committee members

• Ángel Cabrera

  President, Georgia Institute of Technology

  Ángel Cabrera is the 12th president of the Georgia Institute of Technology. One of America’s leading research universities, Georgia Tech serves 44,000 students through top-ranked graduate and undergraduate programs ranging from engineering and science to business, computing, design, and liberal arts, and receives more than $1.2 billion in research awards every year.

  Under Cabrera’s leadership, more than 5,700 members of the Georgia Tech community contributed to a new 10-year strategic plan that launched in November 2020. The plan is grounded on a new mission statement that reaffirms Tech’s commitment to “developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.”

  As president during the Covid-19 pandemic, Cabrera has led the Institute through one of the most critical times in its history to break records in student applications and enrollment, graduation rates, and research awards. Today, Georgia Tech is one of the fastest-growing and most research-intensive universities in the nation.

  Cabrera came to Georgia Tech on Sept. 1, 2019, after serving for seven years as president of George Mason University (GMU) in Virginia. During his presidency, GMU joined the top tier of research universities in the Carnegie Classification and was the fastest growing institution in the state. Before leading GMU, Cabrera was president of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, now part of Arizona State University, and dean of IE Business School in Madrid.

  As a business educator, Cabrera has played a key role in advancing professional ethics, internationalization, and corporate social responsibility. In 2007, while serving as a senior advisor to the United Nations Global Compact, he was the lead author of the “Principles for Responsible Management Education” (PRME). A United Nations–supported initiative that advances sustainable development through management education, PRME has been adopted by more than 800 schools around the world. He is also a co-founder of the University Global Coalition, a global network of universities working in partnership with the United Nations in support of its Sustainable Development Goals.

  Cabrera has been named a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, a “Star of Europe” by Bloomberg Businessweek, a “Henry Crown Fellow” by the Aspen Institute, and a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He has received honorary degrees from Miami Dade College and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

  Cabrera serves on the boards of the National Geographic Society, Harvard College Visiting Committee, Atlanta Committee for Progress, Metro Atlanta Chamber, and Bankinter Innovation Foundation in Spain. He has served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, the advisory boards of Georgia Tech and Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, and three publicly traded companies.

  Cabrera earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in psychology and cognitive science from Georgia Tech, which he attended as a Fulbright Scholar. He also holds a B.S. and an M.S. in computer and electrical engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. His academic publications have been cited thousands of times, and he has been featured or quoted in leading media around the world.

  He is married to management scholar and Georgia Tech classmate, Elizabeth. Their son, Alex, is a Georgia Tech graduate and currently a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. Their daughter, Emilia, is a graduate of Harvard University. Cabrera is the first native of Spain to serve as president of an American university.

• Mark Carney

  UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Co-Chair of Glasgow Finance Alliance for Net Zero, and Chair of Brookfield Asset Management

• Lan Samantha Chang

  Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor of the Arts and Director, Iowa Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa

• Mark D. Gearan (Chair)

  President, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

• Leni Hirsch

  Student, Yale Law School

• Dame Vivian Hunt

  Chief Innovation Officer, UnitedHealth Group

• Anthony Monaco

  Professor and President Emeritus, Tufts University

• Kevin Young

  Andrew W. Mellon Director, National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

  Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. As the nation's largest museum dedicated to telling the African American story, the 19th museum in the Smithsonian complex welcomes 2 million annual visitors and engages an international audience through world-class online programming and digital access to its collections.

  Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Young served as the Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture from 2016-2021, where he oversaw significant increases to its funding, archive acquisitions, and visitor reach. A professor for two decades, he began his career in museums and archives at Emory University in 2005, first as Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library and later as the Curator of Literary Collections, while serving as Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing.

  An award-winning author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, Young is the poetry editor of the New Yorker, where he also hosts the poetry podcast. Young’s most recent works include Stones (2021), Brown (2018) and Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts & Fake News (2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; two have also been named New York Times Notable Books. Other noteworthy titles include Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (2014), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize and his nonfiction debut The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2012), which won the PEN Open Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book. His third poetry collection Jelly Roll: a blues (2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

  Young is also the editor of nine volumes, most recently the anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, released in fall 2020 from Library of America. The collection was named one of the best books of 2020 by the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, TIME, the Atlantic, Good Morning America, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Shelf Awareness, Lit Hub, and Barnes & Noble. The New York Times called it “monumental and rapturous”; NPR’s “Fresh Air” named it “the year’s most revelatory book”; and TIME magazine describes it as “a document both breathtaking and inspiring, historical and personal.”

  Young holds a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College and a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University. He has held a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a NEA fellowship. Director Young is active across the art and cultural community. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.