Board of Governors Bios

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Susan Ball ’78 PhD

Susan Ball is deputy director of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, with responsibility for four departments — collections, exhibitions, curatorial and education. For the past two years she has also served as interim director of education. After receiving a PhD in the History of Art and Architecture at Yale, she taught art and architectural history at the University of Delaware, later attending the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and working in development at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first book (1981) — Ozenfant and Purism, 1915-1930: The Evolution of a Style — grew out of her dissertation.

In 1986, Ball moved into administration, spending 20 years as executive director of the College Art Association and subsequently as director of its Centennial Book Project, writing, editing and producing The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association (2011). She also worked for the New York Foundation for the Arts, where she co-edited The Profitable Artist (2010). She has taught “Leadership, Governance, and Strategic Planning” in the graduate arts administration program at NYU, and “Cultural Policy and the Arts” in the graduate arts administration program at Baruch College, CUNY.

Ball has served on numerous not-for-profit boards, including the National Humanities Alliance, National Cultural Alliance, American Council of Learned Societies, New York Foundation for the Arts, ArtTable, and the Byrdcliffe Artists’ Colony. She has been a member of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association board, having served as its AYA Delegate, and has been involved with its “Where Do I Go from Yale?” conference. She has been active in the Yale Day of Service and has mentored students through several Yale alumni organizations.

Paul D. Bosco ’84 MS

Paul Bosco is a fellow at Harvard University focused on public/private nonprofit coalitions to solve complex societal challenges, such as the future of the internet and computation, and education and leadership development for the digital economy. He is a trustee and advisor to universities, tech startups, and social entrepreneurs.

Bosco previously served in executive roles at Cisco and IBM. At Cisco, where his roles focused on media and broadband innovation, he built and led an industry-leading business delivering infrastructure products to connect homes and lives to the internet. He was recognized for his expertise in collaborative innovation, technology ecosystems, talent/leadership development, scaling ventures, and university partnerships. At IBM he led high-performance computing and communications teams on national and global internet initiatives. In site executive roles he led public-private partnerships, nonprofit engagements, and employee volunteer efforts supporting STEM and computer/data science education.

Bosco is vice chair of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association (GSAA). He has been co-chair of the annual “Where Do I Go from Yale” graduate student and post-doc event; leader of “Careers in High Tech & Media” seminars; co-chair of the AYA Careers, Life & Yale “Careers in Data & the Digital Economy” workshop; GSAA representative on the Wilbur Cross Medal Selection Committee; and member of the Board of Governors nominating committee. He supports Yale graduate students as a sponsor of the new Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, and encourages Yale excellence in science and engineering through Nathan Hale fellowships.

Paul R. Broholm ’78

Paul Broholm is chief investment officer of Theodoor Gilissen Bankiers NV, a private bank based in Amsterdam that focuses on asset management and portfolio advisory services. After graduating from Yale with a B.A. in philosophy, he worked as a research assistant at the Rotterdam School of Management, and then pursued a PhD at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He co-founded a communications firm in the 1980s, then moved to the Netherlands in 1991.

Broholm co-founded the Yale Club of the Netherlands in 2006, and has served as its president since 2009. He spearheaded organization of the AYA’s first International Club Leadership Forum, in London in 2012, and has since hosted a similar forum in Amsterdam, as well as two events in that city for the Yale Global Alumni Leadership Exchange (YaleGALE). Paul has been a participant in the AYA’s pilot alumni-student mentoring program, having served on the Alumni Schools Committee for many years.

Since joining the AYA Board of Governors in 2015, Broholm has served on its Communications & Marketing Committee, and the Volunteer Leadership Committee.

Renata Cesar ’79

Renata Cesar is a Yale College and Stanford Law graduate whose international experience encompasses mergers and acquisition law, nonprofit directorships, and the preservation of historical European buildings. Her current restoration project is a ruined 17th-century palazzo on the island of Malta. She has also established and chaired a foundation in the United Kingdom to improve diversity and access to education.

As a Yale volunteer, Cesar has been a longstanding member of the management committee of the Yale Club of London, and helped launch the London chapter of YaleWomen. She developed and chairs the Yale International Alliance, an AYA shared interest group formed in 2014 whose mission is to connect international alumni with each other and back to the university.

Cesar became a member of the AYA Board of Governors in 2016 after volunteering for three years as an At-Large Delegate. She serves on the board’s Careers, Life & Yale Committee, its Shared Interest Groups Committee, and the Volunteer Leadership Committee.

