Big Data and Analytics, Business Analysis, Financial Acumen, General Management

Gary Kimmel leads a team of Financial Services industry experts & architects within one of the largest software companies in the world. He and his team consult with C-suite and senior executives to create revenue growth, cost optimization, improved compliance and competitive advantages in their businesses.  He brings a unique blend of business acumen, international experience and technology leadership and is credited with advancing many businesses in multiple industries over the last twenty-eight years. Having worked predominantly within large enterprises, Gary has built teams and provided organizations with improved revenue, agility, time to market and improved ability to deal with technology costs and innovations.  He has also worked on multiple corporate acquisitions and integrations, process improvement programs, business re-architectures and technological disruption initiatives. Gary is a Certified Blockchain Expert and currently holds the role of Field CTO and Head of Financial Services Enterprise Architecture at Salesforce. Previous roles include Strategic Digital Marketing Executive and Director of Strategic Innovation at Salesforce where he led organizations to grow through disruptive innovation and ‘zero design’. Gary has worked extensively within the Financial Services sector.  He spent multiple years at TD Bank Financial Group as Chief Security Architect, Head of Enterprise Strategic Architecture and the Head of the Digital Channel Mobile Teams. Before TD Bank, Gary spent eight years with Microsoft in multiple countries, serving as an Enterprise Strategy Consultant in the Financial Services Sector and an Industry Technology Strategist in the Media & Communications Sector. Gary studied at Damelin College and also at the University of Cape Town.  He holds Salesforce, TOGAF, ITIL, Microsoft Solutions and Operations Framework certifications as well as a Blockchain Expert Certification.  

Coaching and Collaboration

Gary Miller is an Instructor in the MBA program for the Schulich School of Business, York University. He has more than 25 years of experience coaching individuals and teams to develop confidence and competence as leaders skilled at driving business results. Familiar in delivering exceptional presentations, courses, and lectures, Gary uses his coaching and facilitation skills to help participants and organizations to hone their people management expertise. He creates a comfortable, collaborative and positive learning environment, which allows individuals and teams to reach their full potential.

Gave is an experienced executive, lawyer, and board director within the media and cultural sectors where he has developed, commissioned, and structured projects across film, TV, streaming, social, gaming, and live events. Currently, he is an advisor and investor in startups across all aspects of the creator economy.   Most recently, he served as the Head of Content Programming for North America at TikTok, where he led the team responsible for original live production, in-app editorial, trends, and off-platform content collaborations such as TikTok Radio and TikTok Tailgate.  Previously, he led CBC’s digital content offerings including CBC.ca, CBC Kids, and launched the streaming service CBC Gem, as Executive Director of OTT Programming. In this role, he created CBC's first YA content strategy and was responsible for commissioning a slate of series from some of Canada's most talented new voices.   Gave also served as Executive Director of the Reelworld Film Festival, worked as a business affairs executive, and began his career as a media and entertainment lawyer at a Bay Street law firm. Gave currently serves on the boards of the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund, TO Live, and the Shaw Rocket Fund. He is a frequent speaker on the intersection of media, content, and innovation and has been featured in The Today Show, Variety, Toronto Life, and SHARP Magazine. He holds BA, MBA, and JD degrees from the University of Toronto and is called to the Bar of Ontario. 

Big Data and Analytics

George J. Georgopoulos is from London, Ontario, Canada. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of Western Ontario, M.A. and PhD in Economics from the University of Toronto, where he is now an Associate Professor of Economics at York University. He has experience working with various governments regarding Statistical Analysis including the Governments of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the Government of Bolivia, and the Government of Canada. The work in Canada included in 2008 being part of a team of economists from Canada and the European Union that worked on the exploratory stage of the Canada-EU free trade agreement, commissioned by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Georgopoulos is the York Senior Fellow Scholar at Massey College, University of Toronto. He has taught and received teaching excellence awards at York University and the University of Toronto. He has also received the Dean’s Excellence Award for Research at York. His research is in the area of Business Statistics, Finance, and Business Economics Strategy. He has discussed his work at various international conferences and to business leaders and in various media sources including CNN International, Bloomberg, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Global Television News in Canada and the CTV Television News in Canada.

