The Future of Money

Lourdes Casanova is the Gail and Roberto Cañizares Director of the Cañizares Center for Emerging Markets and a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. Formerly of the strategy department at INSEAD, Dr. Casanova specializes in international business with a focus on Latin America and multinationals from emerging markets.

In 2014 and 2015, Dr. Casanova was named one of the 50 most influential Iberoamerican intellectuals by Esglobal. She is a member of the board of directors of Boyce Thompson Institute.

Dr. Casanova is a Fulbright Scholar who holds a Ph.D. from Universidad de Barcelona and an M.A. from the University of Southern California.

James Grimmelmann is the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. He helps lawyers and technologists understand one another, applying ideas from computer science to problems in law and vice versa. Professor Grimmelmann studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. He writes about search engines, social networks, data havens, hackers, trolls, copyright-infringing robots, and magical 3D printers, among other things. Professor Grimmelmann is the author of the casebook “Internet Law: Cases and Problems,” now in its fifth edition, as well as over 40 scholarly articles and essays.

Professor Grimmelmann holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in Computer Science from Harvard College. After teaching at New York Law School, Georgetown, and the University of Maryland, he joined Cornell Tech in 2016.

Susan Joseph is Executive Director of Fintech at Cornell, an initiative of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. Ms. Joseph is a J.D./MBA; the founder/CEO of HealthTrends.ai; an NSF grant awardee focusing on public health informatics using blockchain; and principal at Susan Joseph LLC, consulting for the mining industry in climate, digitization, and blockchain. She is Executive Director of Diversity in Blockchain, a 501(c)(3) entity providing education and resources to support diversity and inclusion in the blockchain space.

For the past several years, Ms. Joseph has been consulting and advising in law, blockchain, and fintech in the areas of digital assets, cryptocurrencies, insurance, enterprise distributed ledgers, ESG (climate and diversity), identity and privacy, and other issues across financial services, insurance, and supply chain. She has worked for and represented insurance consortia, including RiskStream and B3i North America, and she created and ran Blockchain Working Groups for Global Insurers.The first Executive Director of ID2020, Ms. Joseph is a part of the World Economic Forum Expert Network and runs the womeninfintech network on LinkedIn.

Eswar Prasad is the Nandlal P. Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy and Professor of Economics at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, holding the New Century Chair in International Economics, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In addition to many other policy positions held, Dr. Prasad was chief of the Financial Studies Division in the IMF’s research department and, before that, the head of the IMF’s China division. His extensive publication record includes collective volumes, top academic journals, books, and monographs on financial globalization, China, and India. Dr. Prasad has testified on multiple occasions before the Senate Finance Committee, House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, and other government bodies.

Three-time entrepreneur, lifelong investor, and now operator, John Wu is the president of Ava Labs, a software services company behind the Layer 1 blockchain Avalanche. In this role, he leads commercial and product teams building tools for technology, finance, consumer, and gaming verticals to develop blockchain-based solutions.

Mr. Wu has over 20 years of experience as a fintech executive and technology investor running Sureview Capital, a global hedge fund backed by the Blackstone Group, and previously managing a global technology portfolio at Kingdon Capital. He began his investment career at Tiger Management.

With a B.S. from Cornell and an MBA from Harvard, Mr. Wu enjoys working with his alma maters, mentoring the next generation of builders. He is an advisor to the Cornell Blockchain Club and regularly supports students through his family scholarship trust.