Faculty

Josh Bersin

For the last two decades, has studied the world of work, HR and leadership practices, and the broad talent technology market. He is often cited as one of the leading HR and workplace industry analysts in the world.

He founded Bersin & Associates in 2001 to provide research and advisory services focused on corporate learning. Over the next ten years, he expanded the company’s coverage to encompass HR, talent management, talent acquisition, and leadership and became a recognized expert in the talent market. He sold the company to Deloitte in 2012, when it became known as Bersin™ by Deloitte. When he “retired” from Deloitte in 2018, Josh returned to his work as an independent analyst and corporate advisor.

In May 2019, Josh launched the Josh Bersin Academy, the world's first global development academy for HR and talent professionals at all levels and across all industries. Serving as the Academy’s dean, Josh guides its program offerings, interacts with members, and shares relevant research and insights to help HR and talent professionals stay current on the trends and practices needed to drive success in the modern world of work. He also currently sits on the board of UC Berkeley Executive Education.

Chris Pirie

Chris Pirie is the Founder and CEO of The Learning Futures Group. Formerly a Partner Level General Manager and Chief Learning Officer at Microsoft and Vice President of eLearning at Oracle, Chris has built deep expertise in the digital transformation of business and workplace learning and in developing award-winning large-scale global talent development programs such as the Oracle Learning Network, and Microsoft Certification program.

Chris brings a passion for driving disruptive change and innovation. He has worked with many large enterprise organizations, international NGOs, and a host of learning technology and service technology providers. He’s participated and designed programs with leading business schools and he is also a frequent contributor and keynote speaker at industry conferences.

Emily Chardac

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, Emily Chardac is an accelerator designing the future of work at the intersection of talent and innovation. At the helm of hyper growth, global expansion, (re)building teams, and positioning for IPO or acquisition, Emily has impacted the People and Culture functions at Square, Mozilla (Firefox), and Speck.

During her time at a financial services firm and investment bank ($265B AUM), she positioned the Human Capital function from paper-based processes into digital platforms and redesigned and aligned the global benefits packages while saving the company millions of dollars. Emily is keen to collaborate with change-makers who want to, and can, make the world a better place while unleashing meaningful change in the workplace ecosystem.

Nazneen Razi

Nazneen specializes in HR and Talent strategies to drive business improvement. Prior to her current role, she was Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer for Health Care Service Corporation, the largest customer owned healthcare provider in the US. Prior to HCSC, Nazneen was Executive Vice President and Chief Global Human Resources Officer for JLL, a leading global commercial real estate company. She has over twenty-five years’ experience leading HR organizations at national and global firms such as Comdisco, Inc. and CNA Insurance Companies.

Nazneen earned a PhD in Organizational Development and an MBA from Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois, where she also served as adjunct faculty for the MBA programs. She holds a Masters’ degree in English Literature from Osmania University in India. Nazneen has co-authored a book “Winning with Transglobal Leadership” that was published by McGraw-Hill in May, 2012.

Dr. Nick van Dam

Nick is an internationally recognized thought leader, advisor, researcher, facilitator and best-selling author of more than 25 books on Corporate Learning and Leadership Development. Dr. van Dam has over 30 years of business experience as a former Partner, Global Chief Learning Officer, HR-Executive, and Client Advisor at McKinsey as well as at Deloitte.

Nick is Chief of the Center for Corporate Learning Innovation at IE University (Spain) and a member of the IE Center for Health, Wellbeing and Happiness. Nick is a Professor at IE University, Nyenrode and the University of Pennsylvania, where he works with candidates in the executive doctoral program for Chief Learning Officer. He is affiliated with McKinsey & Company as an External Senior Advisor. Nick is the founder of the e-Learning for Kids Foundation, which has provided free digital lessons for more than 20 million underprivileged elementary school children.

Riina Hellström

Riina Hellström is recognized internationally as a brilliant agile & people professional. After years working in traditional global organizations, in 2010 she started her own consultancy, driving the Agile organization development scene forward. Now, almost a decade later she is globally the first HR professional to achieve Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) and a Licensed Scrum at Scale trainer. She also holds a Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Product Owner (CSPO), and SAFe Agilist credentials.

