Esther Dyson(@edyson on twitter) is chairman of EDventure Holdings and executive founder of the Way to Wellville (@WaytoWellville), a 10-year nonprofit project to help five small US communities cultivate health among their residents and to develop new business models for doing so. Overall, Dyson works to leverage new business models, new technologies and new markets (both economic and political).

From October 2008 to March of 2009, she lived at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut to two-time space tourist Charles Simonyi.  Apart from this brief sabbatical, she is an active board member for a variety of companies, including XCOR Aerospace, 23andMe, Luxoft, Meetup, Pressreader, Voxiva, and Yandex (Russia – YNDX).  Her past investments include Icon Aircraft (light sport aircraft), Nanoracks, and Space Adventures (which organizes programs such as hers for space tourists) in aerospace.

Dyson also sits on the boards of several nonprofits including Waypaver Labs, the Long Now Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, and Open Humans Foundation and is a patron of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.  She has a BA in economics from Harvard and started her serious career as a fact-checker/reporter for Forbes Magazine (1974-77).  From 1977 to 1982 she worked on Wall Street as a securities analyst, covering companies such as Federal Express, Apple Computer and Electronic Data Systems.  From 1983 to 2004 she wrote/edited Release 1.0, a monthly analysis of the PC/Internet business, and ran the yearly PC Forum, the industry’s leading executive conference (no sponsors), as head of her own company EDventure Holdings.  She sold EDventure to CNET in 2004 and worked there for two years before going completely independent.  Along the way, she served as founding (non-exec) chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000. In addition, she wrote the best-selling, widely translated book “Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age,” published by Broadway Books, in 1997.  She posts photos at www.flickr.com/photos/edyson.