Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson

chairman of EDventure Holdings and Founder of HICCup.co, Socrates Program

Esther Dyson is chairman of EDventure Holdings and founder of HICCup.co, for Health Initiative Coordinating Council, an open-source initiative devoted to defining and testing a business model for investing in health (not health care). Her primary activity is investing in and nurturing start-ups, with a recent focus on health care and aerospace. She recently served on the selection panel for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Young Leader Awards and is active on the “health not healthcare” speaker circuit and from October 2008 to March of 2009, Dyson lived in Star City outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut. Dyson sits on the boards of several nonprofits, including the Eurasia Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, the Personal Genome Foundation, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and StopBadware.org. She has a BA in economics from Harvard and was founding chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000. In 1997 Dyson wrote the best-selling, widely translated book Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, published by Broadway Books.