People
Stefanie Syman
Stefanie is a long-time company builder and author, steeped in the cultural history of both inner and outer technologies. She’s the cofounder of pioneering web media company FEED Magazine and author of The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America. She helped launched a conversational AI assistant (a decade ago!) and has advised startup CEOs from seed to exit. Much of her work centers on understanding how norm changing technologies become commonplace. She has also experienced her own version of exile and return.
FOUNDER
Andrew Markell
Andrew Markell is Director and Co-Founder of The Dawn Collective, a hybrid nonprofit developing scalable solutions in trauma healing, metabolic health, and human performance. He works at the intersection of leadership development, physiological intelligence, and applied strategy. Over three decades, he has worked with senior leaders, founders, investors, and special operations personnel from global corporations and nonprofits to startups worldwide. His work, across the hybrid nonprofit and through his strategic leadership consultancy, The Dawn Studio, is forged from the fighting and healing arts, and the frontier science of human mastery.
FOUNDERAdvisors
Fotini Markopoulou is a quantum gravity physicist and industrial designer. With over two decades in academia, she was founding faculty of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, followed by cofounding a tech company that applied research in neuroscience to mental health, and advisory roles in organizations that support science.
Bennet Zelner. Associate Professor at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business (PhD, UC Berkeley; BA, Brown). Broke with mainstream economics after recognizing that conventional tools couldn’t see past the systems they were built to serve, redirecting his work toward regenerative economics, leadership, and the catalysts that open new ways of seeing and being. His scholarship on how systems actually change gives the Node both the academic rigor and the intellectual courage to challenge the story that incremental reform within existing systems is sufficient.
Kim Syman. Senior Partner at New Profit, where she partners deeply with exceptional leaders working on democracy, health, climate, economic development, education, and legal system reform. Her expansive network of philanthropic, civic, and entrepreneurial leaders, and her hands-on experience structuring grants and impact investments that move institutions, directly serves the Node’s need to build relationships across public, private, and philanthropic realms.
Molly Barton. CEO and Co-Founder of Realm, a podcast-led digital media network. Her earlier career as Global Digital Director at Penguin Random House, where she led the ebook and audiobook business, digital product innovation, and content strategy, gives Heresy a seasoned architect for the storytelling, media distribution, and audience-building that are essential to the cognitive liberation at the heart of our mission.
Eon Meridian. Engineer and Systems Architect working at the intersection of finance, culture, and community infrastructure. Over two decades, they have worked across large-scale enterprise and community systems, spanning engineering and leadership roles at JP Morgan alongside collaborations with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Black Sky DAO, and NEW INC / New Museum incubated BYCO. They teach cyber-ethics through the Bard Prison Initiative and at Fordham University. Their work focuses on AI, decentralized networks, and the translation of social and ecological realities into the infrastructures through which communities coordinate, remember, and create value.
Ben Logan. 25 years building the data and pricing infrastructure that turns inchoate markets into priced, tradeable asset classes. At Markit (now S&P Global), he architected the ABX.HE and CMBX synthetic indices and the Reference Cashflow Database, infrastructure that still underpins synthetic structured credit. Earlier, at Reuters–Loan Pricing Corporation, he built the world's first loan-contributed secondary pricing service and redesigned the Goldman Sachs/LPC Liquid Leveraged Loan Index, the benchmark that catalyzed the institutionalization of bank loans and the explosive growth of the CLO market. Most recently, Ben was co-founder and Chief Product Officer of PEER DATA, a financial data infrastructure startup acquired by Lukka in May 2026. He is co-inventor on two US patents (12,423,389 B2 and Publication 2025/0173404 A1) covering peer-to-peer digital rights management and the daisy-chain rights-tracking architecture that anchored the platform.