Speakers

Dr Chetan Ghate

Director

Institute of Economic Growth

Dr Prachi Mishra

Director and Head, Ashoka Isaac Center for Public Policy

Ashoka University

Dr Ajit Ranade

Vice Chancellor, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics

Former Chief Economist, Aditya Birla Group

Mahesh Vyas

Managing Director & CEO

Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt Ltd

Dr. Barry A.N. Bloom

Bio: Barry A.N. Bloom, Ph.D. is President and Chief Operating Officer of Xenia Hotels & Resorts, Inc., a NYSE-listed real estate investment trust. Additionally, he currently is an adjunct faculty member at Florida International University.

Company Name:  Xenia Hotels & Resorts, Inc.

Country: USA

Prof. N. Edward Coulson

Bio: Professor of Economics and Public Policy and Director, Center for Real Estate, Paul Merage School of Business, UC Irvine

University: Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine

Country: USA

Prof. Franz Fuerst

Bio: Professor Franz Fuerst is Professor of Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Fellow/Director of Studies at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

University:  University of Cambridge, England

Country: UK

Vinod Kothari

Bio: A noted financial consultant and trainer. Consultant on structured finance, asset backed financing, corporate laws. Director of Vinod Kothari Consultants

Company Name: Vinod Kothari Consultants

Country: India

Vipul Roongta

Bio: Managing Director & CEO at HDFC Capital Advisors Limited

Company Name:  HDFC Capital Advisors Limited

Country: India

R.V. Verma

Bio: Chairman Encore ARC Earlier Positions held Chairman AU Small Finance Bank CMD, National Housing Bank Member-cum-Chairman PFRDA Central Registrar and MD CERSAI

Company Name:  AU Small Finance Bank

Country: India

Prof. Vinod Singhal

Charles W. Brady Chair
Professor of Operations Management
Georgia Institute of Technology
Scheller College of Business

Title and Brief Details of the Talk

Financial consequences of supply chain risks and strategies for building resilient supply chains

This talk will present empirical evidence on the effect of supply chain risks on financial performance based on measures related to stock prices and profitability. It will compare the performance effects of three different types of supply chain risks: supply chain disruptions, product introduction delays, and excess inventory. The talk will also discuss strategies that firms can use to build resilience in supply chains and how to make the business case for adopting such strategies.

Brief Bio

Vinod Singhal is the Charles W. Brady Chair Professor of Operations Management at the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. He has a Ph.D. from University of Rochester, Rochester, USA. Prior to joining Georgia Tech., he worked as a Senior Research Scientist at General Motors Research Labs.

Vinod’s research has focused on the impact of operating decisions on accounting and stock market-based performance measures. His research has been supported through grants from the US Department of Labor, National Science Foundation, the American Society of Quality, and the Sloan Foundation. He has published extensively in academic journals and has made more than 200 presentations at different universities. His research has been recognized in the practitioner community through his many articles in industry-practitioner journals and frequent invited presentations as keynote speaker at practitioner conferences. His research has been cited over 200 times in practitioner publications such as Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, Smart Money, CFO Europe, Financial Times, Investor’s Business Daily, and Daily Telegraph. His research has been extensively cited in academic publications, with over 14,500 citations. His paper “An empirical analysis of the effect of supply chain disruptions on long‐run stock price performance and equity risk of the firm” was voted by the POMS members in 2024 as one of the top-ten papers published in Production and Operations Management in the last 30 years.

Vinod is a Departmental Editor of Production and Operations Management, and Associate Editor of Management Science. He is a Fellow of the Production and Operations Management Society. He is a Fellow of the Production and Operations Management Society. He served on the Academic Advisory Board of the European School of Management and Technology, Germany.
Vinod’s teaching interests include operations strategy and supply chain management. He has contributed to teaching at an international level, as well, by offering research workshops in countries including Australia, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom.

