Rajiv Lal
Stanley Roth, Sr. Professor of Retailing
Harvard Business School

Rajiv Lal, is the Stanley Roth, Sr. Professor of Retailing at Harvard Business School where he is the course head for the required course in Marketing in the first year of the MBA program and also teaches in several Executive Education programs including the Top Management Seminar for Retailers and Suppliers.

Lal was Professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University since 1982. He was the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Visting Professor at Harvard Business School for 1997-98. He was visiting Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, France in 1986, 1988, 1992 and 1993. He did his undergraduate work in mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, India and received his PhD in Industrial Administration from Carnegie-Mellon University. Lal is an Area Editor for Marketing Science.

Lal's current research is concerned with the dramatic changes affecting retailing. His most recent work in this area studies the impact of using the Internet as a channel of distribution on a retailer's pricing, merchandising and branding strategy. The paper was published in Marketing Science and nominated for the award of the best paper in Marketing and Management Science. His earlier work in retailing studies the impact of competition between different retail formats, such as EDLP and Hi-Lo grocers. He has also studied the consequences of the increasing use of store brands by grocery retailers on store loyalty and its implications for packaged goods manufacturers.

Ravi Parmeswar
Managing Director – Global Consumer & Marketplace Insights & Client Advocacy, Citi

Ravi Parmeswar is head of Citi Global Consumer & Marketplace Insights and Global Client Advocacy, working with Citi’s business units throughout the world to build best-in-class products, service and marketing.

Ravi joined Citi in September ’07, bringing with him over twenty years of experience in the fields of Consumer Insights, Market Research, Strategic Planning, Product Development and Consulting. Prior to joining Citi, Ravi was with Coca-Cola Consumer Insights in a variety of positions in Latin America and North America, including Vice President, Knowledge & Insights where he led Coca-Cola’s insights department worldwide.

He was previously Director of Global Research at Campbell Soup, prior to which he was at Kraft General Foods.

In addition, Ravi has published numerous papers and delivered speeches on a wide range of topics, including marketing, R&D, and strategy development.

Ravi has an MBA from Temple University and an MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Kansas.

Dr. Mark D'Esposito, MD
Director, Brain Imaging Center
University of California, Berkeley

Dr. D'Esposito was elected Chairman of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping and President of the Society for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology. He is also a Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the UC Berkeley Brain Imaging Center which utilizes functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and EEG to study human cognition. Professor D'Esposito earned his medical degree in 1987 at the SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse and completed his Neurological training at Boston University Medical Center in 1991. In 1993, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he was also the Chief of the Cognitive Neurology Division. In 2000, he joined the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley to become the inaugural Director of the newly created Henry Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center.

He has received numerous research grants from the National Institutes of Health and private sources such as the Dana Foundation and the American Federation for Aging Research. He received the Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral Neurology from American Academy of Neurology for his contributions to research on the neural basis of cognition in humans. His is on the Editorial Board of several neuroscience journals. In 2004 he became the editor of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, the premier journal focused on the neural basis of behavior in humans. Dr. D'Esposito's research focuses on investigating how the brain creates mental experience such as forming memories and making decisions. He is wisely acknowledged as in international leader in human brain research. .

Dr. D’Esposito’s research focuses on investigating how the brain creates mental experience such as forming memories and paying attention.

Earl K. Miller, Ph.D,
Picower Professor of Neuroscience,
Massachussetts Institute of Technology

Earl Miller is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Associate Director of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology and Neuroscience in 1990 from Princeton University.   He has academic appointments in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

Professor Miller was quoted extensively in The New Yorker magazine's "Annals of Science" section, article titled: "The Eureka Hunt." Also, Professor Miller's paper on "An Integrative Theory of Prefrontal Cortex Function", which he co-authored with J. D. Cohen, and which was published in "The Annual Review of Neuroscience", was designated a Current Classic by Thomson Scientific. Papersselected for this recognition have the greatest absolute increase in citations during a certain time period.

Professor Miller is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his scientific work, including the Mathilde Solowey Award in the Neurosciences (2007), election to the International Neuropsychological Symposium (2006), elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005), the Picower Chair at MIT (2003), the National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award (2000), the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award (2000), the Pew Scholar Award (1996), the John Merck Scholar Award (1996), and the McKnight Scholar Award (1996).   He has delivered numerous lectures worldwide, serves as editor, and on the editorial boards of, major journals in neuroscience, and on international advisory boards.

Dr. Leon Y. Deouell
Chair, Neuropsychology graduate program
Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Dr. Deouell a senior lecturer at the department of psychology and a member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned his medical degree summa cum laude at the Sackler School of Medicine at the Tel Aviv University in Israel in 1993 and his PhD in psychology with distinction at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After a
post-doctoral fellowship as a Rothschild fellow at the University of
California at Berkeley he joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on 2003. He is currently the chair of the neuropsychology division at the department of psychology.

Dr. Deouell's research addresses the neural correlates of perception with and without attention, sensory memory, and conscious awareness, using tools such as EEG and functional imaging. In particular his research involves both healthy and brain damaged patients with the aim of understanding the basis of impaired cognition after brain damage as well as the normal function of the brain in behavior.