Our keynote speaker, Robert J. Marks Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor at Baylor University and is the Director of Discovery's Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence. He is the author of Non-Computable You: What You Do Artificial Intelligence Never Will, which Discovery's Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence. He is the author of Non-Computable You: What You Do Artificial Intelligence Never Will, which illustrates that humans have properties and abilities beyond that achievable by artificial intelligence. Marks has consulted for Microsoft, Boeing, DARPA, and NASA.

President and CEO of Life Empowered Consulting Services, Celeste Cuffie, empowers and motivates others to access and utilize their talent and skills, building better families, companies, and communities through corporate training, strategic planning, executive coaching, and motivational speaking. Additionally, she has written several books, including Looking Back, Then Moving Forward and The Risk to Be Great.

Dr. Matthew Hurtienne is a seasoned professor with over 20 years of experience in organizational performance development, strategic planning, and human resources. He has worked across various sectors, including non-profit and for-profit organizations, and has started several businesses. Dr. Hurtienne is a published researcher and presenter in human resource development, focusing on employee engagement and organizational effectiveness. Currently, he serves as a professor and dean at Concordia University of Wisconsin, where he oversees undergraduate and graduate education programs, mentors doctoral students, and contributes to developing new leadership programs. Additionally, he actively engages in peer review for esteemed journals and conferences in the field.

Darcy Paape has 22 years of experience working with emerging young adult leaders in high school, church, and university settings. Currently, she serves at Concordia University Wisconsin as Director of the Women’s Leadership Institute, Adjunct Interpersonal Communication Instructor, and member of the Campus Ministry Team. Darcy is a D.C.E and also has her MS in Organizational Leadership and is author of Someone to Walk With: A Woman’s Guide to Christian Mentoring.

Dr. Elisabeth E. Bennett is an associate professor of business and director of the Master of Science in Leadership at Concordia University, Wisconsin, and Ann Arbor. She has substantial industry experience leading programs and teams in financial services, manufacturing, information technology, and executive leadership in healthcare. Serving on several journal editorial boards, Dr. Bennett is a seminal scholar in virtual human resource development, an area of inquiry defined from her dissertation and nearly 20-year research agenda. She holds a certificate in project management from the American Management Association, and her most recent scholarly project synthesizes leadership ethics and artificial intelligence.

Jeffrey Clark is a Senior Lecturer and the David Gaunt Faculty Fellow in Real Estate at the Finance Department, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Clark is also the Faculty Director of the Master of Finance Program at the Isenberg School of Management. His teaching and research interests include real estate fintech, corporate real estate strategy, investment and development, capital markets, valuation, data and analytics, and project and process management. He is also a 35-year practitioner of real estate, including leading programs, teams, and organizations on six continents that have executed over 4,000 commercial real estate transactions and developed more than 40 million square feet of new office, industrial, manufacturing, critical data centers, retail and logistics sites, valued at over $5 billion.

John Fields is an Assistant Professor of Business Analytics at Concordia University Wisconsin-Ann Arbor, with a background as Director of Business Intelligence at Rockwell Automation, and education from Texas A&M and Syracuse University, currently pursuing a doctorate at Marquette University. His research focuses on AI in education, specifically in text classification and privacy preserving AI, contributing to notable IEEE publications. Fields combines his professional endeavors with a strong Christian faith, guiding his ethical approach in work and research.

Dr. Joey-Lynn Bialkowski-Peterson is the Founder of The Leadership Studio, LLC which is a leadership training and coaching collective that uses blended learning solutions to elevate workforce training, experiential learning, and professional development for students and corporate learners.

Over the past 15 years, Dr. Bialkowski-Peterson has dedicated herself to changing the culture of experiential learning and has innovated unprecedented learning and training programs. Her vision to reimagine virtual and face-to-face learner-centric pathways focused on (soft) skill development and training have garnered support and endorsement from partners and clients including NCAA Final Four, Chewy.com, NBC’s the Voice, Super Bowl Live, and Forbes.

While Dr. Bialkowski-Peterson has cultivated 150+ unique microlearning experiences throughout her career that have served as a launchpad for lifelong learners from across the globe, with new innovations in learning and simulation on the horizon she feels like she is just getting started.