Brian is the CEO and Founder of panOpen Education, a next generation learning platform provider and services company to publishers, institutions, and other educational content creators. He is also the founder of Akademos, a company that focuses on new models of distributing physical and digital course materials in the US. Prior to education entrepreneurship, Brian was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for German Cultural Studies, both at Cornell University. He has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, University of Göttingen, and Yale University. He has published various articles and essays in political theory and philosophy, including the book Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, and articles with EdSurge and Inside Higher Ed concerning the growing market for OER. Brian earned a Bachelor’s degree with honors in English and political science at the State University of New York at Albany, and a Master’s and Doctorate in political philosophy and social theory at Cornell University.

Dr. Heather R. Parker is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Saint Leo University. She earned her Ph.D. in history from UCLA where she began her academic career examining interethnic political interaction in mid-20th-century Los Angeles. While she has devoted much of her recent career to administration, she continues to engage in research and is now focused on interethnic religious interaction and the political implications of these relationships in Florida. Related to this work are two ongoing projects. The first of these is her East Pasco County African American History Archive, which houses a collection of digitized images, oral histories, and data chronicling the lives and experiences of African Americans in East Pasco County, FL. The other is her Community Memory Oral History Collection and Archive in which digitized images, oral histories, and documents related to the history of Saint Leo University and its surrounding communities are housed. She has also been researching the ways in which college administrations and faculty can provide effective mentoring for both traditional and non-traditional minority students. The result of this research is the launch of the Saint Leo Minority Mentoring Project in 2018.

John Dennis is a seasoned independent investor and family foundation manager who focuses on social impact ventures. For 25 years, he has worked as an international development consultant and project manager. He has worked for Asian Development Bank, Cornell University, Oxfam American, UNDP, and Worldwide Fund for Nature, in countries such as Madagascar, Sudan, Afghanistan, Belize, Thailand, and Cambodia. More recently, John led an assessment of two Pakistani universities that resulted in a large USAID grant to Faisalabad University to create the U.S.-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Agriculture and Food Security in partnership with UC Davis. John’s current interests include examining how open source technology developed at Cornell University for the establishment of safe drinking water supplies can be sustainably extended to some of the poorest communities in the world. John holds a B.A. in anthropology and agriculture and a Ph.D. in developmental sociology and agronomy, both from Cornell University.

Ken Brooks is a senior-level operations and technology executive and advisor specializing in helping publishers and education technology companies re-align their organizations, processes, and technology to address disruptions to their markets, products, and business models. He is president of Treadwell Media Group, an operations, technology and strategy consulting firm focused on the education and trade publishing sectors. Prior to Treadwell Ken was the Chief Content Officer for the Academic and Professional Learning division of Wiley, and Chief Operating Officer of Macmillan Learning. He has held senior positions at McGraw-Hill Education, Cengage Learning, Barnes & Noble, Simon & Schuster, and Random House. Over the course of his career, Ken has founded digital services companies both in the US and abroad; a public domain publishing imprint; and a distribution-center-based print-on-demand operation and has worked in trade, professional, higher education and K-12 publishing sectors. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering and a master’s degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, where he also mentors graduate students in Educational Technology.