Keynote Speakers

Voted one of the Top 15 Business Growth Experts, Top 100 Sales Influencers by LinkedIn, and Top 41 Motivational Speakers, Meridith Elliott Powell is an award-winning author, keynote speaker and business strategist. With a background in corporate leadership and sales, her career expands over several industries including financial services, healthcare and finance.

Meridith worked her way up from entry-level to earn her position in the C-Suite. Writing and executing strategy to help leaders master uncertainty, achieve growth and build talent at every level of their organizations.

She has been inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed on less than one percent of professional speakers, incoming Chair of the National Speakers Association, A Master Certified Business Growth Strategist, A Certified Executive Coach and Certified Speaking Professional. In addition, Meridith is an invitation-only author for LinkedIn with more than 750,000 learners taking her business growth courses around the world.

With a passion for helping her clients learn the strategies they need to turn uncertainty to competitive advantage. Meridith has a cutting-edge message, rooted in real-life examples and real-world knowledge. She is the author of nine books, including “THRIVE: Turning Uncertainty to Competitive Advantage” and Who Comes Next? Leadership Succession Planning Made Easy, written with Dr. Mary Kelly. Both books have won the top honors for the Benjamin Franklin Independent Books Sellers Award. One of the highest honors for business books.

Meridith is regularly featured in publications such as Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., Investment News, and American Banker among others. High energy and highly interactive, she helps leaders and business owners learn the new rules of success today, and the strategies they need to Thrive in Uncertainty. You can find her inspiring message and strategies on both of her podcasts: Sales Logic – the “logical” approach to selling successfully in challenging times, and THRIVE – where Meridith interviews leaders, sales professionals and business owners who have transformed their organizations to turn uncertainty to opportunity.

S. Jay Olshansky received his Ph.D. in Sociology/Demography at the University of Chicago in 1984. He is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Research Associate at the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago, former Chief Scientist at Lapetus Solutions, Inc. -- a company that he co-founded, and former Chief Scientist at Wealthspan Financial Partners, LLC. The focus of his research is on estimates of the upper limits to human longevity, the health and public policy implications associated with individual and population aging, forecasts of the size, survival, and age structure of the population, pursuit of the scientific means to slow aging in people (The Longevity Dividend), and global implications of the re-emergence of infectious and parasitic diseases.

During the last 40 years, Dr. Olshansky has been working with colleagues in the biological sciences to develop the modern "biodemographic paradigm" of mortality – the biological nature of the survival and dying out processes of living organisms. Dr. Olshansky is the first author of The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging (Norton, 2001); A Measured Breath of Life (2013); The Rise of Generians (2020); Pursuing Wealthspan (2020); co-editor of Aging: The Longevity Dividend (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2015); and co-editor of Aging: Geroscience as the New Public Health Frontier (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2024).

Dr. Olshansky's recent work is focused on linking the scientific study of aging with investments in longevity and mortality related products. Dr. Olshansky is a former Board member, American Federation of Aging Research (AFAR), U.S. Preventive Medicine, and he served on the Board of Scientific Advisors at PepsiCo. Dr. Olshansky has been honored with the Donald P. Kent Award from the Gerontological Society of America, the Irving S. Wright Award from the American Federation for Aging Research, he was named a Next Avenue Influencer in Aging; he received the Alvar Svanborg Award, the Glenn Award from the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research, the Kathy N. Johnson Achievement Award from Home Care Assistance, he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in France, and was recognized by the Mayo Clinic with the George Randolph and Patricia Scott Visiting Professorship on the Physiology of Aging. In 2022 Dr. Olshansky testified before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on the topic of aging and Geroscience and how advances in aging biology are about to transform what it means to grow old.