UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. –– Travis Lesser, director of the Penn State Smeal College of Business Center for the Business of Sustainability (CBoS), has announced the addition of Mike Medaska to the CBoS Advisory Board.
Medaska is the vice president of corporate strategy for Ingersoll Rand, a global provider of mission-critical flow creation and industrial technologies, specializing in air compressors, pumps, blowers and power tools. In that role, he leads strategy development for the firm and supports enterprise-wide initiatives including services growth and portfolio digitalization.
Since 2025, Medaska has led Ingersoll Rand’s Generative AI Center of Excellence. From 2020 to 2022, he helped develop the company’s lead sustainably strategy with foundational work on product classification and sustainable market identification. Today, the company is recognized by multiple rating agencies as an industrial leader in sustainability.
“Mike brings big picture thinking with a focus on sustainable business along with a valuable perspective from his years at Ingersoll-Rand. I look forward to having him be part of the team as we move both the center and the college forward,” Lesser said.
Mike holds a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from Penn State, a master of science in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Smeal Sustainability Advisory Board members lend their experience and expertise to the Smeal Sustainability Council and serve as conduits to the latest corporate developments in sustainable business practices. The board assists in guiding Smeal’s sustainability agenda by helping to match the college’s strengths with the sustainability issues that the board members encounter as they lead their corporations’ sustainability efforts.
The board also benchmarks Smeal’s sustainability efforts with those of other business schools, identifies essential sustainability research areas, explores collaborations with other University sustainability initiatives, and evaluates the college’s graduate and undergraduate sustainability curricula.