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Nunan Lecture & Research Day
Wednesday, April 16th, 7pm
Lender Auditorium, Whitman School of Management
The Nunan Lecture & Research Day is made possible by a gift from the estate of Jim and Marge Nunan in 2006. The day includes a technical lecture by a distinguished speaker, with round table discussion, and a showcase of graduate student research from all departments and disciplines throughout the college. The Nunans’ gift also enabled the college to create the Nunan Graduate Travel Fund, which financially assists doctoral students who wish to present their work at conferences.
Lecture
This year’s lecturer will be Syracuse University alumni, Nicholas M. Donofrio, IBM’s Executive Vice President of Innovation & Technology. Nick Donofrio is a champion for innovation across IBM and its global ecosystem and is the leader of IBM's technology strategy. He also is vice chairman of the IBM International Foundation and chairman of the Board of Governors for the IBM Academy of Technology. Mr. Donofrio's responsibilities include IBM Research, Governmental Programs, Technical Support & Quality, Corporate Community Relations, as well as Environmental Health & Product Safety. Also reporting to Mr. Donofrio are the senior executives responsible for IBM's enterprise on demand transformation. In addition to his strategic business mission, Mr. Donofrio leads the development and retention of IBM's technical population and strives to enrich that community with a diversity of culture and thought.
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Mr. Donofrio joined IBM in 1967 and spent the early part of his career in integrated circuit and chip development as a designer of logic and memory chips. He held numerous technical management positions and, later, executive positions in several of IBM's product divisions. He has led many of IBM's major development and manufacturing teams – from semiconductor and storage technologies, to microprocessors and personal computers, to IBM's entire family of servers.
Mr. Donofrio is focused sharply on advancing education, employment and career opportunities for underrepresented minorities and women. He served for many years on the Board of Directors for the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) and was NACME's Board chair from 1997 through 2002. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for INROADS, a non-profit organization focused on the training and development of talented minority youth for professional careers in business and industry. He also is co-chair of the New York Hall of Science.
In 2005, Mr. Donofrio was appointed by the U.S. Department of Education to serve on the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, a 20-member delegation of business and university leaders charged with developing a new national strategy for post-secondary education that will meet the needs of Americas diverse population and also address the economic and workforce needs of the country's future.
Nick Donofrio currently holds seven technology patents and is a member of numerous technical and science honor societies. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a Fellow of the U.K-based Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of the US-based National Academy of Engineering, a member of the Board of Directors for the Bank of New York, a member of the Board of Trustees at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a member of the Board of Directors for The Council for the United States and Italy.
This year’s lecturer, Nicholas M. Donofrio’s talk is entitled,
Creating a Culture of Innovation
The nature of innovation is changing in the 21st century and so are the relationships among business enterprises, governments, academic institutions and their partners.
Information technology, while crucially important, is no longer the necessary and sufficient condition for satisfying the most pressing needs of those institutions, as well as our global society. Innovation is what counts -- the ability to transform invention and discovery into products, services, methods, processes and policies that meet today's complex business and societal challenges.
Nick Donofrio will talk about the open, collaborative, multidisciplinary and global nature of innovation in the 21st century and how, by building its own culture of innovation, IBM is helping its clients and partners become innovators.
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