Meredith Meyer Grelli

Meredith Meyer Grelli is the Interim Executive Director of the Swartz Center. She also serves as the Managing Director of the Swartz Center; the Assistant Dean for Entrepreneurship Initiatives in the School of Computer Science and the Director of Project Olympus, a Swartz-affiliated Center focused on commercializing advanced technologies. Meredith is also an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business.

In her roles, Meredith leads a team that supports student, staff, faculty and alumni founders through an extensive architecture of programs and early stage funding. Carnegie Mellon affiliated startups have exits with a cumulative value of more than half a trillion dollars. CMU startups have raised more than $90B in funding.

Prior to her work in academia, Meredith was an entrepreneur and operator. She founded, scaled, and sold one of CMU’s top 100 affiliated exits. She has also founded and led non profits and real estate developments. Throughout all of her work, she has maintained a deep commitment to community-driven economic development.

Meredith has been recognized for her contributions to entrepreneurship and innovation with a number of awards, including the 100 Women to Watch in the U.S. by the Business Times, the Gerald Leland Bach Teaching Award, Canfield-Roseman MBA Entrepreneur of the Year; the Tepper Alumni Award; and two-time James Beard Semi-Finalist Award for Outstanding Wine, Spirits, and Beer Professional. She is an advisor to Fortune’s ‘Most Innovative Companies’ rankings, serves on the Executive Committee of the Carnegie Science Center Board, and has been a board member of multiple private and nonprofit organizations.

Hemathri Balakrishnan

Hemathri Balakrishnan is a highly value focused leader with over 27 years of extensive experience in leading multiple Technology & Data Transformation initiatives across various large global financial institutions. He has led large scale Technology and business transformation initiatives in the US and internationally which includes UK, Germany, Switzerland, Australia & Singapore.

Hemathri is currently the managing director and head of product acceleration and innovation at JP Morgan Wealth Management. His team is focusing on developing the Product Acceleration Garage, integrating AI and GenAI based emerging technologies to help envision and build out industry-leading wealth product capabilities that elevate the advisor and client experiences.

Before JP Morgan Chase Hemathri has gained valuable experience working in the Wealth Management & Asset Management businesses in Deloitte, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, UBS, and Citi.

Toshiro Kiura

Mr. Toshiro Kiura serves as Chief Technology Strategy Officer and Fellow at Honda R&D Co., Ltd., where he guides the company's comprehensive technology strategy across all business areas. With a Ph.D. in System Design Management, an MBA, and master's degrees in both Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Mr. Kiura brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to his leadership role.

Since joining Honda R&D in 2001, Mr. Kiura has built an extensive career spanning engine development, combustion research, and strategic innovation. His expertise was enhanced through a 2005 research fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, leading to leadership roles including new engine development and Vice President of Honda R&D Europe.

In his current position since 2025, Mr. Kiura oversees comprehensive technology strategy, new business development and resource optimization, and development innovation through AI and digital technologies. His leadership bridges Honda's engineering heritage with emerging technologies, positioning the company for future mobility challenges.

Diana Kearns-Manolato

Diana is a senior manager in the Deloitte Center for Integrated Research where she analyzes market shifts and emerging trends across industries. She leads Deloitte’s global digital transformation research and focuses on topics including digital strategy, cloud, AI, cyber, blockchain, IoT, experiential technologies, and the future of workforce. Additionally, she draws on more than 15 years of award-winning marketing communications expertise to align insights with business strategy. She speaks on technology and women in leadership and holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Fordham University.

Jake Loosararian

Jake Loosararian is the co-founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics, the company combining advanced robotics and AI-powered software to build, operate and modernize the world’s most critical infrastructure.

As a student at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College in 2012, Jake visited a local power plant which was suffering from persistent downtime at the facility, costing millions of dollars per month. He saw this as a solvable problem and built a robot out of his college dorm room to help that power plant drastically reduce its downtime, saving the plant money and preventing power outages for thousands of families.

Jake made it his mission to assess the health of the built world and launched Gecko Robotics in 2013. For years, he was bootstrapping, sleeping on a friend's floor, and living on the edge to get the company off the ground. He was down to his last $100 before being persuaded to talk to a venture partner from startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2016.

Gecko Robotics graduated from Y Combinator with a lot of momentum and even an acquisition offer. But, Jake and his co-founder Troy Demmer turned down that offer in favor of building the company their way - close to the customer in the field, rather than out of a lab in Silicon Valley.

Today, Gecko uses a variety of robots that can climb, fly, walk and swim to collect an unprecedented amount of data on built structures, and its own AI-powered software, Cantilever, provides a decision making structure that can assess and predict its health.

Partners include Fortune 100 companies in energy, oil and gas, and manufacturing sectors around the world, as well as the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy to protect and optimize maintenance plans for critical infrastructure, including nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.

In June 2025, Gecko announced it had reached unicorn status, with a valuation of $1.25 billion. Jake currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife, and four kids. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Dave Mawhinney

Dave Mawhinney is the founding executive director, Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, and executive director, Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship.  Dave is also full teaching professor at the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Dave was co-founder, chairman and CEO of mSpoke, an internet content and advertising recommendation engine, that was acquired in 2010 by LinkedIn, the world’s leading professional social networking site. In 2006, Morgan Stanley’s MSCI/Barra business unit acquired mSpoke’s first business line, a quantitative investment recommendation engine.



