Dr. Nerissa DRAEGER is Director of Open Innovation in the Office of the CTO at Lam Research. Her vision of innovation lives at the intersection of emerging technologies, strategy, and people. She drives internal innovation programs, guides external research collaborations, and builds academic partnerships to grow Lam’s technology pipeline. Dr. Draeger has managed pathfinding programs on advanced deposition and etch processes at Lam Research and Novellus Systems. She serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors for UIDP and recently served on the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society. She earned her Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her B.S.E. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Zhihong CHEN is the Reilly Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Before joining the university, she was the Manager of Carbon Technology Group at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. At Purdue, Chen’s research focuses on the design and fabrication of novel materials, devices, and circuits for beyond-CMOS applications and novel computing schemes. Since 2023, Chen has been the Mary Jo and Robert L. Kirk Director of the Birck Nanotechnology Center. She served as the Technical Program Chair for the 2020 Device Research Conference and as its General Chair in 2021. She also served as the Program Chair and the General Chair for the International Interconnect Technology Conference since 2022. She is an IEEE Fellow for her contributions to the understanding and applications of low-dimensional nanomaterials.
Chris RITTER is the division director of scientific computing & AI and director of the Digital Innovation Center of Excellence at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). His team of ~100 computational and data scientists are changing the world’s future with AI/ML, digital twinning, digital engineering, multi-physics, HPC, and digital thread technologies across a portfolio of nuclear energy, non-proliferation, semiconductor, and defense applications.
Chris founded INL's nationally leading digital engineering team which grew from 0 to over ~57 of the nation’s top researchers and developers in digital science. His team led the first nuclear reactor digital twin, built the Deep Lynx open digital thread platform, developed the first autonomous non-nuclear microreactor, and is actively building multiple petabyte-scale digital thread platforms. Additionally, he is co-president of Newcomers in Leadership and is the Chief Digital Officer of SMART USA. Prior to INL, Chris co-founded and led development of the #1 cloud-native MBSE tool, Innoslate, used in 107 counties across 2,000 companies around the world.