Darryl Eugene Crompton ’76 MPH

Darryl Crompton most recently served as Tuskegee University’s general counsel and vice president for legal affairs, where he provided guidance to the president and administration to ensure compliance with federal, state and local laws and regulations. He was particularly involved with Title IX compliance as it relates to campus sexual violence. He currently serves as a public health violence subject-matter expert for the Southeastern Health Equity Council, part of the National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities established by the federal Office of Minority Health.

Prior to joining Tuskegee University in 2011, Crompton held senior positions in the Public Education Network, the Florida Department of Education, the United Negro College Fund Special Programs Corporation, and the Catholic Health Association. Earlier, he was a tenured professor of health law at the University of Alabama in Birmingham for 13 years, and held adjunct faculty appointments at the Morehouse School of Medicine, Howard University College of Medicine, and Tuskegee University, College of Veterinary Medicine, Nursing and Allied Health. He also was a bioethics fellow at the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care.

Crompton’s current volunteer activities at Yale include service on the Yale School of Public Health Alumni Association Board and the AYA executive director’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Working Group; he was previously on the AYA’s DEI Task Force. In addition, he was selected as an At-Large Delegate to the AYA Assembly for the 2017–2020 term. He holds BA degree in political science from the University of California at Los Angeles, an MPH degree in hospital administration and policy from the Yale School of Public Health, and a JD degree from the University of California at Davis.

Wendy D’Amico ’93

Wendy Maldonado D’Amico is an independent consultant, offering community-building and writing services for businesses and nonprofits. She is currently building the mentor network at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY). After receiving her BA in English Literature from Yale, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Belize. She later completed a Master’s in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and an MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She went on to work at Booz Allen Hamilton and SAP.

D’Amico has served on the boards of three nonprofits: Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, the Floating Hospital of New York, and Global Village Engineers. She has served Yale continuously since graduation, starting as a volunteer for the Yale Alumni Fund and then serving on the Reunion Gift Committee for her class’s 10th and 15th reunions. During her time as a board member of the Yale Club of Philadelphia, she revitalized young alumni programming. She served as an AYA At-Large Delegate (2009–2012), co-chaired her 20th reunion, and has interviewed applicants through the Alumni Schools Committee for many years.

D’Amico was elected to the AYA Board of Governors in 2018 after completing a five-year term as secretary of the Yale Class of 1993, during which she led efforts to reinvent the Yale College class model of alumni engagement.

Thomas Simsarian Dolan ’05

Thomas Dolan is a PhD candidate in American Studies at George Washington University, with research focused on Middle Eastern diaspora and race. He has a master’s degree in American Studies from NYU, studied at the New School’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, and recently returned from a semester at the Doha Institute. Previous professional experience includes work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, California Faith for Equality, the Abingdon Theatre Company, the Citizen Observer Initiative in Armenia, and the DC Commission on the Arts.

As a student at Yale, Dolan sang with the Duke’s Men and the Whiffenpoofs. He volunteered as a Yale University Art Gallery guide, worked as a curatorial assistant at the Yale Center for British Art, and was active in the Yale Camerata and the Opera Theatre of Yale College. He was also president of SNAPS (Special Needs Awareness and Peer Services), and an enthusiastic supporter of the now-defunct Safety Dance and Morse CD Café.

Dolan’s dedication to Yale as an alumnus has been similarly related to the arts and inclusion. He helped produce and stage-manage a series of benefit concerts in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Haven as part of the Yale Day of Service over several years, and co-created a music theater piece, The Gay Ivy, performed at the 2010 reunions. He was an active member of the planning committees for Yale’s LGBT reunion in 2013 and the 65th reunion of the Duke’s Men. For the past several years he has served on the board of directors of Y-Apply, a nonprofit founded and run by Yalies devoted to increasing college access for underrepresented communities.

Akosua Barthwell Evans ’90 JD

Akosua Barthwell Evans is founder and CEO of the Barthwell Group, a Detroit-based management consulting firm that provides strategic planning, diversity training, assessments and other services to Fortune 500 corporations, institutions of higher education and the military. She was previously a managing director at JPMorgan, where she developed and led national businesses for both the Private Bank and Asset Management groups. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College and a PhD from Columbia. At Yale Law School she won the Edward R. Robbins Memorial Prize, and established the Warner Thornton McGuinn Scholarship Fund.

Evans has served on multiple boards of nonprofits throughout the United States, including the Student Veterans of America, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Hutzel Hospital, Barnard College, Wake Forest University School of Business, Bennett College, and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. She is the founder and former chair of the Friends of Education at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2014, she was appointed by President Obama to serve on the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African-Americans, and became a Governance Fellow of the National Association of Corporate Directors.

