Dr. Faith Power is a serial entrepreneur, having started and run several companies. Most recently she was the CEO of Ambriel Technologies, LLC, a technology research and development firm whose focus is to support, enhance and expand the capabilities of global communications. Prior to Ambriel Technologies, Power was the founder and CEO of Power/Warner Communications Group, Inc., a full-service marketing communications firm.
In addition to being an entrepreneur, Power is also an organizational consultant and professor teaching in the areas of leadership, cultural change, organizational structure and behavior, entrepreneurship and business management.
Active across the Commonwealth of Virginia, Power served as board chair of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the Top of Virginia Regional Chamber of Commerce. She is currently a member of Valley Health System’s Board of Trustees, the Virginia Port Authority and Our Health.
Power holds a B.A. in Political Science from Marshall University, a Master’s degree from The George Washington University in Education and Human Development and has an applied organizational science doctoral degree from The George Washington University. Power’s doctoral research area of interest is present-moment sensemaking.
Dr. Luis Velazquez-Araque received his Mechanical Engineering degree from the National University of Tachira, Venezuela in 2003. He has experience in the oil industry having worked for Petroleos de Venezuela and also in the cement industry having worked for Lafarge Group. He received his Ph.D. in Thermodynamics and Fluid Dynamics at the Czech Technical University in Prague in 2011 and has been a university professor for more than 12 years at the National University of Tachira and visiting professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague during 4 years. After returning from Czech Republic he founded the Aerodynamics Laboratory at the National University of Tachira.
He is member of the following societies: American Society of Thermal Fluid Engineers ASTFE, American Society of Mechanical Engineers ASME, International Institute of Informatics and Systemics IIIS, Venezuelan Society of Engineers and Rotary International.
He has been part of the "Prometeo Project" from Ecuador, an initiative of the Ecuadorian Secretary of Higher Education Science and Technology, sharing his expertise in the field of teaching and research in biofuels. Luis also began his career as a motivational speaker in 2012, basing his conferences on people development key areas such as leadership, perseverance and attitude. Dr.Velazquez-Araque has published more than 20 papers at international conferences and journals in countries such as USA, Japan, Russia, Taiwan, Netherlands, Austria, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Ecuador and Venezuela. He is currently associate professor at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the University of Guayaquil in Ecuador and founder of the company Innoveos Consulting.
Dr. Nagib Callaos is the Founding President of a 32 years old Multi-Disciplinary Organization oriented to 1) solve real life problems which mostly require multi-disciplinary teams and 2) to synergistically relate all disciplinary and inter-disciplinary departments of the University Simon Bolivar with the public and the private sectors as well as with business and the Venezuelan society at large. He is also the Founding President of the IIIS and the Founding Editor in Chief of the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics (JSCI). He is former Dean of Research and Development of the University Simon Bolivar.
Professor Callaos was also the founding president of several organizations on research, development, and technological innovation, e.g. The Foundation of Research and Development of the University Simon Bolivar, the founding president of the Venezuelan Fund for Technological Innovations (created by presidential decree), which required the evaluation of projects from any discipline as well as technological innovations that required multi-disciplinary teams, The Venezuelan Association of Executives in Patents and Copyrights. As a professional, Dr. Callaos was for many years consultant in Information Systems in the largest corporations in Venezuela including its Central Bank. In this context he is the Founding president of a consulting 32 years old consulting firm in information systems and software engineering. His main research, academic, and professional activities, along almost 50 years were in the area of systemic Methodologies of Information System Development, Group Decision Support Systems, and Action-Research mainly via Operations Research. He tutored more than 100 undergraduate and graduate theses and produced more than 100 research papers and reflection articles. He has also edited, or co-edited many books, mostly conferences proceedings.
Some academic areas necessarily require consulting activities or other related practicing experiences. For example, what would be the “lab” for a professor of information systems development methodologies if not information systems development in the real world? In some other academic fields, consulting activities might enrich, support, and enhance research, as it might be the case in some Engineering fields, Law, Medicine, Managements Science, Operation Research, etc. But yet, in other academic fields, consulting is perceived as an activity that might distract from what is considered proper scholarly research.In some fields or disciplines this might be true at the individual or team level.However, even in these cases scholarly research would eventually generate, via other scholars or researchers, applied research which would support real life problem solving and, consequently, the decision and policymaking processes that are part of the consulting activities. Consequently, research and consulting, directly or indirectly, immediately or not, complement and relate to each other via cybernetic co-regulative loops (negative feedback or feedforward) and co-amplificatory loops (positive feedback). These loops, in turn, may potentially produce synergic effects that: a) increase the effectiveness (and possibly the efficiency) of both kinds of activities, and/or b) generate systems/products development, innovations, entrepreneurship, patents, research papers, etc.
At the individual or team level, disciplinary research and consulting activities are not required to complement each other. However, at the organizational level in Higher Education, research and consulting activities (or real life problem solving) should be related to each other in order to integrate the organization to society at large. This is a necessary condition for legitimizing research universities, reciprocating the financial support being provided by society, and maintaining their functioning as academic organizations, not completely dedicated to instruction or education, but also to research. An increasing number of academics are, explicitly or implicitly, relating research and consulting activities to each other and, sometimes, to their educational activities. Consulting via research and doing research via consulting are both being done with more frequency, in the corporate sector as well as in the academic sector, including organizations created by (and/or in the context of) Higher Education organizations.
