Learn from Industry Leaders

Mariana Amatullo is a practitioner-scholar who leads Parsons open-enrollment and custom executive education programs, long-form Executive Master’s programs, and bespoke programs for corporate partners. She also advances strategy for and delivery of online degree and certificate programs.

Amatullo’s research bridges the management and design fields, with a focus on design as a lever for innovation and organizational change. In her role as vice provost, she oversees Parsons Executive Education’s portfolio of offerings.

Amatullo is the 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.

Drawing on his years of experience in fashion retail, design, branding, and marketing, Keanan Duffty teaches you how to create effective retail operations plans to maximize omnichannel sales.

An award-winning fashion designer, musician, and author, Duffty is the director of Fashion Programs at Parsons School of Design and leads our Fashion Retail Transformation program. A member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), he has created co-branded collections and products with Aveda, Reebok, Gola, and Dr. Martens and served as design director for Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B, John Varvatos, and Ben Sherman.

Duffty established his namesake collection with a client base including Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, Barneys New York, Harvey Nichols, Lane Crawford, Baycrews, and Journal Standard in Japan. Duffty also had a multiyear contract with Target and engaged in a major collaboration with David Bowie, which sold out upon its debut.

Duffty earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Central Saint Martins in London. His writing is regularly featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Women’s Wear Daily and the Business of Fashion.

Connect on LinkedIn or KeananDuffty.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 the Hult International Business School in Boston. Pang 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.

Pang’s teaching philosophy is to empower students to create a roadmap for fulfilling their academic and career goals.

She has worked for Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, TJX Corporation, and Macy’s and 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 turn-around plan and spearheading the launch of an online digital learning platform for an international luxury jewelry and gemstone business.

Pang is a PhD candidate at Iowa State University whose research focuses on cross-cultural consumer behavior as it relates to global retail markets.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Patrick Klesius is the director of Enterprise Data Architecture and Analytics at David Yurman and is a visiting faculty member at Parsons School of Design. For more than 20 years, Patrick has focused on data and analytics for luxury and lifestyle retailers including Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, and David Yurman. His is an expert on merging technology with marketing and business processes to enable brands to meet the changing demands of today’s customers.

Klesius also serves on the advisory councils for Apparel Merchandising, Design, and Production Management at the College of Business at Auburn University and the Couture Council at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

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Ron Thurston has led the retail teams of some of the most prominent brands in the United States, including Intermix, Saint Laurent, Bonobos, and Tory Burch. He is the author of the best-selling book Retail Pride: The Guide to Celebrating Your Accidental Career. Thurston was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People in Retail in 2021 and is a featured keynote speaker and industry expert.

Connect on LinkedIn or RetailPride.com

Jasmine Young is a strategy and operations consultant in the fashion and beauty industry and is currently on the Operations & Strategy team at Gap Inc. She previously worked for Alexander Wang, Glossier, NOAH, and Hood by Air and is a member of the advisory board of Pace University’s Design Thinking Certificate program.

Young is an expert on direct-to-consumer sales and the creation of business strategies for fashion and beauty brands. Her focus is on how technology and changes in consumer behavior have undermined fashion’s traditional business models. She is a 2016 graduate of Parsons’ MA Fashion Studies program.

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