Author: pmiller

The September meeting of the Roundtable is at noon, Thursday, September 19th, at the Capital City Club downtown. 

We’re honored to have as speaker the author, lecturer, NFL player, ESPN analyst, and college coach Bill Curry.  The title of Bill’s talk is “Football, Beyond the Obvious”.

Bill was a multi-sport star at College Park High, played football at Georgia Tech, was a ten-year NFL player, and appeared in two Super Bowls and two Pro-Bowls.  He was head football coach at Georgia Tech, Alabama (where he was SEC Coach of the Year), and Kentucky.  In 2008, Bill started the Georgia State football program from scratch, building the foundation for GSU’s recent miraculous win over Tennessee.

Curry’s book “Ten Men You Meet in the Huddle” is highly recommended.  Pat Conroy wrote “Bill Curry has a wonderful gift for portraiture. This is by far the best book about the NFL I’ve ever read.”  The Avondale Book Club rated the book “must read”.

The May meeting of the Roundtable is at noon, Thursday, the 16th, at the Capital City Club downtown.

Our speaker is John Avery, the new Director of the Advanced Technology Development Center. Founded in 1980, ATDC has developed a global reputation for fostering technological entrepreneurship. Forbes named ATDC to its list of “Incubators Changing the World” in 2010 and 2013. The center has graduated 170 companies, generating $12B of revenue in Georgia.

John Avery is a serial entrepreneur who was part of four startups. With broad experience in data and wireless voice technologies, John was co-founder and chief technology officer of Convergence Corp., a maker of software that connects wireless devices to the Internet. Amazon acquired the company in 1999 and John then served as an engineering manager with Amazon. Before joining ATDC, he was engineering group manager of Panasonic Automotive Systems’ Panasonic Innovation Center at the Georgia Tech campus.

John is a Georgia Tech graduate with a bachelor’s degree in engineering. He holds six patents.

The April meeting of the Roundtable is at noon, Thursday, April 18th, at the Capital City Club downtown. 

Our speaker is Ed McBrayer, the irrepressible Executive Director and co-founder of the PATH Foundation.  Established in 1991, the foundation has built over 285 miles of trails for walkers, runners, skaters and cyclists in the Atlanta area.  The PATH trails are transformative, making Atlanta greener, more pedestrian-friendly and a more livable city. The foundation is one of the key partners of the popular Atlanta Beltline.

Ed will tell us about the history and overall mission of PATH, acquaint us with existing PATH trails, and reveal plans for exciting new connections that will make Atlanta the most trail-connected city in the U.S.

Ed McBrayer is a Georgia native and graduated from Georgia Tech in Aerospace Engineering.  He worked for NASA and  then entered the construction industry, building over 1000 homes in the Denver area.  Ed also serves PATH as a construction manager;  he oversaw development of the Silver Comet Trail (one of the longest paved trail systems in the U.S), the Island Trail system in St.Simons, the Carrollton Greenbelt in Carrollton, and the Spanish Moss Trail in Beaufort S.C.

The March meeting of the Roundtable is at noon, Thursday, the 21st, at the Capital City Club downtown. 

Our speaker is Louise Wasilewski, CEO and founder of Acivilate.   Established in 2014, her company’s mission is to improve outcomes for those involved in criminal justice, from law enforcement and the courts, to correctional and supervision officers, human service professionals and faith-based volunteers, and most importantly, the returning citizen and their family.  

Ms. Wasilewski will talk about the challenges related to hiring individuals with a record. She is passionate about improving criminal justice outcomes because it is an issue that has affected her family.  

A former inmate in the US has a 68% chance of returning to prison within three years.  Acivilate is working in Gwinnett County and across the country to create the conditions for returning citizens to be reliable employees. The company connects individuals with support services, provides reminders for appointments and makes it possible for them to stay in touch with their probation officers.  

Louise Wasilewski is a member of the Greater Gwinnett Reentry Alliance, the Metro Atlanta Reentry Coalition, the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, the American Correctional Association and the National Criminal Justice Association.  She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Aerospace Systems Engineering from Southampton University and an MBA from Emory University.  She has five patents.

The February meeting of the Roundtable is at noon, Thursday, the 21st, at the Capital City Club downtown. 

February’s meeting is especially timely given the recent focus on US-China relations.  Our speaker is Dr. Mary Brown Bullock, China scholar and former president of Agnes Scott College.  Her topic will be “China at Seventy: Implications for the United States.”   

Dr. Bullock has served as a distinguished visiting professor of Chinese studies at Emory University and as the executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China.   Dr. Bullock’s most recent publications are The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy in China (2011) and as co-editor, Medical Transitions in Twentieth-Century China (2014).  She is a member of the Schwarzman Academic Advisory Committee and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  

A 1966 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Agnes Scott, Dr. Bullock earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in Chinese history from Stanford University.  Bullock and her husband George live in Atlanta.  

The January meeting of the Roundtable is at noon, Thursday, January 17th, at the Capital City Club downtown.

We are pleased to have as speaker Dr. Dmitry Shayakhmetov, Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine and David C. Lowance Chair in Human Immunology at Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Shayakhmetov and Roundtable member Henry Wyche are co-founders of AdCure Biotechnologies, LLC.

The focus of Dr. Shayakhmetov’s research is on improving our understanding of how the human immune system initiates and exacerbates inflammation in response to viral and bacterial pathogens. AdCure Bio is a viro-immuno-therapy company, developing potent and safe oncolytic viruses for therapy of solid cancer tumors.

Dr. Shayakhmetov obtained his BS degree in biochemistry and PhD degree in molecular biology and virology under the supervision of one of the leading virologists in Russia. He obtained his postdoctoral training in virology and immunology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The November meeting of the Roundtable is at noon, Thursday, November 15th, at the Capital City Club downtown.

Our speaker is Georgia State University Regents’ Professor Dr. Douglas Gies, director of the GSU Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA). Funded by the National Science Foundation, CHARA operates the CHARA Array on Mt. Wilson in in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles, California. The CHARA Array combines starlight from six widely separated component telescopes to act like one enormous telescope in terms of recording the fine details of stars and their environments, and it is the largest such telescope array in the world.

Dr. Gies will speak on “Seeing the Stars Close Up with the CHARA Array” and will provide a down-to-earth description of the discoveries made with this unique astronomical facility.

Doug Gies has enjoyed stargazing since taking it up first as a hobby as a high school student. He has Bachelor, Masters and PhD degrees in astronomy from the University of Toronto. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin, and he came to Georgia State as a professor in 1988. He the author or co-author of some 180 research papers in the scientific literature, and he is a frequent speaker to both expert and non-technical audiences.