Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. served as a two-term governor of the state of Indiana from 2004 to 2012 and as the 12th president of Purdue University from 2013 to 2022. He currently serves as a Distinguished Scholar and Senior Advisor at the Liberty Fund.
At Purdue, Daniels prioritized student affordability and reinvestment in the university’s strengths. He ended 36 straight years of rising prices by freezing tuition and mandatory fees at 2012 levels for all students. The freeze is still in place today. As a result, the total cost of attendance is lower today than in 2012, even without adjusting for inflation and aggregate student borrowing has declined 37%.
Prior to becoming governor, Daniels served as chief of staff to Senator Richard Lugar, senior advisor to President Ronald Reagan and director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush. He also was the CEO of the Hudson Institute and had an 11-year career as an executive at Eli Lilly and Company. The author of three books and a contributing columnist in the Washington Post, Daniels earned a bachelor's degree from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a law degree from Georgetown.
Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a nationally syndicated columnist. Her primary research interests include the U.S. economy, the federal budget, taxation, tax competition and cronyism. Her weekly columns address economic issues ranging from lessons on creating sustainable economic growth to the implications of government tax and fiscal policies.
De Rugy is the author of a weekly opinion column for the Creators Syndicate, writes regular columns for Reason magazine, and blogs about economics for “The Corner” at National Review Online. Her charts, articles and commentary have been featured in a wide range of media outlets, and in 2015 she was named in Politico magazine's guide to the top 50 thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics.
Previously, de Rugy was a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, and a research fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. She also oversaw academic programs in France for the Institute for Humane Studies Europe. She received her MA in economics from the Paris Dauphine University and her PhD in economics from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
Dominic Pino is the Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at National Review Institute. He is also the host of the American Institute for Economic Research podcast Econception.
Pino holds bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from George Mason University, where he served as the opinions editor for Fourth Estate, GMU’s student newspaper. He also served as a Political Studies Program Fellow for the Hertog Foundation prior to starting his graduate work.
Pino grew up in Wisconsin and lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. He was previously the legal affairs editor of The New Republic and a staff writer for the New Yorker.
Rosen’s new book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. His other books include the New York Times bestseller Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law as well as biographies of Louis Brandeis and William Howard Taft.
Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College at Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar and Yale Law School. In 2024, the French government recognized him as a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Juliette Sellgren is a fourth-year undergraduate studying economics at the University of Virginia. She created and hosts The Great Antidote podcast with Liberty Fund's AdamSmithWorks.org. It explores topics of government, economics, philosophy and modern society.
During her time a Virginia, Sellgren has served as a Winter Humanities Felllow for the Hertog Foundation, a research assistant at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a summer intern at Bates White Economic Consulting in Washington, D.C. She currently works as a research assistant for Professor Charles Holt.
Andreas Widmer is an Associate Professor of Practice in Entrepreneurship at The Catholic University of America’s Busch School of Business, where he has been shaping minds since 2012. He also serves as the director of the Art & Carlyse Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship. In addition, he cofounded The SEVEN Fund, a philanthropic organization that promotes enterprise solutions to poverty.
Widmer’s extensive experience as a business executive spans high-tech, international business strategy, consulting, and economic development. He has held leadership roles at the OTF Group, Eprise Corporation, Dragon Systems, and FTP Software. His work has taken him across the globe, from the United States to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, leading teams to bring over 100 leading-edge technology products to market.
As an author, Widmer has explored the intersection of leadership, entrepreneurship, and spirituality. His book, The Pope & The CEO: Pope Saint John Paul II’s Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard, draws from his experiences serving as a Swiss Guard for Pope John Paul II and his subsequent career in business. His latest book is The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship, Creating Enduring Value, released in April 2022 under the Matt Holt Imprint at BenBella Books.
Dr. Roy Dejoie joined Purdue’s business school in fall 2001 and currently serves as a clinical professor of management in the management information systems area. He is the recipient of several teaching and service accolades at both the school and university level at Purdue, including induction as a Fellow in the Purdue University Teaching Academy in 2015, the school’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2011 and several Outstanding/Distinguished Teacher recognitions across numerous courses dating back to 2002.
Dejoie was also the 2005 recipient of the Purdue University Class of 1922 Award for Outstanding Innovation in Helping Students Learn and was recognized in 2008-09 by Purdue Sorority and Fraternity Life as an outstanding professor. He is also well-known at Purdue and the Daniels School the School for his mentoring and training roles for PhD student teachers and the school’s new faculty. He was recognized as one of the Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Professors of 2022.
