Tavneet Suri
Associate Professor of Applied Economics, MIT Sloan

Prof. Tavneet Suri's expertise is as a development economist, specialized in Sub-Saharan Africa. Suri's work cuts across multiple sectors related to international development, such as digital financial services for the poor, agriculture, and governance. Over the last decade she has spent a significant amount of time in the field across Sub-Saharan Africa. Suri is the scientific director for Africa for J-PAL; a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research; an affiliate of BREAD and CEPR; and lead academic of the Kenya Program at the International Growth Center. She holds a BA in economics from Cambridge University, UK, and PhD in economics from Yale University.

Roberto Rigobon
Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management; Professor of Applied Economics, MIT Sloan

Prof. Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and a professor of applied economics at MIT Sloan. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and a visiting professor at IESA. Rigobon is a Venezuelan economist whose areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. He focuses on the causes of balance-of-payments crises, financial crises, and the propagation of them across countries—the phenomenon that has been identified in the literature as contagion. Currently he studies properties of international pricing practices, trying to produce alternative measures of inflation. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, and a co-founder of PriceStats.

Silvio Micali
Ford Professor of Engineering, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Prof. Silvio Micali has received his laurea in mathematics from the University of Rome and his PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1983 he has been on the MIT faculty, in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, where he is the Ford Professor of Engineering. Micali's research interests are cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudorandom generation, secure protocols, and mechanism design. Micali is the recipient of the Turing Award (in computer science), the Goedel Prize (in theoretical computer science), and the RSA prize (in cryptography). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Christian Catalini
Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor
Assistant Professor, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management (TIES), MIT Sloan

Prof. Christian Catalini is the Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor at MIT, and an assistant professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Catalini's main areas of interest are the economics of digitization, entrepreneurship, and science. His research focuses on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, the economics of equity crowdfunding and startup growth, and the economics of scientific collaboration. Catalini is one of the principal investigators of the MIT Digital Currencies Research Study, which gave access to all MIT undergraduate students to Bitcoin in the fall of 2014. He is also part of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and the recently launched Digital Currency Initiative. He holds a PhD from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and MSc (summa cum laude) in economics and management of new technologies from Bocconi University, Milan.

John Williams
Professor of Information Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT

Prof. John R. Williams is a professor of information engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For many years he was Director of MIT’s AutoID Laboratory, where he led the development of the software architecture for IoT. He is presently the Director of MIT’s Geospatial Data Center, which is dedicated to developing the next generation data science and machine learning algorithms for Big Data. Williams is internationally recognized in the field of computational algorithms for large-scale simulators and has authored two books and over 150 publications. In 2005 he was named, alongside Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, as one of the 50 most powerful people in computer networks. He teaches two graduate courses on Engineering Computation and Data Science and also on Architecting and Engineering Software. He also gives two Executive Education courses on Blockchain and on Applied Cyber Security. Williams consults for international companies, including Accenture, Kajima, Shimizu, Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, and has lectured at the World Economic Forum on cyber security. See more in his YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3TAINAEo0K5BWgjS-G4QKQ 

Chester Spatt
Distinguished Visiting Professor, Golub Center for Finance and Policy (GCFP), MIT Sloan

Prof. Chester Spatt leads the Golub Center for Finance and Policy's (GCFP) research on regulation of financial markets and institutions. In addition to playing a substantial role in shaping GCFP’s research agenda in the regulatory area, Spatt, a former chief economist at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, teaches graduate-level classes addressing financial regulation. As a visiting professor and research fellow, Spatt manages an active research program at the GCFP on critical financial regulatory issues, disseminating findings to policymakers, practitioners and academics. Spatt comes to MIT Sloan during a leave of absence from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, where he serves as the Pamela R. and Kenneth B. Dunn Professor of Finance. He earned his PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. 

Lucas Llach
Vice President, Banco Central de la República Argentina

Lucas Llach holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in economics from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT). He is an economist and historian who has devoted a large part of his career to academic life. His main area of research is Argentina's economic history, a subject on which he wrote his doctoral thesis. He is the author of several books and academic and popular articles. A university professor, Llatch was also Director of the Department of History and of the Master in Public Policies at the Torcuato Di Tella University (UTDT) in Buenos Aires.

Roberto Frossard
Tech Consulting Executive Principal - Business & Technology Integration, Accenture

Roberto Fossard is an industrial engineer who is passionate about football (soccer), technology and innovation. He started his career in large systems implementations and over the last 20 years has lived in 17 cities across the world including Philadelphia, Madrid, Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, Lagos (Nigeria), Bogotá and London. He’s continuously seeking to learn “the new”, most recently in Singularity University’s Executive Program and MIT’s Applied Neuroscience program. Today he is responsible for the Accenture Innovation Garage and leads the practices of Artificial Intelligence and Extended Reality (AR, VR and Holograms) in Latin America, beyond being involved with the startups ecosystem through corporate and personal initiatives.

Sebastián Serrano
CEO and Co-Founder, Ripio

Sebastián Serrano is a young entrepreneur from Argentina. Starting as a skillful developer at a very early age and then leading a successful web & mobile development startup, Sebastián founded Ripio (formerly known as BitPagos) in 2013, offering Bitcoin wallet services plus credit payments for consumers and other Blockchain-based financial services. With Ripio, and their new global lending protocol called RCN, Sebastián and his team aim to democratize digital economy and expand the crypto ecosystem in developing countries.