2021 MPACE KEYNOTES CLARK JONES WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM A 25-year veteran of The Walt Disney Company’s theme park business, Clark leads approximately 110 professional Cast Members in various financial and operational roles that work closely with his partners on strategies and plans to further build the Disney brand, establish, implement and maintain Disneyland Resorts financial plans and provide unique and memorable experiences for Disneyland Resort guests. Prior to Clark’s current position, he served as the Vice President Revenue Management & Analytics, Vice President of Finance for Global Marketing & Sales, Travel Operations, Technology and Public Affairs for the Walt Disney Parks & Resorts segment; Vice President of Finance, Disneyland Domestic Site Operations; Vice President of Finance, Disneyland Resort Operations; Vice President of Finance, Walt Disney World Products & Services; and Director of Finance, Walt Disney World Marketing, Sales & Travel Operations. Clark’s pre-Disney experience was with Deloitte & Touche as a Senior Auditor in the Denver, Colorado area.
DR. SUMUN PENDAKUR THURSDAY, DECEMBER 9 | 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM Dr. Sumun L. Pendakur is a scholar-practitioner, an activist-educator, a skilled facilitator, and a mom. With nearly 20 years in the field of higher education and a decade as a DEI speaker and trainer, Sumi’s work and research focuses on helping campuses and corporations build capacity for social justice and racial equity by empowering individuals at all levels to be transformational agents of change in their spheres of influence. Most recently, Sumi was the Chief Learning Officer at the USC Race and Equity Center, dedicated to advancing scalable racial justice in higher education and other sectors. Prior to that position, Sumi held roles as the Assistant Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion at Harvey Mudd College, serving on the President’s Cabinet and directing the Office of Institutional Diversity, and as the Director for USC Asian Pacific American Student Services. Sumi is serving her second term on the Board of Directors for NADOHE, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. She is also the co-editor, with Dr. Shaun Harper and Dr. Stephen Quaye, of Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Diverse Populations (3rd edition) (2020). In 2019, she was named one of the top 35 women in higher education by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education magazine. Sumi is the multilingual daughter of immigrants, was raised in the Midwest, and now calls Los Angeles her home.
DR. MICHELE HARPER FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10 PRESENTING VIRTUALLY | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM Dr. Michele Harper is an emergency room physician and the author of The Beauty in Breaking, a memoir of service, transformation, and self-healing. In her talks, Dr. Harper speaks on how the policies and systemic racism in healthcare have allowed the most vulnerable members of society to fall through the cracks, and the importance of making peace with the past while drawing support from the present. In each anecdote, she shines a light on the disenfranchisement of patients and providers alike due to poverty, profiling, sexism, and stigmas. Speaking with honesty and compassion, Dr. Harper reflects on her journey from navigating a complicated family in Washington D.C. to attending Harvard, where she pursued emergency medicine and met her husband. They stayed together through medical school— until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a Philadelphia hospital, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Dr. Harper began a new career in a new city, as a newly single woman. Longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Nonfiction, The Beauty in Breaking tells how she learned to bring insight and empathy into the emergency room, and how recognizing and mending physical, emotional, and psychological breaks are all crucial parts of the healing process. A graduate of Harvard University and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, Dr. Harper has worked for over a decade in various hospitals, including being the chief resident at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and an attending physician in the emergency department at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia. She currently resides in Philadelphia. For more information on this Speaker, please visit www.prhspeakers.com. 2021 MPACE Annual Conference
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