Evans has received numerous awards, including the 2011 Entrepreneur Leader Award at the STEM Women of Color Conference, and in 2016 was recognized as one of the ten outstanding woman-owned businesses in Michigan by the National Association of Women-Owned Businesses. An active volunteer for Yale, she has served on the Yale Law School Executive Committee, the board of the Yale Law School Fund, the AYA Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, the YaleWomen Council, the board of the Yale Black Alumni Association, and as an At-Large Delegate to the AYA Assembly.

Pamela A. Farr ’78 MBA

Pam Farr is a partner in Muirhead Holdings, a private equity firm in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her background includes service as chairman of Amerigives, a multimillion-dollar philanthropic outsourcing business, and 10 years as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where she served a variety of Fortune 500 companies. As an entrepreneur, she founded and developed Banyan Homes, a real estate firm, and Best & Company, a manufacturer and retailer of children’s clothing and accessories. She was also a member of the board of directors of Dresdner RCM Global and Capital Funds, based in San Francisco.

Farr devotes substantial time to community service and philanthropy, most significantly with the American Red Cross. She served as national chair of finance from 2004 to 2008, when she was appointed national chair of volunteers. In that capacity she was a member of the senior management team representing some 700,000 Red Cross volunteers at the national level. Prior to her work at ARC National Headquarters in Washington DC, she chaired the ARC board in Greenwich, and held many other leadership positions in that chapter.

In addition to her Red Cross volunteer work, Farr is currently on the board of directors of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, California, and Theatre Forward in New York City. She was elected to the board of Yale School of Management Alumni Association (SOMAA) in 2011, serving as its president from 2014 to 2016, and served as co-president of the New York SOMAA Chapter from 2010 to 2013. She joined the AYA Board of Governors in 2016.

Serena Cherry Flaherty ’99, ’05 CN, ’06 MSN

Serena Flaherty is a pediatric nurse practitioner. After graduating from the Yale School of Nursing she worked at the Fair Haven Community Health Center in New Haven, where she provided leadership to a team providing the full scope pediatric primary care. She subsequently worked at the New York City Department of Health and The Door, an adolescent health center in New York, before relocating back to Connecticut. She now works for Maven Clinic, a company providing telehealth services to families.

Flaherty served as a board member of the Yale School of Nursing Alumnae/Association (YSNAA) from 2011 to 2014 and as its president from 2014 to 2016. During her tenure on the YSNAA Board, she created and launched the Yale School of Nursing Mentoring Program, which is now in its fourth year. She led the board in organizing alumni career panels, negotiation workshops, speed networking events, and virtual CV review events. For her work with the mentoring program, she was honored with an AYA Leadership Award for Volunteer Innovation and Service in 2014.

In 2016, Flaherty joined the AYA Board of Governors. She currently serves on the board’s Careers, Life & Yale Committee, its Graduate & Professional Schools Committee, and the Volunteer Leadership Committee.

Cristina Cruz González ’94

Cristina González is an associate professor of Art History at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. After graduating from Yale in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, she received a master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, a master of philosophy degree from Cambridge in 2000, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago in 2009.

Since her hometown is situated between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, González is a committed member of the Yale Clubs in both places. An enthusiastic interviewer on behalf of her local Alumni Schools Committee, she considers her knowledge of Oklahoma and its people to be vital to Yale’s ongoing recruiting efforts, and she hopes that her ASC work will have immediate local impact while serving Yale’s long-standing mission to form an exceptional and diverse student body.

In recent years, González served on the Yale Latino Alumni Advisory Council, became a charter member of the Yale Alumni Arts League, and was selected an AYA At-Large Delegate for the 2015-2018 term. Drawing on her expertise as an art historian, she has offered lectures at a number of AYA events, including the Yale International Alliance’s “Global Citizen” virtual lecture series in 2015, and the Yale Alumni Art League’s Contemporary Crossroads Symposium at Art Basel Miami at the end of that year. Most recently, she contributed to the AYA’s 2017 Executive Leadership Forum on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Washington, DC.

Lauren Elizabeth Graham ’13 MEM

Lauren Graham is a social entrepreneur and coach. She is the founder of Velvet Frame, a social change strategy and communications startup that provides consulting services to mission-driven organizations on their leadership development and organizational design challenges through a method of applying ecological principles to collective action problems.

While pursuing her master’s degree in environmental management at at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Graham directed the Environmental Film Festival at Yale — the largest student-run festival of its kind to be free and open to the public. Since 2014 she has chaired Yale Blue Green, a shared interest group focused on the sustainability and the environment. Under her leadership, YBG has grown to include three local branches on the East Coast, and hopes to continue expanding to include environmentally minded Yalies from all the graduate and professional schools.

