MS in Information Systems Faculty
Faisal Akkawi
Faculty Director
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Snehal S. Antani
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Snehal Antani is CEO & Founder of Horizon3.ai, a cyber security company that pioneered the use of AI to autonomously conduct penetration testing. Prior to Horizon3, Snehal served as the first Chief Technology Officer for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). As a member of the Commander’s executive team, he led data analytics, cloud/edge computing, and cybersecurity initiatives. Prior to serving within US Special Operations, Snehal was CTO & SVP at Splunk, held multiple CIO roles at GE Capital, and started his career as a Software Engineer at IBM. Snehal earned a Masters in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic University (RPI), a BS in Computer Science from Purdue University where he was their 2023 Distinguished Alumni, and holds 18 patents.
Atef Bader
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Atef Bader has been working in the IT industry for many years and currently is a member of the technical staff at Lucent Technologies. He is a recognized expert in object-oriented technology, automated software testing, concurrent software systems and software architecture. His technical papers have been presented at numerous conferences and published in technical journals. Bader holds a PhD in computer science from Illinois Institute of Technology.
Daniel Baumgartner
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daniel-baumgartner@northwestern.edu
Daniel Baumgartner is an independent management consultant with more than 30 years of business process management and information technology experience. He has held leadership roles in management and information technology consulting services, was a partner in several large management consulting firms and has expertise in improving business processes, developing IT strategies and plans, leading the implementation of IT solutions to address business issues and selecting and implementing enterprise-wide software applications. Baumgartner has managed client business analysts and functional managers. Baumgartner has a master's degree from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
Gunther Branham
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gunther.branham@northwestern.edu
Gunther Branham is a seasoned senior level IT executive. His experience includes senior IT executive responsibility for several global corporate functions for a Fortune 100 company. His responsibilities included systems planning, budgeting, software delivery and systems operations for global Engineering and Regulatory systems. Additional experience includes IT leadership for commercial, manufacturing and distribution, research and development, medical, regulatory and sales and marketing systems. Other significant accomplishments include initiating corporate-wide offshore IT services sourcing, starting an enterprise applications integration technology center, launching and managing key e-commerce activities and integration and startup of manufacturing facility systems. Branham earned a BA in Physics from The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, and an MS in Business Management from the University of Northern Colorado.
Parthasarathi Chakraborty
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Parthasarathi Chakraborty has over 25 years of cyber security technology and leadership experience in the financial services and healthcare industry. An active speaker, panelist, inventor and board member in cyber security industry. He is the founder of Cloud Security Practitioner Council, and chairperson of Cloud Security Alliance's Key Management Workgroup. Chakraborty sits in the technical advisory board for Google Cloud and a few security startups like Oak9, TrueFort Inc. He was awarded Juanita Koilpillai annual service award in 2023 by Cloud Security Alliance. Currently heading security architecture, engineering and innovation program for Humana Inc, a Fortune 40 healthcare company. Prior to Humana, Chakraborty has held executive leadership roles with Bank of Montreal, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and Guardian Life Insurance Company. A CISSP, CCSP, CEH, CHFI certified security evangelist holding a Bachelor’s degree in engineering from NIT Rourkela, a Masters in Cyber Security from Western Governors University, another Masters in Technology Management from Columbia University, a cyber security professional certificate from Stanford University and executive CTO university credit program from Wharton Business School at University of Pennsylvania. Chakraborty also has two patents under his name for JP Morgan and Humana Inc.
Amul Chapla
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Amul Chapla is a Principal AI Architect at Microsoft, specializing in AI and data analytics technologies. With vast experience in using AI to revolutionize businesses and drive innovation, he guides large companies through the AI landscape, providing tech leadership to design innovative solutions deploying AI at scale to transform core business processes. Amul has been honored with the most prestigious award from Microsoft for co-innovating industry-disruptive solutions using multimodal AI & Azure cloud platform. Simultaneously, Amul also teaches AI and Data Science courses at Northwestern University. He combines his industry experience with academic instruction, offering students a practical perspective. Passionate about hands-on learning, he integrates cloud and generative AI into his teaching to equip students with real-world skills.
Terrance Cottrell
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terrance.cottrell@northwestern.edu
Terry Cottrell is Vice President for Information Technology and Planning at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. In addition to 25 years of practitioner expertise in IT, his academic career includes 15+ years of teaching, publication and presentations on the subjects of cybersecurity, e-science research trends, the effects of media on cognition, hands-free AR tools, copyright, diversity in the workplace, IT leadership, management, and finance. He has served on numerous non-profit boards and provided angel investments to four startups. His academic credentials include an MS in Risk Management from Columbia University, an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MBA from the University of St. Francis, and an EdD from Northern Illinois University in Instructional Technology. He has designed and taught a wide variety of courses for Colorado State University-Global Campus and the University of St. Francis, Google for Educators at Northern Illinois University, and Advanced Cybersecurity for Northwestern University.