Riina is the co-founder of Agile HR Community, a lead trainer in Agile HR, training and certifying HR professionals in Agile capabilities globally. She currently works with large corporate agile transformations in Europe through her company People Geeks Ltd Oy. Riina is a Master of Science (Technology) and she has a Master’s degree in Applied Neuroscience from Middlesex University, UK.

Dr. P.V. Ramana Murthy

PV is a thought leader in Talent Management, Organization Development (OD) and Strategy with over 30 years of experience across the entire gamut of the HR function. He currently serves as the Executive Vice President and Global Head – Human Resources at the Indian Hotels Company Limited which operates the Taj Group of Hotels, Resorts and Palaces, the oldest company of the salt to steel conglomerate - Tata Group. PV handles a broad spectrum of initiatives related to Performance Management, Career & Succession Planning, Leadership Assessment & Development, and Culture building.

Prior to this, he was the Executive Director – Human Resources for Coca-Cola in India. During this time, he also undertook several short-term international assignments and handled the Global Leadership Development role for the Bottling Investment Group of The Coca-Cola Company.

Alex Seiler

Alex brings over 15 years of HR experience with him and has worked for companies as diverse and varied as WeWork, Blue Shield of California, NBCUniversal, Time Inc., Ogilvy & Mather and Citi. Currently, he is Partner, Head of HR, Americas for Control Risks, a specialist risk consultancy that helps to create secure, compliant and resilient organizations in an age of ever-changing risk. He is based out of their Los Angeles office.

A graduate of Cardiff University in Wales, Alex holds a Bachelor’s degree in Politics & History. While he has called the US home since 2004, he comes from a truly international background and perspective- he is half British, half Swiss and was born & raised in Hong Kong, so traveling for work and pleasure is second nature.

Tim Sackett

Tim has 20 years of combined Executive HR and Talent Acquisition experience, working for Fortune 500 companies. Tim has a Master’s degree in HR Management and is a highly sought-after international speaker on leadership, HR Tech, talent acquisition and HR execution.

Tim is currently on the board for the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) and is the author of the best-selling SHRM published book, “The Talent Fix: A Leader’s Guide to Recruiting Great Talent”. In 2018, Tim was named a Top 10 Global HR Influencer by Workforce Magazine, and the #8 Influencer Globally on Recruitment.

Joe Militello

Senior HR leader with over 20 years’ experience leading high tech and software companies. Led the People team at Pivotal Software through a spin-out to pre-IPO readiness to post IPO scale to the acquisition of the company by VMware. Successfully transitioned the team from transactional HR to a world-class professional HR organization. Responsible for building and upgrading all aspects of People operations to ensure a strong foundation to support the company’s hypergrowth.

Recognized industry leader with Impact awards in 2017 for Acquiring Top Talent and 2016 for Transforming HR incorporating Agile principles. Frequent speaker on how to accelerate the Inclusion and Diversity imperative.

Madeline Laurano

Madeline’s primary focus over the last 12+ years has been on the talent management market, specializing in talent acquisition. Her work helps companies both validate and re-evaluate their strategies and understand the role technology can play in driving business outcomes. She has watched HCM transform from a back-office function to a strategic company initiative with a focus on partnerships, experience and efficiency.

Before Aptitude Research Partners, Madeline held research roles at Aberdeen, Bersin by Deloitte, ERE Media and Brandon Hall Group. She is co-author of Best Practices in Leading a Global Workforce and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Yahoo News, and The Financial Times. She is a frequent presenter at industry conferences including the HR Technology Conference and Exposition, SHRM, IHRIM, HCI’s Strategic Talent Acquisition conference, GDS International’s HCM Summit, and HRO Today.

Rachel Fitton

Rachel is based in Singapore and in her role as Head, Group Talent Acquisition is responsible for talent acquisition across the entire Singtel Group. Rachel joined Singtel in December 2018 from HP Inc., where she was the Director, Talent Acquisition for Asia Pacific and Japan. Prior to working at HP, Rachel worked at Deloitte leading an internal executive recruiting team focused on hiring consulting Partner and Directors for APAC member firms. Rachel started her career, working in executive search in Hong Kong, she subsequently spent three years working in Japan, before then moving to China and spending six years growing a search partnership business which she successfully co-founded.

