These will be our speakers for the 2024-2025 BFCGI Speaker Series. We are really excited about these thought-leaders and the discussion they will bring to our students and community! Many thanks to our sponsors for their support in helping the Creighton Community host these public discussions.

Joe Vukov (Loyola-Chicago)

Joe Vukov is associate professor of philosophy at Loyola Chicago, where he serves as Associate Director of The Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. His research explores questions at the intersection of ethics and the cognitive sciences, and at the intersection of science and religion. He is author of 3 books, including Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence, in which he argues that AI lacks the embodiment which is such a crucial aspect of human life.

Joshua Fershée, JD, became the 11th dean of the Creighton University School of Law on July 1, 2019. Fershée previously served as associate dean for faculty research and development, professor of law, and director of LLM programs at West Virginia University College of Law.

Steven Fernandes (Computer Science, Creighton U.) Building Robust AI Models

Dr. Steven Fernandes specializes in artificial intelligence, with a focus on deep neural networks, computer vision, and medical image processing. His research primarily revolves around the development and application of novel AI methodologies to enhance the accuracy and robustness of outputs from deep neural networks. A key area of his work involves creating metrics, such as the attribution-based confidence metric, which assess the trustworthiness of outputs from deep neural networks. Some of his work has been used in the field of medicine, demonstrating the value and impact of AI for medicine.

Andreas Widmer (Catholic U. of America)

Andreas Widmer was a Swiss Guard at the Vatican for Pope John Paul II, and wrote a book about lessons he learned there entitled, The Pope and the Ceo . He is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and teaches at Catholic University of America. His most recent book is The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship: Creating Enduring Value

Elisabeth Kincaid (Baylor)

Elisabeth Kincaid is associate professor of ethics, faith and culture in Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, affiliate member in the Department of Management, and Director of Baylor’s Institute of Faith and Learning. She previously held the Legendre-Soule Chair in Ethics at the College of Business in Loyola University New Orleans where she was director of the Center for Ethics and Economic Justice.

Alex Salter (Texas Tech)

Alex Salter is Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and an associate editor of the Journal of Private Enterprise.  Additionally, he is a Sound Money Project senior fellow and a Young Voices State Beat fellow.

His newest book, The Medieval Constitution of Liberty: Political Foundations of Liberalism in the West, was released on August 8, 2023.

His other books are Money and the Rule of Law: Generality and Predictability in Monetary Institutions​, published by Cambridge University Press (May 2021), The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good, published by Catholic University of America Press (June 2023), and The Spirit of ’76: Libertarianism and American Renewal, published by the American Institute for Economic Research (July 2023).

Jordan Magnuson (Southhampton, UK)

Jordan Magnuson is currently Senior Lecturer in Games and Media Art at the University of Southampton, and 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Media at the University of Bergen.  His recently published book, Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023), is a deeply interdisciplinary look at the potential convergences between game making and lyric poetry, and has been praised by a wide-range of scholars, game designers, and poets. Jordan started his first indie games company in 1999, and in 2005 he founded The Independent Gaming Source (TIGSource.com), a community site for indie game developers which became the birthplace of a generation of innovative indie titles such as Fez, Spelunky, Papers Please, and Minecraft. 

Zach McDonald (entrepreneur)

Zach McDonald is former President of Three Crowns, a marketing company in Omaha. He recently founded his own company, Clay Pigeon Communications, and he is quite interested in AI and other technologies and their effects on business and society.

THANKS TO OUR GENEROUS SPONSORS!!!