Before mSpoke, Dave was general partner of PNC Technology Investors. Earlier in his career, he co-founded three successful startup ventures, including Premier Health Exchange (acquired by Medibuy), Hawk Medical (acquired by McKesson), and Industry.Net (merged with AT&T Business Network to form Nets, Inc.). 



Dave is an active board member at 4Moms, Inc., sovaSage, Inc., Shift Robotics, Inc., The Foundation for IUP, and the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Alumni Association (ex-officio, past president). He is an Advisory board member to FifthSeason, #1Cochran, Nimble.ai, Mach9 Robotics, CoPilot, Digital Dream Labs, InnovationWork’s AlphaLab, Pittsburgh Equity Partners, and 3 Points Rising VC. Dave also served as Executive-in-residence at the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, working with healthcare information technology startups.



Dave holds an MBA with Distinction from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in physics, Summa Cum Laude, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Dave was a 2017 recipient of the Tepper School Alumni Award.

Ron Yurko

Ron Yurko is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics & Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and is the Director of the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Center. His research focuses on developing methods at the interface of inference and machine learning, oriented towards problems in sports analytics and natural language processing. His work has been featured in popular media outlets such as The Athletic, FiveThirtyEight, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He is a three-time degree holder from Carnegie Mellon: with a bachelors, masters, and PhD in Statistics. He also has industry experience in both finance and professional sports.

Rebecca Nugent

Rebecca Nugent is the Stephen E. and Joyce Fienberg Professor of Statistics & Data Science and Head of the Carnegie Mellon Department of Statistics & Data Science.  She received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington, her M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University, and her B.A. in Mathematics, Statistics, and Spanish from Rice University. Dr. Nugent is currently on the leadership team for the NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making and has expertise in designing and implementing data science/AI professional development programs for business leaders in industries including health care, finance, automotive/manufacturing, and life sciences.  She was the faculty co-Director of the Moderna AI Academy and the Founding Director of the Statistics & Data Science Corporate Capstone program, an experiential learning initiative that engages faculty and students with data science problems in industry, non-profits, and government organizations.  She has won several national and university teaching awards including the American Statistical Association Waller Award for Innovation in Statistics Education and serves as one of the co-editors of the Springer Texts in Statistics.  She recently served as the co-chair for the National Academy of Sciences study on Improving Defense Acquisition Workforce Capability in Data Use and served on the NAS study on Envisioning the Data Science Discipline:  The Undergraduate Perspective.  Dr. Nugent has worked extensively in clustering and classification methodology with an emphasis on high-dimensional, big data problems and record linkage applications.  Her current research focus is the development and deployment of low-barrier data analysis platforms that allow for adaptive instruction and the study of data science as a science.

Jon Atkin

Jon is a Managing Director in Deloitte Consulting’s Customer practice.  He is an expert and thought leader in customer experience management and sales and execution oversight for teams helping organizations design, implement, and manage enterprise-wide programs. He is a trusted adviser to executive program sponsors and clients.

Dominic Rasini

Dominic is a Principal in Deloitte’s AI & Engineering practice, who brings over 20 years of experience in data and analytics driven business transformation. He helps clients define new data, analytics, and AI focused strategies to build functional and technical capabilities that enable the realization of strategic goals and cross-functional benefits, through integrated operating models and business engagement. Dominic holds a Biomedical Science degree from James Cook University (Australia), and an MBA from the University of Rochester.

Sean Ammirati

Sean Ammirati is the CEO & Co-Founder of Growth Signals, an early-stage startup building an AI-Informed Enterprise Strategy Platform to accelerate front-end innovation for companies. The platform uses generative AI to drive collaboration, refine ideas with new evidence and fast-track the path from discovery to development, turning innovation into revenue-generating ventures.

In addition to his role at Growth Signals, Sean serves as a Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. He is also the Co-Founder of the Carnegie Mellon Corporate Startup Lab (CSL), a Swartz Center initiative that has conducted research and developed tools to help companies better adapt and integrate entrepreneurial best practices into their own innovation processes.

Beyond academia and startups, Sean is a Partner at Birchmere Ventures, where he focuses on SaaS and AI investments. His investments include: NoWait (acquired by Yelp), umano (acquired by Dropbox), Altru (acquired by ICIMS), JazzHR (acquired by Jobvite), Healthie, Crystal and The Zebra.

Sean completed his first book The Science of Growth in April of 2016, which was released by St Martin's Press and was subsequently translated and published in Korean and Mandarin.

Chida Chidambaram

Chida is a tech entrepreneur and a Managing Director in Deloitte’s AI & Data Engineering practice.  He specializes in designing and deploying enterprise-scale AI and machine learning solutions for Fortune 500 clients across hospitality, retail, automotive, technology, media, life science, and financial services.  His work focuses on bringing new generative AI solutions from concept to deployment in complex enterprise environments. Chida is an active mentor at Washington DC developer and startup communities.