Graham is a first-year member of the AYA Board of Governors member. She has volunteered as a Yale Day of Service site coordinator in New York City each year since 2015, and served as an AYA At-Large Delegate from 2013 to 2016.

Robert G. Greenly ’83 MBA

As principal of the Greenly Group LLC and the Corporate Physician Leadership Center, Rob Greenly provides executive coaching, leadership development, team facilitation and training to physicians, scientists, engineers, academics, CFOs and other successful functional experts. His work experience has included being director of leadership at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of Organization Development and Training at Astra Pharmaceuticals, vice-president of Leadership and Organization Development at Boston Scientific, and chief administrative officer for Human Resources at Putnam Investments.

In his volunteer capacity at Yale, Greenly served as president of YaleBoston from 2013 to 2015 and chair of the Yale School of Management Alumni Association of Boston. He previously served on the Yale SOM Alumni Association Board of Directors, where he co-chaired its Regional Chapters Committee. He chaired the SOM Class of 1983 25th reunion, served as an AYA Delegate, and volunteered as the SOM 1983 Class secretary, a Yale SOM student mentor, and a Yale SOM mock interviewer.

In July 2016, Greenly was elected to the AYA Board of Governors, where he is co-chairing a Graduate and Professional Schools Leadership Summit in April 2017. He is also helping to lead a proposed effort to pilot alumni-to-alumni career support.

Ethan Johnson Heard ’07, ’13 MFA

Based in Brooklyn, New York, Ethan Heard is a director of opera, musicals and plays. He is the founding co-artistic director of Heartbeat Opera, which creates radical adaptations of classic opera for the 21st century. His recent production of Beethoven’s Fidelio updated the story to the Black Lives Matter era, and featured more than one hundred singers in six prison choirs across four states. His collaborations with institutions like The Public, Lincoln Center, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Berkshire Theatre Group, and The O’Neill have received rave reviews in the New York Times, New Yorker, and Opera News. In 2017, he served as resident director of China’s first jukebox musical, Jay Chou’s The Secret.

As a Yale student, Heard sang in the Whiffenpoofs and served as artistic director of Yale Cabaret, where he began the beloved “Yale School of Drag” tradition. In 2009, he co-conceived and directed The Gay Ivy, a music theater piece responding to the controversy following a cover story in the Yale Alumni Magazine entitled “Why They Call Yale the Gay Ivy."

Heard teaches acting and directing at the Yale School of Drama, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and Princeton University. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Board of Advisors of the Yale School of Drama. He joined the AYA Board of Governors in 2018.

Jerry Wayne Henry ’80 MDiv

Jerry Henry is a senior partner/owner of Alexander Haas, based in Atlanta, one of the leading fundraising consulting firms in the United States. With over 35 years of experience covering a wide range of non-profit institutions, he provides counsel on a daily basis to a diverse body of clients, including educational institutions, human service groups, cultural institutions and faith-based organizations.

In his volunteer roles at Yale, Henry has served the Yale Divinity School as a class secretary and class agent for the past 37 years. He is a past chair of the YDS Alumni Board, and currently serves on the Dean’s Advisory Council. He has volunteered with the Yale Alumni Schools Committee as an interviewer for Yale College applicants in the Atlanta area, and is an enthusiastic member of the Yale Club of Georgia.

Now in his third year as an elected member of the AYA Board of Governors, Henry has chaired the board’s Graduate & Professional Schools Committee for the past two years. He also serves on the Careers Life & Yale Committee, the Yale Alumni Fellow Nominations Committee, the Yale Medal Nominations Committee. He is also actively involved in mentoring current Yale students.

Xiaoyan Huang ’91

Xiaoyan Huang is a practicing invasive cardiologist and healthcare executive who lives in Portland, Oregon. Born and raised in China, she was fortunate enough to receive financial aid that allowed her to attend Yale, and she feels eternally grateful to the university for its generosity. She attributes much of her professional success to her outstanding undergraduate education, superb professors and gifted fellow students.

As a volunteer alum, Huang has served as an alumni interviewer and in various roles at the Yale Alumni Association of Oregon & Southwest Washington, including board members, chair of its community service committee, and now president. She has traveled to China and Nicaragua with the Yale Alumni Service Corps, has participated in the “YaleGale@Yale” program of the Yale Global Alumni Leadership Exchange, and has helped organize events for the Yale Day of Service and other volunteer alumni activities. In 2015, she produced a very successful AYA-Redpath Conference on health policy for Yale alumni and the community in Portland, Oregon.

