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Speakers
Frank BallantineAttorney, Partner, Reed Smith LLP Frank Ballantine is co-head of Emerging Growth and Venture Capital for the law firm of Reed Smith, with over 1,500 lawyers practicing in significant economic centers around the world. The Emerging Growth and Venture Capital practice comprises over 60 lawyers in 13 offices across California, the central and eastern U.S., London, Birmingham, Paris, and Munich. The group serves innovative and rapidly growing businesses and the investors who fund them. Frank Ballantine serves as outside general counsel to these businesses and as lead transaction counsel to investors and management in venture and private equity investments, mergers and acquisitions, and debt financings. He also assists clients in joint ventures, marketing alliances, and licensing. He has served on the boards of 16 clients and on the advisory boards of two technology venture funds. He is an angel investor and limited partner in investments funds. Frank Ballantine received his B.A. from Haverford College (1978), his JD from The Law School of the University of Michigan (1984), with undergraduate studies at Oxford University (1976-77) and graduate studies in the Film Division, School of the Arts, Columbia University (1979-80). John Bowen, AM’77, PhD’84Dunbar-Van Cleve Professorship in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis John Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches in Anthropology and directs the Pluralism, Politics and Religion Initiative. He received his B.A. from Stanford University, did graduate studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, and received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Bowen studies problems of pluralism, law, and religion, and in particular contemporary efforts to rethink Islamic norms and law in Asia, Europe, and North America. His long-term fieldwork has been in Indonesia, particularly in Aceh, and is most recently reflected in his book Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (Cambridge, 2003). Current research on Islam and the state in France is reflected in Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princeton, 2007), and his next book, Can Islam be French? will appear from Princeton in 2008. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, received the Herbert Jacobs Book Prize from the Law & Society Association, and was a Carnegie Scholar in 2005-2006. Robert Covalt, MBA’67President, RBC Associates After a brief stint in the U.S Air Force (Purdue ROTC) following the receipt of his degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University in 1953, Robert Covalt joined Morton International (now part of Rohm & Haas). Having served in most of the engineering and business positions, Dr. Covalt became President of the Specialty Chemicals Group in 1979 and through 1990 grew sales from $175 million to $1.3 billion. He was then elected as Morton's Corporate Executive Vice President. Following his retirement from Morton, Dr. Covalt took an unusual, and most rewarding, step to pursue an entrepreneurial career and established Sovereign Specialty Chemicals, Inc. in 1996, a company dedicated to be a leading developer and supplier of high performance adhesives, coatings and sealants serving the packaging and converting, industrial and construction markets. Based upon acquisitions and internal growth, Sovereign, with sales of $400 million, became the largest privately owned adhesives company in the United States prior to its sale to Henkel in 2004. Dr Covalt is currently President of RBC Associates, Inc. Dr. Covalt is currently President of RBC Associates, Inc., a firm who recently formed a strategic alliance with The Edgewater Funds in Chicago to acquire companies in the specialty chemical industry. Besides his BS in chemical engineering and his Honorary Doctorate from Purdue University, Dr. Covalt received his MBA from the Chicago GSB (1967). He was named a Purdue Distinguished Engineering Alumnus in 1981 followed by an Outstanding Chemical Engineering Award in 1993 and continues his drive to support the engineering programs at the University. Dr. Covalt is a member of the Dean's Engineering Advisory Council at Purdue. Matthew GrinnellManaging Director, Lehman Brothers
Blair V. Jacobson, MBA’99Director, Citi Private Equity Mr. Jacobson is a Director of Citi Private Equity (CPE). He joined CPE in January 2001 and moved to the UK in early 2005 to help establish CPE's European presence. He is responsible for sourcing and executing equity and mezzanine investments in Europe. Before joining CPE, Mr. Jacobson had four years of prior investment banking and M&A experience in a broad range of industries, most recently as an Associate at Lehman Brothers. Mr. Jacobson received a B.A. from Williams College, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude, and an M.B.A. with Honours from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Andrew Jaffe, SM’90, PHD’94Reader in Astrophysics, Department of Physics, Imperial College Andrew Jaffe was born in New York, grew up in New Jersey. He received his B.S in Astronomy and Physics from Yale University (1988), his M.S (1990) and PhD (2004) from the University of Chicago. He has been a researcher at the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked on the MAXIMA and BOOMERANG experiments which measured the curvature of the Universe using the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. He is currently a Reader in Astrophysics at Imperial College London. Young-Kee KimProfessor of Physics and Deputy Director of Fermilab, University of Chicago As an experimental elementary particle physicist, Kim’s main physics interests are to understand the origin of mass and the origin of the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter presently observed in our universe. Most of her current research is at the CDF experiment, a high energy physics experiment operating at the Tevatron, which brings together an international collaboration of over 800 physicists. Fermilab's Tevatron is currently the world's highest energy accelerator, colliding protons with antiprotons at a center-of-mass energy of 2 trillion volts. Kim’s group has played a major role in the detector construction and operation as well as in the data analysis from this experiment. In 1995, Kim and her research group, along with the sister experiment DZero, discovered the sixth and perhaps final quark, called the top quark. Kim is also involved in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and the International Linear Collider R&D efforts. Rocky KolbArthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the College and Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago Edward Kolb, better know as “Rocky”, is the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the College and Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, and a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. In 1983 he was the founding head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group and in 2004 the founding Director of the Particle Astrophysics Center at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Kolb is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Recipient of the 2003 Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers and of the 1993 Quantrell Prize for teaching excellence at the