Ilana Lowery

Ilana Lowery has been the editor of the Phoenix Business Journal since 2001. She started at the Journal as a reporter and projects editor in 1995, working her way up to become associate editor and then managing editor. Previously, she was an editor for Independent Newspapers Inc., a community newspaper chain based in Scottsdale.

Before moving to the Valley in 1989 from Chicago, Lowery served as a reporter and zone editor for Pulitzer Newspapers. From 1986 to 1988, she was a production assistant for the NBC-TV news affiliate in Chicago.

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Kathy Tulumello

Kathy Tulumello has been business center director of The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com since 2005. She and her staff are responsible for the business news report of the Phoenix paper, its online sites and two business magazines, bizAZ and Arizona Woman. She also has been the sports editor and deputy managing editor/daily at The Republic.

Before that, Tulumello was sports editor, assistant news editor and assistant city editor at The Phoenix Gazette, which closed in 1997. She also worked as a reporter and assistant city editor at the now-defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar. She is a native of St. Louis and a journalism graduate of the University of Missouri.

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Gary Trennepohl

Gary Trennepohl became the first president of Oklahoma State University-Tulsa in 1999. Previously, he served as dean of the College of Business Administration at the OSU campus in Stillwater and held faculty and administrative appointments at Texas A&M University, the University of Missouri and Arizona State University. He has co-authored two college finance texts; contributed chapters for three editions of Options: Essential Concepts and Trading Strategies and The Encyclopedia of Investments; and authored or co-authored more than 30 professional journal articles.

He is active in many academic associations and served as president of the Financial Management Association International in 1994. Trennepohl also has served as a consultant to pension funds, corporations and college endowment funds and is a visiting faculty member for the Options Institute at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, presenting periodic seminars on futures and options strategies to institutional investment managers.

Since 1983, he also has conducted yearly seminars about financial analysis for journalists.

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Mark Tatge

Mark W. Tatge is the Eugene S. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. Before that, he was the E.W. Scripps Professor, Executive-in-Residence at Ohio University. Tatge was previously Forbes magazine’s Midwest bureau chief and senior editor in charge of Forbes’ Chicago operations, including content development for Forbes.com and the Forbes Video Network.

Tatge is a former staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, an investigative reporter assigned to the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s statehouse bureau, and a staff writer for both The Dallas Morning News and The Denver Post. Tatge received the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor Award and the Morton Margolin Prize for Distinguished Business Reporting. In Ohio, the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists honored his public records work with the SPJ First Amendment Award. In Texas, the Associated Press Managing Editors named Tatge the best business writer in the state.

He is a past Kiplinger Fellow in Public Affairs Reporting at Ohio State University, where he completed his master’s degree in journalism. He also holds an MBA from Ohio University. In 2011, Tatge authored The New York Times Reader: Business and Economics, aimed at teaching students how to write financial news. He remains a contributing editor to Forbes on Fox and appears as a frequent financial commentator on CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, FOX and PBS stations.

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Randall Smith,

Randall Smith was named Reynolds Endowed Chair in Business Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism in summer 2009. His 30-year career at The Kansas City Star began in 1979, where he worked on both the news and business sides. Smith started as a copy editor, rising to the positions of business editor and deputy managing editor, and lastly, to director of strategic development.

Smith is a former president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) and a recipient of its Distinguished Achievement Award. He played a major role in conceiving and raising money for Missouri’s SABEW-endowed chair in business journalism. He is the vice chair and first non-family member of the board of the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships.

The author of the book, A Kenyan Journey, Smith has lectured to classes in China, Africa and the United States. Active in diversity-hiring programs, he played a key role in Knight Ridder’s Rotating Internship Program, which placed more than 250 journalists in the newspaper chain’s newsrooms.

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Pam Luecke

Pam Luecke was the initial Reynolds Endowed Chair in Business Journalism, her success at Washington and Lee University paving the way for the naming of subsequent business journalism chairs. She assumed her position in summer 2001 and started the concentration in business journalism, bridging the college’s journalism department and the Williams School of Commerce.

Luecke had a 26-year career in daily newspapers and served last as editor and senior vice president of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky. She also held various editing and reporting positions at the Hartford Courant, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, and the Louisville Times. During her career, she was supervising editor of two projects recognized with Pulitzer Prizes.

She was also a Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University. Luecke remains active in the American Society of Newspaper Editors and chaired its education committee in 2009. She also chaired the Accrediting Committee for the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.

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Alan Deutschman

Alan Deutschman was named Reynolds Endowed Chair in Business Journalism at the Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, in September 2010. In a 22-year career as a journalist, he has been the Silicon Valley correspondent for Fortune, a senior writer at Fast Company, the “Profit Motive” columnist for GQ, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and New York Magazine.

His articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Wired and Salon.com. Among Deutschman’s four books is The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, and he recently released an e-book, How Steve Jobs Changed Our World.

Deutschman began teaching business and other journalism courses at Reno in January 2011, as well as developing its program in business journalism and researching contemporary issues in the subject.

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Urvashi Rangan

Urvashi Rangan is the director of technical policy for Consumers Union, and the project director of Consumer Reports’ GreenerChoices.org. Rangan joined CU in 1999 and developed the ratings system, database and website for evaluating environmental labels. Rangan continues to decode the meaning of eco-labels for consumers and advocates for credible labeling in the marketplace including influencing government policy decisions at the state and federal level. She also conducts research for CU around consumer expectations of sustainable products and labels.

A noted environmental health scientist, Rangan has a column in Consumer Reports’ ShopSmart magazine and also serves as a top spokesperson for Consumer Reports in the areas of sustainable production and consumption practices. Rangan received her Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences from Johns Hopkins University in 1995; her post-doctoral work at the Environmental and Occupational Health Science Institute. She was an NIH fellow from 1990-97.

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Veena_Ramani

Veena Ramani, a manager in Ceres’ Corporate Programs, has managed relationships with a portfolio of Ceres companies, primarily from the electric utility and financial services sectors. She works with these companies on a variety of ESG strategy, performance and disclosure issues including policy and program development, sustainability reporting, stakeholder engagement processes etc. She is also responsible for the oversight and management of the Ceres coalition.

Prior to Ceres, Ramani worked as a Management Consultant with CDM, an environmental consulting firm and focused on providing a variety of sustainability services to clients in the public and private sectors. She also spent three years with Integrative Strategies Forum, a Washington DC based NGO, working on developing national and international policy solutions on sustainable development, building consensus and coalitions among civil society groups on these issues and lobbying government representatives.

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Lisa Palmer

Last year Palmer was a freelance development editor for the America’s Climate Choices study at the National Academy of Sciences. She has also written and produced a reporting guide for journalists covering the green economy for Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland.

• Follow Palmer on Twitter at @lisa_palmer.