Speakers

Joni Wilson Ferguson, Leaders Amplify, The Walt Disney Company
Future Forward: Prepping Tomorrow's Leaders Today

Joni Wilson Ferguson is a business veteran with more than 15 years with The Walt Disney Company. Her passion is sharing her career experiences with current and future leaders to provide perspective on leadership in demanding and growing industries. She’s a high energy speaker, with an informative story-telling format that includes the impacts of leadership in your professional and personal life. Leaders Amplify is her growing leadership development and consulting company focused on transforming technically brilliant contributors into effective leaders with technical brilliance.

Yvonne L. Hinson, AICPA
CPA Evolution: Preparing for Changes in the Accounting Profession and Accounting Education

Yvonne Hinson is the Academic in Residence with the Association of international Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA); a position created to foster closer relationships with universities and faculty. She began her accounting career with Arthur Andersen. Yvonne spent most of her academic career at Wake Forest University where she served as a faculty member, Director of Graduate Studies, Director of Accountancy and Dean of Charlotte Programs. Yvonne has served on numerous academic and community committees and nonprofit Boards and is a past President of the Federation of Schools of Accountancy and past Chair of the AAA Membership Advisory Committee. She is currently a member of the IFAC Education Panel, IFAC Directors Panel, the Federal Government’s Cost Accounting Standards Board, AACSB Accounting Accreditation Committee and AACSB Accounting Accreditation Policy Committee. Her research has been published in both academic and practitioner journals.

William E. McCarthy, Michigan State University
Impact the Future: Integrating Practice, Teaching, and Scholarship with Design Ideas from the Far Reaches of the Accounting Universe

William McCarthy is a Professor of Accounting and Information Systems at Michigan State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, majoring in accounting and minoring in computer science. At MSU, he teaches database design and programming classes in the information systems track of their MS program in accounting, where he has won multiple teaching awards at the department, college, and university levels. Professor McCarthy’s research interests center on the application of knowledge-based systems, object orientation, and database theories to the problems of building better accounting systems, and his present research focuses on (1) the development of accounting enterprise ontologies, and (2) the use of independent-view models in open value networks and blockchain environments.

Professor McCarthy worked in the Artificial Intelligence Group of Accenture where he was part of a research team that analyzed the first uses of embedded semantics for the SEC’s EDGAR system. More recently, Bill has been especially active in international e-commerce standardization efforts with the United-Nations-based ebXML project. He is an editor for the ISO-based Open-EDI initiative where he was the principal architect of the accounting and economic ontology for Open-EDI (ISO 15944-4). In the area of blockchain, he is the co-editor of a developing ISO standard (ISO 15944-21) for Distributed Business Transaction Repositories and Open Value Networks. He is also a member of the board of directors for the Accounting Blockchain Coalition.

From the American Accounting Association, Bill has received the Innovation in Accounting Education Award in 2003, the Outstanding Service Award in 2007, the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 2008, and the Cook Prize (graduate category) in 2019. He has also served as an AAA Vice-President and as an Editor for The Accounting Review. He is a co-author (along with Guido Geerts and Graham Gal) of a forthcoming AAA monograph on the REA (Resource- Event-Agent) model and its use as an accounting and economic ontology.

Nicholas McGuigan, Monash University
Preparing for the New World: Facilitating 2020 Vision in Business Professionals

Nick is an award-winning accounting educator who works as an innovator, instigator and disruptor to create future-oriented business education programs that focus on innovation, creativity and design thinking. He has a particular passion for accountability where he co-founded The Accountability Institute—a progressive platform with an aim of fostering collaborations between art, science, technology and economics, bringing these fields into conversation to create a new language of business—a language of accountability. He researches in the areas of integrated thinking, learning technologies, holistic systems design and regenerative economics. This has led to the awarding of competitive research funds of over 1.5 million Australian dollars, including Federal State level grants in both Australia and Germany. He has published widely in international accounting and education journals, been invited to present at research centers and professional organizations in the UK, U.S., Europe, South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and has received considerable international recognition for his work, the most recent being awarded a 2019 Ideas Worth Teaching Award by The Aspen Institute, New York. He instigated Monash Business School’s newly created Artist-In-Residency program, conceptually designed the world’s first ever accounting perfume and together with the accounting profession is embarking on research that investigates a Queer perspective of accounting. He is the International Outreach Chair for the American Accounting Association’s Teaching and Learning Curriculum Section, an invited member of the newly formed European Accounting Association’s Education Taskforce and Co-Chaired the Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, Accounting Education Special Interest Group.