Americas Accreditation Conference

Jeremy Utley, Adjunct Professor, Co-Author, Ideaflow, Co-Host, Beyond the Prompt, Stanford University

When it comes to creativity and analytics, Jeremy Utley’s blend of on-your-feet thinking and penetrating insight have earned him a reputation as a go-to advisor for CEO’s and start-up founders alike. He teaches two celebrated courses at Stanford, d.leadership, and LaunchPad, which are focused on creating realworld impact with the tools of design. He is also on the teaching teams of d.org, an organizational design course, and Transformative Design, a course that turns the tools of design onto graduate students’ lives.

One of the most prodigious collaborators at the d.school, Jeremy has taught alongside the likes of Lecrae, Dan Ariely, Laszlo Bock, and Greg McKeown. On his 10th birthday, his father asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Jeremy replied, “One of the people who carry boxes with handles.” Jeremy is a recovering investment analyst and management consultant who does not try to hide his love of spreadsheets. He came to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business with his heart set on leveraging his experiences in Africa and South America to pursue a career in economic development, but an unexpected encounter with the d.school while working at a start-up in India changed his trajectory. His time as a postgraduate design fellow showed him that how he worked was more important than what he did. Today, Jeremy helps people change their deeply-ingrained beliefs about themselves and discover, as he did, that it is possible to make a creative contribution to the world. He does this through teaching as well as by growing alongside his students to become better in his own life and work every day.

Jeremy is the Director of Executive Education at the d.school, and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering, where he has earned multiple “favorite professor” distinctions from graduate programs. He holds a BBA with Honors in Finance from The University of Texas at Austin (2005) and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (2009). 

Sahar Yousef, Cognitive Neuroscientist, The University of California at Berkeley 

Dr. Sahar Yousef is a cognitive neuroscientist and faculty at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. After spending over a decade doing Department of Defense research on neuroplasticity and how to improve memory, attention, and overall human performance in as little as 7 weeks, Sahar now researches and teaches busy leaders and their teams how to be more productive and effective at work.

At Berkeley, Sahar runs the Becoming Superhuman Lab (featured in Forbes and Business Insider) and teaches one of the most popular MBA classes, called "Becoming Superhuman: The Science of Productivity and Performance". Sahar has become one of the world’s leading experts on cognitive training and is featured as a top scientist in the Headspace wellbeing app (used by over 2 million people every day). In 2021, Sahar produced a multi-part video series with John Legend on the science of music and its impact on our focus and emotions.

Since COVID began, Dr. Yousef has given over 600 talks and keynotes to knowledge workers in 50+ countries, has advised executive teams at Google, Coinbase, and Visa, and has even been invited to speak for the US Congress.