Diversity and Inclusion Panel
Sponsored by Ford Motor Company
5:00 – 6:30 pm (Thursday), April 8, 2021, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Panel Chair
Dr. Jose Luis Guerrero-Cusuman0
Associate Professor of Operations and Information Management
McDonough School of Business
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C., USA
Jose-Luis Guerrero-Cusumano holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois and a Master of Sciences in Statistics from the Mathematics Department of the University of Illinois. He is also an Economics Statistician from the School of Economics Science, Rosario University, Argentina. Jose-Luis Guerrero-Cusumano is a Tenured Associate Professor at the Georgetown University School of Business. Prof. Guerrero-Cusumano has been a member of the faculty at Georgetown since 1989 in the School of Business. He is also the recipient of the Gold Medal for service at Georgetown University. Professor Guerrero-Cusumano was the Academic Director of the Corporate International Master’s at the Georgetown University School of Business (2012-2017). He is former co-Director of the International Institute on Government, Management, and Policy at Georgetown University. In 2008, Professor Guerrero-Cusumano was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, Doctor Honoris Causa in Administration by Ovidius University (Romania). Also in 2008, he was elected Fellow at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University, England. In 2017, he was recognized by the International Institute for Applied Knowledge Management with the Fellow & Distinguished Scholar Award. Among his research areas are Big and Small Data, Data Mining, Text Mining, International Business, Social Responsibility, Business Forecasting, Six Sigma and Quality Improvement.
In 2017, he was the Co-Chair of the international conference on Responsible Organizations in the Global Context. He was also the Deputy Director and Executive Editor of the journal Globalization, Competitiveness and Governability, Spain, 2007-2011. Dr. Guerrero-Cusumano has published over fifty articles in leading journals. Prof. Guerrero-Cusumano has been a member of the faculty at Georgetown since 1989 in the School of Business. He is also the recipient of the Gold Medal for service at Georgetown University. Professor Guerrero Cusumano was the deputy Director and Executive Editor of the journal Globalization, Competitiveness and Governability, Georgetown U-Universia, Spain, 2007-2011. Professor Guerrero-Cusumano was also the Vice-president of the Latin American Foundation for Quality and he is also a founding member of The Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence (MAAOE). In February 2004, he was the technical chairperson for the 3rd Latin American Quality Conference held in Managua, Nicaragua. He was also a member of the International think Tank on Quality and Social Responsibility for the American Society for Quality.
He won the Belgian-American foundation research grant 1995, and spent Spring 1995 as a visiting professor at Institut d’Administration et de Gestion (IAG), Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve (Belgium) and at Vesalius College (Vrije Universiteit), Brussels. In the fall 1997, Professor Guerrero-Cusumano spent his sabbatical year at Ghent University (The Vlerick School of Business), Ghent, Belgium as an invited professor, where he researched European Quality Certifications for Academic Institutions. In spring 2006, he was invited by Escuela Superior de Administración y Dirección de Empresas (ESADE) in Barcelona, where he spent part of his sabbatical. Professor Guerrero-Cusumano has also lectured widely internationally. He is also a researcher at “Laboratoire de Recherche en Management” (University of Versailles, France) in the area of Comprehensive Management, Quality and Innovation. He has lectured at European Quality Master Program system (Versailles University, France; University of Limerick, Ireland; Tor Vergata University, Rome, Italy; University of Piraeus, Athens, Greece; Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain), the Master of Total Quality Management (Vaxjo University, Vaxjo, Sweden), the Master of Quality Management (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel), and the Master of Industrial Engineering (Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium) as an invited professor.
Dr. Guerrero-Cusumano was an examiner for the American National Science Foundation in the areas of “Transformations to Quality Organizations Program”, the “Production and Operations Research Program” and “the Innovation and Organizational Change Program”. Also, Professor Guerrero-Cusumano served as an examiner for the American National Research Council in the area of Benchmarking and for Institute of International Education. Internationally, Professor Guerrero-Cusumano was an examiner for the European Foundation for Quality Management (E.F.Q.M.). He is a member of the Consumer Interest Forum of the American National Standards Institute.
He has been an external judge for several Ph.D. thesis defenses for prestigious international universities as well as a reviewer for many publications such as Management Science, the Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Information Sciences, etc. Professor Guerrero-Cusumano has been a plenary speaker in many conferences around the world and has appeared repeatedly in the media, such as America’s Voice, French TV5, National Public Radio, the international Spanish channel Univision, the Voice of America and CNN international and Jim Lehrer’s News Hour. He speaks seven languages fluently (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish).
Panel Speaker I
Professor Tonya L. Smith-Jackson
Senior Vice-Provost for Academic Affairs
NC A&T State University
Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
Tonya Smith-Jackson, PhD, CPE is Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at NC A&T State University in Greensboro, NC. Dr. Smith-Jackson earned MS and PhD degrees from NCSU in Psychology/Ergonomics and Interdisciplinary Industrial Engineering. She earned a BA in Psychology from UNC-Chapel Hill. She spent 14 years at Virginia Tech, moving from assistant to associate to full professor of ISE. She is interim director of the Center of Excellence in Research, Education and Outreach and directs the Human Factors Analytics Lab and co-directs the laboratory for Cyber-Human Analytics Research for the Internet of Things (CHARIoT).
Panel Speaker II
Ms. Aryanne Quintal
Specialist, Science, Technology and Innovation
Department of Economic Development
Organization of American States – OAS
Washington, DC 20006, USA
Aryanne Quintal is a Specialist within the Competitiveness, Innovation and Technology Section of the Organization of American States (OAS). In her current position, she participates in the formulation, execution and evaluation of multiple regional development initiatives in the areas of technology transfer and commercialization; technology foresight; transformative technologies and the future of work; engineering education; national quality infrastructure and diversity and inclusion in STEM.
