March 24 | 1PM
Kim LearKim Lear is a writer, researcher, and the founder of Inlay Insights. She is known for skillfully weaving eyeopening statistics, insightful stories, and relevant case studies to make presentations come alive. Previously, Kim was the content director at BridgeWorks, a research firm dedicated to generational and millennial trends. Her undergrad research focused on baby boomers and longevity, and her post-grad work centered on millennials and social media trends. She is currently in her ninth year of a longitudinal study on leadership.
Kim was recently named one of today’s best speakers by Meetings and Conventions Magazine, and she appeared as keynote speaker before some of the most renowned companies in the world. She has received rave reviews from clients such as American Express, Cisco Systems, Deloitte, Disney, General Mills, LinkedIn, Mastercard, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Wells Fargo, and more.
In addition to speaking, Kim was head of research on the book Gen Z @ Work. She has written whitepapers on generational wealth transfer, retirement trends, and Gen Z’s impact on higher education. Kim is the writer of the popular Substack, Kids These Days. She has been featured on NPR and national publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, USA Today, and TIME magazine.
She is a highly sought-after generational expert and serves as an advisor to FORE, an AI startup focused
on predictive analytics for attrition. She also volunteers for The 78 Cents Project, an organization
dedicated to helping young women develop strong presentation skills.
When not delving into the minutia of human behavior, Kim can be found spending time with her
husband and daughters in Minneapolis.
March 25 | 11AM
Cathy N. DavidsonCathy N. Davidson is an author, educator, and academic thought leader best known for her work on institutional change and innovation in higher education. She offers research-backed insights on redesigning college curricula and teaching methodologies to meet the demands of the modern era with a core mission of setting students up for success in the classroom and preparing them for the world beyond it. Cathy is the Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY) and the founding director of CUNY’s Futures Initiative, a program dedicated to advancing equity and innovation in higher education.
Davidson has authored and edited more than twenty books. Her most recent publications include the “How We Know” trilogy, concentrating on the science of learning: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn; The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux; and The New College Classroom. Both The New Education and The New College Classroom received the Frederic W. Ness Book Award, granting Cathy the distinction of being the first author in the history of the award to win it twice.
Throughout her career, Davidson has taught at a range of institutions, from community college to the Ivy League. At CUNY, she is a Distinguished Professor of English who also teaches in the Digital Humanities and Data Analysis and Visualization master’s programs at the Graduate Center. Over the course of her 25-year tenure at Duke University, she held two distinguished professorships and became the school’s (and the nation’s) first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. She is co-founder and co-director of HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Sciences and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory — ”Haystack”), a worldwide coalition of innovators transforming how we think and learn that is recognized as the world’s first and oldest academic social network.
Cathy Davidson has won many awards and grants from institutions including the Guggenheim
Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. She received the Ernest L. Boyer
Award for “significant contributions to higher education,” the Educator of the Year Award from the
World Technology Network, and the Arts and Sciences Advocacy Award from the Council of Colleges of
Arts and Sciences. She has served on the Board of Directors of Mozilla, was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council on the Humanities, and has twice keynoted the Nobel Prize
Committee’s Forum on the Future of Learning.