How cryptocurrency and blockchain technology impact democracy

Professor Allayannis is the Paul Tudor Jones Chair in Business Administration and Associate Dean of Darden's Global Executive MBA (GEMBA) program at the University of Virginia. He is an expert in corporate finance, risk management, and financial institutions. His primary research focus is on corporate risk management, corporate financial policies and international finance. Specifically, his work examines the impact of financial and operational risk management on firm valuation and risk, the valuation implications of cash flow volatility and the determinants and evolution of a firm's exchange-rate risk. His recent work explores capital structure and liquidity as a way to manage risk and improve value, corporate governance and earnings management. His research has been published in leading finance journals, such as the  Journal of Finance, the  Journal of Financial Economics and the  Review of Financial Studies.

LaPointe is a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Beeck Center. She is a futurist who has spent her career focused on the intersection of leadership, technology, policy and ethics. She came to Georgetown from the White House, where she was the Interim director of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships, a non-partisan leadership development program. LaPointe spent more than two decades in the United States Navy, most recently serving as the hand-selected chief of staff to the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for Unmanned Systems. In that position, she helped lead the Navy’s efforts on unmanned and autonomous systems in all domains. She is a patented engineer, having co-designed a passive diver thermal protection system for deep-sea divers. At the Deep Submergence Lab of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, LaPointe conducted research in underwater robotics focusing on deep-ocean autonomous underwater vehicle navigation and sensor fusion algorithms. As a result of her technical and policy expertise, LaPointe frequently serves on panels and initiatives to drive both domestic and international policy around the future role of robotics, autonomy, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybersecurity, and blockchain technology.  

Duda joined Goldman Sachs' Investment Strategy Group in 2011, where he focuses on quantitative analysis and modeling. Prior to that, he was a director of European energy at PIRA Energy Group, where he was involved in analysis of European power and gas markets. He joined PIRA from CEZ, a Prague-based utility, where he worked in analyst and risk roles in electricity trading. Previously, he was a senior assistant professor at the Charles University in Prague. Duda spent two years as a Feinberg Postdoctoral Fellow at Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot (2004–2006) and has published 22 research papers in pure mathematics.

Over the course of a 20-year career in public service, Lu, the Miller Center's Teresa A. Sullivan Senior Fellow, worked in all three branches of the federal government, including seven years in the Obama Administration. From 2014 to 2017, Lu was the deputy secretary of labor, having been confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate. In this role, he served as the chief operating officer of a department with 17,000 employees and a $12 billion budget. From 2009 to 2013, Lu was the White House cabinet secretary and assistant to the president, serving as the president’s primary liaison to the federal agencies. At the end of the first term, Obama said: “Through his dedication and tireless efforts, Chris has overseen one of the most stable and effective Cabinets in history—a Cabinet that has produced extraordinary accomplishments over the past four years.”