Learn from Industry Leaders

Mariana Amatullo is an associate professor of strategic design and management at Parsons. In her role as vice provost and academic dean, she is responsible for the academic programming of the university’s Continuing and Professional Education division. Amatullo is an experienced strategist and practitioner-scholar and an award-winning educator. Her research and teaching bridge the disciplines of art and design education and management, with a focus on design as a cognitive approach  to organizational learning.

Amatullo is the honorary president of the Cumulus Association and serves on the board of Aalto University. She holds a PhD in Management (Designing Sustainable Systems) from Case Western Reserve University, an MA in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of Southern California, and a Licence en Lettres from Sorbonne University.

An award-winning designer and proponent of sustainability, John Bartlett brings to The New School more than 30 years of fashion industry experience. For his namesake collection he received Swarovski’s Best Newcomer Award and was named Best Menswear Designer of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) in 1997. He also received the Designer of the Year award from the American Footwear and Apparel Association in 2010.

Bartlett received a Lexus/CFDA Eco-Challenge grant in 2012 to create a collection entirely from upcycled and recycled material for New York Fashion Week. He has worked only with recycled or organic materials for more than a decade and promotes the use of earth-friendly alternatives to animal-derived materials such as leather, wool, and down.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-bartlett-a1a9946/

Ayushi is a senior consultant committed to uncovering the power of human ingenuity to create change in society. She uses human-centered design and leadership facilitation principles to drive innovation in impact-oriented organizations. 

Over the past several years, she has worked with cross-cultural teams in six countries, supporting public- and private-sector clients in achieving business results. Her international experience includes work with NGOs, innovation labs, and Fortune 500 companies including the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the Stanford Impact Lab, Hewlett-Packard, and Herman Miller.  

Ayushi is a graduate of the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons School of Design. She currently serves state, local, and federal government clients as a consultant at Deloitte and is a part-time faculty member of the Lab in Group Facilitation course at Parsons.

ayushijain.hk@gmail.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayushi-jain-work

Mark is Professor Emeritus of Management at Parsons School of Design and The New School in New York City.

For more than 40 years, he has advised Fortune 500 corporations, think tanks, philanthropies, not-for-profits, and start-ups. C-level executives benefit from his coaching skills, organizational assessment techniques, and leadership development programs. Since 2015, he has led Deloitte’s Chief Executive Program research strategy, and he now consults full-time with CEOs of rapidly growing young firms.

His work as a consultant and professor has inspired his writing for such publications as the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Journal of Management Consulting. His book Guiding Growth: How Vision Keeps Companies on Course (Harvard Business School Press, 2003) has been translated into multiple languages and is considered the vision playbook for CEOs. His 2017 book, Mean Men: The Perversion of America’s Self-Made Man, garnered media praise and three book awards for its intelligent, no-holds-barred analysis of the dark side of entrepreneurship in the United States and beyond.

Mark received his PhD from the School of Management at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and was an Erik Erikson Visiting Scholar-in-Residence in 2009 at the Austen Riggs Center.

mark@marklipton.com

https://marklipton.com

Jen van der Meer is a business model designer who joined The New School’s full-time faculty in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design in 2015. In addition to teaching, she co-directs the Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative, a university-wide program aimed at cultivating the development of entrepreneurial skills, growth mindsets, and inclusive design approaches to actualize innovation in the world. Van der Meer practices her craft at Reason Street, a strategic design consultancy that leads clients through business model transformations toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations.

Before joining The New School, van der Meer served on the board of Designers Accord, a global sustainable design alliance. A former Wall Street analyst and economist, she held executive leadership roles at Organic and frog design before starting a series of successful ventures, both for-profit and not-for-profit. She is an advisor to multiple start-ups in the health and climate technology fields and has served as a judge and mentor for numerous start-up and innovation competitions, including the Berkeley Big Ideas Open Data Challenge, Techstars, and Columbia University’s Lab2Market program.

Van der Meer holds an MBA from the top-ranked HEC (Hautes Études Commerciale) in Paris and a BA in Comparative Religion from Trinity College.

Caryn Pang is a faculty member at Parsons and Hult International Business School in Boston. She teaches marketing and business fundamentals, drawing on her experience of more than 15 years as a retail business executive and a consultant for businesses in the international fashion industry, among them Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, TJX Corporation, and Macy’s. 

