Lunch and Learn Webinars

Learn about contemporary topics in Engineering Management and a program overview of our online Master’s degree as well as benefits to employers and their employees.

Leadership with Ricky Yu

Engineering Your Career Path

March 21, 2024 at noon

When comes to working in an organization, does the idea of getting a promotion or becoming a people manager seem daunting? Do words like “networking” and “politics” make you cringe or send chills down your engineering spine? Join Ricky Yu in a lunch and learn to demystify the corporate ladder and discuss tips on how to become a high performing individual contributor and leader.

Prior to joining Cornell, Ricky Yu was Director of Product Marketing at Meta where he oversaw the international launch, growth and scale of a business management and analytics platform designed to improve the efficiency of Meta’s advertising sales teams. Additionally, he has held leadership roles in advertising operations, sales and account management, program management, advertiser performance analytics and marketing science. As one of the first 50 members in NYC, he has worked at Meta offices in over 15 countries, building teams across dozens of locations, and hiring hundreds of people since 2010. Ricky started his career as a software engineer and then business consultant at IBM, where he then shifted to the digital media space as a founding member of a digital marketing start-up. He grew up in NYC where he attended the Bronx High School of Science and holds a B.S. in Computer Science and M.Eng. from Cornell University.

Sustainability with Francis Vanek

Sustainable Energy as a Tool for Advancing Sustainable Development

April 11th, 2024 at noon

Description: Transforming the energy supply is one of the key steps for creating a sustainable planet. In this talk, I will focus on sustainable energy, based on my teaching, research, and writing at Cornell. First, since the topic of sustainability is very broad, I will situate sustainable energy within the broader array of sustainability goals. From there, I will introduce the "electrify everything" strategy as a way to obtain low- and zero-carbon energy from many sources and deliver it to meet the needs of society. Many of those needs fall into the three categories of buildings, transportation, and manufacturing, so I will next discuss examples of electrification in each of these sectors. I will round out the talk by discussing career opportunities arising from the ongoing energy transition.

Biographical Sketch: Francis Vanek holds undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Asian Studies (Japanese language concentration) from Cornell University, and a doctorate in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Vanek serves as the Senior Lecturer and Research Associate in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. He specializes in sustainable energy, transportation, green building systems, sustainable transportation, renewable energy, and engineering economics.

Risk Analysis with Patrick Reed

Exploring Risk & Equity Challenges in Water Supply Infrastructure Investments for the Federal District of Brazil

May 6th, 2024 at noon

This work explores adaptive risk-based water supply investment pathways in the Federal District of Brazil (FDB). The FDB is home to Brazil’s capital city, Brasilia, and nearly 3 million people. The historical development of the FDB has been marked by unregulated urban occupation, a rapidly growing population, and strong inequalities in income and water consumption patterns. Investments must confront climate change, growing drought pressures, and long-term financial pressures.

Dr. Patrick Reed’s Decision Analytics for Complex Systems research group has a strong focus on the sustainability of Food-Energy-Water systems given conflicting demands from ecosystem services, expanding populations, and climate change. The tools developed in Dr. Reed’s group bridge complexity science, risk management, economics, multiobjective decision making, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing. Dr. Reed is the Academic Director of the Engineering Management Program and the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Cornell University. He teaches Decision Framing & Analytics.

Watch archived lunch and learn sessions

Click on the drop downs below to watch recorded lunch and learn sessions.

Regional Disaster Risk Modeling featuring Linda Nozick

How do you untangle the kinds of complex problems organizations and stakeholders face? It's essential to see the network as a whole and avoid thinking about issues in isolation. Dr. Linda Nozick leads a discussion about Regional Disaster Risk Modeling with a case study from coastal areas affected by natural disasters. This virtual seminar is part of the Cornell Engineering Management Lunch & Learn Series which features our instructors and faculty sharing insights on contemporary topics.

Watch Regional Disaster Risk Modeling

Dr. Linda Nozick develops mathematical models for use in the management of complex systems. She has particular interest in systems that can be represented mathematically as networks, including transportation and logistics systems, civil infrastructure networks and project networks. Her work at the intersection of planning and policy has been used by the National Security Enterprise, Homeland Security, and numerous groups in the intelligence community. Dr. Nozick is Professor and Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering and she teaches Data Analytics in the Engineering Management Program.

