Global Opportunity Initiative Launch Event June 17, 2022

George Westerman

Founder, Global Opportunity Initiative

George Westerman works at the intersection of executive leadership and technology strategy. During more than 18 years with MIT Sloan School of Management, he has written three award-winning books, including Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation.

As a pioneering researcher on digital transformation, George has published papers in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and other top journals. He is now focused on helping organizations to rethink the process of workforce learning around the world.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Futuro Health

Van Ton-Quinlivan is a nationally recognized thought leader in workforce development and a catalyst for creating inclusive social and economic mobility for students through higher education. Her distinguished career spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

Formerly executive vice chancellor of the California Community Colleges, Ton-Quinlivan has been quoted as an expert on higher education in the New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Insider Higher Education, Stanford Social Innovation Review, U.S. News & World Report, and other publications. She is a frequent speaker at events hosted by the National Governor’s Association, Brookings Institute, Aspen Institute, Stanford’s Hoover Institution, RAND Corporation, and numerous other forums.

Tana Wuliji

World Health Organization

Dr Tana Wuliji (PhD, BPharm) led the establishment of the World Health Organization Academy between 2018 – 2021. The Academy will support 10 million people by 2023 with state-of-the-art lifelong learning to achieve health impact, with its first programmes released in 2021.

Tana cares deeply about equity and health and is passionate about people. She is a health workforce expert, researcher and policy advisor and has led large-scale international programmes for over 16 years in 15 countries in Africa, Middle East and Asia.

As Team Lead of the Working for Health programme from 2017-2019 at the WHO, she established and coordinated the world’s first interagency programme with ILO and OECD to address the 18 million health worker shortfall. This programme amplifies health and social workforce investments and intersectoral action for skills, employment and performance to guide and stimulate 40 million new health worker jobs.

Charles Bodwell

International Labour Organization

Charles Bodwell is an Enterprise Development Specialist for ILO’s Decent Work Techical Support Team. His work has centred on creating sustainable approaches for linking job creation and job quality, through support to large factories, business associations, national governments, and the informal economy.  Before joining the ILO, he worked at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, where he was assistant to the Chief of Staff, as well as at Schlumberger, Agfa-Bayer and IBM.  He has studied at Stanford and Cambridge, conducting doctoral research on geographically dispersed teamwork at Intel Corp, as well as at McGill, ESADE and Michigan State University.

Peter Hirst

MIT Sloan School of Management

Peter Hirst leads a team of professionals who partner with clients and faculty to design, develop, and deliver innovative and impactful executive education programs for individuals and companies. He has over twenty years of experience in international strategy, technology consulting, and organizational leadership and development.

His past roles have included: CEO of the commercialization, consulting, and executive education business of the London School of Economics; Senior Science and Technology Policy Officer and Westminster Fellow in the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, where he advised MPs and Peers of all parties on policy issues in the physical sciences, defense, IT, and entrepreneurship.

Steve Suarez

HBSC

Steve is the Global Head of Innovation, Global Functions at HSBC, leading an innovation ecosystem to shape structure and deliver better ways of serving our customers through innovative solutions. Steve is an accomplished transformation expert with 28 years of experience in consulting, telecommunications and financial services, guiding geographically diverse teams and driving large scale complex strategic initiatives across multiple organisations. Steve establishes strong connections with executive stakeholders and corporate partners alike sharing his expertise through multiple channels including non- executive board participation and keynote engagements. His passion for innovation and the growth mind-set drives his continuous learning, the most recent of which is the Innovation and Leadership program at MIT where he has become an MIT Sloan Alumnus.

Melissa Swift

Mercer

In her role at Mercer, Swift is responsible for the firm’s efforts in the areas of workforce transformation, HR transformation, HR digitization, diversity equity and inclusion, and workforce analytics.

Vipin Gupta

Toyota Financial Services

Vipin Gupta is group vice president & chief innovation and digital officer of Toyota Financial Services (TFS). In this role, Gupta oversees the company’s enterprise functions of strategic planning, innovation, business transformation, operational excellence, digital academy, information technology, and cybersecurity. He also heads the new TFS business functions of Payments and KINTO mobility. Through these broad responsibilities, Gupta leads the organization’s development of future businesses and cutting-edge solutions to meet the evolving needs of customers, dealers, and the TFS workforce.