She also serves as one of the main contact points for the Governments of the 34 Member Countries of the OAS, as well as coordinator of the two (2) highest hemispheric dialogues on science and technology of the region, namely the Inter-American Meeting of Ministers of Science and Technology and the Inter-American Committee on Science and Technology.
Additionally, Ms. Quintal is a recognized international guest speaker on issues of science, technology and innovation for social and economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is also a guest lecturer for the course “Humanitarian Development” at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences of Harvard University.
Ms. Quintal speaks French, English and Spanish. She has a Master’s Degree in International Relations from the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), Canada, and a Bachelor of Arts with a Major in Political Communication from the same University.
Panel Speaker III
Prof. Maria Jesus Saenz, PhD
Executive Director, MIT SCM Blended Master Program
Director, MIT Digital Supply Chain Transformation
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Transportation & Logistics
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Dr. Maria Jesus Saenz is the Director of the research area on Digital Supply Chain Transformation at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, as Research Scientist. The primary research aims at leveraging the connections among inter-organizational business drivers when facing new collaborative paradigms in digital transformations. Such opportunities require approaches that encompass the challenges of innovation around digitalization, with organizational changes at inter-organizational level, including multidimensional collaboration, digital supply chain capabilities and digital customer value.
Dr. Saenz also serves as the Executive Director of the MIT Supply Chain Management Blended Master Program, an elite MIT degree that allows learners to combine the MITx MicroMasters credential with one+ semester at MIT.
Dr. Saenz teaches various courses at Master, PhD and Executive Education level on Digital Transformation, Supply Chain Management, Collaboration, Risks, Resilience and Project Management. Regarding her education, Dr. Saenz is certified in Participant Centered Learning by Harvard Business School. She received Cum Laude and the Outstanding Doctoral Award for her PhD in Manufacturing and Design Engineering from the University of Zaragoza, where she previously obtained her M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering, while she also studied Mathematics Sciences for several years. In 2003, she received her tenure as Associate Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Zaragoza. In 2004, she joined the newly-formed research institute MIT Zaragoza Logistics Center as Professor, and she has also served the Center as its Executive Director. She was also the Director of the Spanish Center of Excellence in Logistics. Dr. Saenz has also led various international research projects for the European Commission, as well as for companies on Supply Chain Management innovation, such as P&G, Carrefour, Clariant, Dell, DHL, Leroy Merlin or Caterpillar. She is co-author of more than 80 publications, including books and articles in leading international Journals. Her knowledge transfer work has received 14 awards and her research was cited in the media including MIT Sloan Management Review, Forbes, Financial Times Press or Supply Chain Management Review. She also regularly interacts with business leaders in more than 15 countries.
Panel Speaker IV
Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert
Interim Dean of Georgetown College & Idol Family Professor
Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057, USA
Soyica Diggs Colbert is the Interim Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University, where she is also the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts.
She is also an Associate Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Colbert is the author of Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (forthcoming April 2021), Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics (Rutgers University Press, 2017), and The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance and the Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Colbert co-edited Race and Performance After Repetition (Duke University Press, 2020) and The Psychic Hold of Slavery (Rutgers University Press, 2016). She served as a Creative Content Producer for The Public Theatre’s audio play, shadow/land and is currently working on co-written volume, Black Existentialism.
Colbert has published articles in American Theatre, African American Review, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Boundary 2, South Atlantic Quarterly, Scholar and Feminist Online, and Theatre Topics and in the collections: Black Performance Theory, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights, and August Wilson: Completing the Cycle.
She has served as a dramaturg for productions at Arena Stage of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, and Eduardo Machado’s Celia and Fidel as well as at Shakespeare Theatre Company of James Baldwin’s Amen Corner. She is the recipient of the Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, Mellon Summer Research Grant, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library Fellowship. Her research interests span the 19th-21st centuries, from Harriet Tubman to Beyoncé, and from poetics to performance.
Panel Speaker V
Dr. Sheri Sheppard
Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Stanford University
Palo Alto, California, USA
Sheri Sheppard teaches both undergraduate and graduate design-related classes, and conducts research on fracture mechanics and applied finite element analysis, and on how people become engineers. From 1999-2008 she served as a Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, leading the Foundation’s engineering study. In addition to publishing technical papers, reports, and textbooks, she has led or co-led several large, multi-institutional projects to build new educational research programs and related resources, such as the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), The National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), and a program on summer research experiences for high school teachers. Her industry experience includes engineering positions at Detroit’s “Big Three” — Ford Motor Company, General Motors Corporation, and Chrysler Corporation. She earned her bachelors degree from the University of Wisconsin, and her PhD at the University of Michigan. At Stanford she has served a chair of the faculty senate, as associate vice provost for graduate education, and is the longtime faculty founder of and adviser to the graduate student group MEwomen. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors and awards, including the Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford University’s highest award for excellence in teaching and the Chester F. Carlson and Ralph Coats Roe Awards of the American Society for Engineering Education in recognition of distinguished accomplishment in engineering education, and for outstanding teaching and notable contributions to the mechanical engineering profession.
Panel Speaker VI
Dr. Roberta de Castro Souza Pião
Department of Production Engineering
Polytechnic School
University of São Paulo
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Roberta de Castro Souza Pião holds a degree in Economic Sciences from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (1995), a master’s degree in Production Engineering from the Federal University of São Carlos (1999), a doctorate in Production Engineering from the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo (2005) and was visiting researcher at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, UK. She is currently a PhD professor in the Department of Production Engineering at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo. Member of the Deliberative Council of NAP-CORS / USP (Center for the Study of Organizations). It is dedicated to the areas of “Organizational Economics” and ‘Strategy, Organization and Operations Management’.