Charleen Heidt serves as the Program Research and Marketing Manager for the Division of Graduate and Professional Studies at Ithaca College.
Heidt has over 27 years of Strategic Marketing and Marketing Research experience. She is an expert in Services Marketing having begun her management career in the hospitality industry with ARAMARK. She has conducted a variety of marketing projects for such local, national, regional, and international firms as American Demographics, Corning Inc., Cornell University, Crowley Foods, Hewlett Packard, Hilton International, Iron Mountain, Mohonk Mountain House, Motorola and SAS.
Charleen Heidt earned her MS degree in Business Administration, with an emphasis on Marketing Research and Services Marketing from The Pennsylvania State University. She received her BS degree in Hotel, Restaurant & Institutional Management/Administrative Dietetics, also from Penn State.
Catherine Russell is a working actress/manager/producer/professor. Named the "Cal Ripken of Broadway" by People Magazine for her performance record (over 21 years, no sick days, no vacations) in the long-running Off-Broadway thriller Perfect Crime (9000 performances and still counting), Catherine has appeared on Entertainment Tonight and the Today Show and has been the subject of profiles in numerous publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, the New York Post, the Daily News, and the New Yorker.
Catherine loves teaching acting at NYU, which she has been doing since 1981. In 2005, she built a new theater center in the heart of Times Square, negotiating Off-Broadway's first corporate sponsorship, partnering with Snapple to create the Snapple Theater Center at 50th Street and Broadway, home to Perfect Crime (which Catherine also general manages) and a revival of The Fantasticks. She is also currently one of the lead producers of this production of the longest running musical in the world. She is an executive member of the Off-Broadway Alliance and a member of the League of Off-Broadway Theatres and Producers and the League of Professional Theatre Women. She is currently working on building another new multi-theater complex in Times Square and creating a new reality show, "They Were You" which will feature actors auditioning for the two leading young roles in The Fantasticks.
Catherine Russell received an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a master's degree from New York University.
Megan Epler Wood founded The International Ecotourism Society in 1990, the first and largest ecotourism NGO in the world and was its president for 12 years. Under her leadership, TIES developed a membership program in over 100 countries, publications, workshops and stakeholder meetings that reached tens of thousands, and an international communications program that reached millions. Since 2003, Megan's firm EplerWood International has worked for the World Bank to develop sustainable tourism strategies for some of the poorest nations in the world, and for USAID - developing market-based ecotourism programs in biodiverse regions of Sri Lanka, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, and El Salvador. In the early 1980s, Epler Wood worked for the communications office of World Wildlife Fund-U.S. drawing attention to ground-breaking initiatives in biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Subsequently, she worked as an independent television producer for the National Audubon Society, World Wildlife Fund-U.S., and the National Geographic Society. Her film, The Environmental Tourist, broadcast by the Turner Broadcasting Corporation and PBS in 1991, was the first major television documentary on ecotourism. Epler Wood is a published author and editor of many titles, including Ecotourism; Principles, Practices and Policies in 2002 for the United Nations Environment Program. Her numerous academic papers investigate sustainable tourism markets, certification, economic growth, alleviation of poverty and environmental conservation. In 2006, Epler Wood founded NativeEnergy Travel Offsets (NETO) with her business partner, Richard G. Edwards, as a subsidiary of NativeEnergy, a firm that provides carbon offsets using wind and other renewable energy sources. Dynamic growth in the marketplace and growing investment interest led NativeEnergy Travel Offsets to merge with its parent company NativeEnergy in December 2008 to create one dynamic firm. Edwards and Epler Wood are now shareholders in Native Energy. NETO developed a broad range of clients for NativeEnergy, including Hilton Hotels, Wyndham, American Express, Backroads, Ecoventura, the Sierra Club Outings program and National Wildlife Federation Expeditions among many others. Megan Epler Wood has a bachelor of arts in international relations and communications from Sarah Lawrence College and a masters of science in wildlife biology from Iowa State University .
Sheila Laderberg is co-founder of Punk's Backyard Grill, a fast casual backyard cookout restaurant in Annapolis, Maryland. Her co-founders are Jeffrey Sloan and David McCabe. Laderberg, Sloan, and McCabe came up with the idea for Punk's Backyard Grill while collaborating on a project in the Master of Management in Hospitality program (MMH) at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. After years of refining the concept, planning, and raising capital, they opened Punk's Backyard Grill in February 2009. In its first year Punk's was named one of Washingtonian magazine's "Top 100 Bargain Restaurants" and What's Up! Annapolis magazine's "Best Bang for Your Buck." Prior to launching Punk's Backyard Grill, Laderberg was general manager of Marvelous Market Capitol Hill and worked with other hospitality companies in operations and marketing. Sheila Laderberg is a 2006 graduate of the Master of Management in Hospitality program (MMH) at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. In addition to her Cornell MMH degree, Laderberg holds a BA degree from the University of Virginia.
