Dr. Maureen August is a Lab Group Manager for General Motors Research and Development.  She graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served as an Engineer Officer in the United States Army.  She has deployed to Nicaragua for hurricane recovery and commanded a company in Iraq.  After leaving the Army, Maureen worked as a Senior Systems Engineer developing the Joint Test and Evaluation Methodology for Joint Forces Command.  Before moving to General Motors, Maureen served as the Director of Curriculum for the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness Program.  In this capacity she was responsible for the education and training of Soldiers across the Army focused on performance, energy management, and resilience.  Dr. August was also selected as the Program Manager for the Special Operations Cognitive Enhancement and Performance Program which adopts the principles of sports and performance psychology to provide mental skills training for Special Operations Forces.  These skills focused on teaching human biorhythms, sleep science, energy management, attention control and memory improvement.  This training was critical for elite Soldiers to remain adaptive and ready during high stress training and deployments.  At General Motors, Maureen has worked in as a human factors expert in Safety, a capture manager for GM Defense, and now works with her team on biosensing, information display, and simulation.  Maureen holds an MS in Engineering Management from Missouri S&T, an ME in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and completed her PhD in Systems and Engineering Management at Texas Tech University.

Benjamin Lyon is senior vice president and chief technology officer of Aptiv, a position he has held since December 2022.

In this role, Mr. Lyon is responsible for ensuring that Aptiv remains at the forefront of emerging and disruptive technology trends and prioritizing longer-term technology and business model opportunities in mobility and adjacent markets. In addition, Mr. Lyon is responsible for the technology leadership of the global engineering organization, which includes more than 19,000 technologists located in 12 major technical centers across the globe.

Mr. Lyon has over two decades of experience in senior engineering, developing technology, commercializing products and executing program launches at leading technology companies.

Most recently, Benjamin served as Chief Engineer and Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations of Astra Space, Inc. since 2021. In this role, he successfully deployed 22 satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) and launched the Astra Space Engine Hall-Effect thruster product line.

Before that, Benjamin served at Apple Inc. for over two decades, developing and productized sensors, displays, high-performance compute, and safety / security critical technology for scale. While at Apple, he also cofounded their autonomous systems effort.

Mr. Lyon received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.