Speakers

This page will be updated with more information as it becomes available.

Jennifer Alexander '88

Founder, Kidcity Children's Museum

Jennifer Alexander ’88 made the unusual choice to stay in Middletown after her graduation from Wesleyan’s College of Letters. In 1998, she founded the nonprofit Kidcity Children’s Museum, which draws 100,000 visitors a year to downtown Middletown. As its director and exhibit designer, she works with local artists to create whimsical play-and-art installations for families with young children. She is the chair of the Downtown Business District, and is a member of the Middletown Redevelopment Agency, the Central Business Bureau of the Chamber of Commerce, and the River Valley regional tourism board. She was a founding chair of the Chamber’s Creative Juice Council for people in the arts and creative industries and is the current president of the Macdonough School PTA, where her youngest son is a 2^nd grader.

Ms. Alexander advocated for the creation of the Middletown’s Village District zoning, which protects historic homes within the downtown, and she is a frequent contributor to the hyperlocal news blog, The Middletown Eye. Along with her husband, Mark Masselli, the founder of the Community Health Center, she co-founded Vinnie’s Jump and Jive, a community dance hall on Main Street.

In 2003, Ms. Alexander was honored with the Wesleyan University Service Award. She founded the Wesleyan Club of Middletown and has participated in many Career Resource Center panels on the role of the entrepreneur. She also served on the Wesleyan University Bookstore Advisory Committee, and was a member of Wesleyan’s 175th Anniversary Committee.

In 2008, Ms. Alexander and her husband received the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce Distinguished Citizen Award. In 2009, they each received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Wesleyan University. They live in downtown Middletown with their four children.

Persephone L. Hall

Associate Director for Employer Relations, Wesleyan University

Persephone L. Hall is the Associate Director for Employer Relations in the Career Resource Center at Wesleyan. She is originally from Canton, Ohio and earned a bachelor’s degree in Communications and a Master’s degree in Higher Education from Ohio University. She began her career as a Career Counselor at the University of Connecticut working with business students. For the next 12 years, she served as a Human Resources Consultant in the banking industry and a Training Specialist in retail. She returned to higher education in 2005 as an Assistant Human Resources Director at Wesleyan and has been in her present role for over a year.

Brad Karsh ’87

Sharon Greenberger ’88

Founder and President of JobBound

Brad Karsh is President and Founder of JobBound and JB Training Solutions, companies dedicated to helping individuals succeed in the job search and in the workplace. An industry expert in his field and an accomplished public speaker and author, Brad Karsh has been featured on CNN, CNBC, and The Dr. Phil Show, and has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, and many others. Brad is an advice columnist for both Yahoo! and AdAge, and he is author of Confessions of a Recruiting Director (Prentice Hall Press, 2006).

Prior to starting JobBound and JB Training Solutions, Brad spent 15 years at advertising giant Leo Burnett in Chicago. He began his career in Account Management, working on clients including McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble, and Pillsbury. He then moved into HR where he was responsible for hiring and training hundreds of employees.

Brad graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut with a B.A. in History and currently resides in Chicago with his wife Lisa and son Milo.

Robert King ’84

Sharon Greenberger ’88

Editor In Chief, ESPN.com

In June 2007 Mr. King was named editor-in-chief of ESPN.com in Bristol, CT. ESPN.com is the nation’s most heavily trafficked sports media Web site. ESPN.com averages 18 million unique users per month and features analysis from a roster of more than 150 ESPN editors, writers, analysts, experts and contributors.

ESPN is the leading cable sports broadcaster, reaching more than 97 million US homes with its stable of channels, including ESPN, ESPN2 (sporting events, news, and original programming), ESPN News, and ESPN Classic (historical sports footage). It also creates original programming for TV and radio and lends content for ESPN.com (operated by Walt Disney Internet Group), one of the most popular sports sites on the Internet. Its international operations extend the ESPN brand to another 190 countries. ESPN is 80% owned by Walt Disney (through ABC), and Hearst has a 20% stake in the company.

Prior to becoming editor-in-chief of ESPN.com, from 2004 until 2007 Mr. King was a senior coordinating producer for ESPN. In this position he originally had responsibility for overseeing the daily “Outside the Lines” show, then he went on to oversee golf coverage, joined the team overseeing the ESPN News channel, and eventually moved on to oversee ESPN’s studio coverage of professional basketball.