Rachel has a degree in Accounting and Law from Kingston University. She also spent a year full-time at Fudan University in Shanghai learning Mandarin. Rachel is a frequent conference speaker on Talent Acquisition. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling and yoga.

Josh Alwitt

Josh Alwitt is a thought leader in the Organizational Development space, currently enrolled in the MSOD program at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. At Publicis Sapient, Josh was most recently responsible for Leadership & Culture, where he led the company-wide inclusive definition of a new organizational Purpose and Values, and the co-creation of a culture that enables people to thrive at work.

Prior to this role, Josh formed the Talent Development function at Sapient, which included Learning & Development, Performance Management, Career Development, Succession Planning, Leadership Development and Integrated Talent Systems. He has been a long-standing and active member of the Learning Innovations Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and speaks at conferences focused on learning, organizations and the future of work.

Nancy Vitale

Nancy Vitale was most recently the Chief Human Resources Officer for Genentech where she was responsible for leading the team that was dedicated to creating a great place for the organization’s 14,000 employees to do their best work. Her life purpose is to “make meaningful connections,” and one of Nancy’s primary focus areas is around wellbeing.

This purpose and focus have led her to launch her own boutique People/HR advisory and consulting firm called “Partners for Wellbeing” which is dedicated to helping organizations create better places to work. Nancy also currently serves as a Board Member for the Make-A-Wish America Foundation. Prior to joining Genentech in 2006, Nancy was the head of HR for the Gillette North American Commercial Division at Procter & Gamble (P&G).

Naveen Bhateja

Naveen is the EVP, Chief People Officer at Medidata leading all aspects of human resources including, recruiting, work place solutions, diversity and inclusion teams globally. As a member of the senior leadership team, Naveen operates as a business strategist and trusted advisor and believes that people strategies empower successful business outcomes. Naveen is skilled at driving profitable growth, higher productivity and stronger competitive positioning in the market for fast paced high tech firms.

Prior to joining Medidata, he was Global vice president of HR for Juniper Networks for 5 years supporting 50 countries. In this role, Naveen led several companywide transformational initiatives including an overhaul to workforce planning process that saved $200M+ OPEX to support reinvestment in strategic areas. Naveen’s career spans nearly 25 years in progressive HR roles ranging from HRBP, training, talent acquisition, compensation and leadership development at companies including GE, JP Morgan Chase, Experian and Amazon. He is trained by Stanford in design thinking. Naveen also serves on a non-profit board for Geeks Rule and as a pro-bono account Director at Taproot foundation. He earned his MBA from University of Leeds, UK.

Balaji Ganapathy

Balaji is a human resources, CSR and D&I executive at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) - a Global Top 3 information technology leader, with a mission to advance access, equity and inclusion in society. His stewardship has resulted in empowering millions of women, minorities and underserved students in CS/STEM and TCS being recognized as America’s most community-minded technology company by Civic 50, a Top 50 Company for Diversity across sectors by DiversityInc, and a Top Employer in North America.

With 20+ years industry experience, he has served in board leadership roles for U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, World Economic Forum,STEMconnector, NPower, Million Women Mentors, IMPACT 2030, Here2Here and Women’s Business Collaborative. Recognized with the Charlie H. Mooreaward by CECP, he is a prominent thought leader advocating on purposeful business, social innovation, democratization of prosperity, skills for the future, empowering women and minorities, tech for good and creating shared value.

RJ Milnor

RJ Milnor is a HR leader with about 20 years of global experience improving organizational performance through data-driven talent strategies. RJ believes in taking a business-oriented, creative and collaborative approach to help employees unlock their capabilities, increase their productivity, and improve their wellbeing, and deliver business results.

RJ's career started in investment banking, where he first began to understand the impact that talent strategies can have on profitability and total shareholder return. He has advised Fortune 100 companies on 6 continents about how to optimize their talent management approaches and build analytical capability, and launched new businesses in both executive education and people analytics. RJ has been privileged to build and lead the people analytics teams at two Fortune 5 companies.

RJ now leads People Analytics at Uber.

Pete Sackleh

Pete is a highly experienced business leader with deep expertise at the intersection of employee experience and workplace strategy, learning, talent and operations. Pete has led the strategic, experiential and physical development and operations of two world-class corporate universities - Deloitte’s $300m investment in Deloitte University in Westlake, Texas and KPMG’s $450m investment in the KPMG Lakehouse in Lake Nona, Florida. Both of these cultural homes have become iconic in the way they address Future of Work, Culture and Learning. Pete also led the global expansion of the Deloitte University brand.

