Plenary 2021

William Collis

Co-owner and Co-founder of Team Genji
William Collis

Co-owner and Co-founder of Team Genji

William is the co-owner and co-founder of Team Genji, the esports analytics company behind the number one Hearthstone team in the world. William also co-founded the video game coaching platform Gamer Sensei, which raised over $6M in venture capital before selling in 2018.

William is the co-host of the popular Business of Esports podcast, alongside Paul 'The Profit' Dawalibi, a weekly show that debates the latest trends and opportunities in the industry. He is a frequent speaker at major gaming conventions like PAX, as well as a co-founder and senior advisor to America's first accredited esports business major at Becker College. His lectures on esports at Becker are among the most popular ever taught at the university.

William’s writing is often featured in numerous international publications such as the Japan Times, with his popular work 'Super Mario Syndrome' receiving wide reprints in Asia. He co-authored the award-winning Harvard Business School (HBS) case 'One Game to Rule Them All' and is the focus of the popular HBS case 'Choosing the Right Esports Business Model'.

His recent work The Official History of Esports™ is considered to be a definitive guide to the modern world of competitive gaming, and The Official History of Esports™.

William graduated from Amherst College cum laude and Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar.

Dr. Sanjay Padhi

Head of AWS Research, US Education
Dr. Sanjay Padhi

Head of AWS Research, US Education

Dr. Sanjay Padhi, leads the AWS Research Initiatives including various federal initiatives in collaboration with NSF, NIH and other government agencies. He is a physicist and Adjunct Professor at Brown University. Dr. Padhi has more than 15 years of experience in large-scale Distributed Computing, Data Analytics and Machine Learning, and is the co-creator of workload management systems, currently used for all the data processing and simulations activities by CMS, one of the largest experiments in the world at CERN, consisting of more than 180 institutions across 40 countries. He also co-founded the Computing Grid project at Deutsches Elektronen- Synchrotron (DESY), Germany before joining CERN. Dr. Padhi obtained his PhD from McGill University in High Energy Physics and is also currently appointed by the Dean of Faculty as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Physics at Brown University.

Brian Flemming, Ed.D.

Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Southern New Hampshire University
Brian Flemming, Ed.D.

Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Southern New Hampshire University

Prior to his current role Brian served as executive director of the Sandbox ColLABorative at Southern New Hampshire University. Sandbox is a platform for concept-development and collaborative learning, and applies design-based principles and foresight strategies to help inform SNHU’s strategy. Prior to joining Sandbox, Brian was a Principal at Tyton Partners, a strategy consulting firm focused on education and human capital management markets, and a Senior Analyst at Eduventures, a Boston-based research firm supporting the higher education community.