Huang has been a member of the AYA Board of Governors since 2015, and she serves as chair of its Volunteer Leadership Committee.

Shahriar Reza Karim ’81, ’87 MA, ’07 MPhil

Shah Karim is CEO of SafeRock, an analytics and strategy company that helps retailers and brands increase shareholder value. He is a researcher on retail trends, e-commerce, education technology and consumer behavior. He is a member of the governing board of the College of Merchandising and Digital Retailing at the University of North Texas; the Tribeca Disruptors Foundation, a community of innovators; Penn State’s Industry Advisory Board for Enterprise Systems; and the advisory board for NJIT’s Tuchman School of Management.

Karim has been a guest or keynote speaker on retail megatrends and disruption at numerous international conferences around the world. He has authored and co-authored research published in CITI Research, Retail & Leisure, Retail Solutions Online, Chain Store Age, Apparel News, Handelsblatt, and Shopping Center Business. He is recognized as a “Top 100 Retail Industry Influencer” by Retail Digest.

Karim was president of the Yale Club of North Jersey from 2014 to 2018. He made panel presentations at “Being Useful” life-skills workshop organized by Careers, Life and Yale in 2015; was a participant in the YaleGALE alumni leadership forum in South Africa in 2016; was a panelist on the “Where Do I Go from Yale?” career workshop in May 2017; and co-chaired the CLY forum on “The New Digital Economy” in October 2017, which brought Yale alumni from social-media, finance, biotech and consulting firms back to campus to interact with students. He chaired the AYA Board of Governors Nominating Committee in 2016 after serving as a member the previous year, and was elected to the board in 2018.

Richard D. Kayne ’76 MD

Dr. Richard Kayne, a specialist in internal medicine, endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism, has been practicing medicine for more than four decades. A resident of Cheshire, Connecticut, he is affiliated with the Midstate Medical Center and Yale-New Haven Hospital, where he served on the Department of Internal Medicine clinical faculty for over 20 years. For the past 16 years he has served on the board of directors for Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a program for children with life-threatening diseases.

Kayne has long been active with the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine (AYAM). As the group’s president (2015-2017) he took steps to build consensus within AYAM’s executive team, motivate other members and recruit new officers. Under his leadership, AYAM increased its engagement with students, deans and administrators. It also implemented a strategic planning process that resulted in bylaws changes and the launching of new programs, including a student-alumni Hackathon team, a student shared-interest group in biomedical engineering, and the foundations for what may become a combined Yale master’s degree in medicine and engineering.

Prior to serving as AYAM’s president, Kayne was as a member of its executive committee (2004-2017), AYA Delegate (2008-2011), chair of its Student Engagement Committee (2012-2015), and vice president (2013-2015). He co-chaired his School of Medicine class’s 40th reunion in 2016, and received the Distinguished Alumni Service Award from AYAM in 2017.

William Asher Kolber ’86

Billy Kolber, who has worked as a commercial photographer, chocolatier, top-selling Avon representative, author, travel agency manager, blogger and guest experience consultant, is the founder of two travel magazines for gay and lesbian consumers. His current publication, ManAboutWorld, was one of the first magazines of any kind developed exclusively for mobile. In his professional work today he helps travel brands and destinations implement engagement strategies for the LGBT market, champions the cause of LGBT travel freedom and safety, and speaks on these issues at conferences around the world.

Even before joining the board of Yale.NYC (the Yale Alumni Association of New York) in 2012, Kolber had a long record of volunteer engagement through the Class of 1986 and his singing groups. To many he is best known as the creator of Foodtober, Yale.NYC’s annual month-long festival of food-related events. First held in 2013, Foodtober helps its participants learn about the culture, creation, politics, business, media, history and science of food, bringing Yale.NYC into collaboration with numerous shared-interest groups, alumni organizations and community partners while raising funds for the Yale Sustainable Food Project and local nonprofits.

In addition to being a member of Yale.NYC’s board, Kolber served as the group’s AYA Delegate from 2013 to 2017 — with a perfect AYA Assembly attendance record — and as its vice-president from 2015 to 2017. For the Yale Day of Service each year he has always been either a committed site coordinator or an enthusiastic participant. He has attended every one of the quinquennial reunions for his Class of 1986, was a member of the planning committee for its 30th reunion in 2016, and has long been point person for the Whiffenpoofs of 1986.