Pang’s teaching philosophy is to work with students to create a roadmap for fulfilling their academic and career goals. She enjoys teaching students at different levels, including undergraduates, graduates, and executives. 

As a consultant, Pang is skilled at improving business outcomes, with successes that include creating an executive education program for The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a foundation for its strategic business turnaround plan and spearheading the launch of an online digital learning platform for an international luxury jewelry and gemstone business. 

Pang received a PhD from Iowa State University, where her research focused on cross-cultural consumer behavior in relation to global retail markets.

Connect with Caryn Pang on LinkedIn

Ashok Som teaches strategy at ESSEC. He holds a PhD in Business Administration and conducts research in three areas: organization redesign, innovation in human resources management, and innovation in Asia. Som is the academic director of the EMiLUX program and is the founder of the India Research Center at ESSEC.

For more than twenty-five years, Melissa Rancourt has worked to help organizations and individuals globally to develop their creativity and skills to share their work, expand their reach, and motivate their teams. Melissa was named one of the Top 100 Women in Social Enterprise in Europe for 2021.

Her background is varied – an Industrial Engineer starting in manufacturing and healthcare to University Faculty teaching several technical and business subjects to an Entrepreneur who loves to create businesses.  Melissa uses all these professional backgrounds and experiences to bring Strategic Design to the forefront in companies and to show how the design process and tools can be used to infuse the culture with creativity to transform new ways, products and services for the future.

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Lee-Sean Huang is a Taiwanese American design practitioner, educator, and community builder based in New York City. He splits his time between running Foossa, the service design and strategy consultancy that he co-founded, teaching at New York University, the Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts, and serving as the design education manager at AIGA, the largest professional association for design in the United States.

He is the host and producer of AIGA’s podcast Design Future Now and the Design Future Live Instagram series. He previously founded the design practice at Purpose, a consultancy that builds and supports movements to advance the fight for an open, just, and habitable world.

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Rinat Sherzer is an interdisciplinary biotech engineer, ethical designer, serial social entrepreneur & educator, tackling some of the most complex social issues around equality, diversity and inclusion.

She has over 12 years of experience working at the intersection of tech, human centered design & social good. Rinat combines principles from biomimicry, speculative design & ethnographic research to create a cultural shift towards an egalitarian society by exploring the menstrual cycle and de-shaming it.

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Architect, entrepreneur, and urban thinker passionate about architecture and urban environments that have a lasting impact on society, Eric Ho is the co-founder and Director of Architecture Commons, a design agency for urban innovation.

He also founded Neighbourhood Innovation Lab (NIL) in 2019 instigating a catalyst of systemic change through a range of strategic innovation options and experiments designed with and for city and regional governments; property developers; industry leaders; community organizations and policymakers. Eric was the recipient of the Faculty Design Award at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His work has been published in New York Times, Huffington Post, Fast Company, Good Magazine and PSFK, and was selected among hundreds of companies as a start-up in residence by Urban-X, a startup accelerator built by BMW MINI. Spending most of his time in Asia, Eric is most passionate in finding new ways to disrupt the real estate industry and human-centered design processes for the built environment.

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For nearly 40 years, David Schreff has served as a senior executive or Board of directors member at leading media, sports, consumer products, and technology organizations, including Walt Disney, the Olympics, Marvel Entertainment, Viacom (now Paramount), and the National Basketball Association (NBA).

In his current CEO role at ACTV8me.com, he leads a global marketing technology platform, offering ad monetization and attribution measurement services to leading brands, publishers, and venue operators. In addition, he has taught multiple courses at Parsons School of Design, in strategic design and management, to both graduate MS and undergraduate students. He’s a frequent guest speaker about intellectual property rights management, sports, media and entertainment marketing. He has authored books about the growth of new media technologies and the markets they serve.

Roger Manix is an international consultant, educator, and author at the forefront of designing play-based learning experiences to grow empathy, joy, and belonging. His award-winning curriculum was developed while lecturing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and has been taught to elementary school students through The Fortune 500. Clients include Goldman Sachs, The World Bank, PWC, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Dow Jones, LinkedIn, FDNY, Sprint, Riverdale Country Day, the K-12 Lab at Stanford’s d.school, and NYU.

Roger’s curriculum has been recognized as one of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas, and rated the #1 workshop at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business multiple years in a row. In addition, he taught at Brooklyn College for 11 years.

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