Katie Hall

claira

Katie spent eight years in global workforce development building competency models and helping companies and policy organizations prepare for the future of work.  She regularly speaks and writes on a variety of topics including diversity hiring, AI ethics, and automation impact on the workforce.

Having worked in many types of jobs – cleaning hotel rooms, making sandwiches, and assembling windows on a factory line, she believes valuable competencies are used in every role every day, everywhere. The problem isn’t people, it’s the hiring system.

Katie holds an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management, an MPA from the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and a BA in Political Science from Hope College.

Mariana Costa Checa

Laboratoria

Ms. Mariana Costa Checa is the CEO and Co-Founder of Laboratoria, a social enterprise that gives young women from low-income backgrounds in Latin America careers in technology. Graduates go on to have three times the average income than they did at their previous employment, transforming their lives and those of their families.

Before becoming a social entrepreneur, Mariana worked for organizations such as TechnoServe and the Organization of American States in international development programs throughout Latin America, helping expand access to civil registration services in underserved communities.

Ms. Costa Checa has worked on development projects throughout the region and was named one of the most innovative people in Peru under 35 by MIT and one of the world’s most influential women by the BBC.

She holds a BSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a Master’s in Public Administration from Columbia University in New York.

Charlie Boyle

CXEI

CSEI was established in 2014. CSEI offer a program of continuous improvement based on the four pillars of Awareness-Measurement-Training-Recognition. The Customer Experience is the battleground of the coming decade and service excellence is fast taking center stage. Charlie works with clients directly as well as through the IMI and Enterprise Ireland and with Public and Private bodies. He is a keen advocate of Customer Experience and believes that every business has a need to further improve their customer experience through Awareness, Measurement, Training and Recognition.

Julie Dervin

Cargill

Julie Dervin is the Head of Global Learning & Development at Cargill, one of the largest privately held corporations in the world. In this role since 2016, she has leveraged her visionary leadership to completely reimagine the employee learning experience. In three short years, Julie and her team have built an entirely new kind of L&D organization, positioning learning as a catalyst for accelerating positive change and transformation.

Since joining Cargill in 2008, Julie held senior learning, OD and large scale transformation leadership positions.  Prior to Cargill, Julie spent eight years in learning leadership positions with information tech firm, Insight, and six years leading a progressive non-for-profit program dedicated to serving at-risk youth. Julie holds an undergraduate degree in psychology and a graduate degree in organizational behavior. She continues to model what it means to be a lifelong learner and intentionally has taken steps to reinvent herself as a progressive organizational learning leader that is passionate about helping the L&D profession as a whole transform.

William Bonvillian

MIT

William B. Bonvillian began teaching science and technology policy MIT in 2007, and has also taught a course on innovation policy since 2017. Prior to this position, from 2006-17, he was Director of the MIT’s Washington, D.C. Office, reporting to MIT’s President. In this position he worked to support MIT’s strong and historic relations with federal R&D agencies, and its role on national science policy. He has assisted with major MIT technology policy initiatives, on energy technology, the “convergence” of life, engineering and physical sciences, advanced manufacturing, online higher education and its “innovation orchard” project on startup scale-up. Prior to that position, he served for seventeen years as a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Senate. His legislative efforts included science and technology policy and innovation issues. He worked extensively on legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security, on Intelligence Reform, on climate change, on defense and life science R&D, and on national competitiveness and innovation legislation leading to the America Competes Act in 2007.

Sanjay Sarma

Vice President for Open Learning

Sanjay Sarma is the Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, a unit reporting to the president that  includes the Office of Digital Learning, the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative, the Center for Advanced Virtuality, and the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab. He is also the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

From 2010 through 2012, Sarma was Director of the MIT alliance with Singapore University of Technology and Design, which developed and implemented a forward-looking engineering and design curriculum. Leveraging innovation and ideas, Sarma went on to co-chair MIT’s Taskforce on the Future of Education, and subsequently was charged with implementing the recommendations around digital learning.

Since 2012, Sarma has served as MIT’s Director of Digital Learning, Dean for Digital Learning and now Vice President for Open Learning. In these roles, he has led the creation of the MicroMasters® program credential, developed the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative, founded the Jameel World Education Lab, and created a group that seeks to transform teaching and learning throughout the world, through research, curriculum development, community building and innovative learning offerings.