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Dr. Manish Bansal

Associate Professor

Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, USA

Abstract. Transportation and logistics problems are challenging combinatorial optimization problems that require computationally efficient and effective tools for solving them. In this tutorial, I will present a few mathematical optimization tools that can be leveraged for addressing these challenges. We will begin with integer programming which is a powerful method to formulate and solve combinatorial optimization problems. Since solving integer programs with large-scale deterministic data can still be computationally expensive, we will discuss cutting plane-based approaches and how dynamic programming-based for certain classes of transportation problems can be more efficient. In many applications, it is critical to make strategic long-term planning decisions such as locating warehouses, emergency healthcare or evacuation centers, even with uncertain input data parameters. To handle the uncertain data in optimization problems, stochastic, robust, and distributionally robust programs have gained attention in the research community and to some extent in industry as well. I will share the benefits of these modeling frameworks, and present some challenges associated with solving these programs along with ways to address them.

For supply chain resilience, vulnerability analysis of a transportation and logistics network is the most important task for decision makers. A distinct aspect of uncertainty faced in this analysis is the limited availability of relevant historical data and varying levels of risk-appetite (ranging from risk-neutral to most conservative to risk-receptiveness) of decision makers because of incomplete information of probability of occurrence of events such as natural disasters and cyber/physical attacks. I will introduce distributionally ambiguous interdiction problems that are characterized as Stackelberg games played between two players: an interdictor and defender. The interdictor is a player who makes interdiction decisions using limited resources to degrade the defender’s performance, and the defender makes decisions after observing the interdiction decision. These modeling frameworks also have applications in disrupting domestic sex trafficking networks and illegal drug supply chain networks. We will discuss the shortest path, maximum flow, facility location, feature selection (with application in machine learning), and cameras view-frame placement (with application in telerobotics) interdiction problems, and how to mitigate the impact of data corruption for these problems.

Bio. Dr. Manish Bansal is an Associate Professor, Grado Early Career Faculty Fellow, and Operations Research Program Area Lead with Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. He did bachelor’s in electrical engineering from National Institute of Technology in India, and M.S. with thesis and Ph.D. from Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. His research is focused on the theory of mixed integer programming, stochastic and distributionally ambiguous optimization, game theory, and location science along with their applications in logistics and supply chain management. He has received multiple grants from National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Automotive Research Center at University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and Commonwealth Cyber Initiatives. He has published papers in journals such as Discrete Applied Mathematics, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Journal on Global Optimization, and Mathematical Programming, among others. Dr. Bansal has served as president of INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group and Engineering Faculty Organization at Virginia Tech, and currently, he is a senator in the faculty senate of Virginia Tech. He is also an affiliate faculty with the National Security Institute, and Center for AI and Data Analytics at Virginia Tech.

Dr. Shashank Rao

Dr. Shashank Rao is the Jim W. Thompson Professor of Supply Chain Management at Auburn University. He previously held a faculty appointment at Nova Southeastern
University in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He holds a BS in Environmental Engineering (VTU-India), an MBA in Marketing (TAPMI, India), an MS in Statistics, and a Ph.D. in Operations
and Supply Chain Management (University of Kentucky). Prior to entering the academy, Rao was a relationship manager at Citigroup and also spent time in the construction
sector. His research interests focus on Internet Retailing, Logistics, and the broad intersection of Development Economics and Supply Chain Management. He has published several
articles in every empirical journal in the SCMList including the Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Business Logistics, Production & Operations Management, Decision Sciences Journal, and Journal of Supply Chain Management. He also serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Business Logistics in addition to serving on the editorial board of several other leading Logistics & SCM journals. Dr. Rao serves as a frequent speaker at academic conferences, executive education seminars, and professional meetings. Recent consulting assignments include work with Target, Aptar Pharma, MercuryGate, Tempur-Sealy International, and the US Department of Labor. He has also served as a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology—Bombay, one of the leading business schools in India.

About the editorial session with Journal of Business Logistics
The mission of the Journal of Business Logistics (JBL) is to advance the logistics and supply chain management field by publishing high-quality, scholarly research that enhances both the theoretical and practical understanding of logistics. JBL aims to serve as a bridge between academic theory and business practice, addressing issues of relevance to practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in areas like logistics strategy, supply chain management, transportation, distribution, warehousing, and emerging technologies. The journal focuses on disseminating research that provides actionable insights for improving supply chain efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation, contributing to the broader field of business logistics and supply chain management. In this session, the senior leadership of the journal will discuss details regarding our editorial philosophy, the submission and review process, expectations from submitted papers, our commitment to authors, and so on. Additionally, we will answer audience questions as they arise. The session aims to be a developmental outreach event whose goal is to encourage authors to submit their very best work to the journal in the future.

