Dr. Madhu Viswanathan

Madhu Viswanathan (B.Tech, Mechanical Engineering, IIT, Madras, 1985; Ph.D.(Marketing), University of Minnesota, 1990) is Professor of Marketing, College of Business Administration at Loyola Marymount University in 2019, and Professor Emeritus, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research programs are on measurement, and subsistence marketplaces, where he has authored several books including Measurement Error and Research Design (Sage, 2005), Enabling Consumer and Entrepreneurial Literacy in Subsistence Marketplaces (Springer, 2008), Subsistence Marketplaces (2013), and Bottom-Up Enterprise (2016). He pioneered the area of subsistence marketplaces, a bottom-up approach to poverty and marketplaces (www.business.illinois.edu/subsistence). He teaches courses on research methods, subsistence, and sustainability reaching thousands of students in-person and on-line. He founded and directs the Marketplace Literacy Project (www.marketplaceliteracy.org), pioneering marketplace literacy education that has reached more than 100,000 women across four continents. He has received numerous awards and served on the Livelihoods Advisory Board of UNHCR.

Ron Duncan

Ron Duncan currently serves as an instructor in the School of Earth, Society and Environment at the University of Illinois. In addition he serves as a Senior Lecturer for Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California where co-facilitates the Business for Good curriculum for incoming freshmen.

Mr. Duncan’s career has spanned an array of technical and managerial positions in healthcare and manufacturing prior to coming to education. Working as an Engineer for the Whirlpool Corporation USA, Ron was one of only six internal Performance Effectiveness Specialist serving the company’s North America manufacturing facilities and is credited with the development of electrical control devices patented by Whirlpool. In this role, he was involved in critical manufacturing system design efforts and human factors performance improvements.

A skilled facilitator and project manager, Ron was recognized in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Labor for his assistance in helping the agency broaden the scope of its efforts to make the national online labor data base (O’NET) more accurate in the area of college and professional educators. Along with his engineering credentials Ron holds a bachelor’s degree in Human Resource Development and a master’s degree in Management Science. He has also completed post graduate work in Workforce Education and Development.