Bledi Taska

Emsi Burning Glass

Bledi Taska is EVP and Chief Economist at Emsi Burning Glass. He is a labor economist specializing in the application of econometrics and data science methods on real time labor market data. At Emsi Burning Glass, Bledi leads a team of economists and data scientists, which supports the company’s public policy research, product development, and collaboration with academic researchers and international organizations.

Current projects at Emsi Burning Glass involve topics around skills mismatch and labor shortages, the future of skills, the effect of automation and COVID, and reskilling of workers based on skill adjacencies. Bledi has been invited to present at conferences organized by UNESCO, CEDEFOP, OECD, World Bank, ILO, IZA, and NESTA among others.

Bledi’s work at Emsi Burning Glass has been published or featured in several popular media outlets from all over the world, such as the Australian Financial Review, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist, France 24, the Financial Time, The Guardian, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Bledi earned a doctorate degree in economics from New York University with a concentration in labor and education economics and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Athens, Greece.

John Horton

MIT Sloan School of Management

About
Academic Groups
Information Technology
Academic Area
Management Science
John Horton is the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Information Technologies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Horton’s research focuses on the intersection of labor economics, market design, and information systems. He is particularly interested in improving the efficiency and equity of matching markets.

After completing his PhD and prior to joining NYU Stern School of Business in 2013, he served for two years as the staff economist for oDesk, an online labor market.

Horton received a BS in mathematics from the United States Military Academy at West Point and a PhD in public policy from Harvard University.

Phil Bush

Rockwell Automation

Phil Bush is the Business Development Manager for the Academy of Advanced Manufacturing. In this role he helps lead Rockwell Automation’s efforts to upskill military veterans into front line automation support roles and connect them with manufacturing companies looking for outstanding talent.

Lana Cook

MIT Open Learning

Lana Cook is a strategist, writer and connector at MIT Open Learning where she serves as Assistant Director, Strategic Initiatives and works to incubate and support new and emerging initiatives in education, including within her portfolio the new Systems Awareness Lab at MIT. She also serves as Program Manager for the MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT), which brings the Institute together to find creative solutions to the challenges and opportunities in education for those who have been displaced due to conflict or climate. Cook brings her two decades of experience in teaching, tutoring, curriculum development, curation and communications to her work. Her passion is to help foster community engagement through learning. Cook earned a doctorate in English at Northeastern University, with a focus on contemporary American literature and visual culture, as well as her Bachelors of Arts at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). She also participated in the Federal TRIO Programs: Upward Bound at the University of Maine and Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program at UNH.

Kathleen Kennedy

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

Kathleen Kennedy is Executive Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, a multidisciplinary center which includes Collective Intelligence Design Lab and Pandemic Response CoLab. She also heads MIT Horizon, an initiative of MIT Open Learning. She is a venture partner at Good Growth Capital.

In 2016, she worked as a lead organizer of The Engine (www.engine.xyz), a venture fund and accelerator program for tough tech startups which was built by MIT. Prior to that, she served as President and Chief Strategy Officer of MIT Technology Review, MIT’s global media company, and President of the MIT Enterprise Forum, MIT’s entrepreneurial support organization.

Kathleen is a frequent speaker at global conferences and very active in the innovation community. She serves on numerous selection committees including the Eisenhower Fellowships, the Lemelson-MIT prize and the MacArthur Foundation 100&Change competition. The Women of the Harvard Club named her as one of Boston’s Most Influential Women.

Vijay Kumar

MIT J-WEL

Dr. M. S. Vijay Kumar is Executive Director of J-WEL and Associate Dean for Open Learning at MIT. Vijay has been providing leadership for technology-enabled educational innovation at MIT for the past 22 years, previously as MIT’s Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education, Assistant Provost, and Director of Academic Computing.

Vijay is a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee for MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). He was the Executive Officer for MIT’s Council on Educational Technology; a member of the steering committee for iCampus, the MIT-Microsoft Alliance; and Principal Investigator of the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.). Vijay’s research and his advisory engagements are directed toward strategy, planning, and implementing technological innovations globally.