Andrew Light has held a variety of positions in universities, government, and NGOs working on clean energy and climate issues. From 2021-2025 he served as United States Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs in the Biden administration, focused on accelerating a global clean energy transition while ensuring energy security. From 2013-2016 he served as Senior Adviser and India Counselor to the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change, as well as a staff member for climate in the Secretary of State’s Office of Policy Planning, working on the Paris Agreement and other platforms for climate cooperation. At NGOs, he has been a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute  and Senior Fellow and Director of International Climate and Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress. Andrew is currently Distinguished University Professor of Public Policy, Philosophy, and Atmospheric Sciences at George Mason University and a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth at The University of Chicago.

Yaya J. Fanusie is Director of Policy for AML & Cyber Risk at the Crypto Council for Innovation. He is a pioneer in the research and analysis of U.S. national security issues relating to digital assets. Earlier in his career, he spent seven years as both an economic and counterterrorism analyst in the CIA, where he regularly briefed federal law enforcement, U.S. military personnel, and White House-level policy makers—including President George W. Bush whom he personally briefed on terrorism threats. In 2009, he spent three months in Afghanistan providing analytic support to senior military officials.

After leaving government service, Yaya worked for a small consulting firm on a global financial asset recovery investigation of a kleptocratic regime. Later, he joined the think tank world and as Director of Analysis at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance, Yaya led research on sanctions evasion and terrorist financing threats. As part of this work, in 2016 he began tracking the illicit use of crypto and wrote some of the first public analysis on a terrorist crypto crowdfunding campaign. He later published a major study on efforts by Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and China to build national blockchain infrastructure.

Yaya is a Visiting Fellow at Georgetown’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy. He has served as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) where his research focused on crypto, blockchain, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Yaya has testified before Congress multiple times on illicit financing issues and is a leading expert on China’s CBDC. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, Bloomberg TV, and CNBC, and has been quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the LA Times.

Yaya is a creative and an educator. He is the producer of the audio spy thriller podcast called The Jabbari Lincoln Files. He also hosts the podcast DESIGNATED with Yaya Jata Fanusie for Illicit Edge media, where he interviews financial crime fighters and economic warriors.  In 2018, he developed and taught an Introduction to Blockchain Technology course at Morgan State University in Baltimore. And he worked as a high school math teacher in Washington DC  before his career in the US government.

Yaya received an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a BA in Economics from UC Berkeley.

Amy Froide is Professor of History and the Director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities. Her areas of research include early modern British and women’s economic history, as well as the history of early financial capitalism. Prof. Froide is the author of Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2016). She is currently working on the Charitable Corporation, an innovative microlending company in 18th-century London whose directors embezzled shareholder funds leading to charges of corruption and calls for a Parliamentary bailout.   Prof. Froide was the founding director of UMBC’s minor in Entrepreneurship. She is currently the UMBC Presidential Teaching Professor for 2024-27.

Bio coming soon!

Hanna Pickard is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics and Krieger-Eisenhower Professor at Johns Hopkins University

Abstract coming soon!

Stephen C. Angle is Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University. Angle specializes in Confucianism and comparative philosophy, and his research focuses on philosophy’s role in human rights, politics, and ethics both in East Asia and globally. Angle is the author of five books and co-editor of two others, including Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life (Oxford, 2022) and Progressive Confucianism and Its Critics: Dialogues from the Confucian Heartland (co-edited with Yutang Jin; Routledge, 2025).

In its most general sense, progressive Confucianism is the project of critically developing the on-going Confucian tradition in light of insights and challenges from modern thinkers and societies. Two of the core commitments of the tradition are that (1) all people have the inherent possibility of becoming more virtuous, and our socio-political arrangements should support such growth as much as possible; and (2) internal (or nei) moral growth is inextricably linked to external (or wai) activity, which is summed up in the regulative ideal of “inner sageliness, outer kingliness.” In a contemporary, post-monarchical context, the most encompassing role for individuals can thus be called nei-wai citizenship. The thesis of this presentation is that playing one’s role within the family is a key aspect of nei-wai citizenship, and that such a reframing allows us to see filiality in a broader light than most recent discussions. By viewing filial children as not only having particularist care for their parents but also — as citizens — being responsive to the ways more general structures impact their parents (and others’ parents), we can both answer some of the most pressing objections to contemporary Confucian-inspired social policies and also offer a compelling update to pre-modern Confucianism’s famous analogy between family and state.