Adrian Ma is a host and reporter for NPR’s The Indicator from Planet Money, a daily podcast that breaks down the forces shaping our ever-changing economy. Since joining NPR in 2021, Adrian has explored the ways economic forces shape our lives, tackling topics like AI-driven markets, racial justice, and creativity.

Dr. Lawrence Wu is the president of NERA Economic Consulting and former staff economist in the Bureau of Economics of the Federal Trade Commission. Dr. Wu received his PhD in Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and specializes in antitrust economics and intellectual property law. He will be guiding us in a regulatory case study.

Dr. Lukas Althoff is a post-doc at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and an incoming Assistant Professor at Stanford’s Department of Economics in 2025. Dr. Althoff received his PhD from Princeton in 2023 and primarily studies the causes and consequences of inequality through the lens of applied microeconomics. He will speak on “The History and Future of Inequality”. Please also refer to Dr. Althoff’s website.

Oliver Giesecke is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University! Dr. Giesecke holds a PhD in economics and finance from Columbia University and has worked extensively on city government finances, for which he earned the prestigious NASDAQ OMX Award. He will talk about applying AI for economic research in State Government Debt Structures.

Dr. Qian Wang is Vanguard’s Chief Asia-Pacific economist and Global Head of Vanguard’s Capital Market Model. She manages a research team that conducts research on the global economy with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region, global capital market, and related investment topics. Dr. Wang will be giving her economic and markets outlook for 2024.

Amy Lai is the co-founder and CEO of Teaspoon, a nationwide boba chain that opened its first store in Los Altos in 2015. Teaspoon has quickly become a fan-favorite, both among Harker students and drink connoisseurs across the country. She will be speaking about her journey and how economics plays a role in her business.

Rupa Jack, a Senior Vice President and Wealth Advisor at Morgan Stanley, has talked about personal finance and the importance of networking. She discusses how to be financially conscious as you enter college, how to make and save money through investments and other financial strategies (even when you’re under 18), and how to network and form career connections.

For our next speaker event, we will host Russ Roberts, the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the host of the award-winning podcast EconTalk. He’s known for making difficult economics topics easy to understand in his podcast, where he has interviewed people like Milton Friedman, Jill Lepore, and Michael Lewis. We encourage you to search him up and check him out on his website and EconTalk (or Wikipedia, whichever you prefer).

Daryn Dodson is the Managing Director of Illumen Capital, the world’s first private equity firm focused on reducing implicit bias, and an advocate for social and economic justice. His work with impact investors, Fortune 100 companies, private equity funds, and universities and foundations has been aimed at addressing some of the world’s most pressing social and environmental problems. He also currently serves on the Board of Directors for Ben and Jerry’s.

Larry Stone is the County Assessor for Santa Clara County and was a former Mayor of Sunnyvale. Stone has also been a financial manager on Wall Street and has co-founded a successful Bay Area real estate investment and development firm.

Angela Ma, a Harker Alumnus that graduated in 2014, is a current PhD candidate in business economics at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Economics Department in Cambridge, Massachussetts. Her research interests lie in financial and behavioral economics.

Dr. Matthew Jackson is the William Denman Eberle Professor of Economics and Game Theory at Stanford. He also is an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Jackson has been awarded the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, the B.E.Press Arrow Prize for Senior Economists, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Randall Lewis is an Economic Research Scientist in the Science & Algorithms team at Netflix. Lewis combines machine learning and econometrics to develop scalable causal measurement and prediction systems that help humans and machine-learning algorithms make optimal choices. Prior to joining Netflix in 2015, he worked at Google and Yahoo! Research where he studied advertising and digital markets.

We held a joint event with CareerConnect to host Ms. Kelly Steckelberg, the CFO of Zoom. She currently holds roles as Board Member and Audit Committee Chair at Qualtrics. She discussed her path to success, along with how she uses economic analysis in her work at Zoom today.

A Senior Research Scientist at Google Research, Dr. Guruganesh’s research focuses on new, provable algorithms at the intersection of algorithmic game theory, theoretical machine learning, and approximation algorithms. In his talk, he delves into the idea of equilibria being present in our day-to-day lives. He explains various equilibria such as Mixed Nash Equilibrium and those present in the game of Chicken.