Audrey Prashker is General Counsel at Verizon Communications.
Previously, Prashker as an associate in the Toyko office of the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Audrey Prashker received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College and her J.D. from Columbia University.
Sheryl WuDunn is a Chinese American author, lecturer and businesswoman who was the first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer Prize. A specialist in energy and alternative energy issues, she has also been a private wealth advisor with Goldman Sachs and was previously a journalist and editor for The New York Times. At the Times, she ran the Times' coverage of global energy, alternative energy, foreign technology and foreign industry; previously, she was anchor of The New York Times Page One, a nightly program of the next day's stories in the Times. She also has worked in The New York Times Beijing and Tokyo bureaus, and speaks Chinese and Japanese. She won the Pulitzer Prize with her husband Nicholas D. Kristof for her reporting from Beijing about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. WuDunn and Kristof were the first married couple ever to receive a Pulitzer for journalism. WuDunn has co-authored two best-sellers with her husband, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia. These are non-fiction Asian studies books which examine the cultural, social, and political situation of East Asia largely through interviews and personal experiences. Her next book, also co-written with Kristof, will be published by Knopf in September 2009. It is titled: Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.Sheryl WuDunn attended Cornell University, graduating with a B.A. in European History in 1981. She earned her M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and M.P.A. from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. WuDunn currently serves as a trustee for Cornell University.
Jonelle Bradshaw de Hernandez is the Founder of Jonelle Bradshaw and Associates. Founded in 2002, Jonelle Bradshaw and Associates is an organizational consulting company that diagnoses organizational issues and provides successful and proven solutions.
Jonelle was recruited to work with the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies as a Property and Casualty Underwriter where she managed a 5 million dollar Book of Business underwriting for many Fortune 500 Companies. In 1999 she left Chubb and partnered with 2 business associates to create Insite Consulting, a management consulting company for small to medium sized businesses.
Jonelle Bradshaw de Hernandez graduated from Cornell University College of Human Ecology with a Bachelor of Science in Human Service Studies concentrating in Social Policy and Community Development. She received her Masters in Arts in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University Teachers College.
Constanza Ontaneda is the designer and co-founder of C.S.O.R.K. (which stands for her full name Constanza Smita Ontaneda Rehman Khedker). She is half (East) Indian and half Peruvian. Born in New Delhi, she attended schools in Peru, Brazil, Romania, Peru again and finally, Deerfield, MA in the United States, graduating in 2004.
Before joining the Fiber Science & Apparel Design undergraduate program at Cornell University she decided to spend a gap year in Peru, her late father's country, to get to know it better by doing community service, traveling and studying. One course in Lima, the Influence of Peruvian Ethnic Design on Contemporary Fashion under Professor Olga Zaferson, was particularly influential in guiding her creative and manufacturing strategies. Her burning passion for social service and fashion design brought her into contact with some incredibly talented weavers, seamstresses, knitters and silversmiths all over Peru, all of whom had had to sacrifice their art to make a bare bones daily living doing any jobs available, mostly for under $1 per hour.
Constanza returned to the US after her life-changing gap year experience determined to dedicate her life and privileged education to helping artists like herself, first in Peru and then anywhere else in the world as soon as she had the wherewithal to do so.
In Massachusetts, one of Constanza's best friends is also her step-father, Dennis Longto. Longto is a dedicated biologist and environmentalist who acknowledged and shared Constanza's dream and recognized her dynamic potential to achieve it. Thus C.S.O.R.K was born as a concrete enterprise with three very clear-cut goals: Follow fair trade practices employing local workers and artisans, Produce top quality merchandise at the best possible price, Never to harm any species in the making of their products.
The artists and artisans in Peru who help to manufacture the products sold by C.S.O.R.K do not work "for" Constanza, they work WITH her. They feel respected, recognized and are well compensated. In an atmosphere of equality, laughter, talent and hope they flesh out Constanza's ideas and designs, giving her the gift of their expert advice, experience and workmanship in exchange for the opportunity she has created for their art form.
Liz Thorpe is the Managing Director of Murray's Cheese Shop. Co-author of The Murray's Cheese Handbook and Murray's Wholesale Director, Liz has in recent years emerged as one of the cheese world's best. She left the corporate world in April of 2002 to join Murray's and hasn't looked back since.
Liz Thorpe graduated Yale University with a degree in art history and American studies.