Planning in a Changing World featuring Patrick Reed

Modern decision making requires a careful balance of economic development, environmental sustainability, and evolving uncertainties. Framing decision alternatives can help plan for complexity and uncertainty, which is especially relevant in these challenging times.

Watch Planning in a Changing World

Dr. Patrick Reed’s Decision Analytics for Complex Systems research group has a strong focus on the sustainability of Food-Energy-Water systems given conflicting demands from ecosystem services, expanding populations, and climate change. The tools developed in Dr. Reed’s group bridge complexity science, risk management, economics, multiobjective decision making, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing. Dr. Reed is the Director of the Engineering Management Program and Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Cornell University. He teaches Introduction to Decision Analysis.

Managing a Culture of Innovation featuring Andrea Ippolito

Innovation is not just ideas, but getting ideas to measurable impact for your customers or employees. In this webinar, Andrea Ippolito discusses a systematic approach for developing and supporting a culture of innovation.

Watch Managing a Culture of Innovation

Andrea Ippolito is a Lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University. Prior to joining Cornell, she served as the Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Innovators Network within the VA Center for Innovation and was a Presidential Innovation Fellow based out of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and General Services Administration. Andrea Ippolito teaches Product Management, Developing and Managing a Culture of Innovation, and Entrepreneurship.

Leading Effectively in a Virtual Workplace featuring Robert Newman

Managing remote teams presents new challenges to even seasoned leaders. We will discuss strategies for leading technical teams in the virtual workplace with a focus on soft skills and the human side of project and team management.

Watch Leading Effectively in a Virtual Workplace

Robert Newman's teaching focuses on developing critical skills for leadership, including: emotional intelligence, individual and team behavior, conflict management and other soft-skills for project managers; business savvy, effective communication, economic analysis, negotiation prowess, managing contracts and IP, ethics, and engineering management decision making. Prior to joining Cornell, Robert has over 20 years experience as a successful manager with an outstanding track record of delivering organization development and growth at global providers of technology, capital equipment, consumables, and support services at world-leading organizations. He successfully managed the integration of teams following four acquisitions, and performed a very successful business turn around.

Managing a Culture of Innovation featuring Dirk Swart

The most important strategic decision that startups launching new products can make centers around marketing. Learn how this determines customers, competition and marketing strategy. Gain helpful tips on how to set yourself up for success.

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Dirk Swart is a Lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, he was the founder and CEO of Zynect, an embedded systems and IoT company. Prior to that he was a visiting fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future at Boston University.

Developing an entrepreneurial mindset at large organizations or in start-ups featuring Andrea Ippolito

In this lunch and learn, Andrea shares some tips and approaches for embracing entrepreneurial mindsets along with her experiences as an entrepreneur in start-ups, large organizations, and in the government.

Watch Developing an entrepreneurial mindset at large organizations or in start-ups

Andrea Ippolito is a Senior Lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University. She also serves as the CEO and Founder of SimpliFed, the virtual maternal health leader in baby feeding support which raised $6M in funding in May 2022. Prior to joining Cornell, she served as the Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Innovators Network within the VA Center for Innovation and was a Presidential Innovation Fellow based out of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and General Services Administration. Ippolito teaches Entrepreneurship, Technology Strategy, and Gender Bias.

Decision Making featuring Ricardo Daziano

Economic Choice Models to Learn Customer Preferences

This talk will overview supervised statistical learning of customer preferences through choice experiments and discrete choice models. Empirical applications of inference on economic value of this non-market valuation technique will be covered to illustrate how these econometric tools are used in practice.

Watch Decision Making with Ricardo Daziano

Ricardo Daziano, PhD in Economics and Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, is a choice modeler working on deriving Bayesian and semiparametric estimators for economic models of customer decisions in engineering contexts. He leads research with a unique focus on applied econometrics of consumer choices around energy efficiency. In fact, his technical goal is to derive and apply statistical learning algorithms that are econometrically, behaviorally, and computationally superior to extant tools. Dr. Daziano’s empirical goal is to better understand the interaction of consumer behavior and engineering, investment, and policy choices for energy-efficient technologies and sustainability, especially in transportation.