University of Chicago, Rocky's research field is the application of elementary-particle physics to the very early Universe.His book for the general public, Blind Watchers of the Sky, received the 1996 Emme Award of the American Aeronautical Society. In addition to over 200 scientific papers, he is a co-author of The Early Universe, the standard textbook on particle physics and cosmology. He has traveled the world, if not yet the Universe, giving scientific and public lectures. In recent years he has been selected by the American Physical Society and the International Conference on High-Energy Physics to present public lectures in conjunction with international physics meetings, and was selected to address the president of Pakistan as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the country. Rocky also presented public lectures at the Royal Society of London, as well as Vienna, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Valencia, Rome, Toronto, and Vancouver. He is a past Fellow of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland. Scott F. MeadowClinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, Chicago GSB Scott Meadow teaches “Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity” and “Commercializing Innovation.” He has been named among the top five professors at Chicago GSB in BusinessWeek since 2002, when he began teaching at the school. Angela OlintoProfessor, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the College, Enrico Fermi Institute, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago Angela V. Olinto is Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Enrico Fermi Institute, and a member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. Her research interests are in astroparticle physics and cosmology. Professor Olinto received her B.S. in Physics from the Pontificia Universidade Catolica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and her Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1987) for work on the physics of quark stars. At Fermilab, she worked on inflationary theory and cosmic magnetic fields. Her recent work has focused on the nature of the dark matter in the universe and the origin of the highest energy cosmic particles. She is a member of the international collaboration of the Pierre Auger Observatory designed to discover the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays. Professor Olinto was Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2006. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics, and serves on many advisory committees for the NRC, DOE, NSF, and NASA. In 2006, she received the Chaire d’Excellence Award of the French Agence Nationale de Recherche. In 2007, she was elected Chair of the nominating Committee of the American Physical Society. Arno Schenk, MBA’85CEO and Executive Member of the Board of Directors, Quadrant AG Arno Schenk, a Swiss and Italian citizen, received his M.A. in Architecture from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland (1981), his PhD in Architecture from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy (1983), and his MBA from the Chicago GSB (1985). After first working experiences in consulting and small company management, Arno Schenk joined in 1988 the Saurer Group in Zurich/Arbon, Switzerland, as business development manager. In 1990 Arno started working for the Rothschild Group, becoming a senior vice president of the Swiss subsidiary Rothschild Corporate Finance in Zurich. In 1995 Arno co-founded Triventus AG, Zurich, Switzerland, as one of three partners. In 1996 Triventus established Quadrant AG, of which Arno has been an executive board member and chief executive officer ever since. Richard A. ShwederWilliam Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development and Department of Psychology, University of Chicago Richard “Rick” Schweder is a cultural anthropologist and the William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree in social anthropology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University in 1972, taught a year at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and has been at the University of Chicago ever since. Richard Shweder's recent research examines the scopes and limits of pluralism and the multicultural challenge in Western liberal democracies. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Socio-Psychological Prize. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto and The Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Shweder is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he has served as president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. For the past thirty years Shweder has been conducting research in cultural psychology on moral reasoning, emotional functioning, gender roles, explanations of illness, causal ideas about suffering and the moral foundations of family life practices in the Hindu temple town of Bhubaneswar on the East Coast of India. He is the author of "Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology, Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology, the editor or co-editor of numerous books including Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion and Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies and is writing book tentatively titled Customs Control The Moral Challenge of Cultural Migration. Unni WikanProfessor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway Unni Wikan is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. She has done fieldwork in Egypt, Oman, Yemen, Bali, Bhutan and Scandinavia, and has published nine books. Her books in English are Life Among the Poor in Cairo (Tavistock 1980); Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982; paperback, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991); Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990); Tomorrow, God Willing: Self-Made Destinies in Cairo (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996); and Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002). Her works have been translated into Japanese, Polish, Swedish, and Danish, and are forthcoming in Russian and Turkish. Unni Wikan is currently working on the publication of In Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame (University of Chicago Press, Feb.2008). Unni Wikan has been a visiting professor at Harvard (1999-2000); Wolfgang Goethe Universitat, Frankfurt (2000); London School of Economics (1997); École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1996); Beersheba University, Israel (1989); visiting scholar at Harvard (1995); guest lecturer at Harvard (1987); and visiting assistant professor at Johns Hopkins (1977). She has been a consultant to UNICEF and the World Food Programme (Bhutan, 1989-1994)); the Norwegian Development Organization (Palestine, 1999); and UNDP as team leader for its country evaluation in Yemen (2004). Unni Wikan gives numerous public lectures a year and frequently appears in the media and public debates as well as being sought out for advice by policy forums, public officials, private foundations, social workers, child care workers, teachers, the courts etc. In 2004, she was awarded the Freedom of Expression Award for her ”insightful, open-hearted and challenging contribution to the debate on value conflicts in the multicultural society.” |
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