Prior to joining ESPN in 2004, Mr. King had a 22 year career in the newspaper business. From 1997 until 2004 he worked as a sports editor and deputy managing editor for visuals and sports at The Philadelphia Inquirer. From 1987 until 1997 he was a presentations editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal, as well as a cartoonist, reporter and graphic designer. He started his career as an editorial assistant at the Washington Post.

Michael Lewis ’03

Michael Lewis ’02

Team Leader, Shopper Insights & Analytics, Nestlé USA

Michael leads the Shopper Insights & Analytics team at Nestlé USA, which is a subsidiary of Nestlé S.A., the world’s largest food and beverage company with approximately a $100 billion in revenues globally. Michael works to build a better understanding of the shoppers of Nestlé’s product categories in order to provide strategic business recommendations to drive profitable growth for Nestlé and its retail customers.

Prior to joining Nestlé, Michael was a Manager in the Customer Strategy Group for PepsiCo, Inc in Purchase, NY; and an Associate Manager on the Shopper Understanding Team for The Procter & Gamble Company in Cincinnati, OH and Boston, MA. Michael also interned at Procter & Gamble for four summers through the INROADS program.

Michael was a College of Social Studies major at Wesleyan and was Senior Class President. He also was involved with the Wesleyan Student Assembly, Argus, Ujamaa, and was a Senior Interviewer. Michael also remains involved in the Wesleyan alumni community, serving as Vice Chair of the Wesleyan Fund, and he was a co-chair for his 5^th Year reunion. Michael is a native of Philadelphia, PA and graduated from the Haverford School where he is now on the Board of Trustees.

Michael Sciola

Director of the Career Resource Center, Wesleyan University

Michael Sciola is the director of the Career Resource Center at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, CT, where he is entering his 14th year of service. A nationally noted speaker and educator, Mike has been featured in Newsweek, The New York Sunday Times, USAToday, the Fresno Bee, The Hartford Courant, and other publications of note. He has won numerous awards for his service to student affairs including the Eastern Association of Colleges and Employers’ (EACE) Outstanding Member Award, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Golden Apple Award for outstanding faculty, and is a veteran member of the National Association of Colleges and Employer’s (NACE) Management and Leadership Institute faculty. Prior to working at Wesleyan, he held posts at Brown University, University of Rhode Island, University of New Hampshire, and at the California State University, Fresno.

Michael sits on the board of advisors for Experience.com and Idealist.org. An avid supporter of the arts; Mike is past president of the Greater Middletown Chorale and is currently the chairman of the board for Oddfellows Playhouse, a youth theater in Central Connecticut providing performing arts training to over 2000 students a year.

Michael is a graduate of the University of Rhode Island, holding undergraduate and graduate degrees in Gerontology, Human Development, and Counseling.

Jon Spector ’78

Chief Executive Office, The Conference Board, Inc.

Jonathan Spector is Chief Executive Officer of The Conference Board, Inc., the global research and business membership group. The Conference Board, which connects over 2,000 enterprises in 60 nations, is the most widely-cited private source of business intelligence. Publisher of the Consumer Confidence Index, the Leading Economic Indicators and other reports on economic trends and best management practices, The Conference Board convenes some 20,000 executives annually in council, conference and meeting programs.

Mr. Spector joined The Conference Board after serving as Vice Dean of The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He was responsible during his tenure for the significant growth and strategic repositioning of the school’s Executive Education activities, and also for strengthening Wharton’s involvement in book publishing, in globalization, and in collaborations across the university.

He began his career and spent 20 years at McKinsey & Company, where he was elected a Senior Partner. He founded and managed the Firm’s Taipei office, and helped lead McKinsey’s North American electronics practice until his departure to become the Chief Executive of two startup technology companies.

Mr. Spector is the co-author of We Are Smarter Than Me (Pearson Publishing, 2007), which highlights the ways in which businesses can harness the power of collective intelligence. The book came about from an experiment in which thousands of participants attempted to pool their knowledge and create a book manuscript.

Mr. Spector serves on the Board of the March of Dimes, and is a Trustee Emeritus of Wesleyan University. He earned his BA in Math/Economics, with honors, from Wesleyan University, and his MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School.