We are very excited about this year’s Business, Faith and Common Good Speaker Series! We have a wide range of experts coming to help our students think about business and the common good, ranging from the role of AI in the fields of Law, Medicine, and business, as well as nationally known experts in the fields of economics, entrepreneurship and Catholic thought.

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.

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!!!