Joe Farag is a public finance professional with over 30 years’ experience, including 25 years in senior and executive management positions with the City of Toronto. In 2017 and 2018, Joe served as the City’s Interim Chief Financial Officer, overseeing a $17 Billion annual Budget and providing strategic financial and policy advice to the Mayor and members of Council. Joe also served as the City’s Executive Director of Corporate Finance for a decade with direct management oversight of the City’s multi-billion dollar investment portfolio and debt issuance programs, insurance and risk management, intergovernmental finance and corporate policy development including policies dealing with taxation, development charges and water and wastewater pricing and financing. Joe has developed and led many unique financing arrangements and public private partnerships to deliver major City building initiatives in the areas of transit expansion, affordable housing and social and recreational facilities.  Joe holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree and a Masters Degree in Economics and Finance.

Laila Hulbert graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Engineering Science, with Honors, in 2013, and has worked in the semiconductor industry since. Laila is currently a Staff Engineer and Technical Lead for a hardware design verification team at a large industry-leading multi-national corporation. She has worked primarily on cutting edge hardware to support Artificial Intelligence and image processing applications on mobile platforms. She is passionate about increasing diversity in engineering, and has led numerous initiatives to promote women in engineering. 

Michael Watt, P.Eng is the Executive Vice President of the Environmental Division at Walker Industries, headquartered in Niagara Falls. He is responsible for a wide portfolio of businesses in the environmental field, including composting, biosolids treatment, growing media from waste organics, grease trap and organics collection as well as the traditional waste management services of landfill, waste transportation and logistics. He specializes in business development, change management and mergers and acquisitions. Michael also sits on the Ontario Waste Management Association Board, where he previously served as chair for two terms. 

Scott Carter is a Senior Engineering Technologist. During his time at OCWA, he was a Water Treatment and Transmission Manager at South Peel and a Capital Projects Delivery Program Manager at the corporate office. He has served as a Commissioning Engineer, Designer and Project Manager on water and wastewater projects in Europe and North America that included desalination and solid waste facility run-off capture and treatment. Past experiences have included green energy research in Solid Oxide Fuel Cells and high energy radiation research using floating gate MOSFET technology with test equipment flown in the Space Shuttle.

Scott is a Certified Engineering Technologist with the Ontario Association of Certified Engineering Technicians and Technologists and holds certification from the University of Toronto in Project Management and Reliability Engineering Asset Management as well as obtaining certification as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.

Dr. Nike Dattani was born in Scarborough, Ontario to refugee parents from Uganda. His PhD was completed at Oxford University (in England) where he wrote the first software to calculate Feynman integrals numerically on GPU hardware. He was awarded the prestigious Hetherington Prize for the best doctoral thesis presentation in his year.

While developing the MLR potential energy model with Bob LeRoy at the University of Waterloo, he invented what later became called the “Dattani corrections”. Also while at UW, he worked with Ray Laflamme on the three-slit experiment, which was the first experimental test of Born’s rule in quantum mechanics. He then worked on numerous scientific projects in computational genetics at University of Western Ontario, including one which established the techniques used many years later to discover in early 2020 that the virus causing COVID-19 was closely related to coronaviruses in bats. Other experience of his includes holding a Banting Fellowship at McMaster University, working as a Research Officer at NRC, university-level teaching as a faculty member at University of Waterloo, and instrumental work in the early stages of HPQC Labs and HPQC College.

Outside of Canada, he set the record for “largest number factored on a quantum device” while working at Kyoto University in Japan, he founded the Gravity in Spectroscopy project while working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, contributed to ending a debate about the importance of quantum coherence in photosynthesis while working at NTU in Singapore, and contributed to quantum chemistry software (most notably NECI and OpenMOLCAS) during numerous visits to the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Germany. Dr. Dattani started the Matter Modeling Stack Exchange in 2020. With 4000+ members, it is the largest community in the field of physical and chemical modeling of matter.

Quirien Muylwyk, MASc., P.Eng. is the AECOM Americas Practice Director for Water Quality, where she leads efforts to improve public health via infrastructure investments, including the management of water quality in the distribution system and at the customer’s tap. Prior to joining AECOM, Quirien was the Business Development and Technology Manager for Water Canada with CH2M HILL across all platforms including drinking water, wastewater, water resources, conveyance, operations, and industrial water. She has worked with water systems to optimize performance and prioritize future investments, including the implementation of pragmatic solutions to reduce the risk of lead exposure from drinking water. Quirien has also worked with water utilities across North America and has collaborated with the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation & Parks, Health Canada and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Active with the American Water Works Association, Quirien is a past chair of the Water Quality and Technology Division, a past member of the Technical and Education Council, and is currently a member of the Distribution System Water Quality Committee and the Premise Plumbing Committee.