Upcoming Events
October 14 | Powering the AI Economy
Event Location: Oceti Sakowin Ballroom, Memorial Union, 5:30-7PM
Artificial intelligence runs on data centers, and data centers run on energy, land, and water. North Dakota has all three, which is why the state is drawing serious interest from developers looking for places to build. What would that mean for the grid, for ratepayers, for agriculture, and for the communities that host these facilities?
Join the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth for a panel conversation on the opportunities and tradeoffs of data center development in North Dakota.
The evening includes opening perspectives from each panelist, a conversation moderated by Rob Port, columnist for The Forum and host of Plain Talk, and audience Q&A. Free and open to the public.
Featured Panelists Include:
Robert L. Mayo, Research Specialist at the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth
Doug Goehring, North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner
Tony Clark, Executive Director, National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners
Paul Matthys, President and CEO, Cass County Electric Cooperative
Please help us keep this event respectful and on schedule. Disruptions are not permitted. Anyone who interrupts the program may be asked to leave.
Parking: Free parking is available in the Memorial Union lot after 4:30PM
September 23 | Admiral Stuart Munsch
"Leading When It Counts: Lessons from a Life of Naval Command"
Event Location: Advanced Technology Center, Live Event Venue, Bismarck State College, 5:30-7:00 p.m., hors d'oeuvres will follow from 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Admiral Stuart Munsch is a retired United States Navy admiral who last served as the commander of United States Naval Forces Europe-Africa and commander of Allied Joint Force Command Naples.
He is a native of North Dakota and a 1985 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy Annapolis, Maryland, with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. While at the U.S. Naval Academy, he was brigade commander of his class and an All-American and national champion pistol shooter. He was selected for a Rhodes Scholarship and attended Oxford University and earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Munsch is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. Supreme Court Statecraft Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Seminar XXI Fellow and recipient of the U.S. Navy League's Decatur Award for operational excellence.
His awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (two awards), Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit (five awards) and several unit awards shared with shipmates.
This event is co-sponsored by the Challey Institute and Bismarck State College.
October 7 | Yeonmi Park & Daniel DiMartino
"The Price of Freedom: Firsthand Stories from North Korea and Venezuela"
Event Location: Oceti Sakowin Ballroom, NDSU Memorial Union, 5:30-7:00 p.m., hors d'oeuvres will follow from 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Yeonmi Park is a human rights activist, Young America's Foundation speaker, and bestselling author who was born and raised in North Korea.
At 13, she and her family escaped to China in search of freedom, and after years of hardship, including being sold to human traffickers, she and her mother crossed the Gobi Desert into Mongolia and ultimately reached South Korea in 2009. She tells that story in her memoir In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom, and later wrote While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America.
Her talks at the Oslo Freedom Forum and the One Young World Summit in Dublin made her an international voice for the oppressed, with her viral speeches viewed hundreds of millions of times online. The BBC named her one of its "Top 100 Global Women."
Daniel Di Martino holds a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. He is a Graduate Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and serves on the Center for Entrepreneurship & Free Enterprise Board of Advisors at Young America’s Foundation.
Born and raised in Venezuela, Di Martino experienced first-hand the devastating consequences of socialism. After leaving Venezuela for the United States in 2016, he dedicated himself to explaining how socialism destroyed his homeland, advocating for Venezuela’s freedom, and working to prevent this ideology from being implemented in the United States and elsewhere.
Di Martino appears frequently on national television networks such as Fox News and CNN; writes for USA Today, National Review, and other major outlets; and speaks regularly at college campuses and events across the country. He is also the founder of the Dissident Project, which provides students with access to informed, thoughtful perspectives on how authoritarianism takes hold, what happens when it does, and what America can learn from the failures and human costs of current and former socialist states around the world.
This event is co-sponsored by the Challey Institute and Young America's Foundation.
Register for the event - use code "PRICEOFFREEDOM"
November 4 | Seth Dillon
"No Joke: Free Speech, Censorship, and Building the Babylon Bee"
Event Location: Oceti Sakowin Ballroom, NDSU Memorial Union, 5:30-7:00 p.m., hors d'oeuvres will follow from 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Seth Dillon is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, a fast-growing news satire site that has overtaken The Onion in traffic and engagement. Taking on the tone of a traditional news media publication, the Bee satirizes real-world events and public figures.
