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Chris Anderson is a professor at the Cornell Nolan School of Hotel Administration. Prior to his appointment in 2006, he was on the faculty at the Ivey School of Business in London, Ontario, Canada. Professor Anderson’s main research focus is on revenue management and service pricing. He actively works in the application and development of revenue management across numerous industry types, including hotels, airlines, and rental car and tour companies, as well as numerous consumer packaged goods and financial services firms. Professor Anderson’s research has been funded by numerous governmental agencies and industrial partners. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management and is the regional editor for the International Journal of Revenue Management. At the Nolan School of Hotel Administration, Professor Anderson teaches courses in revenue management and service operations management.

Keith Cowing is a Visiting Lecturer at Cornell Tech and an executive coach to CEOs and product leaders. He currently serves as an advisor to product teams and teaches in the MBA program at Cornell. With 20+ years of experience building products, teams, and companies, Mr. Cowing specializes in training CEOs and product managers, sharing his insights through his blog at KeithCowing.com.

His extensive product leadership experience includes roles as Chief Product Officer at Vesta Healthcare and Vice President of Product Management at Flatiron Health, which was acquired by Roche for $2 billion. Prior to these positions, Mr. Cowing held product management roles at Twitter, LinkedIn, and Goldman Sachs. As a two-time venture-backed entrepreneur, he was the founder and CEO of Seamless Receipts, where he led the team, raised venture capital, managed product development and launch, and secured business from global brands such as Oakley, Tumi, Burton, and Lenox.

Originally from a small town in New Hampshire, Mr. Cowing received both his MBA with distinction in entrepreneurship and his Bachelor of Science cum laude in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University.

Outside of work, Mr. Cowing is an enthusiastic chef and amateur mixologist who enjoys traveling with his family and seeking new adventures. He maintains an active lifestyle and can often be found exercising with his energetic Belgian Malinois, who requires 4-6 miles of daily activity.

Karan Girotra, Professor of Operations, Technology and Information Management (OTIM), is the recipient of the Charles H. Dyson Family Professor of Management chair, for a 5-year term. This chair was given by Rob Dyson, MBA ’74 to support a founding faculty position for Johnson instruction at Cornell Tech, in honor of his father, the founder of the Dyson-Kissner-Moran Corporation.

Karan Girotra is a Professor at Cornell Tech and in the Johnson School at Cornell University. Karan collaborates with companies building new business models in the areas of urban living, smart transportation and e-commerce, helping them build rigorous research based solutions.

Karan’s research team has been recognized by multiple awards including the prestigious Wickham Skinner Early Career Research Award and multiple best paper awards. He has also won teaching awards for his teaching on entrepreneurship and new business models and was featured in the Poets and Quant’s Best 40 under 40 business professors lists.

In addition to his academic work, Karan was one of the founders of Terrapass Inc., which the New York Times identified as one of the most noteworthy ideas of 2005. Since then, TerraPass has helped businesses and individuals reduce over hundred million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Karan holds PhD and AM degrees from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Sarah Kreps is the John L. Wetherill Professor in the Department of Government, Adjunct Professor of Law, and the Director of the Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology, national security, and public policy.

She has written eight books, including the forthcoming book: Harnessing Disruption: Building the Tech Future without Breaking Society (Oxford University Press). Beyond these books, Professor Kreps’ work has appeared in a number of academic journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science Advances, American Political Science Review, World Politics, International Security, and Journal of Cybersecurity, policy journals such as Foreign Affairs, and media outlets such as CNN, the BBC, New York Times, and Washington Post.

Professor Kreps is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations (and is a life member), Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, West Point, and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs.

Professor Kreps received her undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master’s from Oxford and her Ph.D. from Georgetown. She served as an active-duty officer in the United States Air Force from 1999-2003.

Dirk Swart’s teaching focuses on developing critical skills for leadership, including: negotiation, emotional intelligence, individual and team behavior, conflict management and problem solving, managing contracts and IP, ethics, and engineering management decision making.
Dirk has over 20 years experience as a technical entrepreneur and is currently the CEO of Zynect, an embedded sensor company based in Ithaca NY. He co-founded Zynect in 2010, has raised over $2.4m in funding and brought over 20 successful embedded products from concept to market. Prior to that he was a visiting fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future.

Degrees include a BBusSc (Computer Science) from the University of Cape Town and an MA from Tuft’s Fletcher School. His thesis title was: More Voice but Less Say: An analysis of North-South Trade Agreements. His thesis supervisor was Adil Najam.

Lutz Finger is a Silicon Valley technologist and Cornell faculty member with 20+ years of experience building AI-driven products and platforms at Google, LinkedIn, and Snap. He is a serial entrepreneur (R2Decide, acquired in 2025; Fisheye Analytics, acquired in 2013) and currently leads AI strategy at XGEN AI, developing next-generation generative retail solutions.

Finger is also a frequent Forbes contributor on AI and the future of commerce. He is a Venture Partner at Cherry Ventures, serves on multiple advisory boards, and has advised and invested in data-centric companies across the United States and Europe. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and an M.S. in Quantum Physics from TU Berlin.

Clarence Lee is a former Assistant Professor of Marketing at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, where he was a Breazzano Family Sesquicentennial Fellow. Professor Lee’s research examines the drivers behind consumer adoption, usage, and purchase dynamics of digital goods, where he models consumer behavior using Bayesian statistics, structural econometrics, and machine learning techniques. Digital products and platforms, such as the ones produced by many Silicon Valley and NYC tech startups, are increasingly present in almost all consumer interactions. In such settings, understanding consumer choice and the dynamics of engagement and usage become critically important in order to acquire, serve, and retain consumers. Professor Lee taught Digital Marketing and Data Analytics & Modeling at both the Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses.

Professor Lee received his doctorate from Harvard Business School and holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Prior to pursuing graduate studies, he conducted nanotechnology research at IBM and space system design at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.