Princeton University has named nine members to its Board of Trustees, effective July 1.
Amy Alving
The trustees are:
• Heather Gerken, Anthony H.P. Lee and Brad Smith, who were elected by the board to serve eight years as charter trustees;
• Sumir Chadha, Bob Peck and Anthony Yoseloff, who were elected by the board to serve four years as term trustees;
• Amy Alving and Terri Sewell, who were elected by alumni to serve four years as alumni trustees; and
• Sarah Varghese, who was elected by the junior, senior and two youngest alumni classes to serve four years as a young alumni trustee.
Completing their terms as trustees on June 30 are Tumi Akinlawon, Class of 2015; Lori Fouche, Class of 1991; Arminio Fraga, Graduate Class of 1985; Kathryn Hall, Class of 1980; Paul Maeder, Class of 1975; Anne Sherrerd, Graduate Class of 1987; and Doris Sohmen-Pao, Class of 1993.
Biographical information about the new trustees follows.
Sumir Chadha
Alving, of Arlington, Virginia, received her Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton in 1988. Her bachelor’s degree is from Stanford University. After earning her doctorate, she did postdoctoral research in experimental fluid mechanics at Technische Univeristät Berlin.
She joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1996 and, after serving as a White House Fellow at the U.S. Department of Commerce, decided to take a position with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where she worked for seven years. In 2005, she joined Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and soon was promoted to chief technology officer. Since leaving the corporation in 2013, Alving has been a director at Fannie Mae and is a board member of DXC Technology as well as the advanced materials corporation Arconic.
Alving has volunteered for organizations including the Defense Science Board, the National Academy of Engineering and Georgia Tech’s President’s Advisory Board. She served an eight-year term on the advisory council for mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton.
Chadha, of Hillsborough, California, is the co-founder and managing director of WestBridge Capital, and has been investing in India for the past two decades. He also co-founded and was managing director of Sequoia Capital India. Early in his career, he worked in the Principal Investment Area (PIA) at Goldman Sachs, and at McKinsey & Co.
Heather Gerken
In 2018, a gift from Chadha established the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton, with the goal of bringing together scholars and students from all disciplines to broadly explore contemporary India. The center is part of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), where Chadha is a member of the advisory council.
He earned a B.S.E. in computer science from Princeton in 1993 and received an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Gerken, of New Haven, Connecticut, served as an alumni trustee at Princeton from 2014-18. She is the dean and Sol & Lillian Goldman Professor of Law at Yale Law School and is a leading expert on constitutional law and election law.
After graduating from Princeton in 1991 with a degree in history, Gerken earned a law degree from the University of Michigan Law School, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review. Upon graduation, she clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th Circuit’s Court of Appeals and then Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. She entered private practice in Washington, D.C., in 1996 before joining the faculty of Harvard Law School in 2000 and then Yale Law School in 2006, becoming dean in 2017.
Anthony H.P. Lee
Gerken is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served as a senior adviser to the Barack Obama presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. In 2018, she interviewed Supreme Court justices and Princeton alumnae Sonia Sotomayor and Elene Kagan as part of the “She Roars: Celebrating Women at Princeton” conference. As a Princeton student, she won the Harold Willis Dodds Achievement Award.
Lee, of Sydney, is a private investor who is director of Aberon Pty Ltd. He graduated from Princeton in 1979 with a degree in mathematics and has an MBA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before moving to Australia in 1987, Lee worked as a corporate finance executive for a British merchant bank in Hong Kong. He served as a term trustee at Princeton from 2014-18.
Bob Peck
Lee has supported Princeton in a multitude of ways, including through service on committees and through gifts for mathematics, high-speed computing, arts spaces and in establishing the Anthony H.P. Lee ’79 Fund for the Study of Jazz in 2008. He is a board member of several organizations and corporations in Hong Kong and Australia.
Peck, of San Francisco, earned a degree in history from Princeton in 1988. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and went on to become managing director of FPR Partners in San Francisco, an investment firm he founded in 2003.
Peck, who came to Princeton from Texas, was the first person in his family to attend college. In learning to be successful at Princeton, he was inspired to help ease the transition to the University for students in generations that followed him. Through the Bob Peck ’88 Family Fund for the Freshman Scholars Institute, incoming first-year students gain lab-based training in life sciences and engineering the summer before starting at Princeton. Peck also has backed other University endeavors to support first-generation and low-income Princeton students.