Greg Kozdrowski has a BA and MCATD, and he resides in Toronto. He specializes in performance consulting, instructional design and learning technology.

Management

Gregory Milavsky is a Founder of The Black Box Institute, an advisory boutique. He was formerly Managing Director/Group Head of Scotiabank Private Equity Investments and head of Merchant Banking for Rothschild Quantico Capital. Greg spent five years at Rothschild Canada Limited, most recently as Senior Vice President and Director. Prior to Rothschild, Greg was an investment banker with James D. Wolfensohn Incorporated in New York. Greg worked with the CIBC Group as an Associate Director, Corporate Finance in London and Tokyo. He has provided investment banking, corporate finance and financial advisory services to global public and private corporations and governments.

Glem Dias is an award-winning talent management practitioner with diverse industry experiences from Investment Banking, Software, Telecommunications, Pharmaceuticals and Retail. He has been in global roles within Fortune 500 companies managing the design and development of succession management, high potential leadership development, mentoring, action-learning and critical talent mobility.

Hamida is driven and passionate about propelling individuals and teams to achieve their full potential. She executes leadership development, coaching and organizational excellence initiatives in health care. Her work in design and implementation of an emerging leaders program has received Honourable Mention for Excellence from the Association of Talent Development. She has held leadership and project management roles in the academic, research and government sectors. Her most recent board roles include president of the Ontario Association of Public Health Nursing Leaders and member responsible for the Women’s Portfolio on the Ismaili Council for Canada.

General Management

Haniyeh Yousofpour is an award-winning, Harvard-educated business professor and consultant with a passion in organizational change management, influential negotiation and effective utilization of human capital. Yousofpour is a multiple award-winning educator teaching in full-time and part-time Master of Business Administration and Executive Education Programs. In addition to her teaching, Yousofpour has founded a consulting firm providing various integrative management consulting services to multinational Fortune 500 companies. Yousofpour’s integrative and distinctive approach, focusing on self and other awareness, and thorough assessment of the environmental and organizational culture, goals, resources and limitations, enables her to provide customized and attainable solutions scalable to diverse range of clients and situations. Building on the same philosophy she has an effective approach to negotiation and conflict resolution and has led multiple negotiation deals with various global organizations (e.g. AMEX, GE, Xerox, Sodexo to name a few) to reduce cost and improve organizational performance.

Big Data and Analytics, Technology

Hemant Sangwan is a full-time professor at Seneca College. Alongside his position as an instructor for Schulich ExecEd, he is a sessional lecturer at Schulich School of Business, York University and Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He teaches courses in AI/ML, data science, analytics, economics, marketing research, and statistics at undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels. Hemant has led executive education modules in marketing analytics and data science for business delegates and has conducted intensive boot camp programs in Python programming and data science at the leading schools (Boston University, University of Toronto) in the world. Hemant has also contributed to curriculum and program development, pedagogical, and multi-media teaching innovations. He spent 12+ years in the industry (Boston Consulting Group (BCG), GfK Canada, Leger Marketing, IHS Markit) working as a consultant and expert in management consulting, data science and analytics, marketing research, economic consulting and forecasting functions. In his consulting roles, he served clients in the financial services, CPG, retail, telecom, and construction sectors, both in Canada and international markets. He has demonstrated exceptional knowledge of problem formulation, project management, survey design and analytics, data interpretation and translation on cases in growth strategy, branding, pricing, CRM, and new product development. He was a strategist (volunteer) for a political campaign for a candidate in the Ontario municipal election in 2018 and served as Chief Financial officer for a candidate in the federal election in 2021. In this volunteer role, he used his skills in analytics, marketing strategy, branding, and social media to advise the candidate on campaign logistics, voter segmentation, platform positioning, and campaign messaging in print, digital, and social media channels.

