Technology Power Breakfast

Mung Chiang is President of Purdue University and Roscoe H. George Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. From July 2017 to June 2022, he was the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering. From April 2021 to December 2022, he was the university’s executive vice president for strategic initiatives. He led Purdue Engineering to its first back-to-back top 4 graduate ranking in the U.S. while growing it to be the largest top 10 undergraduate engineering college in the country. Previously, Chiang was the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. For his research in wireless networking, Chiang received the Alan T. Waterman Award in 2013, the highest honor to an American researcher under the age of 40 each year, and was elected to the National Academy of Inventors and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award in Engineering at Princeton for developing one of the university’s first Massive Open Online Courses that has been taught to over 400,000 people. Most of Chiang’s 25 U.S. patents have been licensed and deployed by the communications and networking industry, and he co-founded three startup companies in mobile networks, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things. Chiang also served as the Science and Technology Adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State and initiated the U.S. government’s tech diplomacy programs.

Stephanie Kim is Chairman of the Board at Telamon Corporation and President of Telabotics (formerly Telamon Robotics), a company under the Telamon Ventures umbrella. In addition to her executive leadership roles, she oversees the Telamon Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Telamon companies. Prior to becoming Chairman, Stephanie served as Chief Administrative Officer, where she led key corporate initiatives across the organization. Over her tenure, she has also held roles including President of Telecom Solutions, led the Wireless Handset Repair Operation in Kunshan, China, and managed purchasing and supply chain operations.

Stephanie began her career in telecommunications with GTE (now Verizon Communications) in Dallas, Texas, after earning her B.S. from Vanderbilt University. She later earned her MBA from the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business.

A native of the Indianapolis area, Stephanie is a Carmel High School graduate and was inducted into its Alumni Hall of Fame in 2019–2020. She has been recognized with numerous honors, including IBJ’s Forty Under 40, Transformational Woman in Family Business by Family Business Magazine, and the Innovation Excellence Award from Minority Business Review.

Stephanie is deeply committed to community service. She serves on the boards of the Carmel Clay Public Library, Eskenazi Health Foundation, Visit Indy, and the United Way of Central Indiana. In her free time, she enjoys Pilates, tennis, golf, and worshiping at College Park Church. Stephanie lives in Carmel with her husband and their two children, Katherine (16) and Ashton (14).

Bret Swanson is president of Entropy Economics LLC, a technology research firm that advises institutional investors and technology companies. He is also a fellow at the Brownstone Institute and a visiting fellow and advisory council member of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue. From 2013 to 2023, he was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he co-founded the technology research program.

In 2022, Swanson launched Infonomena, a new tech and economics channel on Substack.

For eight years Swanson advised technology investors as executive editor of the Gilder Technology Report and later was a senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, where he directed the Center for Global Innovation. Between 2005 and 2020, he was also a fellow at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, where he studied economic growth and capital markets.

Swanson presents his research around the globe and often contributes to the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal on technology and the economy. For many years, he wrote a column for Forbes.com.

From 2009 to 2024, he was chairman and trustee of the Indiana Public Retirement System (INPRS), the state’s $50-billion pension fund, where he also chaired the investment working group. He is a board member of the Insurance Collaboration to Save Lives, a partnership with life and health insurance companies aimed at mitigating rising mortality rates. For five years he was a member of the investment committee at Indiana University Health.

His recent research focuses on information technology and A.I.’s potential to drive a resurgence in productivity and economic growth. See, for example, Moore’s Law at 50: The Performance and Prospects of the Exponential Economy; The App-ification of Medicine: A Four-Faceted Information Revolution in Health; Imagining the 5G Wireless Future: Apps, Devices, Networks, and Spectrum; and The Coming Productivity Boom: Transforming the Physical Economy with Information.

In previous research, he has presented a new theory of the economic rise of China; projected an “exaflood” of Web video, leading to an estimated 56% compound annual growth of Internet traffic through the year 2015; exposed the deep monetary errors behind the crashes of both 2000 and 2008; anticipated the shale hydrocarbon boom and following drop in energy prices; advanced a new concept linking information theory and entrepreneurial economics; and explained how digital censorship led to the vast array of Covid policy mistakes.

Swanson began his career as an aide to Sen. Richard Lugar and was then an economic analyst for former Rep. Jack Kemp. He studied economics at Princeton University and now lives in Zionsville, Indiana, with his wife and four children.