Jonathan Valenti

Jonathan Valenti  is a principal in the Financial Services practice of Deloitte focused on Customer Strategy & Applied Design and lead for Deloitte Digital's Applied Innovation offering. He brings 20 years of experience consulting organizations on various strategy projects and transformation programs, including those for growth strategy, customer segmentation, customer experience design, digital transformation, and innovation.

Maciek Dlugosz

Aniket Kittur

Aniket Kittur is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research on crowd-augmented cognition looks at how we can augment the human intellect using crowds and computation. He has authored and co-authored more than 70 peer-reviewed papers, 14 of which have received best paper awards or honorable mentions. Dr. Kittur is a Kavli fellow, has received an NSF CAREER award, the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, major research grants from NSF, NIH, Google, and Microsoft, and his work has been reported in venues including Nature News, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He received a BA in Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton, and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from UCLA.

Amulya Vishwanath

Amulya Vishwanath is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Techable VC, the first venture fund launching in 2025 with a dedicated focus on Physical AI- the convergence of robotics, AI and embodied systems.

Before founding Techable VC, Amulya spent seven years at NVIDIA, where she was the first product marketer for NVIDIA Isaac (since 2018) and most recently helped launch Isaac GR00T, NVIDIA’s research initiative for development of robot foundation models and data pipelines. As a developer marketing lead for Deep Learning and Vision AI, she drove key product adoption initiatives and introduced developer-friendly software platforms that reached millions of generative AI and robotics developers worldwide. Her earlier industry roles at Intel and Molex spanned product marketing and engineering for signal processing solutions.

Amulya holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas. At Techable VC, she brings deep technical expertise and operator DNA to help founders and investors build the future of Physical AI.

Jeffrey Brashear

Jeffrey has more than 25 years of experience helping clients develop and execute strategies to take advantage of disruptive technologies. He has focused on helping clients clarify their understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s value proposition to them, their paths to closing enablement gaps in human and technical capabilities, and their options for establishing and refining governance to help safeguard against AI’s unique challenges. Most Recently, Jeff has began a position teaching about Artificial Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.

John Almasan

Dr. John Almasan is an accomplished technology executive with over 20 years of experience leading global tech teams and building large-scale AI, data, analytics, and cloud platforms for prominent companies such as TIAA, McKinsey & Company, American Express, Bank of America, and Nationwide Insurance. With deep expertise in multi-cloud big data engineering, machine learning, and data science, John is a hands-on practitioner and passionate about enabling the acceleration of AI adoption. As an adjunct professor at various universities and a member of Arizona State University's Board of Advisors, John is committed to preparing the next generation to meet the future's skillset needs and demands. He focuses on employee cross-training and actively engages in teaching and mentoring students in the field. John holds two master’s degrees in engineering and statistics, a Doctor of Business Administration with focus on Machine Learning and has over 40+ patents filed. He has received several awards throughout his career for his contributions to the technology industry.

Julia McDowell

Julia McDowell is the vice president of artificial intelligence (AI) strategy and enablement at Highmark Health, a $29 billion national, blended health organization that includes one of America’s largest Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers and a growing regional hospital and physician network. Highmark Health’s 44,000 employees serve millions of customers nationwide through Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, HM Insurance Group, United Concordia Dental, and enGen.

In her role as vice president of AI strategy and enablement, Julia spearheads efforts to responsibly scale AI across Highmark Health’s integrated payer-provider system. She is dedicated to ensuring that these technologies enhance health outcomes and experiences, reduce costs, and improve access to care for customers served. Driven by a passion for transforming health care, Julia focuses on ethical, transparent, and effective AI implementation, aligning solutions with user needs and bridging the gap between people and machines. Under her leadership, Highmark Health launched its first enterprise-wide GenAI application, Sidekick, empowering employees to innovate and work smarter in a secure environment. She also founded the Women in Tech interest resource group at Highmark Health, championing women's leadership and working to close the gender gap in technology.

Since joining the organization in 2013, Julia has held numerous leadership roles, most recently serving as vice president of enterprise change management. In that role, she guided Highmark Health's strategic approach to navigating complex organizational transformations, developing and implementing change management strategies, building a culture of adaptability and resilience, and empowering employees to thrive in a dynamic environment.

Throughout her career, Julia has been dedicated to aligning business strategy with human capital, understanding how automation can transform work while emphasizing the critical importance of caring for employees to maximize value creation.

Julia is a graduate of Penn State University with a degree in Business Administration and earned her master’s degree at Robert Morris University in Instructional Leadership. She is also currently enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University’s AI Systems graduate certificate program. Julia is the past president of the Penn State Beaver Alumni Society board and a volunteer at the Light of Life Rescue Mission.

Christopher Martin

Christopher currently serves a member of the leadership team of the BNY AI Hub. As part of the bank’s global AI Hub effort, Chris is focused on leveraging AI to develop and deploy innovative solutions across the enterprise. He leads governance efforts within the Hub, working to ensure the responsible application of AI at BNY. Chris is also responsible for driving collaborations with top-tier academic institutions, working with leading scholars to shape the future of AI in financial services.