Lorenzo Mejia is an entrepreneur who is passionate about building successful organizations that benefit their communities.  He has diverse experience in capital raising, finance, marketing and general management and has worked and lived in Asia, Europe and Latin America.  Prior to starting Acorn, Mejia held executive roles in four venture-backed companies focusing on healthcare, telecommunications and cloud computing. In his early career, he worked on Wall Street.

Mr. Mejia has an MBA and MA from Stanford University, and an MS from the University of California at Berkeley.  He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).  In 2014, he founded Dementia Friendly Orange County (www.DFOC.org) a non-profit that provides free dementia training to local businesses.

Learn more about Acorn Home Care Services, Inc.

Professor Jennifer Blouin’s research centers on the role of taxation in firm decision making. Professor Blouin studies taxation in many contexts, including capital structure, asset pricing, payout policy and multinational firm behavior. Professor Blouin’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals including Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, National Tax Journal and the Journal of the American Taxation Association. She has received funding from the Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research, the Global Initiatives Research Program and the International Tax Policy Forum. In addition, Professor Blouin is a 2009-2010 Golub Faculty Scholar.  Professor Blouin teaches taxation to undergraduate, MBA, and PhD students. She received her PhD in Accounting from the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill and her BS from Indiana University – Bloomington.

Sunwoo is a PhD candidate in finance at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. Prior to joining the program, he worked as an Asia research analyst and headed Korea research of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) at MSCI. With his team based in Singapore, he produced research and vote recommendations on publicly-traded companies in the region for ISS’ clients, who are the largest institutional shareholders worldwide. Prior to joining ISS, he majored in asset management at KDI School of Public Policy and Management (2009-2010), industrial engineering and operations research at Pennsylvania State University (2007-2009), and industrial and information systems engineering at Ajou University (2002-2007). While at Ajou, he took two years off to serve in the Republic of Korea Marine Corps as an intelligence and communications specialist.

Tsafrir is a PhD student at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, UNC, Accounting department. He is interested in cyber-security and capital markets regulation, information disclosure policies, insurance and capital optimization. Previously, he was a researcher at the Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University. He has interned as a financial consultant at Ernst&Young, Israel’s top accounting firm, at the Transaction Advisory Services (TAS).  During his internship he utilized financial modelling and optimization tools to support transaction analysis. His work concerned insurance companies, high-tech startups, the energy sector and general retail.

Steve Miller is a family business expert and co-founder of the Family Enterprise Center at UNC Kenan-Flagler.

His research focuses on next-generation leadership development in family-owned enterprises.

Dr. Miller works with family businesses and his students to help them develop world-class, sustainable enterprises. His approach to family business leadership is to create and use business and governance strategies that align business, family and ownership goals.

He draws on his 34 years of experience as the top non-family executive of the Vanderbilt/Cecil family-owned Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C., where he played a key role in making Biltmore the most visited historic home in the United States, with over 1 million visitors each year.

He also is president of GenSpan, Inc. in Asheville. In addition to ongoing succession planning, leadership training, and strategic consulting for The Biltmore Company and other clients, he chairs the board of Draper & Kramer, a fourth-generation family-owned real estate development and management firm in Chicago, and serves on the board of Asheville Savings Bank, a public community bank.

Dr. Miller received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Undergraduate Business Program at UNC Kenan-Flagler. He completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

Barry Schochet serves as the managing partner and senior counsel of Volt Energy, one of the world’s largest minority-owned solar energy development firms based in Washington D.C. As managing partner, Schochet oversees business development and strategy for the company.

Schochet is also a distinguished attorney. His career has included private law practice and service in the U.S. Senate, where he was counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee and staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.

As a business developer, Schochet has crafted significant projects in both the U.S. and international markets. These projects have spanned a variety of industries including food service, real estate, restaurant, financial and solar. He was also an early limited partner of The Cheesecake Factory, playing an integral part in the company’s early expansion nationwide and initial public offering.

Schochet also serves on the Chancellor’s Associates Council at University of California, San Diego.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his J.D. from Emory University.

Clifton has served as CEO of Gallup, a global leader in public opinion research and advanced analytics, since 1988. Under his leadership, Gallup has expanded from a predominantly U.S.-based company to a worldwide organization with 30 offices in 20 countries and regions.

Clifton is the creator of The Gallup Path, a metric-based economic model that establishes the linkages among human nature in the workplace, customer engagement and business outcomes. This model is used in performance management systems in more than 500 companies worldwide. His most recent innovation, the Gallup World Poll, is designed to give the world’s 7 billion citizens a voice on virtually all key global issues.

In June 2015, the Clifton Foundation and Gallup announced a $30 million gift to the University of Nebraska to establish the Don Clifton Strengths Institute. The gift will support the early identification and accelerated development of thousands of gifted entrepreneurs and future business builders.

Clifton is the author of The Coming Jobs War and coauthor of Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder, as well as many articles on global leadership. His blog appears regularly in the Influencer section of LinkedIn and on Gallup.com’s Chairman’s Blog. He serves on several boards and is Chairman of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. He has received honorary degrees from Jackson State, Medgar Evers and Bellevue Universities.

Shawn Munday is a professor of the practice of finance and executive director of the Institute for Private Capital at UNC Kenan-Flagler.

The Institute for Private Capital was founded to promote research and public understanding of the roles of private capital in the global economy.

Professor Munday was a managing director in the alternative assets group at Citigroup where he advised and financed alternative asset managers on over $75 billion of transactions including leveraged buyouts, dividend recapitalizations, bolt-on acquisitions, IPOs and divestitures.

Prior to Citigroup, he served as a commissioned submarine officer in the U.S. Navy.

He received his MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler and a BS in electrical engineering from the United States Naval Academy.

Ben Holmes, a Durham, N.C. native, holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the College of Charleston. After graduating in 2010, he held several roles in operations management for Shimano American Corp, a leading outdoor retail product manufacturer. Immediately prior to business school, Holmes worked as a project manager for a local logistics company in Raleigh called Riley Life.

As an MBA candidate at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, Holmes focused his studies on operations management, finance and sustainability. He began working with NC Growth as an analyst in Aug. 2015. He joined the Kenan Institute’s affiliated center, because he wanted to contribute his acquired and growing business skills to communities in distressed regions of the state. He’s passionate about rural communities and is very interested in economic development.

Over a two year period, Holmes successfully completed four projects for NCGrowth. They included marketing strategy and online fulfillment recommendations for Cape Fear Vineyard and Winery in Balden County and a business plan for Tortillas Carolina in Robeson County, which was devastated during Hurricane Matthew. His projects were wide ranging and demonstrated his adaptability and the dedication he has to serving the people of North Carolina.

Upon completing the MBA program in 2017, Holmes joined Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tenn. as a product manager.

In his time in the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School MBA program, Eric Blocher has simultaneously served as president of the MBA Healthcare Club and has taken action to develop an independent research project supporting the Kenan Institute and UNC Kenan-Flagler on the Business of Healthcare initiative. This research intensive project will help to map the healthcare innovation and commercialization ecosystem across the campus and the region. During the past year, he also participated in five projects for startup consulting through UNC’s Technology Commercialization Carolina (TCC) Initiative.

After graduation in May 2018, Blocher will join the international marketing and business development team at Eli Lilly and Co. Blocher holds his bachelor’s degree in international development studies from the University if California at Los Angeles.