James M. DeMarco
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Jim DeMarco is a business leader and digital business strategy practitioner with more than 25 years' experience. In his current business role, Jim advises some of Microsoft's largest financial services customers on their digital transformation stories and roadmaps; Jim has trained hundreds of Microsoft employees on how to engage their customers in digital transformation partnerships and how to use design-led thinking to drive customer engagement. Jim has held leadership positions in the telecommunications industry, where he helped innovate the use of real time decision making in customer interactions. A lawyer as well as a business strategist, Jim is a proud Northwestern alumnus (Kellogg MM 1999) and a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (JD 1994, BS 1990).
Leslie Fischer
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Leslie Fischer is a Lecturer in the Writing Program and SPS. With more than 30 years of experience teaching English, Business Writing and Communication at Northwestern University, Fischer is a seasoned mentor in writing, communication, and teamwork. Experienced as both a student and teacher of online courses, she understands how students learn online and the particular challenges for adult students. Fischer mentors design and engineering students in the Design Thinking and Communication program. There, she teaches students how to communicate and cooperate well as they work on real-world projects for clients such as the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Fischer earned her MA in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and her MS in Information Design and Communication at Northwestern University. She is currently working on her EdD in higher education leadership. In addition to her work in higher education, she has significant professional experience as an editor, writer, and trainer. She has worked with diverse clients, from global banks to educational publishers to the local humanities festival.
Sunil Kakade
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sunilkumar.kakade@northwestern.edu
Sunil Kakade has over 18 years of experience in various technical and leadership roles focused on lT transformation initiatives, analytics-driven software development, and big data technologies. Sunil is a big data and data science evangelist with hands-on expertise in implementing Hadoop and NoSQL technologies. Sunil leads the architecture and delivery of business systems for a Fortune 100 company. His areas of interest include machine learning, data science, legacy systems modernization, and open source technologies. His research papers have been presented at multiple international conferences and published in technical journals. He has patents pending in areas of IT and retail processes. Kakade has an MS in information technology and management from the Illinois Institute of Technology at Chicago and an MS in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, researching applications of artificial intelligence to manufacturing processes.
Nebiyou Kedir
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nebiyou.kedir@northwestern.edu
James Kerwin
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847-224-6855 (cell)
Ricardo Lafosse
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ricardo.lafosse@northwestern.edu
Ricardo Lafosse is responsible for IT risk governance, OT security, incident management, technical disaster recovery, and determining enterprise-wide security policies and procedures. Lafosse regularly presents on security topics at global conferences, including MirCon, ISACA CACS and Secure World. Prior to his current role, Lafosse was chief information security officer for Morningstar, where he was responsible for providing strategic information security leadership, implementation, and governance for the Information Security Program. Lafosse has more than 16 years of experience in information security for the government, banking, legal, healthcare, and education sectors. Lafosse began his career in information security consulting in finance. Lafosse holds a Master’s in Information Assurance from Iowa State University. He also holds the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) designations.
Anthony Mersino
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anthony.mersino@northwestern.edu
Anthony Mersino is the founder of Vitality Chicago, an agile coaching and training firm with a strong focus on creating the environment for technology people to do their best work. He works closely with small and large organizations to foster business agility and has helped several Fortune 500 organizations adopt agile ways of working. Since 2004, Anthony has developed and taught several IT project management and the Agile Certificate program for Northwestern University. In 2020 he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award from Northwestern's School of Professional Studies. Prior to founding Vitality Chicago, Anthony worked as an IT program manager for IBM, Unisys, and Ameritech. Anthony has authored two books, Agile Project Management and Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers. He holds a bachelor's degree from Michigan State University and a masters in business administration from Loyola University of Maryland.
David Ostrowski
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david.ostrowski@northwestern.edu
David Ostrowski has over 30 years professional experience in software development between the areas of connected vehicle analytics, Intelligent controls, manufacturing simulation, agent-based modeling, database and real-time data acquisition. Ostrowski currently works in Ford Motor Product Development Business Office as the Artificial Intelligence Leader. Ostrowski also has over 25 years experience as an adjunct professor at several universities teaching courses recently in Artificial Intelligence, Functional Programming, Analysis of Algorithms and Theory of Computation. He received his BBA in Management Information Systems from University of Michigan-Dearborn as well as an MS and PhD in Computer Science from Wayne State University. Ostrowski has fifty refereed publications, ten patents, two book chapters, numerous technical reports, and participates within several technical committees including IEEE TEC transactions, IEEE ICSC, IEEE AI4I and IEEE ICIOS.
