Ms. Matrice Ellis-Kirk has been Managing Director of RSR Partners since January 2014 and serves as its Head of Dallas Office. Matrice Ellis-Kirk earned her BA from University of Pennsylvania.
<p>Carol Rattray is Managing Director and Co- Founder of Zoomdojo.</p> <p>Since the mid 1990\'s, she has been investing, and advising primarily start-ups, in China and in the US, and was previously Vice President in the Capital Markets Group at Bankers Trust Company.</p> <p>n philanthropy, Carol is President and Co- Founder of the Rattray Kimura Foundation. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Bates College, The Asian Cultural Council, and the Re Foundation and a former member of the Board of The Nature Conservancy, New York State Chapter, The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and The Friends of the Museum of the Chinese University in Hong Kong. Carol is also co-chair of The Asia Foundation\'s Women\'s Empowerment Program\'s Lotus Circle Advisors and serves as a member of the Cornell University Council and The Arts and Sciences Advisory Council.</p> <p>Carol Rattray holds an MBA and MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and earned an undergraduate degree from Cornell University.</p>
Ritu Banga is a cofounder of Zoomdojo, a New York City–based college to career readiness startup. The company works with educational institutions, NGOs, and student organizations around the world. Banga is a trustee of the Marymount School of New York. She is a graduate of Delhi University and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
Adam Hanina is CEO and co-founder of AiCure. He has been a strategist in healthcare software delivery for over fifteen years and holds over a dozen patents in his name. Prior to AiCure, he helped further develop Cerner Corporation\'s European strategy and was a Visiting Fellow of eHealth at Imperial College in London, UK. Mr. Hanina has spoken extensively on the topic of healthcare innovation and has acted as a subject-matter expert on medication adherence technologies for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is currently a principal investigator for multiple NIH innovation grants. He holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and an undergraduate degree from Brown University.
Michael Polk joined Newell Rubbermaid as President and Chief Executive Officer in July 2011. Previously, Mike was President of Global Foods, Home and Personal Care at Unilever, where he was responsible for the development, innovation and marketing of Unilever\'s entire 64 billion dollar portfolio of categories and brands. During eight years at Unilever, he is credited with transforming the company’s business in the Americas, sharpening Unilever’s global portfolio strategy, and creating a more competitive, faster-growing, innovation-driven organization. He was a member of the Unilever Executive Board from 2007-2011. Earlier, Mike spent 16 years at Kraft Foods serving as President, Asia Pacific Region, Kraft Foods International and President, Nabisco Biscuit & Snacks, Kraft Foods North America. In both positions, he served on Kraft’s Management Committee. Prior to Kraft, Mike spent three years at Procter & Gamble working in manufacturing and research & development in the Paper Products Division. He has a B.S. in operations research and industrial engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Jay Walker is one of America's best-known inventors and entrepreneurs and is one of a dozen or so living inventors worldwide to hold 200 patents in multiple fields.
Walker, and a team at Walker Digital, LLC, his invention laboratory, created the central ideas behind priceline.com, the groundbreaking "name-your-own-price" company for airline tickets and hotel rooms.
Walker has also created a number of other successful businesses, including New Sub Services (now named Synapse) a company he co-founded and that revolutionized the magazine subscription industry and was recently sold to AOL Time Warner for $600 million. Walker also co-founded Target Communications, a conference and publishing company which was sold to Primedia in 2000.
Mr. Walker is currently chairman of Walker Digital, LLC, a Stamford, Conn.-based laboratory that invents entirely new ways for businesses to operate and serve consumers. Walker Digital is not a consultancy, but a privately funded active research laboratory that use long-term interdisciplinary invention teams to create solutions in the same manner and style as the original Edison laboratory. Successful inventions are licensed to industry or used as the core intellectual property of innovative startups for which the laboratory provides both personnel and funding. To date, Walker Digital has invented over 600 proprietary business methods addressing dozens of significant business problems in a wide range of industries such as travel, data security, retail, automotive, restaurants, groceries, financial services, gaming and entertainment.
Walker's inventions and innovations have been widely recognized. He has twice been recognized by the editors of TIME magazine as one of the 50 most influential business leaders in the digital age. Business Week selected Jay as one of its 25 Internet pioneers most responsible for "changing the competitive landscape of almost every industry in the world." Newsweek named him as one of three executives at the forefront of the Internet commerce revolution.
Walker and his wife have two children and live in Connecticut. He holds a B.S. degree in Industrial Relations from Cornell University.
Robert Waldman is Managing Director & Head of Corporate Bond Research at Citigroup. He has worked at Citigroup for the past 20 years. Prior to that role, he worked at Standard & Poor's. He also worked in criminal law while serving in the Marine Corps.
Robert Waldman is a graduate of CUNY City College of New York. He also holds a law degree.
Rajiv Gupta is Chairman, President and CEO of Rohm and Haas, which specializes in making cutting-edge specialty chemicals that are used in products as diverse as paint and computers. During this lecture, he shares thoughts on the importance of engineering to industry and the world.
Rajiv Gupta received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and received his Masters in Operations Research & Industrial Engineering from Cornell University.