Jennifer Ebisemiju Madar ’88

Jennifer Madar has a background in marketing communications. She recently completed three years of service as president of YaleBoston, a position she reached after years of volunteer service on the club’s board as secretary, vice-president and AYA Delegate. During her first year as president, she worked with her board to launch a new website, revise the club’s bylaws, and obtain 501(c)(3) nonprofit status for the organization, all the while overseeing YaleBoston’s year-long 150th anniversary celebration. In recognition of these accomplishments, YaleBoston was recognized by the AYA with the “Outstanding Major-Cities Yale Club Award” in November 2016.

In her remaining years as president, Madar also focused on providing more ways for Boston-area alums to engage with the organization and one another. She strengthened the group’s relationship with the Boston chapters of AYA-recognized shared interest groups, and made a point of respecting the dedication and expertise of long-serving volunteers while introducing new perspectives, ideas and demographics to the organization. Her goal throughout was to foster a welcoming, inclusive atmosphere for all alums, undergraduate, graduate, and professional alike.

Madar is currently in her first year as a member of the Governing Council of YaleWomen, and serves on the Steering Committee of YaleWomen Boston. For many years she has also been a member of a Boston-area Alumni Schools Committee, interviewing high-school students applying to Yale. She feels that her background in communications has given her an openness to different perspectives as well as a strong commitment to consensus-building and outreach.

Patricia Melton ’83

Since 2012, Patricia Melton has been executive director of New Haven Promise, a program funded by Yale and the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven that covers tuition at in-state colleges for New Haven public-school students who maintain at least a 3.0 GPA and 90% attendance record in school, perform community service, and keep up a positive disciplinary record. She came to the job with a master’s degree in education and 18 years of experience in the field, but she also draws from a deep well of empathy for her students: she grew up on welfare in the housing projects of Cleveland, the sixth of seven children raised by a single mother who died when she was 12.

At Yale, Melton competed on the varsity track and field hockey teams and worked to help pay her own way through college. She became a nationally ranked track star, got involved with a parent organizing drive in Seattle’s public-school system, and went on to serve as chief fundraiser for Boston’s first charter high school, assistant dean of instruction at Vincennes University in Indianapolis, and chief academic officer for Indiana’s third-largest public-school district. In 2007 she won a Silver Anniversary Award from the NCAA, which recognized her for being a distinguished former student-athlete on the 25th anniversary of the end of her intercollegiate eligibility.

Melton served as an At-Large Delegate to the AYA Assembly from 2006 to 2009; was a guest speaker at the panel on “Progress and Potential: Public Education in New Haven Today” during the 2013 Assembly, which celebrated the city’s 375th anniversary; and became a board member of the Yale Club of New Haven in 2014. She was an alumni panelist at the Careers, Life and Yale “Being Useful” workshop on public-service careers in October 2015, and served as an AYA Delegate from the Yale Black Alumni Association from 2016 to 2017. In 2018 she was elected to the AYA Board of Governors.

Thomas J. Opladen ’66

Tom Opladen, the executive chairman of MMT Inc., is president and co-founder of the Yale Veterans Association. He is treasurer of the Yale Class of 1966 and co-chair of its annual class dinner. He serves as a member of the Athletics Committee of the Yale Club of New York City, and is a director of the New York chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors, as well as chairman of the chapter’s Membership Committee.

Opladen was a Director of PB Inc., a multibillion-dollar global engineering firm, from 1989 to 2009, and chaired its Audit Committee and Finance Committee for most of that period. Prior to that he was CEO of Graham Field Health Products Inc., an Atlanta-based manufacturer of durable medical products; a senior vice-president and director of corporate finance in the Investment Banking Group at Bank of America in New York; director of private placements for Bank of America; a vice-president in the Investment Banking Department at Shearson Loeb Rhoades; and director of Burns and Roe, an engineering firm in Oradell, New Jersey.

Opladen received a B.S. degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. He served in the U.S. Navy for four years after receiving his commission through the Yale NROTC program, last serving as the chief engineer and third-in-command of a destroyer. He holds a Certificate of Director Education (CDE) from the National Association of Corporate Directors, where he is a governance fellow.

Rahul R. Prasad ’84 MS, ’87 PhD

Rahul Prasad is a senior physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he leads a research group at the National Ignition Facility. In the years after he received his PhD in engineering and applied science at Yale, he served on the research faculty at Yale, worked as a research scientist at Physics International and later Science Research Lab, and in 1994 co-founded a small business, Alameda Applied Sciences Corporation.

In his volunteer capacity at Yale, Prasad served as a member, secretary, treasurer, vice-chair (2002-10) and chair (2010-12) of the Graduate School Alumni Association, where he helped create the “Where Do I Go from Yale?” annual GSAS Career event. While a member of the AYA Board of Governors, he created two career workshops — Green Careers for Yale Blues, and Healthy Career Choices — to bring alumni back to campus to provide students career and life-skills advice. He co-founded the AYA’s Careers Life and Yale (CLY) program in 2015 while an executive officer of the AYA Board of Governors.

