Time: April 9, 8:45 pm – 9:45 pm
Speakers: Chris Tidrick
Chris will share lessons from his career at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and how integrity has been a constant, guiding principle in his leadership journey. While tools, programs, and strategies evolve, how you put these things into action—especially when no one is watching—matters far more than the things themselves. Chris will challenge the audience to prioritize authenticity, honesty, and a people-first mindset as leaders, because lasting leadership is built on character, not just capability.
Dr. Patrice Buckner Jackson, known as Dr. PBJ, challenges the conventional tactics of time management, resilience, and work-life balance. Deriving from personal experience and her extensive expertise as an executive coach and educator, Dr. PBJ understands the toll burnout takes on accomplished professionals. She highlights the inadequacy of surface solutions and reveals why they fall short of addressing the underlying causes of burnout.
Dr. PBJ will empower participants to shed the burdens of burnout and embrace their authentic brilliance. With her compassionate approach and practical wisdom, she will show them how to break free from the cycles of exhaustion and rediscover the joy and meaning in their personal and professional lives.
Jena Marble explores the transformative potential of generative AI, drawing from industry experience and academic research. She examines how technology can amplify human storytelling, break down creative barriers, and open new pathways for expression. Attendees will take away resources and practical strategies for using AI tools that enhance creative capabilities by entering a human-first approach.
Speaker: Jepson Taylor
Get ready to venture into the uncharted territory of future job markets with AI expert Jepson Taylor. This talk focuses on the intersection of AI, entrepreneurship, and the emerging job landscape. Learn from Jepson’s extensive experience in startups and AI applications how to prepare for and excel in jobs that don’t yet exist, leveraging AI as a powerful tool in your career arsenal.
Speaker: Terresa Moses, Lisa Mercer
Racism Untaught is an iterative framework and toolkit that shows organizations how to recognize racism in designed artifacts, systems, and experiences and how to create anti-racist design approaches. Throughout our keynote, we will explore the foundation of our work which includes our agency as the designers of artifacts, systems, and experiences and how the designs we each develop and implement in the spaces around us affect historically underinvested communities.
We will also explore six major paths of study, including:
- The Racism Untaught research study and the development of the framework.
- Defining design and the agency we each have in the development and implementation of artifacts, systems, and experiences in the spaces around us and how they affect historically oppressed communities.
- The individual’s positionality in the context of racism and oppression and the intersectionality of the conversation on concepts of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and other isms.
- A shared language that helps participants identify how oppression shows up in the world around us.
- The identification of racialized artifacts, systems, and experiences and how design perpetuates and reinforces the status quo and various levels of oppression; and last.
- The role of equity, ethics, and responsibility in the design discipline leading us to collective liberation. The Racism Untaught workshops have been conducted with over 3,000 participants – over 700 hours of workshops, 12 college-level courses, and numerous national and international presentations in academia, industry, and community. Including PayPal, Target, Apple, Spotify, Shopify, Matterport, and our academic partners including Parsons School of Design, Louisiana State, University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, University of Tennessee, University of Cincinnati, and Auburn University.
