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Chris Anderson is a professor at the Cornell Nolan School of Hotel Administration. Prior to his appointment in 2006, he was on the faculty at the Ivey School of Business in London, Ontario, Canada. Professor Anderson’s main research focus is on revenue management and service pricing. He actively works in the application and development of revenue management across numerous industry types, including hotels, airlines, and rental car and tour companies, as well as numerous consumer packaged goods and financial services firms. Professor Anderson’s research has been funded by numerous governmental agencies and industrial partners. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management and is the regional editor for the International Journal of Revenue Management. At the Nolan School of Hotel Administration, Professor Anderson teaches courses in revenue management and service operations management.

Keith Cowing is a Visiting Lecturer at Cornell Tech and an executive coach to CEOs and product leaders. He currently serves as an advisor to product teams and teaches in the MBA program at Cornell. With 20+ years of experience building products, teams, and companies, Mr. Cowing specializes in training CEOs and product managers, sharing his insights through his blog at KeithCowing.com.

His extensive product leadership experience includes roles as Chief Product Officer at Vesta Healthcare and Vice President of Product Management at Flatiron Health, which was acquired by Roche for $2 billion. Prior to these positions, Mr. Cowing held product management roles at Twitter, LinkedIn, and Goldman Sachs. As a two-time venture-backed entrepreneur, he was the founder and CEO of Seamless Receipts, where he led the team, raised venture capital, managed product development and launch, and secured business from global brands such as Oakley, Tumi, Burton, and Lenox.

Originally from a small town in New Hampshire, Mr. Cowing received both his MBA with distinction in entrepreneurship and his Bachelor of Science cum laude in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University.

Outside of work, Mr. Cowing is an enthusiastic chef and amateur mixologist who enjoys traveling with his family and seeking new adventures. He maintains an active lifestyle and can often be found exercising with his energetic Belgian Malinois, who requires 4-6 miles of daily activity.

Karan Girotra, Professor of Operations, Technology and Information Management (OTIM), is the recipient of the Charles H. Dyson Family Professor of Management chair, for a 5-year term. This chair was given by Rob Dyson, MBA ’74 to support a founding faculty position for Johnson instruction at Cornell Tech, in honor of his father, the founder of the Dyson-Kissner-Moran Corporation.

Karan Girotra is a Professor at Cornell Tech and in the Johnson School at Cornell University. Karan collaborates with companies building new business models in the areas of urban living, smart transportation and e-commerce, helping them build rigorous research based solutions.

Karan’s research team has been recognized by multiple awards including the prestigious Wickham Skinner Early Career Research Award and multiple best paper awards. He has also won teaching awards for his teaching on entrepreneurship and new business models and was featured in the Poets and Quant’s Best 40 under 40 business professors lists.

In addition to his academic work, Karan was one of the founders of Terrapass Inc., which the New York Times identified as one of the most noteworthy ideas of 2005. Since then, TerraPass has helped businesses and individuals reduce over hundred million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Karan holds PhD and AM degrees from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Sarah Kreps is the John L. Wetherill Professor in the Department of Government, Adjunct Professor of Law, and the Director of the Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology, national security, and public policy.

She has written eight books, including the forthcoming book: Harnessing Disruption: Building the Tech Future without Breaking Society (Oxford University Press). Beyond these books, Professor Kreps’ work has appeared in a number of academic journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science Advances, American Political Science Review, World Politics, International Security, and Journal of Cybersecurity, policy journals such as Foreign Affairs, and media outlets such as CNN, the BBC, New York Times, and Washington Post.

Professor Kreps is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations (and is a life member), Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, West Point, and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs.

Professor Kreps received her undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master’s from Oxford and her Ph.D. from Georgetown. She served as an active-duty officer in the United States Air Force from 1999-2003.

Dirk Swart’s teaching focuses on developing critical skills for leadership, including: negotiation, emotional intelligence, individual and team behavior, conflict management and problem solving, managing contracts and IP, ethics, and engineering management decision making.
Dirk has over 20 years experience as a technical entrepreneur and is currently the CEO of Zynect, an embedded sensor company based in Ithaca NY. He co-founded Zynect in 2010, has raised over $2.4m in funding and brought over 20 successful embedded products from concept to market. Prior to that he was a visiting fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future.

Degrees include a BBusSc (Computer Science) from the University of Cape Town and an MA from Tuft’s Fletcher School. His thesis title was: More Voice but Less Say: An analysis of North-South Trade Agreements. His thesis supervisor was Adil Najam.

Clarence Lee is a former Assistant Professor of Marketing at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, where he was a Breazzano Family Sesquicentennial Fellow. Professor Lee’s research examines the drivers behind consumer adoption, usage, and purchase dynamics of digital goods, where he models consumer behavior using Bayesian statistics, structural econometrics, and machine learning techniques. Digital products and platforms, such as the ones produced by many Silicon Valley and NYC tech startups, are increasingly present in almost all consumer interactions. In such settings, understanding consumer choice and the dynamics of engagement and usage become critically important in order to acquire, serve, and retain consumers. Professor Lee taught Digital Marketing and Data Analytics & Modeling at both the Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses.

Professor Lee received his doctorate from Harvard Business School and holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Prior to pursuing graduate studies, he conducted nanotechnology research at IBM and space system design at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Lutz Finger is a Silicon Valley technologist and Cornell faculty member with 20+ years of experience building AI-driven products and platforms at Google, LinkedIn, and Snap. He is a serial entrepreneur (R2Decide, acquired in 2025; Fisheye Analytics, acquired in 2013) and currently leads AI strategy at XGEN AI, developing next-generation generative retail solutions.

