Mr. Dan Cartwright, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner, National Fire Chiefs Council, National Deputy CBRN(e) Strategic Lead

Dan Cartwright has over 30 years’ experience in emergency response, national resilience, and civil protection. His career spans frontline fire and rescue leadership, national policy development, and international collaboration on Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) preparedness.

He currently works with cross-government partners on public safety and resilience programmes and represents the UK as a Civil CBRN expert to NATO. Alongside this, he serves as a Reservist Major in Specialist Group Military Intelligence. Dan has supported multi-agency responses to major incidents and international events, and contributes to improving how civil and military organisations plan, train, and work together.

He remains committed to practical, proportionate resilience, supporting collaboration across emergency services, government, and international partners.

Ltc Thomas Holmberg has served in the Swedish Armed Forces since 1988, with extensive experience in CBRN operations and training. He has held key roles at the Swedish CBRN Defence Centre, including Development Officer for Army CBRN, Head of Exercise and Evaluation, and head of Training Support. As Head of the CBRN School he took the initiative creating and leading the International CBRN Winter Course. Since 2019, he has led the Training and Capability Development Division and represents Sweden in the JCBRND-CDG and the Doctrine and Terminology Panel. His career reflects a strong commitment to advancing CBRN training and operational effectiveness. The latest of his initiatives is to create an NATO CBRN Winter Exercise, Toxic Winter. Toxic Winter will be conducted 2027 in Sweden. 

Dr. Eva Gudgin Dickson is Adj. Assoc. Prof. at the Royal Military College of Canada, and has been a specialist in the area of protection and decontamination for high hazard (CBRn) agents for more than 34 years. The projects her group has executed support clients worldwide and her collaborators have spanned the globe. Dr. Dickson’s work has focused on requirements and standards development, technology and response gaps and needs, research and development of new materials and PPE designs, realistic qualification and evaluation including methods development, life cycle management support, training, commander’s guidance, and support to procurement. She also is the author of patents on the design of novel protective materials and systems and as well as one book and many papers and reports in the area.

Phil Kester joined Guild Associates, Inc. in 2024 and is a Senior Chemical Engineer in their Materials Development group. In this role, he conducts and leads laboratory operations for the development of next-generation materials and processes for defense and industrial applications. His current work focuses on the destruction of persistent pollutants and chemical warfare agents, biogas separations, and wastewater purification. Phil has a background in heterogeneous catalysis and inorganic materials synthesis specializing in zeolites, gas-phase olefin epoxidation, and surface titration methods to quantify active sites in porous materials.  

Phil holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University. 

Dr Jozef Sabol is an Associate Professor at the Police Academy of the Czech Republic (PACR) in Prague, where he is the Head of the Department of Crisis Management. He holds a PhD and DSc. Before joining the PACR in 2016, he had worked for more than 20 years at the Faculty of Nuclear and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. During his career, he was primarily engaged in radiation protection and the safe use of radiation and nuclear technology in medicine, industry, and environmental studies. These activities resulted in 8 monographs, more than 300 scientific publications, and 18 patents. Dr Sabol also spent some time abroad: 5 years as the Project Manager at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, two years as the Visiting Professor at the Institute of Nuclear Engineering and Science in Hsinchu (Taiwan) and two years at the Pebble Bed Nuclear Modular Reactors in Centurion (Republic of South Africa). Currently engaged as a head of the group at PACR, working on two research projects (CHIMERA and UNICOPS) sponsored under the EU Horizon program. Both projects are related to protecting the population against CBRN agents.

Dr. Margaret E. Kosal is Professor (full) in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she serves as Director of Graduate Studies, Director of the Georgia Tech Military Fellows Program, and Director of the Policy and Politics of Emerging Science and Technology Initiative. Her research uses theories and concepts from the social sciences, primarily international relations and comparative political economy, to explore relationships among science, technology, and security and to explain how these phenomena impact innovation and geopolitics. Her work includes projects to explain how and why states translate research in emerging technologies to development, commercialization, and employment in areas that they deem strategically important and to explain how states approach governance and regulation of the bioeconomy. Kosal is an elected Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Formally trained as an experimental scientist, Kosal earned a doctoral degree in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) working on biomimetic and nano-structured functional materials. She is also the co-founder of a sensor company, where she led research and development of medical, biological, chemical sensors and explosives detection. Kosal previously has served as a Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, as Science and Technology Advisor within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), as Senior Adjunct Scholar to the Modern War Institute at West Point, and as an Associate to the National Intelligence Council (NIC). From June 2022-23, she served as Senior Fellow at the US Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) helping stand up the new Nonproliferation Applied Sciences Center (NASC). She remains a Joint Faculty Appointee to SRNL in addition to also serving as a member of the SRNL National Security Advisory Board (NSAB). She is the recipient of multiple awards including the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence.

Dr. Brenda Anne Wilson earned her BA degree in biochemistry and German from Barnard College in New York. Her post-baccalaureate DAAD graduate exchange Fellowship in Biochemistry was at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany. She earned her PhD degree in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University as an AAUW doctoral fellow studying antibiotic biosynthesis. She then undertook an NIH postdoctoral fellowship in microbiology at Harvard Medical School. Her first tenured faculty appointment was in Biochemistry at Wright State University School of Medicine, Dayton, Ohio. She is currently Professor of Microbiology and Associate Director of Undergraduate Education in the School of MCB in CLAS; Inaugural Professor of BTS in CI MED; Professor of Pathobiology in CVM; and Senior Faculty Fellow for the National Laboratories in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a member of the AAM Selection Committee, and an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer. Dr. Wilson's current research work focuses on the host-microbe interface, bacterial pathogenesis and bacterial protein toxins, development of anti-toxin and toxin-based cargo-delivery vehicles for therapeutic biologics, comparative and functional genomic technologies and applications involving pathogen evolution, microbiomes and their roles in health and disease, climate change impacts on microbiomes, health, and disease transmission, and development of technologies and applications for detection and risk assessment of Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) objects, publications, and activities.

Police Officer Joseph Rinaldo began his public safety career as a New York City Paramedic, where he responded to numerous large-scale hazardous materials incidents, including the Ebola outbreak, gaining extensive experience in emergency medical response under high-risk conditions. In 2018, he joined the New York City Police Department, serving in the 42nd Precinct in the South Bronx on midnight patrol and in the anti-crime unit, where he demonstrated exceptional dedication to community safety. 

In 2023, Officer Rinaldo was transferred to the Counterterrorism Operational Support Section’s COBRA Unit, where he plays a key role in the Hazmat Operations Program, training over 1,100 NYPD personnel in large-scale decontamination procedures. He has developed and coordinated multiple exercises addressing chemical suicide response and continues to advance research into emerging hazardous material threats. Officer Rinaldo remains committed to enhancing first responder safety through innovation, training, and operational excellence. 

In 2023, Officer Rinaldo also received a Citation from the NYC Mayor for coordinating a multiagency rescue of a woman who was attacked by a shark on a NYC Beach. 

Michael Cashman is a former Captain of the United States Marine Corps where he served as an Infantry Officer. He served for approximately 9 years . He transferred to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). While he spent his  career in the DEA, his specialty was investigating Clandestine drug labs around the US and world. He was for a while, the sole instructor at the DEA clan lab school.

Due to a massive increase in labs, the DEA brought in other Special Agents to help conduct OSHA training classes. He has authored numerous article’s, movies, and training classes about the hazards of Clan labs.

He retired from DEA and is currently a senior law enforcement instructor for NOBLE supply and logistics and teaches at the DEA academy. He also instructs for other federal agencies, DOD and State and local agencies on lab hazards.