If Shakespeare could advise contemporary leaders on how to navigate today’s challenges, what would he say? On January 21, 2025, we’re exploring this question in a special event organized by McGill Delve, the official thought leadership platform for the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, the English Department of McGill University, and the Stratford Festival.
We’re delighted to invite you to attend. Details are as follows:
Reimagining Shakespeare, Remaking Modern World Systems
January 21, 2025, 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
Armstrong Building 365 & 370, McGill University, 3420 rue McTavish
Free event with registration. Register here.
We are honoured to welcome leaders from the cultural, financial, social, and economic spheres to sketch a roadmap towards sustainability and wellbeing, using Shakespeare’s life and work as our guide. Together we will examine the qualities of money-making (wealth, status, power) and meaning-making (the search for purpose, identity, and significance) to determine how they can converge and co-exist to create a better world for everyone.
We hope to see you there.
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Presenters
Shawn Brown
Senior Director of Engineering, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
Dr. Brown is Senior Director of Engineering at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise where he leads a large team of engineers building high-performance computing cloud services. He was formerly the Director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Vice Chancellor of Research Computing at the University of Pittsburgh. He has over 25 years of experience in developing software to support the use of high-performance computing for research in areas such as chemistry, bioinformatics, and public health. His research interests are: (1)How agent-based modeling and other computational techniques can be used to provide decision support in public health and chronic disease; (2) Building of highly convergent collaborative neuroinformatics platforms for open data sharing and computation; (3) Synthetic Ecosystems for representing cohort and cross-sectional data for modeling and open data sharing.
Antoni Cimolino
Artistic Director, Stratford Festival
Member of the Order of Canada
Antoni Cimolino is the Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival, a post he was named to in 2012, having served as General Director, Executive Director and General Manager, in addition to other roles. He began at the Stratford Festival in 1988, as an actor, taking on his first directing projects in the mid-1990s. In 2013, his first season as Artistic Director, Cimolino introduced The Meighen Forum, a season-long series of more than 150 events illuminating the themes of the playbill and illustrating their relevance in today’s world. That same season he directed The Merchant of Venice, with Tom McCamus and Scott Wentworth, and Mary Stuart, with Seana McKenna and Lucy Peacock, a production that was extended an unprecedented four times. In 2014, Cimolino and Executive Director Anita Gaffney launched Stratford Festival On Film, an ambitious project to capture all of Shakespeare’s plays. The productions from this ongoing initiative, along with films of some non-Shakespeare productions and original digital content are part of a massive catalogue of arts programming available on the Festival’s subscription streaming platform, Stratfest@Home. In 2018, Cimolino and Gaffney launched a $100-million campaign to build a new Tom Patterson Theatre. The campaign exceeded its goal and the new theatre opened in May 2022, winning a number of architectural awards, including the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture, the global MasterPrize Award, the UK Civic Trust Award and the Design Excellence Award from the Ontario Association of Architects, as well as the OAA’s People’s Choice Award. Cimolino, now in his 37th season at the Festival, is the director of the 2024 production of London Assurance at the Festival Theatre.
Laurette Dubé Moderator
Emerita Professor and Distinguished McGill Chair of Consumer and Lifestyle Psychology and Marketing
Founding Chair, McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE)
Laurette Dubé is an Emerita Professor and James McGill Chair of Consumer and Lifestyle Psychology and Marketing at the Desautels Faculty of Management. She is Founding Chair and Scientific Director of the McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE). Originally trained as a nutritionist, with graduate degrees in finances (MBA), marketing (MPS), and behavioural decision making/consumer psychology (PhD), Dr. Dubé’s lifetime research interest bears on the study of affects, behavioural economics, neurobehavioural, and socio-economic processes underlying consumption, lifestyle, and health behaviour. Her translational research examines how such knowledge can inspire more effective behavioural change and ecosystem transformation as scale to address complex challenges and possibilities facing modern society. Through MCCHE, Dr. Dubé has pioneered convergence and systems approaches to research and innovation in agri-food, health and economic domains, placing the whole person as the center of the whole society. She is principal investigator of the 3-Agency funded pan-Canadian SMART healthy cities implementation sciences training platform. She is also the academic lead of the ISED-funded FCI-Canada platform that connect enterprises from agri-food sector across Canada to improve their performance and resilience in domestic and international markets. She led Canada International Collaboration into EU-Horizon funded FSAFETY4AFRICA, with both programs anchored into the convergence-by-design approach she pioneered with a world network of like-minded scientists and action leaders. Dr. Dubé is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 2006. She received the 2011 YMCA women of distinction award for the social and environmental science in 2011 and the 2013 The Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.
