LGT Capital Partners' Annual Investor Conference 2025

Thomas H. Zurbuchen, known in the space community as Dr. Z, is a Swiss-American astrophysicist, leader, and innovator.
Since June 2023, he is the leader of the ETH Space initiative. His stated goals are to build the world's best Master’s program in space science and technology, improve on the entrepreneurship program to enable more Swiss startups, and to assist space sciences. The Master's program took on its first students in September 2024.
Prior, he was the longest continually serving Head of Science at NASA from October 2016 through 2022, the leading program worldwide for doing science in and from space. During this time, he drove all aspects of leadership in space science, leading 130 missions with 37 launches. His achievements include bringing the international James Webb Telescope to launch, overseeing two Mars landings - the Perseverance rover and the first controlled flight away from the Earth with the Ingenuity helicopter - and developing the Parker Solar Probe, a mission to touch the Sun. He also conceived and led the Earth System Observatory, an advanced multi-platform observatory that creates a 3D holistic view of the Earth, from bedrock to atmosphere, and oversaw humanity’s first successful attempt at moving a celestial object, using a spacecraft impact.
Dr. Zurbuchen was born in Switzerland in 1968, became the first college graduate in his family, studied physics at the University of Bern with a minor in mathematics, and was awarded his PhD in 1996 with a thesis entitled “Turbulence in the interplanetary medium and its implications on the dynamics of minor ions”.
In that same year, Dr. Zurbuchen left for the US and joined the University of Michigan as a research associate, where, in 2008, he was made Professor of Space Science and Aerospace Engineering. His scientific research focuses on solar and heliospheric physics, experimental space research, and space systems. He is also well known for his work on innovation and entrepreneurship. During his time at University, Dr. Zurbuchen co-founded the Center for Entrepreneurship, which was recognized as the US leading undergraduate program.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Zurbuchen built multiple space instruments, such as the MASS sensor on NASA’s WIND spacecraft, launched in 1992, and the Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer, for which he served as team leader, on NASA’s Messenger, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.
Due to his achievements, Dr. Zurbuchen is a sought-after international expert in innovation and leadership of pioneering organizations. He chaired the US National Academy of Sciences committee, for example, that produced a report on CubeSats in 2016, widely credited for diversifying Mission portfolios and tech approaches for science and Earth observations.

Matthew Kaminski is the cofounder of POLITICO Europe and former editor in chief of POLITICO in Washington. He is a leading American commentator on politics and global affairs, and writes a column for POLITICO Magazine.
Over a decade as a senior media executive, Matt helped build a transatlantic digital publication and led it to its sale three years ago to Axel Springer. POLITICO Europe, which launched under his leadership in 2015, quickly established itself as the most influential publication on EU affairs – and one of the most successful media startups of the digital era. He moved to Washington to take up the top editor’s job of POLITICO, overseeing a period of unprecedented growth and journalistic impact for the company. He built out its national security, legal, tech and energy & environment offerings and created innovative engineering and AI teams in the newsroom. POLITICO has operations across nine-time zones and publishes in three languages. During his editorship, POLITICO’s reporting on the pandemic, its “scoop of the century” on the Supreme Court’s draft ruling to overturn abortion rights and its political coverage was recognized by the George Polk, Pulitzer and other awards. Matt led the newsroom through the publication’s sale to Axel Springer in late 2021, in the biggest digital media deal ever. Since September 2023, Kaminski has been POLITICO’s editor-at-large, writing his column and other features. He also advises a couple AI startup, and serves on the boards of Partners Group (Asia) and World Minds.
Born in Warsaw, Matt emigrated to the U.S. with his family at the age of eight and grew up in Washington. He has bounced between both sides of the Atlantic throughout his career. He started reporting on Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union for the Financial Times in 1993, before even graduating from Yale. He was then a foreign correspondent, editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels, Paris and New York for nearly two decades. Matt was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of the Overseas Press Club Award for his coverage of Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014. His reporting on the European Union won the Peter Weitz Prize, awarded by the German Marshall Fund in 2004. Matt lives in Washington DC with his wife Alexandra Geneste, a French journalist and author.