Bios:

Dr. Christopher E. Borroni-Bird
Founder, Afreecar LLC

Dr. Christopher Borroni-Bird is an expert on sustainable and affordable mobility for ALL the world’s people. This builds on his 25-year career leading advanced mobility initiatives at several major companies and universities as well as volunteering in sub-Saharan Africa. With his consulting business, Afreecar, he is a senior advisor on future mobility to McKinsey and EVage (an Indian commercial EV startup) and is also sought out to provide independent technical due diligence on future mobility technologies and companies in vehicle autonomy, connectivity and electrification. Separately, Afreecar is also developing an e-kit that power assists non-motorized vehicles while also transforming them into mobile power sources, which has many applications in both the developing and developed worlds.

He served as Waymo’s Chief Engineer for Future Vehicle Programs and has been a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab. From 2012 to 2017, he was Qualcomm’s VP of Strategic Development, responsible for wireless automotive solutions. Prior to this, he led GM’s Electric Networked Vehicle (EN-V), the world’s first drivable vehicles to demonstrate today’s accepted vision of future mobility (and extensively deployed at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo). He led GM’s Autonomy, Hy-wire and Sequel “skateboard” electric vehicle concepts, now widely adopted by the Auto Industry, and has 50 patents. He is co-author of “Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century”, with Larry Burns and the late Bill Mitchell (MIT Press, 2010).

Before joining GM in 2000, he led Chrysler’s gasoline fuel cell vehicle development. He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame as a Young Leader in 2000, was one of Automotive News’ inaugural “Electrifying 100” in 2011, and was profiled by Motor Trend/Blackberry in the “Coding the Car” documentary and book series in 2023. His latest book, “Sustainable and Affordable Mobility for All: Putting the Heart back into Technology” was published by SAE in 2025.

Aaron Waterman
Co-Founder & CEO, Humanbrand AI

Aaron is the creator of the Brand OS – an intelligence layer for in-house marketing teams that gives organizations an unmatched ability to understand how their brand is evaluated by both humans and AI. Unlike governance or workflow tools, Humanbrand AI focuses exclusively on brand intelligence and content performance: diagnosing digital brand perception, revealing narrative gaps in the market, and generating on-brand, product-accurate content that strengthens a company’s competitive position.

With more than 25 years of experience in business development, product strategy, and brand transformation, Aaron has led major initiatives for General Motors, Magna, Stellantis, Toshiba and Harman International. Prior to founding Humanbrand AI, he guided the go-to-market strategy for GM’s connected-car commerce platform, Marketplace, launching partnerships with Starbucks, ExxonMobil, and Shell.

Aaron is recognized for translating emerging technology into meaningful business outcomes and for his forward-looking perspective on how AI will reshape brand strategy, content excellence, and enterprise growth.

Jeevak Badve
Chief Growth Officer, SundbergFerar.com

Jeevak brings energy, passion & curiosity to his CGO role at Sundberg-Ferar Innovation Studio. With his unique blend of education and experience in industrial design, engineering and business, he is a rallying voice for the alignment of innovation strategy and business vision; via empathetically injecting the end user’s un-met needs & unspoken wants in the core value proposition of a company’s products & service portfolio, spanning the entire customer journey; to attain the optimal market-product relevance fit, to eventually generate a significant and sustainable business growth.

Jeevak has more than 25 years of professional design experience, starting in India at Tata Motors, and then in the U.S. for 20 years; at GM Design, ASC, Harman, RLE and now Sundberg-Ferar. Beyond his role at SF, he also served on IDSA’s International board for 6 years and chaired IDSA’s 2017 flagship International Design Conference: “Design IS Business” apart from orchestrating numerous regional design events and webinars.

Jeevak is also sought as a keynote speaker on the topics of innovation strategy and business growth. (Conferences include – DMI, IDSA, CAR-MBS, Design weeks, business schools) He is/was also a jury member for the EOD car award show, cooper-Hewitt national awards, IDEA awards, etc. He was the board member for IDSA, Ether, Design Core, MIDC, etc) He also conducts hands-on workshops/seminars for building a winning culture of design for a significant and sustainable business growth.

In his copious amounts of spare time, Jeevak can be found indulging in his love of fitness kickboxing, obstacle course running, or photographing birds in obscure parts of the world.

Action:

Feel free to come prepared with a question or two for our speakers, ranging from innovation, strategy, biz growth, creativity, future, design studio life, team culture, customer centricity, marketing, etc.

If unable to attend, send the questions to Jeevak@SundbergFerar.com

Next Speaker/Topic:

Feel free to let me know what topics or which speaker you would like to hear for our next session. We will do our best to respond to those requests. Jeevak@SundbergFerar.com