Speakers 2019

             AJ Edelman:

AJ Edelman is an Israeli bobsled and skeleton athlete.  A lifelong athlete, he is Israel’s first sliding sport Olympian and most decorated sliding athlete, having competed in skeleton.  Skeleton is head-first bobsled, where an athlete slides head-first at 90mph, chin an inch from the ice.

Originally told that making the Olympics in skeleton would be impossible due to physical limitations, Edelman self-funded and self-coached himself to Olympic success in 4 short years.  He is the first Orthodox Jewish winter Olympian. After the PyeongChang Olympic Games Edelman transitioned to head of development of Bobsled/Skeleton Israel and learned to drive bobsleds, with an eye on 2022.

          CB Bhattacharya:

CB Bhattacharya is the H.J. Zoffer Chair in Sustainability and Ethics at the Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh. He is a world renowned expert in business strategy innovation aimed at increasing both business and social value. His research and teaching focuses specifically on how companies can use underleveraged “intangible assets” such as corporate identity, reputation,corporate social responsibility and sustainability to strengthen stakeholder relationships and drive firm market value.

Prof. Bhattacharya has published over 100 articles and has over 25,000 citations per Google Scholar. He is co-author of the book Leveraging Corporate Responsibility: The Stakeholder Route to Maximizing Business and Social Value and co-editor of the book Global Challenges in Responsible Business, both published by Cambridge University Press. He has served on the Editorial Review Boards and served as Editor of special issues of many leading international publications. Prof. Bhattacharya is the founder of the Center for Sustainable Business as well as the ESMT Sustainable Business Roundtable, a forum with more than 25 multinational members, aimed at discussing opportunities and challenges in mainstreaming sustainability practices within organizations. In 2007 he started the Stakeholder Marketing Consortium with support from the Aspen Institute. Prof. Bhattacharya is part of a select group of faculty that has been named twice to Business Week’s Outstanding Faculty list. He has been recognized by both Thomson Reuters and Google Scholar as one of the top cited scholars in his field. He has won several best paper awards, teaching awards and research prizes. He was also a finalist for the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Pioneer Award in 2007. In addition, he received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award in 1995, the highest teaching award at Emory University.

He received his PhD in Marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in 1984 and his Bachelors (with Honors in Economics) from St. Stephens College, Delhi in 1982. Before joining ESMT in 2009, he was the Everett W. Lord Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Marketing at the School of Management at Boston University. Before joining Boston University, he was on the faculty at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University. Prior to his PhD, he worked for three years as a Product Manager in Reckitt Benckiser plc. Prof. Bhattacharya has conducted research and consulted for many organizations such as Allianz, AT&T, Bosch, Eli Lilly, E.ON, General Mills, Green Mountain Coffee, High Museum of Art, Hitachi Corporation, Procter & Gamble Company, Prudential Bank, Timberland and Unilever. As an expert in corporate responsibility and sustainability, he is often interviewed and quoted in publications such as Business Week, BBC, Forbes, Financial Times, Newsweek, The New York Times and The Economist and on TV stations such as Times Now, CBS and PBS. He frequently delivers keynote speeches or brings in his insights as a panelist at company, industry, and academic conferences and conventions.

 

          Nesra Yannier:

Dr. Nesra Yannier is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and Founder and CEO of NoRILLA: an award-winning patented mixed-reality platform bridging physical and virtual worlds to improve children’s inquiry based STEM learning. Yannier has received her PhD in Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.  She has been awarded Mister Rogers Scholarship (Emmy’s College Television Awards in New Media for Children) as well as National Science Foundation grants to take her PhD project forward. She has also received the Innovation Fellowship from the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University to help commercialize her PhD research to benefit society. She has BS degrees in Physics and Computer Engineering, an MS in Computational Sciences and Engineering from Koc University, Istanbul and an MA in Learning, Design and Technology from Stanford University. She has experience working at Disney Research, NASA Ames Research Center and start-up companies, designing and building new educational technologies to be used in real world settings. She has also started and led an organization at Koc University to coach children from underserved communities to participate in the FIRST Lego Robotics Competition. She is passionate about creating novel technologies to have a positive impact on children’s lives.

 

           Judy Bannon:

Judy Bannon began her career in infant health and safety with SIDS of Pennsylvania in 1989, taking the organization from a regional to a statewide presence by 1992. With the success of the national Back to Sleep Campaign, Bannon, as a member of the Allegheny County (Pittsburgh, PA) Child Death Review Team recognized that 90% of babies that continued to die of ‘SIDS’ were perishing in unsafe sleeping environments. In 1998 she founded Cribs for Kids with the intention of providing a safe sleep space to as many families as possible. Cribs for Kids has expanded into a National organization that is saving the lives of infants and helping every baby sleep safer through innovative programs that focus on prevention and education. Over 1,450 organizations nationwide have signed licenses with Cribs for Kids with new partners signing on every week. These partners consist of community-based organizations, state and local health departments, churches, Child Death Review Teams, hospitals, and government agencies. To date, this program has placed over 600,000 infants into a safe sleep environment and has provided safe-sleep education to millions of families. In 2017 Cribs for Kids unveiled their line of safety products for infants including their safe sleep environment, the Cribette. In addition to funding Cribs for Kids programs, the profits from the sale of every Cribette funds vital SIDS research through the Aaron Matthew Research Foundation of Cribs for Kids. Through Bannon’s tireless advocacy, Pennsylvania Act 73 of 2010, mandating that every mother giving birth in a Pennsylvania hospital or birthing center be given infant safe sleep education and a crib, if needed, was signed into law by Governor Edward Rendell in October 2010. She has chaired six national Cribs for Kids® Conferences held in Pittsburgh, the location of Cribs for Kids Headquarters. In addition to the top SIDS/SUID researchers in the world, these conferences bring partners and advocates together to share best practices and further the mission of Cribs for Kids.Mrs. Bannon has been recognized nationally by the National Center for Child Death Review with the ‘Making the Difference’ Award in 2009 and is a proud recipient of the 2012 Circle of Commendation Award from the Consumer Products Safety Commission which was bestowed upon her by Chairman Inez M. Tenenbaum. In 2014 she received the Distinguished Educator Award at the International SIDS/Stillbirth Conference in Amsterdam for her contributions to parental support, professional education, and prevention of sudden infant deaths. In 2015 she was named an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award finalist. April 26, 2017 was designated Judy Bannon Day in Pittsburgh by Pittsburgh City Council to recognize her contribution to the city. Judy and her daughter, Jennifer, have chronicled the story of the Cribs for Kids movement from humble beginnings to a multi-million dollar national non-profit in their book, Five Ladies and a Forklift.

 

  Victoria Shineman:

Victoria Shineman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Before moving to Pittsburgh, she earned her PhD from New York University, and was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. Shineman is a BITSS Catalyst with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, and a member of Evidence in Governance in Politics (EGAP). She teaches undergraduate and PhD-level courses in public opinion, electoral behavior, and experimental research. Her research focuses on electoral policies which affect the costs and incentives to participate, ranging from systems that encourage voting (like compulsory voting) to those that discourage or disenfranchise (like felon disenfranchisement and other forms of voter suppression).Her work has been published in the British Journal of Political Science, and has been cited in a number of media outlets including the New York Times Magazine, PBS News Hour, US News, The Washington Post, The Conversation, and the World Economic Forum.

          Joseph C. Maroon, MD, FAANS:

Dr. Maroon is clinical professor of neurosurgery, Heindl Scholar in Neuroscience, Team Neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers and a member of the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee. He co- developed ImPACT the first computerized system to determine concussion severity and the timing for return to contact sports. He was president of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, the largest society of neurosurgeons in North America. He has published six books and 285 scientific papers

His latest book is Square One-A Simple Guide to a Balanced Life. He has competed in78 triathlon events including 7 ironman distance triathlons (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike and 26.2 mile run).In 1999 he along with Joe Montana and Kareem Abdul Jabaar, was inducted into the Lou Holtz Hall of Fame for his athletic accomplishments and contributions to sports medicine. In 2009 he was inducted into the Western Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame. In April of 2010 he was inducted into the National Fitness Hall of Fame in Chicago. In 2011 Dr. Maroon was given the Distinguished Alumni Service Award from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana where he was scholastic all American in football as an undergraduate. In 2018 He received the Jerome Bettis Humanitarian Award. His practice is at UPMC.

 

         Terry Smith:

TERRY SMITH, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is also Lecturer at Large in the Curatorial Program of the School of Visual Arts, New York. In 2010 he was named the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate, and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). During 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2007-8 the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Research Centre, Raleigh-Durham, and in 2014 Clark Fellow at the Clark Institute, Williamstown. From 1994-2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney. In the 1970s he was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, New York, 2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2015), The Contemporary Composition (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), and One And Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). He is editor of many others including Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity (with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, 2008). A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a Board member of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and of the Biennial Foundation, New York. See www.terryesmith.net/web/

 

       Brian Burley:

Brian Burley is a bestselling author and founder of YNGBLKPGH. Burley is a speaker, entrepreneur and an MBA graduate from the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business and a proud native of Pittsburgh. Due to the phenomenal success of YNGBLKPGH, Burley’s work has been featured both locally and nationally in the likes of Whirl, Pittsburgh Magazine, Essence.com, Blavity, The Huffington Post and a host of other media outlets since its April 2017 release.

Burley’s work of promoting the advancement and visibility of millennial professionals of color in this region led to his regional representation at Harvard University as a part of their Young American Leaders Program in the summer of 2018. YNGBLKPGH is featured within schools throughout the region and has been adopted as the required reading for the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ curriculum.

The community built off the back of the book now hails over 4,500 millennial professionals of color around the region and country. Burley recently added a new title as the Director of Economic Inclusion at The Allegheny Conference on Community Development where he is spearheading their efforts around economic inclusion. Burley proudly lives in the city of Pittsburgh and is happily married to his wife, Brittini and they have one son, Jackson Ross.