Sewell, who graduated from Princeton in 1986 with an A.B from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, is in her fifth term representing Alabama’s 7th District in Congress. One of the first women elected to Congress from Alabama and the first black woman to serve in the Alabama congressional delegation, she is vice chair of the Ways and Means Committee and is a chief deputy whip.
Terri Sewell
Sewell was Selma High School’s first black valedictorian and was the first person from her high school to attend an Ivy Institution at the time, she told participants at the “She Roars” alumni conference in 2018. Sewell received a master’s degree in politics from Oxford University as a Commonwealth Scholar, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. She pursued a U.S. Federal Court clerkship, then spent seven years at a Wall Street law firm before returning to Alabama where she was a partner at Maynard, Cooper and Gale, distinguishing herself as one of the leading public finance lawyers in the state. During college, she served three internships for Richard Shelby, then a Democrat representing Alabama’s 7th District, and, in 2009, Sewell herself decided to run for public office. She was elected to Congress in 2010.
Brad Smith
Smith, of Bellevue, Washington, has been president of Microsoft since 2015, where he has worked since 1993. Currently, Smith leads a team of more than 1,400 professionals in 56 countries. Last fall, Princeton teamed up with Microsoft to establish a collaboration on the leading edge of microbiology and computer modeling research. At the helm of Microsoft, Smith leads work on a range of issues involving the intersection between technology and society, including cybersecurity, privacy, ethics and artificial intelligence, human rights, immigration, environmental sustainability, and philanthropy. Smith and Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber continue to work together to support permanent protections for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Sarah Varghese
Before joining Microsoft, Smith was a partner at a Washington, D.C.-based law firm after clerking for U.S. District Court Judge Charles Metzner in the southern district of New York. Smith is active in several civic organizations and serves on the Netflix board of directors and chairs the board of directors of Kids in Need of Defense and the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship program.
Smith served as a term trustee at the University from 2014-18. He graduated from Princeton in 1981 with a degree from the Woodrow Wilson School before earning his J.D. from Columbia University. Smith has served on numerous committees at Princeton over the years. In 2018, he spoke on campus about the benefits and perils of artificial intelligence as part of the University’s G.S. Beckwith Gilbert ’63 Lectures series. As a Princeton student, he won the Harold Willis Dodds Achievement Award.
Varghese, of New Delhi, graduated in June with an A.B. in computer science. Before starting classes at Princeton, she participated in the Novogratz Bridge Year program in Kunming, China, where she volunteered at an anti-human trafficking NGO and taught English and dance. The following summer, she participated in a PIIRS Global Seminar on Contemporary Chinese Society at Peking University in Beijing. Most recently, she spent time at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya as an education initiatives summer intern, teaching math and computer science and facilitating community-based projects on disease awareness and prevention.
Anthony Yoseloff
At Princeton, Varghese has been an Orientation leader, Outdoor Action leader, student worker at the Rocky-Mathey Dining Hall, member of the academic committee of the Undergraduate Student Government, peer tutor and learning consultant at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, and fellow with the Fields Center. Most recently, she has worked at the Frist Welcome Desk, and has served as a student peer adviser at the Lewis Center for the Arts. She also has been a dancer and choreographer for Raqs Princeton Belly Dance Company and Expressions Dance Company, a member and co-founder at the Scully Co-op, and an actor and co-director for “The Vagina Monologues.”
She will join Digital McKinsey’s New York location as a business analyst, while also applying to master’s programs relating to the intersection of technology and society.
Yoseloff, of New York City, earned his bachelor’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School in 1996. He has a J.D. from Columbia Law School and an MBA from the Columbia Graduate School of Business Administration. Yoseloff is the co-executive managing member of Davidson Kempner Capital Management LP, a global institutional investment management firm with over $30 billion in assets under management.
Yoseloff is a member of the Board of Trustees of Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America and a member of the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library. He is a member of the Board of Directors of PRINCO, the investment manager of the Princeton University endowment.
Yoseloff has been an active volunteer across the Princeton community for over 20 years, including originally conducting ASC interviews of potential students and more recently serving on the Executive Committee of the Aspire Campaign. Yoseloff has been selected as co-chair of Critical Few for his upcoming 25th-year class reunion.
