Blockchain Speaker Profiles

Henry C. “Hank” Foley, Ph.D
President and CEO, NYIT

Henry C. “Hank” Foley, Ph.D., is the fourth president of NYIT. He joined the university in June 2017 after serving as interim chancellor of the University of Missouri-Columbia. Foley earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Providence College, a master’s degree in chemistry from Purdue University, and doctorate in physical and inorganic chemistry from Penn State. He has held faculty appointments in chemistry and chemical engineering at MU, Penn State, and the University of Delaware.

An accomplished researcher who has dedicated more than 30 years to advancing the study of nanotechnology, Foley holds 16 patents, has written more than 150 articles and a textbook, and has mentored nearly 50 undergraduate and graduate thesis students.

Teddy Wayne
New York Times Columnist and Author

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Loner (Simon & Schuster), The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Simon & Schuster), and Kapitoil (Harper Perennial). He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A columnist for the New York Times, he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney’s and has taught at Columbia University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Yale Writers’ Conference. He lives in New York.

Nada Anid, Ph.D.
Dean, NYIT School of Engineering and Computing Sciences

Nada Marie Anid, Ph.D. is the first female dean of NYIT's School of Engineering and Computing Sciences. She oversees more than 80 faculty members and approximately 3,500 graduate and undergraduate students. She embraces NYIT’s forward-thinking and applications-oriented mission and works on several strategic partnerships between the School and the public and private sector, including the creation of the school’s Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center, with labs and research focusing on IT and cybersecurity; bioengineering and health; and energy and green technologies.

Anid is committed to educating a new generation of scientists and engineers ready to address societal challenges. Her contributions to the advancement of women in technology include numerous awards and her recent book, The Internet of Women: Accelerating Culture Change. She earned her Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and bachelor's and master's degrees in chemical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH-Stockholm).

Mary Beth Buchanan
Partner, Bryan Cave LLP

Mary Beth Buchanan is a partner in Bryan Cave's White Collar Defense and Investigations and Securities Litigation and Enforcement Client Service groups. She serves as chair of the firm’s Digital Currency Team. Buchanan concentrates her practice on white collar criminal defense, SEC and FINRA enforcement matters, corporate and accounting fraud, internal investigations, corporate compliance, foreign corrupt practices violations, Congressional investigations, and complex civil litigation. She joined the firm from the United Nations, where she served as the ethics and reputational risk officer and conducted the United Nations’ first ethics and reputational risk assessment for U.N. Peacekeeping and Special Political Operations. From 2001 to 2009, Buchanan served as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania and is the only woman in Pennsylvania's history to be presidentially appointed to this position. She oversaw the prosecution of more than 5,000 cases, including corporate and securities fraud, bank fraud, foreign corrupt practices, false claims, money laundering, healthcare fraud, public corruption, and a broad range of violent crimes.

Tetyana Colosivschi
Director of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships for Energy, ConsenSys

Tetyana Colosivschi is a Director of Strategy, Business Development and Partnerships at ConsenSys Energy, a venture production studio founded by a co-founder of Ethereum. Colosivschi’s mission is to advise and help oil and gas companies and governments with timely adoption of blockchain technology.

Prior to joining ConsenSys in 2017, Colosivschi founded Fabco Energy Group, an upstream oil and gas transaction advisory firm. She has a decade of experience in the oil and gas industry, working in the OFS and upstream sectors with leading oil and gas companies and governments across the globe. Colosivschi has taken M.B.A. classes at Wharton School of Business and has a master’s degree from Yonsei University, a top private university in South Korea. She speaks Russian and Korean.

Bob Graham
Chairman and CEO, BlackRidge Technology

Bob Graham is the co-founder and chairman and CEO of BlackRidge Technology. He is a longtime IT and technical guy and has seen many technologies come and go. Blockchain technologies are transforming the way organizations engage with their customers and partners for contracts and information management, in addition to their support for cryptocurrencies. BlackRidge is working with IBM Blockchain group and others to protect blockchain cloud services from unauthorized discovery and access, and from denial of service and other cyber attacks. BlackRidge was founded in 2010 and funded by the U.S. military to commercialize its patented network security technologies.

Nikhil Gupta
IBM Blockchain Academic Outreach

Nik Gupta leads academic outreach for IBM Blockchain and has worked on ecosystem development for IBM Blockchain since early 2016. He previously held roles in IBM Systems and Analytics. He has a B.A. from New York University and an M.A. from Duke University. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Melanie Swan
Author, “Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy”

Melanie Swan’s career has focused on academic research, finance, and entrepreneurship. She served as director of research at Telecoms Consultancy Ovum RHK, and held management and finance positions at iPass, J.P. Morgan, Fidelity, and Arthur Andersen. She serves as an advisor in academic, government, corporate, and startup settings, and is active in promoting science and technology opportunities in the community. She is a hackathon participant and designs collaboration simulations including “Discontinuity Futures,” “Being an Entrepreneur,” and “The Trader's Pit.” She has an M.B.A. in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research, and an M.A. in Contemporary Continental Philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy.