Finger is also a frequent Forbes contributor on AI and the future of commerce. He is a Venture Partner at Cherry Ventures, serves on multiple advisory boards, and has advised and invested in data-centric companies across the United States and Europe. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and an M.S. in Quantum Physics from TU Berlin.

Sarah J. Buszka is an internationally recognized leader at the intersection of higher education, technology, and AI strategy. As Director of the Applied AI Lab at Waukesha County Technical College, she leads transformative efforts to apply artificial intelligence to real-world challenges. In this role, Sarah develops cutting-edge AI solutions, delivers workforce training, and serves as the region’s primary resource for AI strategy and innovation.

Her 15-year higher education career spans both U.S. coasts, with previous leadership roles at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she shaped enterprise IT strategy and infrastructure. Passionate about building the next generation of leaders, Sarah has chaired the EDUCAUSE Young Professionals Advisory Committee, co-hosted the EDUCAUSE Rising Voices podcast, and advised national organizations and government on the future of education technology and artificial intelligence.

Sarah’s academic foundation includes a Master of Public Administration from Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude, with a specialization in AI policy and publications on democracy and innovation in the Cornell Policy Review. She also holds a B.S. in Neurobiology, Psychology, and Russian from UW–Madison and leads Forward AI Consulting to expand AI access across sectors. She is driven by a bold vision: to establish Wisconsin as the “Silicon Prairie” of AI.

Recipient of the 2024 EDUCAUSE Rising Star Award.

Jed Stiglitz is an Associate Professor of Law and the Jia Jonathan Zhu and Ruyin Ruby Ye Sesquicentennial Fellow. His research focuses on administrative law, with an emphasis on the relationship between judicial review and the values of trust and accountability in the administrative state. Professor Stiglitz also studies legislation and other areas of public law.

Professor Stiglitz’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal; University of Pennsylvania Law Review; Cornell Law Review; Southern California Law Review; Journal of Legal Studies; Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization; Journal of Legal Analysis; Administrative Law Review; Theoretical Inquiries in Law; and the Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics, among other journals. His co-authored book on American elections was published by Princeton University Press in 2012. Professor Stiglitz is co-editor of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Stephen F. Williams of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

David Reiss joined the Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech faculty in July 2024 as a Clinical Professor of Law and the Research Director of the Blassberg-Rice Center on Entrepreneurship Law. Professor Reiss was most recently a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School where he was also the Research Director of the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE). He was the founding Director of the school’s Community Development Clinic.

His scholarship primarily focuses on real estate finance and housing policy. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Paying for the American Dream: How to Reform the Market for Mortgages (Oxford University Press). Professor Reiss is a frequently quoted expert on legal developments in the real estate sector. His comments have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other news outlets.

He serves on the New York State Bar Association’s Task Force on Emerging Digital Finance and Currency because of his work on the intersection of real estate and blockchain technology. Until recently, Professor Reiss served as the Chair of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board. He is also a member of the American Law Institute, a Fellow of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, and a Fellow of the American College of Mortgage Attorneys.

Robert MacKenzie is joining the Cornell Law School in July 2025 as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law. Robert was most recently the Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP Clinical Teaching Fellow at New York University School of Law with the Entrepreneurship Clinic and Social Enterprise and Economic Empowerment Clinic. Previously, Robert was an Associate in the Capital Markets Group at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, New York, where he advised US and non-US corporate and financial institution clients on a wide variety of transactional, governance, Securities and Exchange Commission reporting, and other securities law and corporate matters.

John McCarthy is an Associate Professor at Cornell University’s ILR School. His research examines how to build and sustain collaborative organizations and the impact of employee participation on workers and broader organizational outcomes. In recent years, John has expanded his research to explore the transformative effects of emerging technologies, with a particular emphasis on generative artificial intelligence and its implications for the future of work. He is the principal investigator at the JEM Lab for Generative AI at Work.

John’s research appears in several leading academic outlets, including Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Industrial Relations, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and Harvard Education Press.

Before joining Cornell’s ILR School, John was a Visiting Doctoral Student and Research Fellow at The Wharton School and a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, He received his PhD from the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University.

Ayham Boucher is the Head of AI Innovations for both the Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) at the Ithaca campus and Information Technologies & Services (ITS) at Weill Cornell Medicine. With over eight years of experience at Cornell University, Ayham leads the institution’s AI innovation efforts in support of education, research, and administration. He also directs the AI Innovation Lab, which develops custom AI solutions to support Cornell’s institutional mission.

Ayham received his Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University. His expertise lies in building Large Language Model (LLM) powered applications, with a focus on harnessing LLMs to solve complex problems. He has particular experience in developing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and AI Agents.

Prior to his current role, Ayham contributed to various AI projects at Cornell. He also co-leads the AI Innovation Accelerator, a group that encompass more than 50 institutions, fostering collaboration and advancement in AI technologies across higher education.

He currently teaches a course on building AI applications at Cornell, helping students bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical implementation.

Mark Bayer is an international keynote speaker specializing in high-impact written and oral communication, storytelling, and the art and science of persuasion. He previously served as a Chief of Staff in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives during a 20-year career working in Congress.

Mark is also a Visiting Lecturer for Cornell University’s professional development unit, eCornell. Since 2018, he has hosted the podcast “When Science Speaks,” ranked in the top 5% most popular podcasts out of 3.5M podcasts globally. Mark has appeared in Science, The New Yorker, Forbes, Barron’s, TeenVogue, and many other publications.