Dec 2, 2026 |Gimelstob Ballroom
The Kravis Center welcomes it’s Corporate Partner’s to the 2026-2027 Business Speaker Series. For the first installment of the series, the Kravis Center is excited to bring a conversation moderated by Laurie Silvers featuring Yesha Yadav and Joshua D. Clinton from Vanderbilt University to discuss The Power of Predictive Markets.
About Laurie Silvers
Laurie is the Co-founder of the SyFy Channel national cable network and Co-CEO of Hollywood.com. She is also a Co-founder of Misfits Gaming, a global esports organization.
Laurie is the Immediate Past Chair of the Board of Trustees of the University of Miami; Life Trustee of the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in Palm Beach County; a past Chair of the Board of the Economic Council of Palm Beach County; Donor, Duke University’s “Rubenstein and Silvers Hillel.” The Law School at the University of Miami has named the “Silvers Rubenstein Hall” building in her honor. Laurie is a former member of the PBS Foundation Board in Washington, DC, has served as a Chair of the Board of South Florida PBS and currently is a member of the Board of South Florida PBS, the 7th largest PBS station in the country. She is a recipient of the Women of Distinction Award from Palm Beach Atlantic University. Laurie is a member of the Miami Beach Senior High School Hall of Fame. She has been a featured speaker on Women and Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, Duke University and the University of Miami. Laurie is a Co-Founder of the Promise Fund which provides funds for underserved women in Palm Beach County to receive screening and treatment for breast and cervical cancer. She serves on the Board of the Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin Counties, The Cox Science Center in Palm Beach County as well as the Board of the United Way for the Town of Palm Beach.
About Yesha Yadav
Yesha Yadav is the Milton R. Underwood Chair, Associate Dean and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School. Her research explores the regulation of market structure, specializing across multiple asset classes including U.S. Treasuries, derivatives, digital assets, payments and prediction markets. Her work seeks to build bridges across and between academia, policy and industry. She has been active in shaping the policy debates surrounding U.S. Treasury market fragility, digital assets, stablecoins and prediction markets. This has included testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs on digital assets, as well as the House Financial Services Committee as part of its subcommittee work on U.S. Treasury market reform. She has served as a member of the CFTC’s Technology Advisory Committee and co-chaired the sub-committee on Distributed Ledger Technology – and as a member of the CFTC’s Market Risk Advisory Committee’s subcommittee on the Future of Finance. She is a current member of the Nasdaq’s Hearing Panel. As part of her work as a serving board member of the Fintech Foundation, a non-profit that hosts the premier DC Fintech Week conference, she has helped lead public-private conversations on new payments technology and agentic payments both nationally and internationally. In 2026, she founded the Emerging Technology Forum at Davos to facilitate policy dialogue between technology leaders across the U.S. and India as a bridge for promoting collaborative policy progress on AI, blockchain and quantum technologies in financial markets. At Vanderbilt, alongside the Blockchain Association, she launched Vanderbilt University’s Summit on Digital Assets and Emerging Technology to showcase Vanderbilt’s unique position as a leader in frontier markets research. At Vanderbilt, she was also part of a cross-disciplinary team seeking to develop a first-of-its-kind prediction market on climate change-related outcomes.
She is a frequent speaker across industry and policy forums and her commentary has been featured across national media such as CNN, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Guardian, Newsweek, the Economist and others.
Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she practiced at Clifford Chance in its Financial Regulation and Derivatives practice as well as the World Bank on market structure reform efforts post-Crisis. At Vanderbilt Law School, she teaches courses on securities markets regulation, financial regulation, corporate bankruptcy, law and innovation, blockchain and crypto and digital market structure. She received her MA(Hons)(First Class) in Law and Modern Languages from the University of Cambridge and a Masters-in-Law from Harvard Law School.
About Joshua D. Clinton
Josh Clinton is the Abby and Jon Winkelried Chair and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. He is Co-Director of the Vanderbilt Poll, Co-Director of Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a member of the Executive Committee of the Vanderbilt Data Science Institute, and a three-time Emmy-nominated Senior Election Analyst for NBC News, where he has helped make election night projections since 2010. He was named a 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and received Vanderbilt’s 2026 Alexander Heard Distinguished Service Professor Award.
Clinton previously chaired the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s (AAPOR) Task Force on the Performance of Pre-Election Polling in the 2020 Election, which investigated the causes of polling errors in 2020, and he also served on AAPOR’s 2016 task force. His research examines how data and statistical methods can improve our understanding of politics, with recent work on prediction markets, public opinion polling, artificial intelligence in survey research, public attitudes toward higher education, trust in elections, and money in politics.
His teaching in data science, statistics, political parties, and elections emphasizes helping students better understand evidence, evaluate data-driven claims, and analyze how strategic individuals respond to incentives.
Learn More about Professor Clinton.
With Support from:
Speaker Luncheons are a benefit of the Kravis Center Corporate Partners and are by invitation only.
Kravis Center Corporate Partners are a group of corporate and professional leaders in Palm Beach County whose mission is to support and enable the Kravis Center to continue its extensive educational and community outreach programs. Learn more about becoming a Corporate Partner.