Technology

Henry Kim is a professor of operations management and information systems and director of BlockchainLab at the Schulich School of Business at York University. The Lab is engaged in projects with the Canadian Government, United Nations, NIST, Don Tapscott’s Blockchain Research Institute and various start-ups and companies. Prof. Kim has written about, or advised on, blockchain applications in supply chain, minerals mining, agriculture and insurance. Moreover, for 25 years, his primary research has been in enterprise modelling using AI-based ontologies.

As an adjunct professor at the Schulich School of Business, Hjalmar Turesson teaches AI and natural language processing. Throughout his career, he has worked on both sides of the fence between natural and artificial intelligence. His Ph.D. research focused on the relationship between language, a compositional system, and the collective computations of billions of simple, interconnected biological neurons. His current area of interest is the application of artificial neural networks and natural language processing to automate tasks that were impossibly labour-intensive only a couple of years ago. Hjalmar Turesson holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Psychology from Princeton University, an M.Sc. in Behavioral and Neural Sciences from the International Max Planck Research School at the University of Tübingen, and a B.Sc. in Biology from Lund University.

Isik Bicer, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems at the Schulich School of Business, York University. His current research focuses on analyzing the impact of operational factors on financial parameters (e.g., stock price, capital structure, and return on assets) and designing operational strategies to ensure high customer-fulfillment rates in economically feasible ways. He uses methods from corporate finance, quantitative finance, and optimization theory to address these challenges. His research has appeared in the Financial Times listed journals such as Production and Operations Management and the Journal of Operations Management. He is also a member of Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Operations Management. Prior to joining the Schulich, he was a faculty member at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, the Netherlands; a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland. During his doctoral studies, he was a member of the OpLab team at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and collaborated with the US Department of Commerce for the development of a cost assessment tool. He also has an industry experience in pharmaceutical and finance industries and a consulting experience on the projects related to digital transformation and operational performance assessment. Before moving to Canada, he has worked and lived in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Turkey.

Izabella was a Business Solution Architect with IBM Global Services, working on multiple large-scale, strategic initiatives from concept to implementation. She has over 20 years of experience working in client services and success for enterprise clients in Telecommunications, Financial Services and Airlines. Featured in Your Turn, a book about 150 successful women in Canada, dedicated to empowering the next generation of female leaders, Izabella is a Bronze Stevie Award winner for Female Executive of the Year in 2018 and was named one of Canada’s top women in FinTech by Digital Finance Institute in 2019. Izabella is the Board Chair of Peerscale, a leadership organization for technology executives. Izabella holds an Honours B.Sc. in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Toronto and was awarded a patent for catalogue-driven order management for rule definition.

James is a senior Health IT executive and strategist. As a design thinker who loves tackling complex problems for large and small organizations, James brings over 20 years of experience as a business strategist, product manager and marketer to leadership positions. He has dedicated his career to solving problems within the healthcare ecosystem, having developed the skills to bring creative solutions from ideas to prototyping to launch. He is an expert in all forms of digital media and digital strategy, finding novel ways to engage with targeted audiences to drive the commercialization of groundbreaking products and services. Having worked in both tech companies and innovation/design agency, James has led product management, sales and operations at innovative healthcare technology firms in both the United States and Canada, and helped launched products and services in Europe and globally, contributing to awards for both product and customer satisfaction. Through his work with clients including the US Department of Defense, the White House, McKesson, Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand, Cerner, Allscripts, UCB Pharma, Novartis, Athenahealth and Siemens, he is acutely concerned with cultural issues in strategic decision-making. A published and award-winning author, in his free time, James co-created a YouTube channel and blog, which has garnered over 400,000 followers, 10+ million views, and a bestselling book sold globally. He produced and managed business development, digital marketing, media and audience engagement for that brand. He's also written for innovation and tech publications, produces an award-winning health industry podcast and is regularly interviewed on podcasts in the digital health and strategy spaces. James holds a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from the Schulich School of Business at York University, and a Masters of Business Administration in Healthcare from Baldwin-Wallace University.