Dillon's experience with censorship and deplatforming has placed him on the front lines of the battle for free speech in the public square. He now speaks on college campuses and at conferences across the country about the effectiveness of humor, the moral imperative of mockery, and the dangers of censorship.
This event is co-sponsored by the Challey Institute and Young America's Foundation.
Register for the event - use code "NOJOKE"
Fridays from 10-11 a.m. in Beckwith Recital Hall
September 4 | Ahmad Al Asady
“Entrepreneurship During Conflict and Crisis”
Dr. Ahmad Al Asady is an Assistant Professor of Management in the Department of Management and Marketing and a Challey Institute Faculty Scholar at the NDSU College of Business. His research focuses on international entrepreneurship, institutions, corruption, and cross-border entrepreneurial behavior, with publications in journals including the Journal of World Business, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, and the International Small Business Journal. He teaches Strategic Management, International Entrepreneurship, and Advanced Strategic Management at the undergraduate and MBA levels. Beyond academic publishing, he contributes public-facing commentary on entrepreneurship, international business, and trade through outlets such as The Hill, U.S. News & World Report, and the Washington Examiner.
September 18 | Wade Myers
“Impact Investing: Funding Entrepreneurial Efforts At Addressing Big Problems”
Wade Myers is a serial entrepreneur, investor, author, and speaker that has founded, invested in, and been a director of 100+ startups and has completed scores of financing and M&A transactions. He is a general partner of the Eagle Venture Fund and multiple public equities and real estate funds. Wade’s entrepreneurial ventures include a tech-enabled investment bank, a SaaS-based big data company, a tech-enabled government services firm, and an Inc. 5000 SaaS-based property management firm. He also worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Mobil Corporation, and served as an Airborne Ranger in the US Army where he was a decorated veteran of the Gulf War. Wade is a Baker Scholar graduate of Harvard’s MBA program.
October 16 | Erec Smith
“The Rhetorical Significance of Mattering: Toward Reviving Civil Discourse”
Erec Smith is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. Although he has eclectic scholarly interests, his primary work focuses on the rhetorics of anti-racist activism, theory, and pedagogy as well as the role of rhetoric in a free, pluralistic, and civil society.
October 23 | Tessa Conroy
“The Rural Economy and Livability”
Tessa Conroy studies regional economic development with a commitment to developing practical and actionable knowledge for communities in Wisconsin and the rest of the U.S. Her research focuses on small business dynamics as a key component of local economic growth, including the factors that drive entrepreneurship and business survival. As she has studied entrepreneurship and business outcomes, she's become more and more interested understanding the gaps in business development and performance.
October 30 | Abigail Wozniak
“How Recovery From the Pandemic Shaped the Earnings Distribution in the U.S. and the Upper Midwest”
Abigail (Abbie) Wozniak is a labor economist and vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, where she serves as director of the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute. Her research has examined migration between states and cities, employer compensation and screening policies, and sources of inequality in the labor market. Abbie has served in advisory and affiliate roles for numerous institutions, including the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Institute of Labor Economics at LISER (IZA@LISER), the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA), the W.E. Upjohn Institute, McKinsey & Company, and the EconJobMarket website. Her work has been featured regularly in the media, and she has been interviewed on Marketplace, National Public Radio, Bloomberg TV, and other outlets.
From 2014 to 2015, Abbie served as senior economist to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, working on labor economics issues. She was a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2008–09 and the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute in 2017. She previously served on the faculty in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned tenure in 2013 and was named the Dannelly Distinguished Lecturer in 2025. She is a graduate of Harvard University (Ph.D.) and the University of Chicago (A.B.). She is a former associate economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She is also active on several board and volunteer efforts in the Twin Cities.
November 20 | Admiral Stuart Munsch
“Leadership and Flourishing”
Admiral Stuart Munsch is a retired United States Navy admiral who last served as the commander of United States Naval Forces Europe-Africa and commander of Allied Joint Force Command Naples.
He is a native of North Dakota and a 1985 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy Annapolis, Maryland, with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. While at the U.S. Naval Academy, he was brigade commander of his class and an All-American and national champion pistol shooter. He was selected for a Rhodes Scholarship and attended Oxford University and earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Munsch is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. Supreme Court Statecraft Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Seminar XXI Fellow and recipient of the U.S. Navy League's Decatur Award for operational excellence.
His awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (two awards), Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit (five awards) and several unit awards shared with shipmates.