As a life-long philanthropist, Laure established her foundation in 1995 in order to formalize her charitable giving in the areas of education and social services for disadvantaged children. In 2015, she established The LaureL STEM Fund, with a focus on STEM education and medical research.

Laure is a former clinical researcher whose experience includes trials for treatment of cystic fibrosis, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, cancer and infant nutrition. She has held clinical research positions at several California Bay Area companies, including Matrix Pharmaceutical and Genelabs Technologies. Early in her career, Laure founded Woods Consulting, Inc., to advise companies that test the safety and efficacy of medications devices, diagnostic products and treatment regimens intended for human use.

As someone struggling with late-stage Lyme disease, Laure co-founded the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, to advance research aimed at making this tick-borne disease easy to diagnose and simple to cure. She currently serves as Board Chair of that organization. Laure also serves on the Board of the L.K. Whittier Foundation, a private foundation supporting medical and technology research. She holds a BS in Animal Science from the University of California at Davis.

Jon started his media career in London in advertising, before transitioning to exhibitions and trade-shows. Transferred to LA in the 90s with his British company, he worked on major art fairs and wine shows. Jon then launched Softworld in the US, building the company as CEO before its acquisition by a larger media company. From then on much of Jon’s career has been in the media/event market, with senior roles at Gartner, The Economist, Bloomberg Media and Recode.

More recently he switched to the non-profit space as Executive Director of the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto and collaborated with Andy Wegst to produce “Africa The Struggle of Beauty”. The exhibition was devoted to highlighting the plight of African wildlife through fine art photography, featuring Andy’s work in a unique and powerful narrative format.

Why I want to help Maono

Growing up in the UK in the 60s, our family would visit the cinema regularly with the films of Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers being amongst our favorites. Born Free and The Ring of Bright Water left an indelible impact on me and ensured a life long love of wildlife. Finally getting the opportunity to travel to Africa to see such wonderful animals in the wild in Kruger Park impacted me enormously. The sight and sound of a very young female elephant emerging from the bush, playfully trumpeting with her ungainly trunk, was so deeply emotional for me. In one sense the experience was pure joy, but in anther sense deeply troubling, as I considered her potential for survival. I was adamant I had to do something to help.

I have enormous respect for the quality of Andy’s work as a filmmaker and photographer, so the chance to help him with his visionary mission of Maono, is a great honor.

Dale Sakai is recognized as an industry leading strategist with over twenty years of general management experience in the technology industry ranging from large companies such as IBM to start-ups backed by venture capitalists and investment banks such as Kleiner Perkins and Goldman Sachs. He is best known for his analytic and market based approaches to strategic planning.

Mr. Sakai is currently a co-founder of Obo Incorporated, which provides a Product Decision System (PDS) that enables companies to improve valuation through the formulation of profitable products. The underlying methods were developed by Mr. Sakai in conjunction with product experts from IBM, Oracle, the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Prior to founding Obo, Mr. Sakai was the managing director of the Incyte Group where he utilized his strategic planning methods for the world’s leading technology companies, private equity firms and venture capital groups. Clients included IBM, Oracle, Symantec, KKR and Accel Partners.

While at IBM during the 90’s, Mr. Sakai was involved in the restructuring and repositioning of the company. As COO of both Data Base Systems with annual revenue of $2.3B and Application Development Software with annual revenue of $2.7B Mr. Sakai improved profitability by 27%. As Chief Strategy Officer at Active Software, a Kleiner Perkins company, Mr. Sakai helped establish the Application Integration market. After repositioning the company and a successful IPO, Active Software was acquired by WebMethods for $1.3B. As CEO of Confer Software, a Goldman Sachs company, Mr. Sakai helped initialize the EHealth market while restructuring and recapitalizing the company. Confer Software was acquired by Quovtix.

Mr. Sakai holds a BA in Physics from Amherst College, a BS in Engineering from Stanford University and a Masters in Management Science from Stanford University.

Ann Johnson Prum has been an independent nature and science cinematographer and media producer for more than twenty-five years. She runs Coneflower Studios, a woman-owned nature and science documentary production company. She has filmed and produced twelve programs for PBS Nature, and additional programs for Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, ABC, TBS, and Science Channel. Her work has won numerous awards including two national Emmy Awards for PBS Nature: An Original Duckumentary (2013, Best Natural History Program) and Super Hummingbirds (2017, Best Cinematography). Her work has garnered 12 additional Emmy nominations, five Cine Golden Eagles, and other national and international awards. From Amazonia to Antarctica, and the Argonne National synchrotron to urban hospital emergency rooms, Johnson Prum has assembled teams of the greatest talents in science and wildlife documentary to communicate science and nature to the public. Johnson Prum holds a BA in Environmental Science and Art History from Bowdoin College.