ACES 2026

Thursday, January 15th 

8 AM-4PM

Click Here for Event Website

Keynote Speakers:

Rich Gagnon

Rich Gagnon serves as Assistant City Manager and Chief Information Officer. Rich leads the Information Technology, Library, Office of Engagement and Innovation, Civic Center, Airport, Public Health, Civic Center, Women Infants and Children, Transit, Community Development, and Environmental Health teams.

Rich is a highly experienced technologist and executive leader. Prior to filling his role at the city of Amarillo six years ago, Rich led a worldwide engineering team responsible for over a billion dollars of annual revenue as the Global Vice-President of Systems Engineering for F5 Networks. He also led as the Theater Vice-President of the Americas for Palo Alto Networks and the Director of Global Infrastructure for GameStop.

Rich now applies his experience and proven track record of bringing transformative technical and business initiatives to market in the private sector to his work for the citizens of Amarillo. “It is an honor, a privilege, and a joy to work every day serving the community we call home,” Rich Gagnon.

Dr. Jose Antonio Bowen

José Antonio Bowen has been leading innovation and change for over 40 years at Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southampton (UK), then as a dean at Miami University and SMU and as President of Goucher College (voted a Top 10 Most Innovative College under his leadership). He now runs Bowen Innovation Group L.L.C., and does innovation, pedagogy and D&I consulting and training in both higher education and for Fortune 500 companies including AT&T, Chevron, Pfizer, Toyota, and Walmart.

As a scholar, Bowen holds four degrees from Stanford University (in Chemistry, Music, and Humanities), has written over 100 scholarly articles, was editor of the Cambridge Companion to Conducting (2003), and an editor of the 6-CD set, Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology (2011). He received a National Endowment for theHumanities Fellowship and has a TED talk on Beethoven as Bill Gates. In 2010, Stanford honored him as a Distinguished Alumni Scholar.

Bowen is a musician and has appeared on five continents as a jazz pianist and conductor with Stan Getz,Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Brubeck, Liberace, and many others. His compositions include a symphony (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1985), and music for Jerry Garcia.

Bowen has long been a pioneer in education, classroom design and technology, featured in The New YorkTimes, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsweek, PBS News Hour,and on NPR (an extended media list is here). He was given a Stanford Centennial Award for UndergraduateTeaching in 1990 and he has presented keynotes and workshops at more than 400 campuses and conferences in 46 states and 20 countries around the world.

His books on teaching include Teaching Naked (2012) winner of the Ness Award for Best Book on HigherEducation from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the sequel, Teaching NakedTechniques: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Classes with C. Edward Watson (2017) and Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers using Relationships, Resilience and Reflection(2021, Johns Hopkins University Press). His latest book with C. Edward Watson is Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (2024, Johns Hopkins University Press).

For more, see his website teachingnaked.com or his education TED talks.

In 2018 he received the Ernest L. Boyer Award (for significant contributions to American higher education) from the New American Colleges and Universities. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in England, is currently a Senior Fellow at the Association of American of Colleges and Universities.