Dean's Thought Leadership Series UCI Merage School

Marlo is an XR technology visionary with a passion for innovating the impossible. Under her leadership, AVATAR Partners™ supports Military and Industry with heavy-duty Immersive Reality and Virtual Workforce Collaboration, Marlo is Chapter President, VR/AR Association Orange County CA, and CEO Roundtable Member, University of California Irvine.

Following Your Passion | Anoosheh Mostafaei-Oskouian by UCI Paul Merage School of Business

Nick Tran MBA ’11, global head of marketing for TikTok.

In his current role at TikTok, Tran oversees all aspects of the company’s global marketing efforts, including brand strategy, media and advertising, social media and co-marketing partnerships. Tran led TikTok's first global marketing campaign, "It Starts on TikTok," to celebrate the global TikTok community for propelling unique and inspiring content into memorable cultural moments and movements.

Before joining TikTok, Nick was vice president of brand and culture marketing at Hulu, where he helped to reinvent the brand, working on memorable campaigns such as "Better Ruins Everything," "Hulu Has Live Sports"(including the Tom Brady Super Bowl ad) and the "World Record Egg."

Josh Childress co-founded LandSpire Group to further his personal commitment to community development and expand the investment platform for people of color. While Josh spent 15 years as a professional basketball player in the U.S., Greece, Australia and Japan, he has cultivated over 10 years of experience as a venture capitalist and real estate investor. He was a seed stage investor in Viola, the largest black-owned cannabis company, and is part owner of the SouthEast Melbourne Phoenix, the only black and minority-owned sports team in Australia.

In 2010, Josh founded the Josh Childress Foundation (JCF) to provide mentorship and resources to high school and collegiate athletes. He also established and funded the Josh Childress Athletic Scholarship, the first ever Summer Studies scholarship at Stanford University. Josh received his B.A. in Sociology from Stanford University.

Chad T. Lefteris, an executive with considerable experience in integrated and academic health systems, has been named CEO of UCI Health, overseeing Orange County’s only academic medical center and all clinical and patient-serving operations.

His appointment was approved by the University of California Board of Regents.

Lefteris has served as UCI Health’s chief operating officer since December 2018. In his new role, he oversees the overall UCI Health system, which includes UCI Medical Center and more than a dozen outpatient research and specialty care centers throughout Orange County and portions of Riverside County.

Catherine Zhou, CEO of EcoKMC LLC, joins Dean Ian Williamson's Thought Leadership Series to share about how organizations should never waste a crisis and always following the market force.

Ms. Catherine Zhou is the CEO of EcoKMC LLC, a management consulting, Investment, a financial advisory firm with an accelerator in China. Our mission is to promote and integrate U.S. technology and solutions into China’s ever-growing market by providing them with Chinese investment, manufacturing resources and, most importantly, Chinese market opportunities. This mission is collaborated through its wholly owned Chinese entity EcoKMC (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. With offices in Los Angeles and Suzhou, on the one side, EcoKMC works closely with Suzhou government, Chinese investment communities, and industries associations to built an eco-system for its China Accelerator; on the other side, EcoKMC has been successfully promoting products, technology, and solutions in China through a tightly managed nationwide distributor channel.

Through the years, Zhou, FEMBA ’04, has aided the Merage School’s admissions and alumni relations efforts in China and was recently selected as the school’s ambassador for China under a new alumni connection program. She helps organize both the Merage School and UCI Alumni chapters in Shanghai.