Scott Henderson
Media and Technology Investor
Board Member, Tangerine (Audit Committee) and SAGE Publishing (Finance Committee)
Scott Henderson has over 25 years of experience operating and investing in media and technology businesses. Over the course of his career,k he has been senior executive / board member with financial, strategic and operating experience. He is a digital native with first-hand experience leading the transition from print to digital (Financial Times). He is the cofounder and CEO of successful technology start-up in business aviation sector (Traxxall). Particular interest in datadriven business models. Extensive Merger &Acquisition experience across publishing, digital media, education, financial technology and aviation.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Novelist, Playwright, Actor
Richler Artist in Residence, McGill University, Department of English
Officer of the Order of Canada
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a novelist, playwright, actor, and television host. Her work has been honoured with numerous awards, including the Chalmers, the Governor General’s, Gemini, Dora Mavor Moore, John Drainie, the Gascon-Thomas, the Canadian Authors Association, the Canadian Booksellers Association, and the Commonwealth Prize. Her writing for the stage includes the plays, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet), Belle Moral: A Natural History, and Hamlet-911; the libretto for the chamber opera, Nigredo Hotel, and book and lyrics for Anything That Moves; her novels are Fall On Your Knees, The Way the Crow Flies, Adult Onset, and Fayne. Ann-Marie graduated from the Acting Program of The National Theatre School of Canada in 1980. In 2019 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. She was the 2024 Mordecai Richler writer-in-residence at McGill University.
Raghu Machiraju
Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science and Engineering and Pathology at the Ohio State University.
Raghu Machiraju is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science and Engineering, Pathology at The Ohio State University. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of the ICICLE, a newly funded NSF Institute to Democratize AI ( icicle.ai). Additionally, he serves as an Associate Chair for Growth in the Department Computer Science and Engineering and as a Principal Data Scientist at the Translational Data Analytics Institute. Raghu’s research includes applying data science and AI models to problems from the clinic and the biology laboratory.
André Pratte
Expert Panelist, Canadian Centre for the Purpose of the Corporation
The Honorable André Pratte is an Expert Panelist at the Canadian Centre for the Purpose of the Corporation (CCPC. André assumes the role after a successful career as a journalist spanning nearly 40 years. Most of this time, he worked for La Presse, Canada’s foremost French language newspaper. From 2001 to 2015, he was the paper’s Chief Editorial Writer and was part of the company’s management team. In 2016, André was appointed to the Senate as an independent Senator. Disappointed by the partisanship that still dominated the Senate, he resigned from this position in 2019. In 2022, André received an MBA from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts. Earlier in his career, he had studied economics at McGill University and received a B.A. in political science from the Université de Montréal. Besides his journalism career, André wrote several books on history, the media and politics, including a biography of Wilfrid Laurier. He has spent years reflecting on issues such as crisis management, the media’s role in society, the social license to operate, businesses’ purpose, economic development, the exploitation of Canada’s immense natural resources, and climate change. André also sits on the boards of The Lighthouse – Children and Families and of the Paul Gérin-Lajoie Foundation.
Frédéric Sanama
Head of Strategic Development, Sustainable1, S&P Global