A long-standing member of the Yale Club of San Francisco board of directors, Prasad currently serves as its president. He was chair of the Association of Yale Alumni Board of Governors — the first alum of the Yale Graduate School to hold that post — from July 2016 to June 2018.

Christopher M. Quander ’86

Chris Quander, a financial technology strategist based in Chicago, is head of business development at Lekos Technology Solutions LLC and OptionEyes LLC. He formerly managed proprietary options trading groups in Amsterdam, Chicago, Frankfurt and London. He has been active with the Yale Club of Chicago for many years, serving as its vice-president (2016–2018) and current president, and as a board member of the Yale Club of Chicago Foundation since 2016. He has been president of the Chicago chapter of the Yale Black Alumni Association (YBAA) since 2015, and has long been an interviewer for his local Alumni Schools Committee.

Just as he assesses the metrics of product relevance, system scalability and technical efficiency in his work, Quander strives for similar benchmarks in the Yale activities he helps organize. As an example of relevance, YBAA’s Chicago chapter collaborated with the Yale Alumni Art League in a 2016 visit by Yale curator Pamela Franks to highlight Afro American art at the Yale University Art Gallery. As an example of scale, Yale Chicago and the Yale Divinity School hosted “Violence: A Faithful Response to the Plague in Our Neighborhoods and in Our Nation,” a 2017 panel discussion with academics, civic leaders and clergy that brought together hundreds of Yale alumni, community members and on-line viewers.

Concerning efficiency, Quander advocates using tools that work in alumni outreach but also staying apprised of innovative approaches. He has attended several Yale alumni workshops in recent years to discuss topics ranging from disruptive leadership strategies to diversity, equity and inclusion. He reports that engaging with fellow alumni at these workshops has provided him with a wealth of knowledge and ideas to use in program development back in his hometown of Chicago.

Anthony Daniel Sabatelli ’81 MS, ’84 PhD

Anthony Sabatelli holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Yale and a law degree from the Salmon P. Chase College of Law. He is an adjunct professor at the University of New Haven, as well as a registered patent attorney and partner at Dilworth IP. Prior to joining Dilworth, he was vice-president and general counsel at Rib-X Pharmaceuticals Inc. — now Melinta Therapeutics Inc. — and previously held patent counsel positions at both Merck and Procter & Gamble. He himself is an inventor on over a dozen patents.

In his volunteer capacity at Yale, Sabatelli served on the board of the Graduate School Alumni Association as a member, secretary, treasurer, vice chair (2007-14) and chair (2014-16). Through the GSAA he helped create the annual “Where Do I Go from Yale?” career event. He was recently elected to the AYA Board of Governors and serves on the board’s Graduate and Professional Schools Committee, the Careers Life & Yale Committee, and the Marketing and Communications Committee.

Sabatelli is a frequent speaker and writer on issues relating to intellectual property and policy and government affairs issues.

Pulin Manoj Sanghvi ’92

Pulin Sanghvi currently serves as the inaugural executive director of career services at Princeton University, where he is leading a reimagining of the university’s career center focused on purposeful and meaningful work. He teaches a “Career and Life Vision” program that has drawn thousands of members of the Princeton, Stanford and Yale communities, and is launching a student-alumni social networking platform for Princeton.

Sanghvi graduated from Yale in 1992 with a B.A. summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with Distinction in Economics, and also holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He serves Yale on the Association of Yale Alumni’s Board of Governors, where he chairs the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee and serves on the Careers, Life & Yale and Marketing & Communications Committees. He also serves on the National Board of Directors of Positive Coaching Alliance, a nonprofit focused on changing the win-at-all-cost culture in youth sports.

Sanghvi previously served as assistant dean and director of the Career Management Center at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and worked at McKinsey & Company in Palo Alto and Morgan Stanley & Company in New York. He also served on an advisory council to the Association of Yale Alumni, and served for eight years as the Palo Alto Alumni Schools Committee Director.

Amy Frances Savage ’10 PhD

Amy Savage is associate dean for educational assessment at Bard College, a liberal-arts institution in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She had previously served as the director of Bard’s Citizen Science program, an initiative to develop scientific literacy in first-year students. As a academic administrator, she has focused on fostering student-centered teaching practices in an environment that values inclusion and diverse perspectives.

