David Concannon FN’96 is an attorney and explorer with nearly 40 years of experience in the field and 30 years of trial experience in courtrooms around the United States. David has lost only one trial in his legal career, his first, and he didn’t like it. Consequently, he has not lost another trial since 1995. An avid explorer, David has sailed the Beagle Channel, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, dived 16,000 feet deep in the Bermuda Triangle, recovered artifacts from the R.M.S. Titanic, explored the H.M.H.S. Britannic, and he led the expeditions to find and recover the Apollo F-1 engines that launched men to the moon.

He has been General Counsel (or the equivalent) to a number of organizations, including The Explorers Club, X-Prize Foundation, Professional Shipwreck Explorers Association, Anglo-Danish Maritime Archaeology Team, and the American Academy of Underwater Sciences. David now lives in the ski town of Sun Valley, Idaho, high up in the Rocky Mountains, but he ventures down to sea level when the need arises.

Charles Norchi FN’90 is the Benjamin Thompson Professor of Law in the University of Maine School of Law. He teaches and researches International Law, Law of the Sea, International Human Rights, Arctic Law, Expedition Law and directs the Center for Oceans and Coastal Law. Dr. Norchi is Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Admiralty and Maritime Law, Co-President of the Arctic Futures Institute, Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Geographic Society, and The Explorers Club.

He is a contributing editor to Global Geneva, the Journal of the North Atlantic and Arctic and was Fulbright Ministry of Foreign Affairs Arctic Scholar in Iceland. Professor Norchi holds degrees from Harvard College, Case Western Reserve University, Yale Law School and is a dual national of Ireland and the United States. He has been awarded The Explorer Club Flag for multiple expeditions including Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Greenland.

Kristin Larson FN’02 spent a decade in Antarctica managing the largest, most diverse scientific research program on the continent. Her time spent south of 70 degrees interpreting and implementing the complex legal framework governing Antarctica – an entire continent without sovereigns – inspired Kristin to augment her two chemistry degrees with a juris doctor.

She received her law degree from George Washington University while serving on a White House task force for Vice President Al Gore focussed on harmonizing international agreements with domestic environmental protections. Kristin Larson’s Antarctic tenure was recognized by the naming of “Kristin Peak” (a mountain on Ross Island, Antarctica) in her honor.

Moriba Jah is an associate professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin where he is the holder of the Mrs. Pearlie Dashiell Henderson Centennial Fellowship in Engineering. He is the director for Computational Astronautical Sciences and Technologies (CAST), a group within the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences as well as the Lead for the Space Security and Safety Program at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Moriba came to UT Austin by way of the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory prior to that, where he was a Spacecraft Navigator on a handful of Mars missions.

Moriba is a Fellow of multiple organizations: TED, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), American Astronautical Society (AAS), International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). He has served on the US delegation to the United Nations Committee On Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN-COPUOS), is an elected Academician of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), and has testified to congress on his work as related to Space Situational Awareness and Space Traffic Management. He’s an Co-Editor of the IAA and Elsevier Acta Astronautica journal, and serves on multiple committees: IAA Space Traffic Management, IAA Space Debris, AIAA Astrodynamics, IAF Astrodynamics, and IAF Space Security.

Richard Garriott de Cayeux currently serves as the President of the Explorers Club. He is a founding father of the videogame industry and the commercial spaceflight industry, a flown astronaut, and the first explorer to have explored pole to pole, orbited the Earth, and reached the deepest point in the Ocean.

As a principal shaper of the commercial spaceflight industry, he cofounded Space Adventures, the only company to arrange space flights for private citizens and is the sixth private astronaut to live aboard the International Space Station. The son of a NASA astronaut, he became the first second-generation astronaut, served on NASA advisory Council, and has been a key leader in civilian and commercial space through institutions such as the Challenger Center for Science Education, the XPRIZE Foundation, and Space Adventures.