committee members

• Geraldine Acuña-Sunshine (Overseer)

  President, Sunshine Care Foundation for Neurological Care and Research; and Senior Counsel, Bracebridge Capital

  President, Sunshine Care Foundation for Neurological Care and Research Acuña Sunshine is president of the Sunshine Care Foundation for Neurological Care and Research, an international nonprofit focused on funding brain research and finding effective therapies for rare neurodegenerative diseases. She is also Co-Founder and a Director of the MGH Collaborative Center for X-Linked Dystonia Parkinsonism and serves on the NIH NINDS Non-Profit Forum Executive Committee. Prior to working in the scientific, patient advocacy, and social impact sector, Acuña-Sunshine worked full-time as a corporate lawyer and as senior counsel in derivatives and alternative investments at Bracebridge Capital in Boston. She sits on several boards, including the Harvard University Board of Overseers, the Women's Foundation of Boston Board, and the Massachusetts General Hospital President’s Council. She is co-president of the Harvard Club of the Philippines and serves on the Visiting Committees for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard’s International and Area Studies. She is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Kennedy School, and Columbia Law School.

• David Barron

  Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit

  David J. Barron became the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in April of 2022. After graduating from Harvard College, he worked as a newspaper reporter before attending Harvard Law School. Chief Judge Barron clerked for Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and for Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court. He then worked as an attorney advisor for the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School. He rejoined the Justice Department as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010 before returning to Harvard Law School as the S. William Green Professor of Public Law. He was appointed to the First Circuit in 2014.

  Chief Judge Barron continues to teach at Harvard Law School as the Louis D. Brandeis Visiting Professor of Law. He is the co-editor of casebooks on both administrative and local government law. Among his other publications are City Bound, with Jerry Frug, and Waging War, which won the 2017 Colby Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 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.

• Jill Dolan

  Dean of the College, Annan Professor of English, Professor of Theatre, Princeton University

• Janet Echelman (Overseer)

  Visual Artist and President, Studio Echelman

  Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. Echelman’s work defies categorization, as it intersects Sculpture, Architecture, Urban Design, Material Science, Structural & Aeronautical Engineering, and Computer Science. Echelman’s art transforms with wind and light, and shifts from being “an object you look at, into an experience you can get lost in.”

  Using unlikely materials from atomized water particles to engineered fiber fifteen times stronger than steel, Echelman combines ancient craft with computational design software to create artworks that have become focal points for urban life on five continents, from Singapore, Sydney, Shanghai, and Santiago, to Beijing, Boston, New York and London. Permanent works in Porto (Portugal), Gwanggyo (South Korea), Vancouver, San Francisco, West Hollywood, Phoenix, Eugene, Greensboro, Philadelphia, Seattle, and St. Petersburg (FL) transform daily with colored light.

  Curiosity defines Janet Echelman’s nonlinear educational path. After graduating from Harvard College, she lived in a Balinese village for 5 years, then completed separate graduate programs in Painting and in Psychology. A recipient of an honorary Doctorate from Tufts University, Echelman has taught Harvard, Princeton, and MIT where she is currently the 2022-23 MIT Distinguished Visiting Artist.

  Her TED talk "Taking Imagination Seriously" has been translated into 35 languages with more than two million views. Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Harvard Loeb Fellowship, Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship, and Fulbright Sr. Lectureship, Echelman received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.” In popular culture, Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and Echelman was named an Architectural Digest Innovator for "changing the very essence of urban spaces."

• Monica Higgins

  Kathleen McCartney Professor of Education Leadership, Harvard Graduate School of Education

  Monica Higgins joined the Harvard faculty in 1995 and is the Kathleen McCartney Professor of Education Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) where her research and teaching focus on the areas of leadership development and organizational change. Prior to joining HGSE, she spent eleven years as a member of the faculty at Harvard Business School in the Organizational Behavior Unit. Her book, Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across an Industry (2005) focuses on the leadership development of executives in the biotechnology industry. In education, Professor Higgins studies the effectiveness of senior leadership teams in large urban school districts across the United States and the conditions that enhance organizational learning in public school systems. As a long-time member of the Public Education Leadership Project, a joint initiative between HBS and HGSE, Professor Higgins co-authored a book with her colleagues on managing central office-school relationships called, Achieving Coherence in District Improvement; this book is based upon their work with large urban districts over a ten-year time period. Professor Higgins is currently working on a book with her colleague, Jennie Weiner, on women in leadership in education that will be published in 2023.