Savage is a parasitologist, specializing in zoonotic and vector-borne diseases. After earning her PhD in Epidemiology & Public Health at Yale in 2010, she remained at the university as a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in the Yale College seminar program. She also collaborated frequently with the Yale Center for British Art, using its collection to lecture on scientific topics. Prior to Yale she earned her BS degree at the University of Connecticut and her MS at the University of Florida, and worked for the U.S. Geological Survey investigating avian malaria in native Hawaiian birds.

Savage regularly volunteers her time to the Mid-Atlantic Region Commission on Higher Education and the Association of American Colleges & Universities. She has served in many volunteer roles since joining the Graduate School Alumni Association board in 2014, most recently co-chairing the GSAA’s “Where Do I Go from Yale?” spring career event. She has been active in the Yale Day of Service, both with her local club as a site coordinator and as a regional director serving the state of New York.

Nathaniel Morris Segal ’08

Nathan Segal served through January 2017 at the White House as a presidential appointee, working across the National Economic Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy as senior advisor to President Obama on issues of economics, technology, investing and finance. He also served as an assistant administrator at the U.S. Small Business Administration, working as the point of contact between the White House and the head of the agency. Before his time in DC, Segal worked in the areas of direct private and public investing, M&A advisory, and sales and trading at several large investment firms and banks in New York City.

In his senior year at Yale, Segal he was named to USA Today’s All-USA Academic First Team. He graduated summa cum laude and was a Truman Scholar, Udall Scholar, Rhodes Scholarship finalist, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Today he is active in the Truman Scholars Alumni Association, the Toigo Foundation, and Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO). He has also served on the boards of ONABEN (Our Native American Business Network), the DC chapter of Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), and the Riordan Programs Alumni Association.

As a member of the AYA Board of Governors, Segal serves on three committees: Careers, Life and Yale; Appointed Board Nominating; and Graduate & Professional Schools. He is a founding member of Native American Yale Alumni (NAYA), chief financial officer of the Yale Latino Alumni Association (YLAA), a member of the AYA Diversity & Inclusion Task Force, a board member of the Yale Club of Washington, DC, and an interviewer for the Alumni Schools Committee (ASC). He enjoys mentoring numerous current Yale students and recent alumni.

Nancy Anne Stratford ’77

Nancy Stratford, chair of the AYA Board of Governors, earned a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Yale in 1977 and an MBA from the Wharton School in 1982. She is a co-founder of YaleWomen, the shared interest group for women at Yale; a founder and chapter head of YaleWomen NYC; a past chair of the Yale Alumni Fund; a past member of the Yale Tomorrow Campaign Committee; and a current member of the Yale Development Council and the 1977 Class Council. She also continues as Chair of Agents for her class. She has received the YAF Chairman’s Award and the Yale Medal.

With others, Stratford is currently leading a pilot mentoring program for alumni and students sponsored by the AYA, CLY (Careers, Life & Yale), and STAY (Students and Alumni at Yale). She has served on the women’s committee of the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club for 20 years. She also chairs the Education and Scholarship Committee for the CDA.

Professionally, Stratford was a senior vice-president at Paine Webber for many years, where she advised large institutions, hedge funds, mutual funds and government entities on investments. She was also a private banker at J.P. Morgan. She now manages private portfolios.

Kevin R. Winston

Kevin Winston is founder and CEO of Digital LA, the largest digital professional organization in Los Angeles, and the Silicon Beach Fest start-up conference, recognized for its outstanding contributions by the mayor of Los Angeles. He was recently listed in the inaugural Los Angeles Business Journal’s “500 Most Influential People in Los Angeles” — where, he was amused to discover, he is listed between Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon. He is an Emmy voter and a member of the Television Academy.

Winston has created digital marketing campaigns and strategy while working at McKinsey, Fox Interactive Media, MySpace, and Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment. He has been a guest speaker at SXSW, CES, San Diego Comic-Con, Silicon Beach Fest, Cannes Film Fest, Social Media Week LA, NATPE, Entertainment Finance Forum, Digital Entertainment World, and Digital Hollywood. He is also founder of Ivy Entertainment, which creates collaborative events in the Los Angeles area.

Winston is a founder of the AYA shared interest group Yale in Hollywood, serving as its president for the past 15 years and spearheading three of its conferences that drew more than 350 attendees each. He founded the Los Angeles chapter of Yale Tech, another SIG, and has been involved with organizing several AYA Assemblies and the first Yale Entrepreneur Conference. He has spoken on best practices in social media at the Yale Social Media Summit in San Francisco and the Yale Leadership Summit in Dubai, and has served as a board member or officer at the Yale Clubs in Los Angeles, Boston and New York.

AYA Board of Governors

Board Members