FHIR API Implementation for the world’s largest health insurer.

Phil Windley is Executive Director of the IIW Foundation, the non-profit responsible for the Internet Identity Workshop and is writing book on authorization for Manning Publications. He was most recently a Senior Software Development Manager at AWS Identity. Before that he was an Enterprise Architect and Principal Engineer in the Office of Information Technology at Brigham Young University (BYU). He was the Founding Chair of the Sovrin Foundation serving from 2016 to 2020.

For over a decade, Jared has worked on healthcare’s interoperability problem. From helping disabled Americans gather their (then-paper) medical records to helping KLAS Research shine a light on healthcare’s progress, Jared is dedicated to the vision of what healthcare can become through technology.

Keanu Pahio is a software engineer with a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University–Hawaii. He is currently working for the KERI Foundation, contributing to core infrastructure and backend components that make decentralized identity systems reliable and developer‑friendly.

Karla McKenna is an international standards specialist in financial services. Ms. McKenna is Managing Director, GLEIF Americas, as well as Head of Standards for the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation. Ms. McKenna led the development of the digital use of the LEI, concentrating on the implementation of the verifiable LEI (vLEI), and is also responsible for facilitating the development and implementation of GLEIF standards and leveraging international standards to maximize data quality and the operational integrity of the Global LEI System. Ms. McKenna chaired the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee 68 (ISO/TC 68), Financial services, from 2006 to 2018, and continues ISO work in the areas of standards interoperability and regulatory use of international standards as co-convenor of the TC 68 Standards Advisory Group.

I work at the intersection of fields in order to bring about new discoveries, bringing together resources from unique locations to create real-world value. While not an academic by training, I seek the highest level of thought possible in order to understand cardinal principles.

As a partner @ Key State Capital, we invest in the verifiable, autonomic future.

Christopher Bramwell is Utah’s Chief Privacy Officer and Director of the Utah Office of Data Privacy, where he architected and oversees the implementation of the Government Data Privacy Act, one of the nation’s most comprehensive state government privacy laws. He is the public policy architect for Utah’s State-Endorsed Digital Identity (SEDI) initiative, advancing a constitutional, privacy-first model for trusted digital identity.

Evan Asakawa is a software engineer at the KERI Foundation, where he is building a web wallet to bring KERI to the browser. He also holds a BS in computer science from UC Santa Barbara.

Ryan Hansen has nearly 30 years of experience designing and building software solutions in a broad range of industries, including FinTech, healthcare, and digital identity. Ryan is a core engineer on the KERI Foundation team, focused on improving the KERI developer experience and building tools to help organizations more easily understand, adopt, and deploy KERI solutions in the real world.