James Barrese

With more than 25 years of technology experience that spans the military, the academic world, business consulting, and enterprise platforms and infrastructure, PayPal chief technology officer James Barrese is uniquely qualified to lead the company's efforts to transform payments with innovative products and services for consumers and businesses. A graduate of Stanford, James served as a high-frequency communications specialist for the U.S. Army Signal Corp, spent time as a programmer at Stanford, worked for Andersen Consulting, and then joined the e-philanthropy company Charitableway as vice president of engineering. In 2001, James joined eBay. Leading a number of strategic technology initiatives, he last served eBay as the vice president in charge of delivering the open platforms, infrastructure, systems software, analytics and site operations running the world's largest marketplace at scale. In 2011, James moved over to PayPal, first as vice president of global product development, and, beginning in 2012, as chief technology officer. With his mobile-first approach and his commitment to creating customer experiences that make things simpler and easier, he heads the world-class teams of technologists who are creating the products, platforms and technology infrastructure to power PayPal's innovative payment services for tens of thousands of merchants and millions of account holders around the world.

Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is the leading light of today's interdisciplinary, collaborative, open-minded approach to innovation. His writings have influenced everything from cutting-edge ideas in urban planning to the battle against 21st-century terrorism. Steven's most popular work on innovation is the bestselling Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Steven considers breakthroughs as different as Darwin's theories and the rise of YouTube, and asks: what did these moments have in common? Specifically, what environments fostered these ideas? He answers these question with a core set of innovation principles that have encouraged creativity across history. It's a fascinating read and a wonderfully practical guide to making any space more innovation-friendly. Good Ideas is just one of Steven's many books celebrating progress and innovation. He is a contributing editor to Wired magazine and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and many other periodicals. He's appeared on many high-profile television programs, including The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Steven blogs at stevenberlinjohnson.com

Jonathan Aaron Cain

Jonathan Aaron Cain, MM, BS is active as a performing artist, cellist, multi-instrumentalist, arts entrepreneur, scholar, and educator. Jonathan is most at home when sharing ideas with others; listening, learning, educating, and speaking. His career goal is to promote social, cultural, and humanitarian discourse with a global and technological awareness through education in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Cited by the Washington Post for an "edge-of-the-seat performance" of Steve Reich's 'Double Sextet' with Grammy award-winning eighth blackbird, Jonathan enjoys performing new music in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

Michael Stay

Michael Stay is a Partner at Biosimilarity, LLC. He worked as a codebreaker for six years, then received a MSc for work connecting Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. He worked as part of Google's computer security team for six years developing Caja, a virtualization layer for the browser used in Apps Script. He hopes to defend his PhD thesis this year.

Natalia Duong

Natalia Duong is a performance artist, choreographer, and scholar, native to the San Francisco Bay Area. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Kinesthetic Empathy as a resource for conflict resolution, community devised theater, and the embodied transmission of trauma as exemplified in the bodies of those affected by Agent Orange. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of PAO, a New York based movement collective interested in how war is inherited in the body. She recently gave a TEDx talk on her research at TEDxStanford in May 2013. Natalia holds a Masters degree in Performance Studies from Tisch School for the Arts at New York University, and a BA in Psychology and Dance from Stanford University. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Hadley Wickham

Dr. Hadley Wickham is Chief Scientist at RStudio and Adjunct Professor of Statistics at Rice University. He's interested in building tools (computational and cognitive) that make data preparation, manipulation, visualization and analysis easier. He has developed many R packages that support data analysis (ggplot2, plyr, reshape2), make R less frustrating (lubridate for dates, stringr for strings, httr for accessing web APIs), and make it easier to do good software development (roxygen2, testthat, devtools, lineprof, staticdocs).

Kenneth David Stewart

Kenneth David Stewart (BMI) is presently pursuing a Ph.D. in Music Composition at Duke University whose compositions range from symphonic music to multimedia works written for live instruments and electronics. As a composer and programmer, Kenneth develops work in physical interfaces toward multi-media and compositional ends in music, theatre and dance. In 2008 Kenneth was awarded the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award. Recently, his electro-acoustic work, 'Thetastate' was given a studio recording by the jazz trio The Bad Plus and was released online by Duke University in conjunction with Duke Performances. Another work, 'I Flaunt the Fiends of Hell' was installed in the Bryan Center art gallery and featured in the Chat Festival 2012. Kenneth holds degrees from Duke, Rice University, the University of Arizona and Pima Community College.

Hessam Sarjoughian

Dr. Hessam Sarjoughian is co-director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Modeling & Simulation (ACIMS). His research at ASU has been funded by NSF, Lockheed Martin, Intel, DISA, and Boeing. Sarjoughian's professional experience has been with IBM and Honeywell. Sarjoughian's research focuses on modeling frameworks that support specification of composable and scaleable simulation and software models. His main areas of research are multi-formalism modeling, hybrid SW/HW system modeling, collaborative model development, distributed simulation and software design.

Cesar Kuriyama

Cesar Kuriyama. Creative Human Person. Director. Producer. Entrepreneur. Animator. TED speaker. 3D VFX Artist. Geek. Educator. Clients have included Hersheys, BMW, Verizon, Gillette, & the NFL. His personally produced work has generated millions of views online & has been featured on publications such as Fast Company, Wired, CNN, BBC & the New York Times. He's also taught courses at NYU, Harvard University, and his alma mater, Pratt Institute. Currently the founder and principal of 1 Second Everyday.