Prof. Rohini Pande

Rohini Pande is the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She is also the faculty director of Inclusion Economics at Yale. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Econometric Society fellow, and a former co-editor of American Economic Review: Insights. Pande received the 2018 Carolyn Bell Shaw Award from the American Economic Association for promoting the success of women in the economics profession and the 2022 Infosys Prize in Social Sciences. Formerly, Pande was the Rafik Harriri Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Pande’s research, which has influenced policy in South Asia and globally, focuses on how institutions shape power relationships and patterns of economic, political, and environmental advantage in low-income countries. She is interested in the role of public policy in providing the poor and disadvantaged political and economic power, as well as how notions of economic justice and human rights can legitimize and enable such change. With Inclusion Economics India Center, she is working with Indian state governments on gender-inclusive rural development and digital policies and with Inclusion Economics Nepal Center she is evaluating policies to strengthen quality of policy-making by elected local governments.

Pande received a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics, a BA/MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University, and a BA in Economics from Delhi University.

Prof. Anirban Adhikary

Prof. Anirban Adhikary is the Dean of Faculty and Research, Associate Professor, and Young Faculty Research Chair at IIM Udaipur. His research primarily focuses on sustainability issues in supply chains, exploring innovative solutions to address environmental and social challenges.

Prof. Adrija Majumdar

Adrija Majumdar is a faculty member and the current chairperson in the Information Systems area at IIM Ahmedabad. Her research interests include social media, online communities, crowdfunding, and text mining. Her research articles have been published in international journals such as Information & Management, International Journal of Information Management, Information Systems Frontiers Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Technology Forecasting and Social Change, Communications of AIS, International Journal of Production Economics, etc. She completed her PhD from IIM Calcutta in Management Information Systems.

Shri Alpan Raval

Alpan Raval is the Chief AI/ML Scientist at the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a non-profit devoted to developing and deploying AI for social impact across the global South. The institute currently build AI solutions for public health, agriculture and education. Alpan has been working in the applied AI space for over two decades, initially as a professor at the Claremont Colleges in California, and later at D E Shaw Research, Amazon, and LinkedIn. He is an author of a book on network biology, Introduction to Biological Networks.

Alpan holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Maryland, USA and an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Chetan Savla

Chetan Savla is President – Sustainability and Strategic Projects at Kotak Mahindra Bank.

Within his career with Kotak group of over 30 years, Chetan has led the Sustainability practice for the Group since 2021.

Prior to that, Chetan was Head of Group Strategy at Kotak Mahindra Bank for 4 years and he worked for 18 years as an investment banker with Kotak Mahindra Capital Company. As a part of his work in investment banking, Chetan led over 80 capital market transactions to raise over USD 18 billion for corporate India, as well as advised Indian and global companies in their M&A transactions.

Chetan is a 1991 MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

Prof. Balagopal Vissa

Prof. Bala Vissa is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise and The André and Rosalie Hoffmann Chaired Professor of Family Enterprise at INSEAD. His research focuses on entrepreneurial leadership, particularly in emerging economy settings – examining both new ventures operated by first-gen founders as well as mature organizations operated by next-gen scions of family businesses. His research delves into topics such as the structuring of upper echelon teams (these include founding teams of new ventures, boards of family businesses, investor teams of VCs, Family Offices etc.), the emergence of family business groups, the links between successful entrepreneurial exit and social impact, efficacy of entrepreneurship training and so forth. He is an invited speaker and advises entrepreneurial companies and professional investors on these topics.

Prof. Vissa has received numerous research awards and currently serves as Associate Editor at the Strategic Management Journal; in addition, he previously served as Associate Editor at the Academy of Management Journal. He also served as elected Chairperson of the Entrepreneurship & Strategy interest group of the Strategic Management Society.

He teaches topics related to entrepreneurial leadership, corporate venturing, transitions in family businesses and scaling up new ventures - in degree programs as well as in executive training programs, using a variety of pedagogical approaches including simulations, workshops and case-based learning. Currently he is directing INSEAD Leadership Programme for Senior Executives - India and numerous client-specific programs (CSPs).