Pete leads SolutionSpark LLC, a workforce optimization consulting firm. He applies the expertise he has developed in various business leadership roles as he serves organizations in developing innovative talent experience models addressing attraction, acquisition, engagement, investment and retention.

Jill Larsen

Jill serves as CHRO of PTC (NYSE:PTC). She is a visionary with more than 25 years of experience working in global, high-tech companies to establish or transform Human Resources functions. She is focused on designing innovative digital and talent strategies that accelerate business outcomes. Prior to PTC, Jill was the CHRO of Medidata (NYSE:MDSO) where she transformed the People function and established Medidata as a Great Place to Work.

Prior to Medidata, Jill spent five years in a blended SVP role at Cisco, as both a Global HR Business Partner and leader of Talent Acquisition. Jill drove a complete digital transformation of Cisco’s TA function with a focus on candidate experience, talent brand, predictive analytics and next gen tools. Her talent brand efforts resulted in Cisco winning 41 awards for social media and brand engagement. Earlier in her career, Jill spent five years at EMC as the CHRO of RSA Security and head of HR Operations. She also held senior HR leadership roles at SunGard and a number of technology startups. Jill holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and English from Boston College, and a Master’s Degree in HR Management from Emmanuel College. She also earned a PHR designation and a Certificate in HR Management from Bentley University.

Jill is a two time finalist for HRO Today’s TA Leader of the Year Award, a winner of the YWCA Women’s Leadership Award and a winner of the Bob Gatti HR Leader of Distinction Award. Jill is an adjunct professor at Columbia University where she teaches a graduate course on Digital HR & The Digital Workplace; a course she created for the CU HCM program. She is an active public speaker and is a Board member serving on the Compensation Committee of Sterling and a Board Advisor to Envoy & JBA.

Dr. Frida Polli

Dr. Frida Polli is the co-founder and CEO of Pymetrics, a platform using behavioural data and ethical AI to help organizations better understand their workforce as well as make fairer and more predictive people decisions. Dr. Polli is a trained neuroscientist turned startup founder; after spending a decade in academia at Harvard and MIT, she sought to apply the science from the lab to real-world problems, leading her to found pymetrics.

Dr. Polli has presented at many of the largest scientific and world conferences including the World Economic Forum in Davos, TED, and at the President’s Circle at the National Academy of Sciences. She has appeared on several of the major news outlets including CNN, BBC, BloombergTV, and NPR and been featured in major global publications including the Economist, WSJ, NYT, and Financial Times. Today, pymetrics serves around 100 global enterprise clients and, in 2019, ranked #338 on the Inc. 5000 list as well as #30 on the first-ever Forbes AI 50 list of "America's Most Promising AI Companies."

Frank van den Brink

Frank is a technical, entrepreneurial and comprehensive HR leader with a progressive career in Financial Services and clear focus on people, business and organization transformation. He is expressing a creative growth mindset with strong business acumen and after a corporate career co-founding and advising several start-ups, scale-ups and mid-sized corporates.

Frank has made a critical contribution to the strategy and business transformation of ABN AMRO as the Chief Employee Experience Officer / CHRO at ABN AMRO. He can act both as change leader and operational leader with a strong focus on execution and delivery. He has been pioneering into the field of Employee Experience/Customer Experience and has a proven ability to lead digital vs human transformation and (re-)built employee centric organizations.

Dr. Cris Wildermuth

Dr. Cris Wildermuth is an Associate Professor at Drake University, in Des Moines, Iowa, where she directs the Master of Science in Leadership Development and teaches graduate courses in ethics, global leadership, human resource development, and change leadership. Fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, Dr. Wildermuth has traveled extensively, facilitating leadership development programs in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Her main research and consulting practices focus on employee engagement, ethics, personality in the workplace, and international/intercultural development. Dr. Wildermuth is the Community Chair of Linked:HR and its affiliate groups, a very large set of groups on LinkedIn for HR professionals with about 1.5 million members worldwide.