Chris Tse
CTO, Dot Blockchain Media; Founding Director, Cardstack Project

Chris Tse is a blockchain technologist/designer working to humanize the decentralized world. He is the technical lead of the Dot Blockchain Media project (dotBC), architecting open-sourced software that bridges existing music databases and future blockchain-based registries. He is also the founding director of the Cardstack project, leading the creation of the experience layer of the decentralized Internet that will serve as the on-ramp to a blockchain-based economy for the mass market.

Jess Boronico, Ph.D.
Dean, NYIT School of Management

Jess Boronico earned his Ph.D. in operations research from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a B.S. in mathematics and an M.S. in Mathematics, Operations Research, from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Prior to joining NYIT and attaining AACSB accreditation for the School of Management, Boronico served as dean of the Christos M. Cotsakos College of Business at William Paterson University, where he led its attainment of AACSB accreditation.

Boronico is an active member of INFORMS and the Decisions Sciences Institute. He serves on the editorial board or as an ad hoc reviewer for numerous academic journals. As a member of MENSA and the International High IQ Society, Boronico has received numerous honors, including three Anbar citations of excellence, and been nominated into various Who’s Who publications, including Strathmore’s Who’s Who.

Steven Shapiro Ph.D.
Professor, Accounting and Financial Studies, NYIT

Steven Shapiro oversees NYIT School of Management's Center for Risk Management, which prepares students for decision-making processes involving elements of uncertainty and helps them identify risks and manage them effectively. He has been leading efforts to incorporate Bloomberg terminals and other technologies in NYIT's curricula. Outside of class, as an economic and financial consultant, Shapiro serves as an expert witness in court, prepares external reports, and provides litigation support to attorneys.

Prior to NYIT, Shapiro taught for more than 20 years at the University of New Haven. He was a senior economist at the New York Telephone Company and a research analyst for the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division in the Economic Policy Office. Shapiro earned his Ph.D. in financial economics and master's degree in economics from Georgetown University. He received his bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics from the University of Virginia.

Richard J. Daly
Chief Executive Officer, Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Prior to Broadridge’s formation, Richard J. Daly founded the Investor Communications Solutions (ICS) business, which had two employees when he sold it to ADP in 1989. Today, ICS has 4,000 associates globally and $2.2 billion in revenues; Broadridge has more than 10,000 associates globally and $2.9 billion in revenues. Daly has served as president of the brokerage services group of ADP, a member of the executive committee, and a corporate officer.

Prior to Broadridge’s formation, Richard J. Daly founded the Investor Communications Solutions (ICS) business, which had two employees when he sold it to ADP in 1989. Today, ICS has 4,000 associates globally and $2.2 billion in revenues; Broadridge has more than 10,000 associates globally and $2.9 billion in revenues. Daly has served as president of the brokerage services group of ADP, a member of the executive committee, and a corporate officer.

Paul McNeal
Founder, The Crypto Curator

Being aware and invested in the bitcoin blockchain since 2012, Paul McNeal has amassed knowledge, understanding, and wealth. Leveraging first-hand insights and experience, he seeks to help people and organizations navigate the complexity and growth of crypto-currency technologies via the newly launched THECRYPTOCURATOR.COM. A self-described brand evangelist and technologist, McNeal founded IT consultancy The Sturgeon Group, LLC.

Selva Ozelli, Esq., CPA
International Tax Attorney

Selva Ozelli is a tax and finance executive with diversified legal experience dealing with highly complex issues in the field of international taxation and related matters within the banking, securities, real estate, and aerospace industries. She has achieved significant professional recognition and standing within the federal taxation community by publishing numerous articles on securities, alternative and traditional investment funds, derivatives, credit instruments, and mortgage-backed securities, and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

Maggie Parent
Executive Vice President, Voya Financial

In her role at Voya, Maggie Parent, Executive Vice President, leads the Technology and Operations divisions and is focused on driving innovation throughout the company to gain competitive advantage and to meet customer needs. Prior to joining Voya in 2016, she served as Managing Director, Americas Head of Corporate Technology at Deutsche Bank AG, responsible for delivery of all finance, treasury, risk, legal, and compliance systems and services for the Americas region. Previously, Parent held the title of Managing Director at Credit Suisse AG and at Morgan Stanley, where she was the CIO for the Americas and the Global COO for Operations, Technology, and Data. Her 35-year career also includes several years in start-up technology companies. Parent earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Bowdoin College.

Sunil G. Singh
CEO, ServerCube, Inc. and DBMS Consulting, Inc.

Sunil G. Singh founded ServerCube as a working startup that intends to invert the traditional high-performance cloud computing model by globally distributing smaller footprint servers (SC Devices) throughout the world running in a swarm computing model. Using blockchain technology and cryptocurrency mining as a means to build scale, ServerCube plans to offer deep learning AI, VR modeling and blockchain-as-a-service to any company, industry, or institution that cannot afford to build or lease supercomputing time or access expensive platforms by major cloud service providers. Singh is also the CEO of DBMS Consulting, a specialized healthcare IT services and cloud solution provider to top-tier pharmaceutical, medical device, biotech, and government institutes globally.

Jonathan Brovda
NYIT Student and Founder, Crowcoin

An undergraduate student in NYIT School of Management’s Class of 2020, Jonathan Brovda founded the first membership-based peer-to-peer crypto asset marketplace, currently in the start-up stage. Crowcoin endeavors to revolutionize the cryptocurrency landscape by eliminating safety risk and exploitation fees associated with cryptocurrencies.