  Professor Higgins also works with entrepreneurial education organizations to help them navigate the constraints and opportunities they face in the education reform movement. Central to this work is HGSE’s Scaling for Impact initiative, which Professor Higgins leads. Here, along with colleagues from HGSE, HBS, and HKS, Professor Higgins is engaged in research and teaching that focus on helping entrepreneurial teams both within and outside of traditional district structures scale their work for even greater social impact.

  Professor Higgins served as an appointee for Education Secretary Arne Duncan of the Obama Administration from 2009-2016 and currently sits on several boards in the nonprofit education field. At Harvard, Professor Higgins teaches in the areas of leadership and organizational change, entrepreneurship, teams, and strategic human resources management. She has also taught in leadership programs for The Broad Foundation and for New Leaders for New Schools.

  Before academia, Professor Higgins held organizational consulting positions at Bain & Company and Harbridge House. Professor Higgins earned her A.B. in policy studies with a focus in organizational behavior from Dartmouth College, her M.B.A. from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, her M.A. in psychology from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. in organizational behavior jointly from the Harvard Business School and the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

• Leni Hirsch

  Digital Services Expert, US Digital Service (White House)

  Leni is 2018, summa cum laude, graduate of Harvard College where she lived in Pforzheimer House. As an undergraduate she was active in a number of campus organizations, including serving as the student representative to the Education Policy Committee for the College. After graduation, she worked at Bain & Company's San Francisco office until joining the 2020 Biden Campaign as a member of the Finance team. She joined the Biden administration as a Special Assistant on Health and Human Services' COVID-19 response team and now serves as the acting chief of staff for the U.S. Digital Service.

• Nannerl O. Keohane (Chair)

  President Emerita, Wellesley College and Duke University

  Nannerl O. Keohane served as President and Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and then at Duke University, from 1981 until 2004. She has taught at Swarthmore, Stanford, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania in addition to Wellesley and Duke. Professor Keohane is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Ethics at Stanford University in the winter quarter each year. Her publications include Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton Press 1980), Higher Ground: Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University (Duke Press 2006) and Thinking about Leadership (Princeton Press 2010). She has also written on feminist theory and contemporary political thought. She served several terms on the Visiting Committee to the Harvard Kennedy School and was a member of the Harvard Corporation from 2005 until 2017.

• Elizabeth Samet

  Professor of English, Department of English & Philosophy, U.S. Military Academy

  Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of several books, including Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, winner of the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History; and Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest. She recently edited The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and the Library of America volume World War II Memoirs: Pacific Theater. Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant. She is a professor of English at West Point, where she directs the first-year literature course

• Robert N. Shapiro

  Retired Partner, Ropes & Gray LLP; Retired CEO, Ropes Wealth Advisors LLC

  Rob Shapiro is the retired Chief Executive Officer of Ropes Wealth Advisors LLC. He was a partner in the global law firm, Ropes & Gray LLP, from 1987 until his retirement and move to RWA in 2016, serving as trustee for many families, chairing the firm’s Trust Committee, and focusing his law practice on estate planning, personal and charitable trusts, and philanthropic planning. Throughout his career, Rob has served as a trustee and fiduciary advisor for individuals and families. Rob serves as chair of the board of governors of the Handel and Haydn Society. He has also been a trustee of the Peabody Essex Museum for more than 25 years and served as president of the board from 2005-2020. He is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. From 2006-2012, he was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, having previously been president of the Harvard Alumni Association and president of the Harvard Law School Association. For more than forty years, Rob has been a member of the selection committee for the Harvard-Cambridge Scholarships, awarded annually to four Harvard seniors for post-graduate study at Cambridge University. In May 2018, Rob received the Harvard medal, awarded for extraordinary service to the university. He has also served as a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy and of Noble and Greenough School.

• Sherry Turkle

  Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Professor Turkle writes on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology, especially computers. She is an expert on culture and therapy, and the social and psychological impacts of mobile technology, social networking, and sociable robotics.

  She is the author of pathbreaking books on our evolving relationships with digital culture including Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other; The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit; Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet; and the New York Times, bestseller, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age. Most recently, she is the author of an award-winning memoir, The Empathy Diaries, which weaves together her personal and professional lives. Turkle has also edited several collections on how we use objects to think with, particularly in the development of ideas about science. These include Evocative Objects: Things We Think With; Falling for Science: Objects in Mind; and The Inner History of Devices. A recipient of a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Humanities Fellow, she is a featured media commentator, a recipient of a Harvard Centennial Medal, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  Turkle graduated from Radcliffe College/Harvard University (1970) and has a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sociology and Personality Psychology, 1976.

• 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.