Keynote Speakers & Judges

Randy I. Anderson is the director of the real estate programs at the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, where he leads program development and industry engagement. Anderson teaches courses in real estate finance and investments. He is an internationally recognized scholar and practitioner in real estate, with a research focus on real estate investment trusts (REIT), private and public real estate solutions, and portfolio construction.

Anderson has played a pivotal role in shaping real estate education across the country, having helped establish and lead programs at Florida International University, the University of Central Florida, and Baruch College. He held Eminent Scholar Chairs at FIU and UCF, served as academic director of the William Newman Real Estate programs at Baruch, and was the first William Newman Chair of Real Estate.

In the private sector, Anderson was co-founder and CEO of Griffin Capital Asset Management Company, where he launched and managed the Griffin Institutional Access Real Estate Fund and the Griffin Institutional Access Credit Fund. These funds, now part of Apollo Global Management, represent innovative approaches to democratizing institutional real estate investing. He also served as a partner in real assets at Apollo, CEO and chairman of the board for the Real Estate Interval Fund, and co-CEO and board member of Apollo’s non-traded REIT.

Before joining Griffin, Anderson held senior roles at Bluerock Real Estate LLC, Prudential, Marcus & Millichap and CNL. He is a former executive director of the American Real Estate Society, a Kinnard Young Scholar Award recipient, and has served as co-editor of both the Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management and the Journal of Real Estate Literature.

Anderson earned his Ph.D. in finance as a Presidential Fellow from the University of Alabama and holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from North Central College.

Tabish Azeem specializes in strategic analytics, applying advanced quantitative methods to inform high-stakes organizational decisions across the public, academic and corporate sectors. As a senior manager of business intelligence at Box, he serves as a trusted advisor to senior executives, developing analytical frameworks that drive decisions on customer retention, revenue growth and product adoption.

Before joining Box, Azeem was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he advised C-suite executives at Fortune 500 and public-sector clients on enterprise transformations. Previously, he was a strategy analyst and Swensen Fellow at Yale University, where his data-driven analyses informed major institutional policy decisions.

Earlier in his career, he served as a Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellow with the Government of India. He holds a master’s degree from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree from NIT Trichy.

Kendall Drew is a consulting account director at Microsoft, where she leads strategic engagements with enterprise customers to drive digital and AI-enabled transformation. She works with business and technology leaders to design and deliver high-impact solutions aligned to critical priorities.

As part of her role, Drew leads Microsoft’s Forward Deployed Engineering sales motion in the Americas, accelerating the adoption of innovative, custom-built solutions that unlock new business value. She joined Microsoft in 2017 and has held roles spanning solution design, consulting and customer strategy.

Prior to Microsoft, Drew led product and engineering teams for Levy Restaurants, a subsidiary of Compass Group. She holds a B.S. in industrial engineering and economics from Northwestern University and an MBA from Cornell Tech.

Lydia Manikonda is an assistant professor at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses on building robust, goal-driven AI systems that learn from complex, real-world web data, with applications in privacy, public health and finance.

Her work examines how generative AI is reshaping human behavior, privacy norms and mental health, and how these shifts impact institutions such as higher education. Her research also includes developing interpretable AI systems that support metacognition rather than replace it.

Manikonda received her Ph.D. in computer science from Arizona State University.

Nneka J. Penniston is a data science and analytics leader with more than 15 years of experience across pharmaceutical, healthcare, financial services and education organizations, including Bristol Myers Squibb and Citibank. She specializes in predictive modeling, natural language processing and generative AI.

She is currently developing FashionIQ, a multi-agent analytics system that uses crewAI and the Anthropic API to analyze fashion retail data. Penniston holds a Master of Science in Business Analytics from NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

Since 2018, she has served as adjunct associate faculty at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies, where she has mentored more than 500 graduate students in applied analytics, machine learning and AI. She is the author of CODE FASHIONABLY: Fashion Analytics and Machine Learning for Business Impact.

Paul Thompson is vice president of industry strategy for health plans at DXC Technology. In this role, he is responsible for the formation and execution of the company’s commercial health plan segment vision through technology innovation, implementation and strategy execution.

He also served as a regional director of underwriting for commercial healthcare products in 15 markets across the United States. Thompson graduated from Fairfield University with a B.A. in economics and from the University of Connecticut with an MBA in marketing and finance.

Shantam Mogali is a senior data engineer whose career spans roles at technology companies including Google, Amazon and Dell. He specializes in hyperscale data systems and complex ETL ecosystems, working at the forefront of modern data strategy to build products used by millions worldwide.

His work focuses on integrating applied AI with large-scale data engineering to address complex data analytics challenges. Through his career, Mogali has contributed to the ongoing evolution of data engineering practices across the technology industry.

Sam Meldrum has a background in both business and technology, with more than 15 years of industry experience. He has worked with a range of companies to develop and implement data-driven commercial strategies, including predictive modeling and customer behavior insights.

In his current role as global client director at Salesforce, Meldrum works directly with one of the company’s strategic customers in the health and life sciences space. He is responsible for developing solutions to support commercial projects globally.

Meldrum holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Delaware and an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.