Contacts

Vanessa Franking

Vanessa Franking earned her BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Memphis in a heavily male dominated discipline.

She worked for Federal Express to pay for her college education and then continued for eleven years where she helped design and deploy the FedEx worldwide data network. She was responsible for the Eastern half of the US network. She became a private pilot during her tenure at FedEx. Her reputation for strong interpersonal and leadership skills in the networking industry and amongst industry groups during her tenure at FedEx attracted Intel Corporation to recruit her in 1994, at which time she moved to California. At Intel she worked both as a network technologist and worldwide program manager for network education in Intel’s Information Technology division. In 1996 she fulfilled a lifelong ambition by competing in and completing the 100th running of the Boston Marathon.

A person of many and varied interests, Vanessa retired from corporate life in 1997 and moved with her husband and two sons to Lake Tahoe where she supported a number of charitable causes including being elected president of the Lake Tahoe branch of the American Association of University Women and serving on the Computer Science Advisory board for Sierra Nevada College. When not enjoying life at Lake Tahoe, Vanessa spends her time pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and enjoying the Caribbean and New England coast on her sailboat which she and her husband keep in Newport, RI.
 

Jim Giancola

Jim Giancola is a retired Chief Executive Officer of NASDAQ and NYSE traded regional banks in the Midwest. He was also a founding partner in a National Bank Consulting firm based in Atlanta. He has been a guest lecturer at Valparaiso University, Indiana University, and Arizona University. Jim has served on advisory boards at I.U. Northwest, Concordia University, and the University of Southern Indiana. Jim has a degree in Economics from Harvard University, did graduate work at he University of Colorado and Suffolk University, and has an Honorary Doctorate of Laws degree from the University of Southern Indiana.