Tarkington Business Futures Institute

Anthony W. Orlando is a leading scholar and consensus-builder who uses data and history to unpack complex financial and economic challenges that face today’s leaders in the public, corporate, and nonprofit sectors. He helps organizations understand the macro trends that confront them—and find forward-looking, collaborative strategies to adapt and thrive.

Dr. Orlando is an Associate Professor of Finance, Real Estate, & Law at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he holds the Tarkington Family Endowed Chair. He serves as the Director of the Tarkington Business Futures Institute. He also serves on the Public Finance Authority Board for the La Verne Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, the Human Services Commission for the City of Pasadena, and the Board of Directors for the Cal Poly Pomona Philanthropic Foundation. He previously served as Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta from 2018 to 2024.

Dr. Orlando teaches and conducts research at the intersection of finance, real estate, and public policy. He has published over two dozen peer-reviewed academic articles, as well as the book Keeping Races in Their Places: The Dividing Lines That Shaped the American City. His work has been profiled in top media outlets including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Bloomberg. He serves on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics.

Dr. Orlando received a Bachelor’s in economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s in economic history from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD in public policy and management from the University of Southern California. He is a CFA charterholder and a member of the CFA Society of Los Angeles.

Yufan (Frank) Lin is a scholar of AI-mediated selling and measurement whose work examines how technology transforms the way salespeople communicate, adapt, and persuade — and how researchers can rigorously capture those behaviors at scale. He develops computational frameworks that bridge human judgment and machine intelligence, with a focus on natural language processing, generative AI, and large language models as tools for advancing sales and marketing science.

Dr. Lin is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the College of Business Administration at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He holds the Tarkington Endowed Research Fellowship in AI in Business and serves as Director of the AI for Business Leadership Certification Program, Principal Investigator of a $200K AI FAST Grant from the California Learning Lab under the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, and Organizing Faculty Fellow for the CPP AI in Business Hackathon, which drew more than 300 participants across five colleges, and over 60 judges and mentors in its third annual year.

Dr. Lin developed a standardized protocol for LLM-based text classification, currently invited for revision at a top-tier marketing journal (UT Dallas List). His work has been presented at the ISMS Marketing Science Conference, the AI in Management Conference, the Society for Consumer Psychology Conference, and the National Conference on Sales Management. He has published cases in the Case Research Journal and Harvard Business Publishing, co-authored with his students. His research has earned several honors, including the 2026 Tarkington Endowed Research Fellowship, the 2025 AI in Management Conference Best Junior Faculty Paper Finalist award, the 2026 CPP Provost’s Teacher Scholar award, and the 2025 Sales Researchers’ Collaboration Consortium (SRCC) Fellowship.

Dr. Lin received his Ph.D. in Business Administration (Marketing) and his MBA with a concentration in marketing analytics from the University of Missouri. Before entering academia, he served as a Marketing Analytics Manager at Sears Holdings Corporation in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and as a Fraud Analytics MBA Intern at MasterCard Worldwide in O’Fallon, Missouri. In his spare time, he enjoys mountain biking, singing, and spending time with friends and family.

Dr. Ong is an Associate Professor of International Business and Marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and a Tarkington Business Futures Institute Faculty Fellow. She was a 2024–25 Fulbright U.S. Scholar, conducting research with the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and currently serves as CPP’s Fulbright Scholar Liaison. She co-chaired the 2025 Transformative Consumer Research Conference in Washington, D.C., a leading forum for interdisciplinary scholarship on consumer vulnerability and social well-being.

Dr. Ong’s research has been published in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of the Association of Consumer Research, and Journal of Business Research. She is an active undergraduate mentor and has received the CPP Provost’s Teacher Scholar Award twice and multiple grants for research and course development. She teaches classes in international business and marketing and co-teaches the CPP Innovation Incubator pop-up course on misinformation and conspiracy theories in the digital world.

Dr. Ong received her Ph.D. in Business Administration (Marketing) and M.S. in Management from the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, her M.A. in International Affairs from UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, and her bachelors’ in Musical Arts (Percussion) and Economics from Vanderbilt University. She previously worked as a Research Scholar for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and as a consultant in Deloitte Consulting’s Strategy and Operations group.