Prior to finishing his doctoral studies at London Business School, Prof. Vissa was involved in setting up and growing new businesses in different specialty chemical niches for Unilever in India.

Prof. Mats Alvesson

Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Bath, UK and is also affiliated with Lund University, Sweden

Debashish Ghosh

Debashish Ghosh is a senior Human Resources professional with over 20 years of experience in managing end-to-end functions in HR. Over these years, he led both global organizations and Indian conglomerates across multiple industries and locations. His core expertise lies in organization culture transformation, change leadership, and talent management.

Debashish is currently working as the Senior Vice President and Country HR Head of Berkadia, a Berkshire Hathaway and Jefferies Financial Services Co. Prior to joining Berkadia, he was associated with GE, Genpact, and the Ramoji Group managing multiple roles in HR.

Debashish is an Executive Education Alumnus of IIM Calcutta and a Marshall Goldsmith Certified Executive and Teams Coach. He is also a certified practitioner of several behaviour and personality assessment tools.

Debashish has been awarded with two of the most prestigious HR credentials in the world - Senior Certified Professional® from Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM-SCP®), and Global Talent Management Leader (GTML™) from Talent Management Institute.

His contribution towards Human Resources function has been recognized by the industry. His recent achievements include:

• Recognized by Siliconindia magazine as one of the “Top 10 most promising HR Leaders 2020”.
• Featured in Forbes India magazine (Oct '21 issue) as "India’s 50 Best HR Leaders 2021"

Debashish passionately advocates the cause of industry-academia collaboration. He sits in the Industry Advisory Boards/Committees of several Universities, B-schools and Colleges.

Debashish is a sought-after public speaker and has delivered guest lectures/keynotes in over 200 educational institutions and industry forums.  He is also a LinkedIn influencer with over 75K followers.

Debashish is a trusted mentor for many students and young professionals. Topmate, a mentoring platform, has recognized Debashish as one of the top 1% mentors worldwide. LinkedIn has also recognized him with the “Top Mentoring Voice” badge.

Prasad Kumar

Prasad Kumar is the Founder of Human Endeavour Associates, a niche consultancy firm specializing in strategic advisory for owner and partner led companies, family businesses and corporates.

He has worked in senior executive roles, with many leading companies, partnering in their growth and success.

His experience with Family Business Advisory and Corporate Development spans over five decades.

Most of his engagements are long term partnerships, integrating the cultural and structural dimensions for Growth, Governance and Institution Building. Helping organization and people to get “future ready” is key to his mission.

He is engaged in coaching of Board members, top management and senior leaders across industries and is an active Life Coach to business leaders.

His last positions were Business Chairman and member of the GMR Group Holding Board, Chairman of RAXA (Homeland Security).

He founded Parampara Family Business Institute and was its Vice Chairman and Managing Director. Post retirement, he is now Advisor and Academic Council member.

He has been member of:

• The Economic Times Advisory Panel on Family Business
• The Economic Times Advisory Panel on Corporate Board Governance

A postgraduate in Management and accredited in Applied Behavioral Sciences, Prasad has been a Certified Professional of the International Association of Facilitators and a Life Member of the Association.

He teaches specialized modules in Family Business, Leadership and Succession at IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, Indian School of Business (ISB), SP Jain Institute and many other leading business schools.

He has also been Executive-in-Residence at the Kellogg School of Management, NW University, Chicago, USA.

Prof. Ashish Pandey

Prof. Ashish Pandey is an Associate Professor with Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. Prof. Ashish teaches the courses on organization development, human resource management, and self-mastery to students of postgraduate levels for the last ten years. Prof. Ashish has published more than forty research articles in reputed national and international journals and handbooks in the field of spirituality at the workplace, mindfulness. He is in the editorial board of Frontiers in Psychology and Humanistic Management Journal. The most recent recognition of Prof. Ashish's work includes the Best Paper award during the Indian Academy of Management Meeting 2020, Fretzer scholarship to his three Ph.D. students (Academy of Management, MSR division, 2020), Outstanding Reviewer (Academy of Management, MSR Division, 2019), recognition by Fowler Centre of Case Western University for the years 2016 and 2018 (AIM2Flourish for the cases written on sustainable development based business models with his students ), and Best Paper during Doctoral Consortium with his Ph.D. student (Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, 2018). Prof. Ashish is regularly engaged in consulting work for Organizations and Leadership development with organizations across industries.

