CEO, TechUnited:NJ

Aaron Price is the CEO of TechUnited:NJ, the region's largest community of innovators, entrepreneurs and investors, and co-founder of BetterFutureLabs, an AI startup studio. A serial entrepreneur and active investor, Aaron has built several startups, including three successful exits in deliverU, effordables, and most recently, Propelify, an innovation festival dubbed the "SXSW of the Northeast" by Forbes, acquired by TechUnited in 2019. He has served as a tech expert for the Obama Administration, The Wall Street Journal and others. Aaron lives in Hoboken with his wife, their favorite startups — his daughters — and the family dogs, Moose and Milo. 

Partner, Global Corporate Group, Reed Smith

Gerry DiFiore is a partner in Reed Smith’s Global Corporate Group and serves as chairman of the firm's Securities Review Committee. He is a member of the firm’s Emerging Company Practice and its Opinion Committee. He has more than three decades of experience representing clients in equity and debt public offerings, M&A deals, private placements, VC and PE investments, joint ventures, financings, tender offers and similar transactional and governance matters. His experience includes SEC-registered public offerings and global offerings of companies listed in Hong Kong, spin-offs, restructurings and a variety of other transactions.   

DiFiore worked in Reed Smith’s Hong Kong office for several years and has considerable experience in cross-border M&A transactions between China and the U.S. He also has considerable experience in advising public companies on their ongoing SEC reporting requirements, disclosure issues, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and corporate governance matters.  He started his legal career at the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission as a lawyer in the Corporation Finance Division. 

DiFiore works with companies in a variety of industries including life sciences, consumer products, technology/fintech, food and beverage, manufacturing, energy and real estate. He routinely works with senior management and private equity firms and their portfolio companies in reaching strategic goals, assisting companies in all stages of the growth cycle from early-stage private companies to mature publicly traded companies. He has handled capital markets and M&A matters having an aggregate transaction value in excess of $20 billion.

Vice President, Product Development, WorkMarket, HCM Marketplace, ADP Reporting

Isabel Espina '87 is the Vice President of Product Development at ADP, where she leads a diverse portfolio of human capital management products, specializing in scalable, cloud-native, AI-powered and intelligent data analytics solutions. With more than 25 years of experience, she has successfully led global product development teams, delivering solutions that seamlessly align technology with business strategy to drive growth and maintain a competitive market advantage. Espina holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology and a Master of Business Administration from the MIT Sloan School of Management. 

Vice President of Development, Madison Realty Capital

Juan Herrera '00 is Vice President of Development at Madison Realty Capital, where he is responsible for oversight and management of construction. Prior to joining Madison, Herrera worked at Sugarhill Capital Partners as the executive director of development and construction.  His professional experience includes the execution of more than two milion square feet of capital projects in multifamily and mixed assets while implementing sustainable work practices. Herrera earned a Master of Fine Arts in Digital Design from Parsons School of Design. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from NYU and a Bachelor of Engineering in Materials Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology.  

President, Consolidated Edison Company of New York

Matthew Ketschke is president of Con Edison of New York, with responsibility for the safety, construction, planning, design and reliability of Con Edison’s energy systems serving more than nine million New Yorkers with electricity, natural gas and steam. He previously served as senior vice president of Customer Energy Solutions, with areas of responsibility that included energy efficiency, electric transportation and grid modernization. Before becoming a senior vice president, Ketschke served in a series of positions of increasing responsibility at Con Edison including Vice President of Distributed Resource Integration, Vice President of Manhattan Electric Operations and Vice President of Staten Island Electric Operations. He joined Con Edison in 1995. Ketschke holds a Master of Business Administration from Columbia University. He also holds a master’s degree in management and bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology. He currently serves on the board of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and is a Rockefeller Fellow.

Director, Plug and Play New Jersey

Tyler Lange is the Director of Plug and Play New Jersey. He started his career as the eighth hire for Plug and Play's Silicon Valley Insurtech practice, which quickly grew to be the largest vertical in Plug and Play's global ecosystem. He led the East Coast market for the practice, working closely with partners across the insurance value chain including Cigna, The Hartford, Guy Carpenter and AXIS. After this role, Tyler led insurance go-to-market for unicorn fintech startup Array before returning to Plug and Play to lead the firm's first Northeast accelerator, NJ FAST. 

Founder, Sans Regrets

Laura Paglione '90 has more than 25 years of experience across startups and Fortune 100 companies, specializing in persistent identifiers, innovation and research infrastructure. She was the second employee and founding technical director at ORCID, a global not-for-profit that connects research data and solves name ambiguity, which grew to more than five million users in its first six years. Recently, Paglione founded Sans Regrets, a business focused on curating and selling non-alcoholic adult beverages. She holds an MBA from MIT Sloan, a Master of Computer Science from Brown University and a Bachelor of Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology. She also serves on the Stevens Alumni Association board. 

President and General Manager, POET Technologies Inc. 

Vivek Rajgarhia has been a successful entrepreneur and intrapreneur in the optical communications and semiconductor industry for more than 30 years.  He has founded two optical companies and has held senior executive positions, building global businesses, at public companies such as Lucent Technologies, Hitachi (OpNext), MACOM and POET. He received his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology.  He is a father of three and lives in New Jersey with his wife Huynh Nga Nguyen '90, also a Stevens engineering alumna. Outside of his professional responsibilities he enjoys golf, pickleball and following professional soccer.

Technical Program Manager, Google

Izabela Serowik is a technical program manager at Google, spearheading the delivery of novel generative AI prototypes built on Google Cloud for public sector customers across state, local and education domains. Prior to joining Google, she was a design architect at Amazon Web Services, accelerating Fortune 500 customer innovation from concept to prototype. Beyond her corporate roles, Serowik has consulted for two startups, one focused on personalized recommendations for local bars and restaurants and the other focused on managing anxiety via biomarkers collected with an Apple Watch. A proud Stevens Institute of Technology alumna, she earned a B.E. in Engineering Management and a M.E. in Systems Analytics. The academic highlight of her time at Stevens was winning first place at the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition in 2018 with her team, OrthoInsight, which developed a digitally enabled knee replacement implant to reduce the rate of knee-revision surgeries.