Dr. Ernestine Fu Mak is Co-Director of Stanford Frontier Technology Lab. She has taught interdisciplinary courses across engineering and medicine: Frontier Technology - Understanding and Preparing for Technology in the Next Economy, Design and Innovation for the Circular Economy, Autonomous Vehicles Studio, Entrepreneurship Through the Lens of Venture Capital, and Silicon Valley and the U.S. Government.

She is Managing Partner of Brave Capital. Over the past decade, she has worked across the startup ecosystem, negotiating mergers and acquisitions, organizing SPVs for later-stage companies, angel investing in and advising startups that have since been acquired, and advising banks on venture debt. Alongside her role at Brave Capital, she is a Venture Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, where she began her career and has guided founders as they navigate the journey to product-market fit and scale their businesses and teams. She was recognized on the inaugural Forbes Magazine 30 Under 30 list, Vanity Fair Next Establishment list, and Business Insider Silicon Valley 100 list. She is a Kauffman Fellow and Eisenhower Fellow.

She completed her B.S., M.S., MBA, Ph.D., and postdoc at Stanford University. Graduating with Tau Beta Pi and Phi Beta Kappa honors, she was awarded the Kennedy Prize for the top undergraduate thesis in engineering and the Terman Award as one of the top thirty graduating seniors in engineering. Her doctoral thesis focused on human operator and autonomous vehicle interactions with system bias and transitions of control. She is an inventor on numerous granted or in-process technology patents.

Faith Zehfuss is a co-term student in the FSI Masters in International Policy with a concentration in International Security. She is currently continuing her work at 8VC on the defense investment team. As an undergraduate student, Faith was involved with Hacking for Defense and Women In National Security. She has international startup experience through Stanford SEED, assisted a refugee entrepreneurship project in Uganda for a year with the MS&E Department and Stanford King Center, and was a varsity lightweight rower.

COLONEL U.S. ARMY (ret) is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the National Defense University Institute for National Strategic Studies, Center for Technology and National Security Policy and a senior advisor within the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO).

During his 32 years in uniform he served as both an enlisted national guardsman and as an active duty officer. He served in, led, and commanded Infantry units at the platoon through brigade level, while performing peace support, combat, and special operations in Panama, Kosovo, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

During his last assignment in the military he led the U.S. Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF) in the investment of over $1.4B in developing rapid solutions to answer Soldiers’ most pressing needs. Among the initiatives he developed were the Army’s $66M effort to develop and deploy renewable energy systems on the battlefield and the Army’s $45M effort to design an integrated system to gather the data required to determine the potential causes of Traumatic Brain Injury. He was also responsible for the Army’s first deployment of mobile advanced/additive manufacturing labs in a bid to more closely connect scientists and engineers to problems on the battlefield. His efforts to accelerate problem recognition and solution delivery to military units is the subject of the 2013 Stanford Graduate School of Business Case Study “The Rapid Equipping Force Customer Focused Innovation in the U.S. Army” and appears in the 2014 book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao.

Newell holds a BS from Kansas State University, an MS in Operations from the US Army Command & General Staff College, an MS in Strategy from the National Defense University and Advanced Certificates from the MIT Sloan School and Stanford University Graduate School of Business.