Engineering Leadership Summit Keynote Speakers

Exploration AI Research Program Manager, ExxonMobil

Dr. Amit Kumar joined ExxonMobil in 2013 and currently serves as the Exploration AI Research Program Manager, where he leads the development and application of artificial intelligence solutions for subsurface exploration. During his tenure at ExxonMobil, he has led and contributed to the application of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and physics-based simulation methods across a broad range of upstream domains, including exploration, drilling and completions, and production operations.

Kumar earned a Bachelor of Technology in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and completed a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Passionate about bridging cutting-edge research with real-world energy applications, Kumar continues to drive innovation by integrating physics-based models with modern AI techniques to enable smarter decision making and accelerate the digital transformation of the upstream energy industry.

President, Lockheed Martin Space

Robert Lightfoot is President of Lockheed Martin Space and an officer of Lockheed Martin Corporation. In this capacity, he leads the Space business, which is a more than $11 billion enterprise employing more than 22,000 people globally.

Previously, Lightfoot served as Vice President of Operations for Lockheed Martin Space and was responsible for production operations, including assembly, test, and launch operations, supply chain, quality, program management, and all facilities, logistics, and security services. Prior to joining Lockheed Martin in 2019, he served as the president of LSINC Corporation.

Lightfoot spent 29 years at NASA, where he served as Associate Administrator, the agency’s highest-ranking civil service position. He held other critical leadership roles supporting space operations, exploration, and science missions, including Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and Director of Propulsion Test at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. He also focused on strategies for key missions, including the space shuttle’s return to flight following the Columbia tragedy, then the initial transition and retirement efforts for shuttle infrastructure.

He was inducted into the State of Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame in 2010 and received numerous awards during his NASA career, including the Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Executives, the highest honor for federal government work, in 2006, 2010, and 2016. Lightfoot earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from The University of Alabama, where he is a Department of Mechanical Engineering Fellow and a Distinguished Engineering Fellow for the Styslinger College of Engineering.

Director of Strategic Academic Partnerships and Centers of Excellence, Dassault Systems

Dr. Keith Nagara joined Dassault Systems in 2022 to lead academic strategy and partnerships, supporting educational transformation and workforce development in the areas of virtual twins, model-based systems engineering, semiconductors, and life sciences. Previously, he founded and directed the transportation design and product design programs at Lawrence Technological University. Nagara began his career at Ford Motor Company, where he led multidisciplinary projects and was selected by the executive leadership team to support corporate transformation initiatives. He also developed a cradle-to-cradle strategic plan in collaboration with William McDonough to implement a sustainability-driven, evolutionary business model.

Chief Helper, The GTM Firm

Bobby Napiltonia is a technology executive, entrepreneur, and ecosystem builder who has spent nearly four decades helping shape some of the defining technology platform shifts of the modern computing era.

His career spans the evolution of the personal computer, cloud computing, intelligent energy systems, and now artificial intelligence. Early in his career, Napiltonia helped bring digital sound to the PC at Creative Labs, transforming computers from business machines into platforms for gaming, multimedia, and digital entertainment. At Salesforce, he helped build the AppExchange and launch one of the industry’s first enterprise low-code platforms, fundamentally changing how enterprise software was developed by enabling business users to build applications with clicks instead of code. Long before generative AI began writing software, Napiltonia was helping redefine who could build it. Today, the Salesforce AppExchange ecosystem generates more than $1 trillion in economic impact, making it one of the largest and most successful enterprise software ecosystems in the world.

Napiltonia later helped scale Twilio’s communications platform and API ecosystem, powering billions of digital interactions that businesses and consumers rely on every day. Beyond software, he has spent more than 15 years building intelligent energy infrastructure, including a smart grid company acquired by Siemens and a virtual power plant platform acquired by Schneider Electric.

Today, Napiltonia advises founders, Fortune 500 companies, and technology leaders across the modern AI ecosystem, working with technologies and platforms from NVIDIA, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other industry leaders. His work focuses on AI infrastructure, physical AI, robotics, digital twins, cloud platforms, APIs, and the convergence of software, compute, networking, and energy systems.

Vice President of AI Infrastructure, Microsoft 

Ananth Sankaranarayanan serves as Vice President of AI Infrastructure at Microsoft, where he is responsible for designing, building, and operating Azure supercomputing infrastructure to power the world’s most advanced AI models both within the company and across industry pioneers. With more than three decades of leadership experience across Microsoft, Meta, and Intel, Sankaranarayanan has built transformative technology platforms, scaled global organizations, and driven innovation from silicon to cloud. He holds two patents, has authored multiple technical publications, and contributed a book chapter on artificial intelligence. Sankaranarayanan is a recipient of the National Science Teaching Association Award, reflecting more than 10,000 hours of volunteer service dedicated to mentoring and preparing the next generation of STEM leaders.

Senior Fellow, AMD 

Michael Schulte is a Senior Fellow with AMD, where he leads research, advanced development, and technology transfer activities in artificial intelligence, domain-specific processing, and high-performance, energy-efficient computing. He was a principal investigator on AMD’s Extreme-scale Computing Projects and Chief Engineer at AMD for the Frontier and El Capitan exascale supercomputers. He currently works with his team to drive hardware and software innovations for AMD data center products. Prior to joining AMD, Schulte was a tenured faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Lehigh University. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an IEEE Fellow recognized for his contributions to compute architectures.