President, Leonard Hochberg, Ph.D.
Leonard Hochberg has served the Mackinder Forum in a leadership role for approximately 20 years, currently as it's President.
He taught at Stanford University (among other institutions), was a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-founded Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (i.e., STRATFOR). He has published work in Social Science History, Historical Methods, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Orbis, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Cartographica, Naval War College Review, Gatestone, etc. Len earned his PhD in political theory and European history from Cornell University.
As the U.S. coordinator, Hochberg arranges talks, invites speakers for the Mackinder Forum from the United States.
As the U.S. coordinator, Hochberg arranges talks, invites speakers for the Mackinder Forum from the United States.
Chairman of the Board, Michael Hochberg, Ph.D.
Michael Hochberg is a visiting scholar at the Cambridge University Centre for Geopolitics, where he is now working on a book devoted to applied geopolitics. Hochberg has been a physicist, an engineer, a professor, a startup founder, an executive at startup companies, an executive at a large multinational, and a freelance advisor and board member. He is fluent in the languages of technology, geopolitics, policy, business and strategy, and is particularly interested in the areas where these different fields intersect.
Hochberg spent much of his youth surreptitiously working his way through his father’s library, reading Thucydides and Mackinder when he was supposed to be doing homework or sleeping. He worked in high school as an intern at his father’s startup, Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), which was, in the late 1990s, the first private-sector geopolitical advisory firm.
In college, Hochberg turned his attention to technology and physics: While an undergraduate studying physics at Caltech, Hochberg founded his first company, Simulant, which developed supercomputing software. Still an undergrad, he founded Luxtera (later acquired by Cisco), which built hardware deployed today in data centers worldwide.
In graduate school, Hochberg won an award for the best thesis by a graduating student in nanotechnology. He completed his MS degree in two years, and his PHD in one year.
After receiving his Ph.D. from Caltech, Hochberg went on to become a professor at UD, UW, and NUS, and he founded Silicon Lightwave Services, which did silicon chip design services for commercial and government clients, and then Elenion (acquired by Nokia), which built coherent transceivers which are deployed worldwide in telecommunication systems. Hochberg joined Nokia as CTO of the Optical Subsystems business unit. The startups he co-founded have generated over a billion dollars in aggregate exit value.
Michael won several awards for his work, including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a U.S. Air Force Young Investigator Program Award, a Singapore National Research Foundation Fellowship, and a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, which is the highest honor granted by the U.S. government to young scientists. His work has been cited over 20,000 times in the scientific literature. His articles have appeared in Science, Nature, and other top scientific journals.
While Hochberg was employed in the private sector, the Chinese national champions posed a direct technological and sharp-power challenge to his businesses. The failure of the United States during those years to confront the PRC led Hochberg to write the “Long Telegram for the 21st Century”, a document that denounced that autocratic regime’s illegitimate practices. That document was shared with U.S. government officials in 2018 and is now to be found on Hochberg’s substack, longwalls.substack.com
Leveraging his experiences in the spheres of business strategy, academia, and commerce, Hochberg now devotes his attention to geopolitics, foreign relations, grand strategy, economic statecraft and technology policy. His predictive piece in The Hill, “Could the U.S. fight a four-front war? Not today”, predicted the current dilemma faced by the U.S. and its allies in fighting a multifront war. His recent work on atrocity as a strategy of warfare in Gaza was later confirmed by the comments by Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, as published in The Wall Street Journal. He has published on geopolitics, national security, and grand strategy in various outlets including National Review Online, The Hill, RealClearDefense, Fast Company, American Spectator, and Naval War College Review.
Hochberg is the President of Periplous LLC, which provides advisory services on strategy, technology, policy, and organization design.
Vice President, Christine Clay
Christine Clay brings 25 years of experience as an operations leader to the Mackinder Forum. Specializing in program development, Clay has produced events for Nobel Laureates to CEOs. She comes to the Mackinder Forum after serving as Manager of Corporate Communications at Luminous Computing and while serving as Chief of Staff at Periplous LLC.
Clay received her bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland, College Park and her master's degree from the University of San Francisco.