Dejoie’s teaching duties at Purdue have included database management systems, systems analysis and design, ethics and information technology, programming languages and team dynamics, as well as introductory courses in management computing, management information systems and supply chain/analytics.
Eamon Duede is an assistant professor of philosophy at Purdue and an epistemologist of science focusing on three streams of research. His theoretical work in the philosophy of science focuses on the epistemology of emerging technologies, principally artificial intelligence (AI). His empirical work investigates and evaluates roles and capabilities of AI in enhancing the effectiveness and scalability of innovative, data-driven, and algorithm-assisted operational frameworks for scientific discovery.
Duede is also concerned with the dynamics of discovery across disciplines, geographic space, and time. In this research, he uses the computational techniques of ‘data science’ to study the flow of knowledge and influence between communities of experts and other audiences, and studies how these can be catalyzed or stymied by institutional and technological factors.
Before joining Purdue, Duede was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, affiliated with the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard Business School and the Embedded EthiCS program in the Philosophy and Computer Science departments. He earned a joint PhD in Philosophy and Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science from the University of Chicago, where he was also an NSF-funded Fellow at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
Mohammad Rahman is the inaugural Daniels School Chair in Management at Purdue’s Mitch Daniels School of Business. He was named one of the World's Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40 by Poets&Quants in 2017. He is known as a technology and business researcher dedicated to examining issues that involve the impact of digital forces on market transformations, user experiences, decision-making, and innovation outcomes.
Rahman is skilled at using micro-level data to measure and quantify digital and physical world interactions to answer long-standing questions of interest for economics and management, such as the omnichannel retail outcomes, business model changes driven by artificial intelligence (AI) transformations, or Airbnb rentals’ effect on local businesses. He was among the first in his field to analyze micro-level clickstream data to better understand online consumers’ experiences and behaviors.
Rahman is the co-founder and president of RightFit Analytics, an AI-powered firm focused on personalized healthcare solutions. He is also the founding director of the Master of Business and Technology (MBT), a degree program focused on educating professionals and leaders who understand both business and technology to drive innovation and stay competitive. He also co-directs the Master of Science in Business Analytics and Information Management (BAIM) program.
Dr. Kasie Roberson is a clinical assistant professor at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue University, where she serves as the associate director of outreach and coaching for the Center for Working Well (CWW) and the course coordinator for MGMT 335 Strategic Business Writing.
Dr. Roberson is the author of Strategic Business Writing: A People-First Approach, an undergraduate textbook published in Spring 2024 by Kendall Hunt that covers an array of different types of business writing and best practices for using Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an effective communication tool.
At Purdue, Dr. Roberson also teaches graduate level courses on executive presence and a PhD communication skills course. A strategic communication expert with an industry background in marketing and communication, she is also the founder and lead executive coach at LGS Coaching, a platform dedicated to performance and leadership coaching.
Melinda Zook is the Germaine Seelye Oesterle Professor of History and Director of Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts for the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. She specializes in the history of political thought, religion and women in early modern Britain and teaches courses on English and medieval history, as well as on such topics as Shakespeare’s Kings and the history of toleration.
Zook has published numerous articles on radical politics, martyrdom, political poetry, queenship, religion, and teaching. She is the author of Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in late Stuart England and Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660-1714, which was awarded Best Book on Gender for 2013 by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.
Zook is the primary architect and current director of the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts, a general education program that provides incoming students with enhanced first-year experience, through its sequence, Transformative Texts I and II, and allows STEM majors to integrate liberal arts coursework into this degree program. In 2020, The National Endowment for the Humanities recognized Cornerstone as a national model for general education and it is currently being replicated at 60 institutions of higher education.
Mara Faccio is the Tom and Patty Hefner Chair in Finance at Purdue’s Daniels School of Business. Her primary research interests are in international finance and corporate finance. Her research has appeared in various leading academic journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Journal of Corporate Finance, Financial Management, and Management Science.
Faccio currently holds the position of president-elect of Financial Management Association International (FMA). She previously served on the board of directors of the American Finance Association. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the International Corporate Governance Society, and a research associate of the European Corporate Governance Institute.
Prior to joining Purdue in 2007, Faccio was a faculty member at Vanderbilt University, at the University of Notre Dame, and at Università Cattolica (Milan). Faccio earned a PhD in finance from Universita' Cattolica (Milan), an MPhil from City University Business School (London), and both a master's degree and a bachelor's degree from Universita' di Pavia.
