Speakers

Anne L. Christensen

Anne L. Christensen, professor of accounting, earned a MBA and a Ph.D. in accounting from the University of Utah. She also holds a B.S. in psychology and a M.Ed. in counseling from Brigham Young University. Prior to joining Montana State University's Jake Jabs College of Business & Entrepreneurship (JJCBE) faculty in 2002, she taught at Portland State University for 13 years.

Christensen teaches undergraduate and graduate tax courses in the accounting option. She is the director of the Master of Professional Accountancy Program. She is also the director of the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program at MSU where she trains and supervises students in the preparation of tax returns for low income individuals. She is the past president of the American Taxation Association, a group of approximately 800 tax professors and professionals from throughout the world dedicated to improving tax education and fostering tax research. Her research has been published in journals such as The Journal of the American Taxation Association, Issues in Accounting Education, and The Tax Adviser. She is the President-Elect (2016-2017) of the American Accounting Association.

Laura Brock

Ms. Brock specializes in audit and accounting with a focus in nonprofits and governmental organizations as well as forensic accounting and investigations.  In, addition, she assists with supervision in the field, training, quality review and audit efficiency.

Ms. Brock joined Kerkering, Barberio & Co. in 2016.  She joined KB from CBIZ-MHM, LLC (formerly Kirkland Russ Murphy & Tapp) where she was a managing director/shareholder.  Prior to that, she was a partner with Cherry, Bekaert & Holland and held positions with other accounting firms in Florida.

Ivy Walker

Ivy Walker is Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Helios Digital Learning, a Chicago-based firm that uses first-person storytelling, gamification and adaptive learning to help business professionals and students improve their ethical decision making. Ivy is passionate about developing solutions that can help change the alarming decline in trust that citizens around the world have in institutions—especially big corporations and government. She believes that as institutional actions are the collective actions of individuals and research shows that more than 90% of human behavior is predictable, ethics and compliance programs can be more effective at influencing the right behavior than they presently are. By leveraging the science of decision making and an understanding of adult learner engagement, Ivy works with clients to identify their specific areas of opportunity and to create innovative and effective content and programs powered by real stories. This content is designed to engage employees in a way that helps them to focus on their own decision making and to create a connection to the compliance resources available to them within their organization.

In addition to working directly with institutions and their employees, Ivy is passionate about creating content that leverages first-person storytelling and story immersion through interactive storytelling to help improve ethical decision making for mainstream audiences. Her current projects include the development of story-based games such as “wtf?!(why the fraud?!)”, the in-process documentary, “All the Queen’s Horses”, and an upcoming documentary, “Betting Your Life”, which is in early pre-production.

Ivy’s background includes a range of Fortune 500 and entrepreneurial experiences in both for-profit and not-for-profit/social venture settings. Prior to Helios Digital, she held roles such as President of a venture-backed health technology start-up, CEO of a social venture that brought diagnostic medical imaging technology to low resource countries, and CEO of a business accelerator for start-up and high growth African American owned businesses.

Ivy holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.S. in Community Health from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was awarded Kellogg’s Alumni Entrepreneur Supporter of the Year Award and the Anti-Defamation League’s Rising Star Award. Her civic and professional activities include serving as Board Chairperson for Kaleidoscope, a child welfare agency that focuses on Illinois’ most vulnerable children and serving on the board of Golden Apple Foundation, a nationally recognized non-profit that prepares teachers to be successful in schools of need in Illinois. She is a member of the Economic Club of Chicago, an avid global traveler and an aspiring Cessna pilot.