More speakers to follow.
Sam Smith
Sam Smith, the inventor of KERI.
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.
He has over 100 refereed publications in the areas of machine learning, autonomous vehicle systems, automated reasoning, and decentralized systems. He was principal investigator on numerous federally funded research projects.
Karla McKenna
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.
Ms. McKenna is a member of the inaugural Boards of the Eurofiling Foundation and the KERI Foundation, the Steering Committee of Trust over IP, and the transitional Board of the Ayra Foundation; is the Immediate Past Chair of the Securities Market Practice Group (SMPG) and also has served on the Boards of XBRL International, the International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication (ISITC) and the Accredited Standards Committee X9 (ASC X9).
Kent Bull
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.
Kent currently works for GLEIF as a software developer on the vLEI technical team. He is more than grateful and excited to see you on the journey to use KERI and the vLEI. Ask him any questions about either vLEI or KERI whether architectural, product based, or deeply technical.
Jay-Alexander Elliot
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.
Keanu Pahio
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.
Evan Asakawa
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
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.