Prof. Veena Vohra

Dr Veena Vohra is Professor – Human Resources and Behavioral Sciences and Vice Dean (Accreditation, Ranking, Industry, Alumni) at the School of Business Management, NMIMS, Mumbai. Veena is PhD (Leadership and Emotional Intelligence) and holds an MBA as well as MS in Psychotherapy and Counselling.

After a brief corporate stint at Dabur India Ltd and Tata Consultancy Services, she has been with School of Business Management, NMIMS, Mumbai for the last 20 years. She teaches Case Study Research Methodology and Qualitative Research in the PhD program as also Organizational Behavior, Change Management and OD, Building Resilient organizations, Emotional Intelligence, and Appreciative Inquiry in the MBA and MBA HR programs.

Veena has designed and chaired the impactful MBA HR program, served as the chair of the flagship MBA program at School of Business Management. She also served as Associate Dean (Programmes and Student Learning Experiences), driving several innovations in student centric learning and the institutionalization of several academic administrative practices.

Currently the EQUIS Accreditation Project Coordinator for SBM, Veena has been instrumental in leading the successful EQUIS accreditation of SBM. She has received several awards for her services and teaching, including the Prof Indira Parikh 50 Women in Education Leaders Award.

Veena’s research, consulting and training interests lie in the domains of organizational behaviour, organization development, leadership and emotional intelligence. Veena partners with Align HR and is on the Advisory Council of Contextus, both boutique consulting firms offering transformative human capital solutions

Veena has published a number of research papers and case studies on managing change, in international journals. She has co-authored books on organizational development, talent management and human resource management. She has recently completed a research project capturing the decade long OD journey of an Indian multinational organization. Her research profile can be accessed here:

https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=TDW1D2MAAAAJ&hl=en

Prof. Samrat Gupta

Area: Information Systems
Affiliation: Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA)
Topic: Network Analysis
Link: https://www.iima.ac.in/faculty-research/faculty-directory/samrat-gupta

Prof. Sumit Kunnumkal

Area: Operations Management
Affiliation: Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad
Topic: Assortment optimization
Link: https://www.isb.edu/en/research-thought-leadership/faculty/faculty-directory/sumit-kunnumkal.html

Anuraag Aekka

Anuraag is a Research Consultant in the Development Research Group at the World Bank. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from NYU Stern in 2024. His research combines general equilibrium models of firm dynamics with microdata to study how various frictions affect aggregate productivity.

Prof. Sudarshan Kumar

Prof. Sudarshan Kumar is a faculty member in the Finance and Control group at IIM Calcutta. He is B.Tech. (Hons.) in Civil Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, and PhD in Finance from IIM Ahmedabad. He primarily works in the area of quantitative finance, fixed income, derivatives and has published in many prestigious journals including European Journal of Finance, Journal of Complex networks,  Journal of Futures Markets, and Applied Economics.

Prof. Snehal Awate

Snehal Awate is a faculty of Strategy at S. J. Mehta School of Management of IIT Bombay.  Her research is at the intersection of strategic management and international business. She studies firms’ knowledge management strategies by employing network analyses. Her research has appeared in several top ranked journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Global Strategy Journal, Journal of Economic Geography, Journal of International Management, and California Management Review. She is a senior editor for Asia Pacific Journal of Management. Some of her current network-based research projects explore capability development and catch-up using internal and external firm networks.

Prof. Anand Shrivastava

Anand Shrivastava is an Associate Professor of Economics at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, and a Faculty Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Employment at the University. He completed his PhD in Economics at the University of Cambridge. He also has an MPhil and a Graduate Diploma in Economics from the University of Cambridge and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. His PhD research consisted of theoretical and empirical work on the economics of conflict. Since then he has worked on labour economics, economics of networks, and on interactions between economics and issues of history, politics and religion.