Naz Quadri
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Naz Quadri heads Bloomberg's Enterprise Data Science and ML groups, a position he's held since September 2015. His teams develop the financial models, bespoke AI, Alternative Data and real-time NLP solutions for the financial markets.
Naz came to Bloomberg in 2013 as the global head for Bloomberg's derivatives trading tools and analytics. He brought with him extensive experience designing financial models, particularly for derivatives instruments, as the global head of technology for Morgan Stanley's Interest Rate Derivatives Trading Group for more than eight years. He was part of the team that built the risk assessment and mitigation technology the bank needed to calculate market and credit default risk in the wake of the financial crisis. Prior to working for Morgan Stanley, he also served as a senior technologist with ABN AMRO's Market Risk group and began his career at Goldman Sachs.
In the early 2000's, Naz started a company called BackChat, which pioneered the first telephony-based, zero training continuous speech voice recognition software.
Naz earned his Masters degree in Mathematics, with distinction, from Warwick University in the United Kingdom.
Jennifer Singer
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jennifer.singer@northwestern.edu
Jennifer Singer is an IT Management Professional, with over 20 years of experience. Her professional background includes database management and administration, leading teams of application and middleware developers, and supporting development teams in adapting principles of DevOps. The majority of her professional experience has been in the telecommunications and financial fields. She has been recognized as a top contributor for the past 3 years, with her current employer. Jennifer earned her bachelor’s degree from University of Colorado Boulder, and master’s degree from the University of Denver, both in Computer Information Systems. More recently, she has completed coursework in the area of leadership with the University of Denver’s Executive Education program. She is passionate about all things database-related, and effectively leading people.
William Sunna
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William Sunna has more than eight years of data solutions experience in industry as a principal consultant to several Fortune 500 companies in insurance, retail, and financial services. He also teaches courses in programming, database concepts and design, web development, and other computer science areas at the University of Illinois at Chicago as well as Northwestern. He has presented his research in multiple conferences and workshops and has co-authored articles in more than 12 publications, including Transactions in GIS, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing and International Journal of Electronic Government Research. Sunna earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, researching automatic alignment of heterogeneous ontologies in the geospatial information domain.
Kevin Vaccaro
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kevin.vaccaro@northwestern.edu
Kevin Vaccaro has more than 25 years of experience working in Information Technology. He has also been teaching various topics in IT ranging from service and repair to Cybersecurity for more than 20 years. He is a full-time faculty member at Moraine Valley Community College and an adjunct Industry Professor at Illinois Institute of Technology. He has written several articles on digital forensics for eforensics magazine. Kevin holds an MS in Information Technology from Illinois Institute of Technology and several industry certifications including CISSP and CEH and also is an authorized trainer.
Srikanth Victory
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srikanth.victory@northwestern.edu
Srikanth is a seasoned technology executive with over 26 years of experience, known for his customer-focused leadership and expertise at the intersection of business and technology. With a strong background in diverse domains, including Marketing, Sales, Finance, Supply Chain, and more, Srikanth is passionate about driving enterprise digital transformation through cultural change and fostering a data-driven approach. He has a proven track record of successfully leading digital transformation & data and analytics initiatives at Fortune companies.
Srikanth has dual master’s degrees — business administration from Webster University in Webster Groves, Mo., and mathematics from Loyola College in India.
William Waas
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William Waas is the Executive Director of the GoodTogether philanthropic initiative at Sage Sustainable Electronics with a focus on narrowing the digital divide.
Mr. Waas was the Chairman & CEO of the Illinois Technology Foundation (ITF). ITF was a not-for-profit organization that focused on keeping graduating students in Illinois and working with k-12 students encouraging them to pursue a career in technology.
He started his career at Grumman Data Systems Corporation and held various management positions in strategic planning, finance and service management.
Mr. Waas was Senior Vice President of Service and Support at Vanstar Corporation, a $2.5 billion dollar system integrator. At Vanstar, Mr. Waas headed the $250 million service organization.
Mr. Waas was Vice President of Value Added Services at Dell Computer Corporation. He was responsible for a $750 million dollar division of Dell, responsible for the sale and delivery of software, peripherals, and system integration services.
He is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, the Harvard Extension School, and the Morris Graduate School of Management.
Mr. Waas also serves on the IT advisory councils for St. Petersburg College and the Hillsborough Community College.
He is a member of the board and chair of the programs and marketing for the Society for Information Management Tampa Bay Chapter.
Mr. Waas was a co-founder of the Service Section of CompTIA and was a member of the Board and Chairman of the association from 1995-1997.
Mr. Waas holds a BBA in accounting and an MBA in finance from Hofstra University.
He resides in St. Petersburg, Florida.