Joel Dudley

Dr. Joel Dudley is currently Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Director of Biomedical Informatics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Prior to Mount Sinai, he held positions as Co-founder and Director of Informatics at NuMedii, Inc. and Consulting Professor of Systems Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he participated in leading research to incorporate genome sequencing into clinical practice (published in The Lancet, Cell, and PLoS Genetics). His current research is focused towards solving key problems in genomics and precision medicine through the development and application of translational and biomedical informatics methodologies. His lab publishes in the areas of bioinformatics, genomic medicine, personal and clinical genomics, as well as drug and biomarker discovery. His recent work with co-authors describing a novel systems based approach for computational drug repositioning (published in Science Translational Medicine) was featured in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal, and earned designation as the NHGRI Director's Genome Advance of the Month. He is co-author of the book Exploring Personal Genomics from Oxford University Press. He received a BS in Microbiology from Arizona State University and an MS and PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University School of Medicine.

Craig Weiss

Before joining NJOY in June 2010, Craig Weiss, a U.S. Registered Patent Attorney, practiced law, where he focused on the drafting and prosecution of patent applications for medical device, ecommerce and business method inventions.Weiss has three patents to his own name, including two for medical devices. He was also the managing member of a hedge fund focused on intellectual property. Weiss earned his law degree from Arizona State University and his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania. A lifelong resident of Arizona, Weiss is married with two children and resides in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Brett Larson

Emmy® Award winning Brett Larson gets media and broadcasting and has done so with a track record of success. From humble beginnings doing overnights at a 50,000 watt FM station in Reno Nevada to drive-time in San Jose, California, he has always grabbed the #1 spot in the ratings. For more than a decade, Brett has covered the exciting and fast paced world of technology at media outlets TechTV, CBS, Fox Television and now CNN. Brett has also anchored the news on the radio at the helm of the #1 news station in the country, 1010-WINS-AM. Brett has an understanding of the digital divide between traditional and online media and social networking-- an essential skill in today's market.

Tishin Donkersley

Tishin Donkersley is an award-winning journalist and a frequent guest on television and radio segments, tech blogs and expert panels. She has covered technology, eco, lifestyle and psychology for over 12 years. She is also the founder of Elements Communication, a branding, content generation and grassroots strategy consultancy. Previously, Tishin launched and served as chief editor of Green Living magazine which sold in November 2012. Tishin is a graduate of Arizona State University, serves as a mentor for ASU Entrepreneurship & Innovation Group program, startups and venture capital firms around the southwest, a TiE Arizona board member and Women Investing In Women Arizona chapter board member. She also holds a Master's degree in Psychology graduating Cum Laude. She and her yellow lab Lilly are volunteers at Pets on Wheels, a pet therapy organization servicing senior homes and the Scottsdale Unified School System.

Gordon McConnell

Gordon McConnell is the leader of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group (EIG) at ASU, which manages all of ASU's startup accelerator initiatives in ASU SkySong. During his time in ASU Gordon created the Alexandria Co-working Network, the pracademic startup training program Rapid Startup School and the Furnace Technology Transfer Accelerator. He is the Principal Investigator for the Pracademic Center of Excellence in Technology Transfer (PACE) which is funded by the US Department of Defense. Previously Gordon was Deputy CEO of the Dublin City University (DCU) Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship in Ireland. He is the founder and first director of the Propeller Venture Accelerator which was launched in Dublin 2010 with the financial backing of the Ryan family (Ryanair). He spent several years as chief of staff to the President of Dublin City University and was the architect of the university's strategic plan 2005-2008. Gordon was part of the founding team of two start-up companies in the late 1990's. Prior to working at DCU, Gordon worked in industry before becoming a senior consultant in the Andersen Consulting (Accenture) strategy practice in Europe. He has taught entrepreneurship, management and social enterprise courses in a number of colleges and universities.

CJ Cornell

CJ Cornell is a serial entrepreneur, investor, advisor, mentor, author, speaker, and educator. As an entrepreneur, CJ Cornell was founder of more than a dozen successful startup ventures that collectively attracted over $250 million in private funding; created nearly a thousand new jobs; and launched dozens of innovative consumer, media and communications products that have exceeded $3 billion in revenues. Recently he was Professor of Digital Media & Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication, and was awarded ASU's prestigious President's Award for Innovation. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at Cogswell Polytechnical College in Silicon Valley, and is the author of many papers and articles on entrepreneurship, technology and on crowdfunding. In 2012. he founded Propel Arizona - a pioneering Crowdfunding platform for entrepreneurs that quickly became the largest in the southwest before being acquired in 2014. He holds degrees in engineering, management and a Ph.D. in marketing and strategy, and sits on the board of 5 high tech companies and many public entrepreneurship development agencies.

Ryan Quick

Ryan Quick received degrees in English and Philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and went on to study American Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. His lifelong hobby of working with computers provided a means to support himself through college and he has been a part of the Internet and Linux communities since the early 1990s. He has focused on distributed systems for the last 20 years, with special attention to the interaction between applications, operating systems, and the hardware and networks underlying them and has experience in government, health-care, financial, educational, manufacturing, and Internet industries. Ryan holds patents for messaging middleware systems, and is a pioneer in bridging High-Performance Computing technologies with enterprise best-practice infrastructure.