Innovation drives success. Diversity drives innovation. Gender, age, culture, personality, experience, perspective,... diverse groups perform better than not.

Come to the Symposium for perspectives on diversity, innovation and success

Sheldon Inwentash, a serial entrepreneur, is chairman and chief executive officer of ThreeD Capital Inc., a Toronto-based venture capital firm specializing in investments in the junior resource, graphene, AI, AR and blockchain sectors.

Sheldon has more than 30 years of investing experience and has been instrumental in raising $15 billion for his portfolio companies over the last 15 years. He co-founded Visible Genetics, the first commercial pharmacogenomics company, in 1994 and exited in 2001 to Bayer. Through two decades leading Pinetree Capital, Sheldon created significant shareholder value through early investments in Queenston Mining (acquired by Osisko Mining Corp. for $550-million), Aurelian Resources (acquired by Kinross for $1.2-billion) and Gold Eagle Mines (acquired by Goldcorp for $1.5-billion) to name a few.

Sheldon obtained his B.Comm from the University of Toronto and is a Chartered Accountant/Certified Professional Accountant. In 2007, he was an Ontario finalist for the Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the year award. In 2012, Sheldon received an honorary degree, doctor of laws (LL.D) from the University of Toronto for his valuable leadership as an entrepreneur, his philanthropy, and inspirational commitment to making a difference in the lives of children, youth and their families. Sheldon is a keynote speaker at many conferences and events worldwide. In his spare time, Sheldon is an avid art collector.

Barbara Stewart, CFA is one of the world’s leading researchers on women and finance. For the past nine years, she has researched, written and published an annual series of Rich Thinking® white papers, launching every International Women’s’ Day.

In addition to being a researcher and author, Barbara is a sought after speaker, educator and evangelist on women, money and investing. Barbara is an advocate for women, for diversity, and for financial education, both in public and as a consultant using her proprietary research skills to help large global financial institutions seeking to transform themselves. She is a columnist for the CFA Institute’s Enterprising Investor website, a contributor for Golden Girl Finance, and a thought leader regularly consulted by print and broadcast media worldwide. Barbara is on the Advisory Board for Kensington Capital Partners Limited in Toronto.

In her previous life, Barbara spent five years as an institutional currency trader and 20 years as a portfolio manager and investment counsellor for high net worth investors. She lives in Toronto with her husband Duncan Stewart, CFA and their Bernese Mountain Dog Hank.

MBA Financial Engineering, ICADE (Madrid, Spain).

Rafael García (54) started his professional career as a financial analyst and portfolio manager at Banco Santander.

In 1993, he founded SERFIEX, a Risktech, FinTech and RegTech company.

SERFIEX is nowadays the Spanish leader on financial and actuarial risk-management solutions.

Rafael has leaded or coordinated more than 250 projects on risk management and ALM for banks, insurance companies and asset management companies.

Rafael is also CEO of VALUEX (Valuadora y Proveedora de Precios del Perú S.A), a company created by SERFIEX and Bolsa de Valores de Lima (Peruvian Stock Exchange), in 2017. VALUEX is one of the two official pricing providers of the Peruvian financial industry.

Rafael is President of TUS OJOS, a Spanish film production company specialized on educational and childhood related movies.

Wendy K. Tam Cho Professor with appointments in the Departments of Political Science, Statistics, Mathematics,Asian American Studies, and the College of Law, Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for SupercomputingApplications, a Guggenheim Fellow (2015-2016), Faculty in the Illinois Informatics Institute, and Affiliate of the ClineCenter for Advanced Social Research, the Computational Science and Engineering Program, and the Program on Law,Behavior, and Social Science, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Her general research interests are in the development and application of computational and statistical models in the socialsciences. Her research is driven by a desire to discover creative and important ways for social scientific progress andsocietal advances to march alongside scientific and technological growth. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, capitalizingon the strengths of many individual disciplines by recognizing and integrating them into a collective approach. Her aim isto harness the power of information by developing statistical and mathematical models to guide computing technologytoward intelligent information extraction. Her scholarly publications have appeared in the fields of Political Science,Geography, Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, High Performance Computing, Operations Research, Physics, AsianAmerican Studies, Racial and Ethnic Politics, and Law. Her research has been supported by multiple grants from theNational Science Foundation (political science, statistics, and engineering programs) as well as computing allocationgrants on the Blue Waters Supercomputer.