Mark Levy

Mark is a seasoned globally minded Employee Experience Leader. Mark was the pioneer of designing the Employee Experience at Airbnb, which has since created significant changes in the way organizations globally are looking at expanding the HR function to focus on the entire employee journey. Glassdoor recognized Mark and his team’s work by naming them the #1 Place to Work in 2016.

Mark has taken his learnings to consult with companies, from start-ups to large global brands, to advise on how to evolve from HR to Employee Experience. Mark is an advisor to several start-ups as well as a few big-hearted VCs, including Backstage Capital and SemperVirens. Most recently Mark spent 8 months at Allbirds, combining his experiences in retail and start-ups to help them scale their people, culture and global expansion.

Robert M. Burnside

Robert M. Burnside was most recently the Chief Learning Officer for Ketchum Public Relations where he was responsible for creating a learning environment for 2500 global employees. In addition to developing Ketchum University he created the Ketchum Leadership Institute. He also formed lasting relationships with Tsinghua University in Beijing and Tufts University in Boston.

Prior to joining Ketchum, Robert was at the Center for Creative Leadership where he provided leadership development globally to Fortune 100 senior teams. Currently his focus is on bringing learning and development into the digital age, working as Senior Learning Advisor with Nomadic Learning.

David J. DeFilippo, Ed.D.

David DeFilippo is passionate about developing processes and plans for individuals and organizations to reach their full potential. In David’s corporate career he served as Chief People & Learning Officer for Suffolk Construction, Chief Learning Officer for The Bank of New York Mellon and in senior learning and talent roles at Capital One and Comcast.

David started DeFilippo Leadership in 2019 to provide executive coaching, leadership development and talent management solutions to organizations. David also serves as an Executive Coach in Harvard Business School’s Executive Education programs where he focuses on individual and team development through coaching.

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in psychological profiling, talent management, leadership development, and people analytics. He is currently the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup, co-founder of Deeper Signals and Metaprofiling, and Professor of Business Psychology at University College London and Columbia University. He frequently lectures at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, London Business School, and IMD.

Dr. Tomas has written 10 books and over 150 scientific papers on the psychology of talent, leadership, innovation, and AI. His work has received awards by the American Psychological Association, the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, and the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology, to which he is a Fellow. Over the past 20 years, he has consulted to a range of corporate clients, from HSBC and Goldman Sachs to Google and P&G, and he is a regular contributor on TV shows, from the BBC to CNN.

Ekpedeme “Pamay” Bassey

Pamay is the Chief Learning Officer for the Kraft Heinz Company, where she creates a culture of continuous learning and drives the company’s global learning and development strategy and initiatives through Ownerversity, Kraft Heinz’s corporate university. Pamay has deep expertise in learning theories derived from artificial intelligence research and practical experience designing and developing highly-rated learning solutions and transformative professional development programs.

Prior to Kraft Heinz, Pamay served as the Global Head of Learning Platform and Professional Development for BlackRock. Before that, she was president of The Pamay Group, an e-learning design and strategy company.

Pamay is also Chief Experience Officer of the My 52 Weeks of Worship Project, through which she facilitates courageous conversations about cultural and interfaith diversity, inclusion, and understanding. Her 2018 TEDx talk, Navigating Sacred Spaces, is based on her project work and her book: My 52 Weeks of Worship: Lessons from a Global, Spiritual, Interfaith Journey. Pamay earned a B.S. in symbolic systems from Stanford, with an AI concentration, and a M.S. in computer science from Northwestern. She is also a graduate of the Second City Conservatory program in Chicago, an advanced study of improvisational comedy and theater.

Nuno Gonçalves

Nuno is a senior HR leader who is at the forefront of envisioning and driving transformations that are either HR-led or HR supporting the business. He is an early pioneer in the move towards continuous transformation as a new reality. In his current role, Nuno is UCB’s Head of Talent Acquisition and Development focused on building UCB’s ability to anticipate the talent needs of the future and foster an environment to “learn and grow every day to create value for patients”.

Before joining UCB Nuno worked in different companies and sectors, from Pharmaceuticals at Sanofi as their Chief Learning Officer, to commodity and specialty Plastics and Chemicals at Solvay in multiple regional and global roles. Nuno is a life-long learner with a degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology; he’s also a Stanford alum having completed an in-residence Program in 2018.