Here are some of our newly enrolled Spring 2015 students! As always, our program attracts a diverse range of students from many fields. For this semester, we have 33 active students. To those newly enrolled: welcome to the exciting world of Foresight. We wish you all the best for your work in the field and are confident that the program will give you all you need to be successful as a professional futurist!
Ciara O’Connell lives with her husband and two daughters in Voorhees, NJ. She is a Director of Consumer & Customer Insights at Campbell Soup Company, where she has worked for 10 years. She leads insights and strategy for Campbell’s largest and oldest businesses, creating strategic direction for brands such as Campbell’s, Chunky, Swanson, Prego, and Pace. Ciara has a B.A. and M.A. in Anthropology (from University of Virginia and SUNY Buffalo, respectively), as well as an M.B.A. from Temple University. Her favorite work is in innovation: linking cultural insights and consumer behaviors to identify unmet needs that can generate new product solutions. Ciara is excited to delve more formally into the field of Foresight at UH and help to build this capability for her company in the future. In her free time, Ciara enjoys reading, travelling, and leading two Girl Scout troops for her 6th grade and 4th grade daughters and their friends.
Carla Bass manages the Structured Market Engagement Program at Platts, a leading provider of news, data, and benchmark prices for the world’s commodity markets. Before that, she spent most of her working life studying the present as a journalist and editor. She started her career as a business reporter at The Dallas Morning News before moving to Ecuador to work as a freelance journalist. There she wrote for The Economist, The Miami Herald, and other publications, as well as for her current employer, covering the Ecuadorean oil industry. Carla holds a Bachelor’s in Journalism from The University of Texas at Austin. She lives near Houston with her husband and two young sons.
Mark Sackler has more than 40 years of varied work experience in advertising, marketing, market research, broadcasting, publishing and sales. Mark started his career in the 1970’s as a newscaster and sportscaster and also did freelance work for the NBC radio network during that time. His biggest claim to fame was was the Major League Baseball One Millionth Run Scored promotion in 1975, which he researched, originated and helped promote. Since then he continued to build an impressive résumé working at a long list of companies: VP of Marketing, Medical Tribune Group (1985-1987), President, SMG Publishing, Inc., (1987-1996), Director of Marketing Services, Tactical Retailing Solutions (1996-1998), Director of Sales, Pion, Inc. (2003-2006) and Director of Marketing, Vortex Sales Group (2013-2015). Mark would eventually like to apply his foresight skills to write, lecture, and teach about how to think about the future, and to advocate for individuals and society to eschew short-term thinking and take the long view.
