boston-university
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Jill Beraud
Jill Beraud is an American consumer brand executive who has spent more than three decades building and running some of the best-known names in retail, beauty, luxury and beverages. She began in brand management at Procter & Gamble, ran her own New York advertising agency, then spent 13 years at Limited Brands, where as Chief Marketing Officer of Victoria's Secret she helped grow the label into a multi-billion-dollar business and also led marketing across Bath & Body Works, Express, Henri Bendel, C.O. Bigelow and Limited Stores. In December 2008 PepsiCo created the role of worldwide Chief Marketing Officer for her, reporting to Indra Nooyi; there she pushed the company away from Super Bowl spending and into the $20 million Pepsi Refresh Project, and later ran the Starbucks and Lipton joint ventures. She went on to serve as CEO of Living Proof, EVP of Global Retail Operations at Tiffany & Co., and CEO of the luxury jewelry house IPPOLITA, before co-founding the plant-based functional beverage company Sh'nnong. Fast Company named her one of its 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2013. She has sat on the board of Levi Strauss & Co. since 2013, was re-elected in April 2026, chairs the Fashion for Good board, and has served on the World of Children Board of Governors since 2009.
Yaakov Zar
Yaakov Zar is the founder and CEO of Lev, a New York company rebuilding how commercial real estate gets financed. He started Lev in 2019 after watching a $4 million loan crawl through six months of email, faxes and paperwork - and decided a $200-billion-a-year industry running on 1990s process deserved better software. Lev began as a tech-enabled brokerage connecting borrowers to nearly 10,000 lenders, raised more than $200 million, then pivoted into an AI-powered CRM and agentic workflow platform for brokers, lenders and sponsors. Before Lev, Zar co-founded Dispatch, a workforce platform sold to Vista Equity Partners in 2018.
Constant Therapy
Constant Therapy is a Boston-area digital health company that turns speech, language, and cognitive rehabilitation into an AI-personalized app. Spun out of Boston University's Aphasia Research Laboratory in 2012, its platform delivers more than 100,000 evidence-based exercises across 80-plus task categories to people recovering from stroke, traumatic brain injury, aphasia, dementia, and other neurological conditions - and to the clinicians who treat them. A patented NeuroPerformance Engine adapts each session to the individual, extending therapy beyond the clinic and into daily home practice.
David Durand
David Durand is the CEO and co-founder of Tizra, the Providence-based digital publishing platform that helps associations and scholarly publishers sell, organize, and deliver high-value content. A PhD computer scientist who has worked with markup languages and hypertext since 1984, he helped shape the standards that quietly run the web - XML, TEI, HyTime, XLink, and WebDAV - and co-wrote the first in-depth guide to HyTime. He taught at Brown, served as Chief Scientist at its Scholarly Technology Group, and turned decades of document-engineering research into a company that powers digital libraries for groups like the American Dental Association.
Shabbir Dahod
Shabbir Dahod is the co-founder, President and CEO of TraceLink, the Massachusetts company that built the de-facto industry standard network for tracing pharmaceuticals from factory to patient. He started the company in 2009 out of ideas sparked at MIT, after earlier stints building multimedia and web products at Paul Allen's Asymetrix and Microsoft, and founding the serialization pioneer SupplyScape. Today he is pushing TraceLink's 291,000-entity digital network toward agentic AI and end-to-end supply chain orchestration, work that earned him a 2024 Pros to Know Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ariadna Bogolepova
Ariadna Bogolepova went from a curious Suno user finishing her economics degree in Russia to a UX Research Ops team member at the AI music company in Cambridge. A self-taught content creator whose Suno videos racked up millions of views, she parlayed obsessive product knowledge and a project-management background into a role studying how people actually make music with AI. She holds a Master of Science in Management Studies from Boston University's Questrom School of Business.
Dmitry Fonarev
Dmitry Fonarev is the co-founder and CEO of Testkube, the Kubernetes-native test orchestration platform that has powered over 100 million automated tests for customers including Cloudflare, Siemens, Adobe, and Volvo. A Boston University computer science graduate with more than two decades building engineering teams at Dell, SmartBear, and vKernel, he co-founded Kubeshop in 2021 with SoapUI creator Ole Lensmar, then spun Testkube out as a standalone company that raised an $8M Series A in 2025.