Princeton University has named seven members to its Board of Trustees, effective July 1.
The trustees are:
- Henri Ford and Philip Hammarskjold, who were elected by the board to serve for eight years as charter trustees;
- Blair Effron and Thomas Roberts, who were elected by the board to serve for four years as term trustees;
- José Alvarez and Derek Kilmer, who were elected by alumni to serve four years as alumni trustees;
- and Azza Cohen, who was elected by the junior, senior and two youngest alumni classes to serve four years as a young alumni trustee.
Biographical information about them follows.
Alvarez, of Boston, is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, where he teaches a retailing course and an entrepreneurship course for MBAs and lectures in the Agribusiness Seminar, an international executive program focusing on current issues in the global food system. This represented a career shift following a nearly 20-year career in the retail grocery industry that culminated with him serving as CEO of the Stop and Shop Supermarket Company. Alvarez received his A.B. in history at Princeton in 1985 and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He serves on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards including TJX Corporation, Digital Lumens, the Joyce Foundation, Daily Table, and the National Center on Time and Learning.
Cohen, of Highland Park, Illinois, graduated this year with a degree in history and certificates in South Asian studies and urban studies. Cohen has directed and produced two documentary films during her time at Princeton, "Refugee Refugee" and "Specks of Dust," and in 2014 worked as an intern at Forbes India. In 2015-16, she served as program coordinator for the Princeton University Summer Journalism Program, contributed to The Daily Princetonian as an opinion columnist, co-founded the Career Services Student Advisory Board and served on the Commencement Committee for the Class of 2016. Recipient of the Spirit of Princeton Award in 2015, Cohen will spend the year following graduation studying culture and colonialism at the National University of Ireland Galway as a George J. Mitchell Scholar.
Effron, of New York, is co-founder of Centerview Partners, a leading independent investment banking firm specializing in general advisory, mergers and acquisitions, defense assignments, and divestitures. A member of the Class of 1984, Effron received his MBA from Columbia Business School and launched his career in investment banking with Dillon Read (which merged with SBC Warburg and then UBS), holding a variety of senior banking and administrative positions over his 20-year tenure. He serves on the boards of Lincoln Center, New Visions for Public Schools, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Council on Foreign Relations and the New York City Partnership. Effron is a member of The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.
Ford, of Los Angeles, is vice president and chief of surgery at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, as well as vice dean of medical education, professor and vice chair for clinical affairs in the Department of Surgery and Keck School of Medicine. Ford previously served as professor and chief of the Division of Pediatric Surgery and surgeon-in-chief at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. After earning his bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1980, he received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1984 and later earned a Master of Health Administration from the University of Southern California. A Princeton trustee from 2010-14, Ford has served as president of the Association for Academic Surgery, Society for Black Academic Surgeons and Surgical Infections Society. Among his current leadership roles, Ford serves on the American Pediatric Surgical Association Board of Governors and American College of Surgeons Board of Regents.
Hammarskjold, of Atherton, California, is the chief executive officer of Hellman & Friedman and chairman of the firm's investment and compensation committees. He held previous positions with Dominguez Barry Samuel Montagu in Sydney and Morgan Stanley in New York. Hammarskjold serves on the board of overseers of the University of California-San Francisco and is a director of Grocery Outlet Inc. Having received his BSE from Princeton, he went on to earn his MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. Hammarskjold previously served as a term trustee at Princeton and is the chair of the PRINCO board.
Kilmer, of Gig Harbor, Washington, is United States Representative of Washington State's 6th congressional district, encompassing Tacoma-Pierce County and the Olympic Peninsula. Graduating in 1996 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Kilmer received the M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize, the highest honor awarded to a Princeton undergraduate. As a senior he received a Marshall Scholarship and went to the University of Oxford, earning a Ph.D. in social policy. Kilmer put his interest in solving local problems to work, returning to Washington state to work in economic development. In 2005, he was first elected to public office, serving in the Washington State House of Representatives and the state senate until he was elected to the U.S. Congress in 2012. A member of the House Appropriations Committee since 2014, Kilmer has been named one of the 10 most effective members of Congress by The Washington Post.
Roberts, of Wellesley, Massachusetts, oversees Summit Partners' Peak Performance Group and Credit Team and is active in the firm's equity investment activities in North America and Europe. Since joining the firm in 1989, he has served as a director of more than 30 companies, including Aurora Diagnostics, B&W TEK, Infor Global Solutions and LiteCure. Prior to Summit, Roberts was an analyst at Booz Allen Hamilton. He received an A.B. in economics from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. Roberts is a member of the advisory board of the Alydar Funds, Summit's public equity investment management affiliate, the national council of the American Enterprise Institute, and the Fessenden School board of trustees.
Completing their terms as trustees on June 30 are Jaime Ayala, Angela Groves, Laurence Morse, Robert Murley, Ruth Simmons and John Wynne.
