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The Foundation is governed by a Board of Directors of up to 16 persons including the President who serves ex-officio as a member of the Board. Each Director is eligible to serve up to three four-year terms. A Director is reviewed by the full Board before election to a new term.
Learn About Our Governance
Stephanie Bell-Rose is a philanthropy, governance, and corporate professional. From 2010 to 2020, she was a Senior Managing Director at TIAA and Head of the TIAA Institute, focused on economic research and organizational effectiveness in the charitable and educational sectors. Previously, Bell-Rose was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs and founding President of The Goldman Sachs Foundation (1999-2009) with a mission to promote education and leadership development globally. She formerly served as Legal Counsel and Program Officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where she started and ran the legal office. She is a descendant of the U.S. Colored Troops through her third great grandfather, who departed enslavement in North Carolina to join the Union’s forces during the Civil War. She is currently a director of the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and The Steve Fund, where she serves as President.
Bell-Rose was elected to the Board in 2021. She is a member of the Audit Committee, Ad Hoc Committee on Impact Investments, and the Investment Committee.
Amy C. Falls is chief investment officer at Northwestern University, overseeing a $14.0 billion investment portfolio. A prominent voice in endowment thought leadership, she transitioned endowments from bottom quartile to top decile in less than five years in past roles at Rockefeller University and Phillips Academy Andover. With extensive experience on nonprofit and academic boards, Falls is currently a board member of the Harvard Management Company and the Ford Foundation and is the chairman of the board of trustees at Phillips Academy, Andover. She also serves on the board overseeing the investments for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Falls and her husband created the Amy Falls and Hartley Rogers Foundation, a nonprofit providing grants to organizations devoted to educational equity and equality.
Falls was elected to the Board in 2024. She chairs the Investments committee and is a member of the Impact Investments and Nominating committees.
Gish Jen has written about topics ranging from artificial intelligence to immigration to baseball. Often concerned with the conflicts, nuances and complexities of the American experience in her fiction, she has chiefly used her nonfiction to explore global cultural divides. To both she has brought depth, breadth, heart, and humor. Her writing has earned her a Lannan Award for Literature, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors; it has been included in The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Jen has represented the U.S. Department of State in Turkey, Armenia, Japan, China, Egypt, Serbia, and Israel. As a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she currently serves on both the International Affairs Committee and the Commission on the Arts.
Jen was elected to the Board in 2022. She is a member of the Budget and Compensation and Institutional Policy Committees.
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Paul Klingenstein’s career has been focused on driving change, largely in healthcare, through both private sector and philanthropic strategies. He is a former and current director of numerous healthcare technology companies at various stages of development, both private and public. In 1999, he founded Aberdare Ventures, a San Francisco venture capital firm focused on investing in people and technology to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare. Prior to forming Aberdare, Klingenstein led the healthcare investing team at Accel Partners and worked at Warburg Pincus and at the Rockefeller Foundation. He also serves on the boards of The Campaign Legal Center, The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and is a founding board member of Nia Tero, an organization dedicated to supporting Indigenous people and the guardianship of their ecosystems.
Klingenstein was elected to the Board in 2013. He chairs the Investment Committee and is a member of the Budget and Compensation Committee, the Ad Hoc Committee on Impact Investments, and the Nominating Committee.
William F. Lee is a leading trial, appellate, and intellectual property lawyer. A partner at WilmerHale, Lee has represented a variety of technology-focused clients for more than 40 years. Lee served as lead trial counsel for Harvard in the case challenging its race-conscious admissions policy. He has also served as lead trial counsel for high-profile cases representing Apple, Broadcom, and Pfizer. Throughout his career, Lee has tried more than 200 cases to judgment and argued more than 100 appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeals. Among many awards earned throughout his career, Lee was honored with a lifetime achievement award by the American Lawyer and was selected as one of the National Law Journal’s 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America. Lee is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Lee was elected to the Board in 2024. He chairs the Institutional Policy committee and is a member of the Audit and Nominating committees.
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Martha Minow was elected to chair the Board of Directors in 2022. She is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University and the former Dean of Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 1981. She is an expert in human rights, constitutional law, and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities, women, children, and persons with disabilities. Minow has served on a variety of commissions, including the Center for Strategic and International Studies Commission on Countering Violent Extremism and on the Independent International Commission Kosovo. She serves on the boards of the Advantage Testing Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the SCE Foundation, public broadcaster WGBH, and the Council for the American Bar Association Center for Innovation. Minow is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Minow was elected to the Board in 2012. She chairs the Nominating Committee and, as Board Chair, serves ex officio on all Board committees.
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Sendhil Mullainathan is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He helped co-found ideas 42, a nonprofit to apply behavioral science to social problems, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a center to promote the use of randomized control trials in development. Mullainathan has produced a diverse set of research in behavioral economics including: the impact of poverty on mental bandwidth; using fictitious resumes to measure discrimination; showing that higher cigarette taxes make smokers happier; and modeling how competition affects media bias. His latest research focuses on using machine learning and data mining techniques to better understand human behavior. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002.
Mullainathan was elected to the Board in 2013. He is a member of the Audit Committee and the Investment Committee.
Cecilia Muñoz is a Senior Advisor at New America, which she joined in 2017 to build a team on public interest technology. Previously, she served on President Barack Obama’s senior staff as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and then as Director of the Domestic Policy Council. Muñoz was Senior Vice President at the National Council of La Raza (now UNIDOS US), the nation’s largest Hispanic policy and advocacy organization, where she led a policy team and collaborated with a broad range of constituency groups. Muñoz is a Senior Fellow at Results for America, a nonprofit that advances the use of data and evidence in policy making. She also advises the Open Society and JPB Foundations, is a trustee of the Kresge and Joyce Foundations, and serves on a number of nonprofit boards. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000.
Muñoz was elected to the Board in 2019. She chairs the Budget and Compensation Committee and is a member of the Institutional Policy Committee.
Alondra Nelson is the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values lab. From 2021 to 2023, Dr. Nelson served as deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In 2023, Nelson was nominated by the White House and appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to serve on the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence. Widely known for her scholarship at the intersection of science, technology, and society, Nelson is the author of several award-winning books including The Social Life of DNA. She was named to the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in the field of AI and to Nature’s list of 10 People Who Shaped Science. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Nelson was elected to the Board in 2024. She is a member of the Institutional Policy and Impact Investments committees.
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Dr. Olufunmilayo Falusi Olopade, a practicing medical oncologist, is the Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics and Global Health at the University of Chicago. Dr. Olopade’s innovative research in women's cancers showed that women of African ancestry can be genetically susceptible to a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. She is an elected member of numerous honor societies including the National Academy of Medicine, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She served as a member of the National Cancer Advisory Board under the Obama Administration and currently serves on the boards of the Lyric Opera of Chicago and two Chicago-based healthcare companies, Cancer IQ and Tempus. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2005.
Olopade was elected to the Board in 2016. She is a member of the Budget and Compensation Committee and the Institutional Policy Committee.
John Palfrey is the President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Palfrey is a well-respected educator, author, legal scholar, and innovator with expertise in how new media is changing learning and education. Prior to joining the Foundation, he served as Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover, the only school of its kind to maintain need-blind admissions. Prior to Phillips Academy, he served as the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School; as Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society from 2002 to 2008; and the founding board chair of the Digital Public Library of America. Palfrey also serves on the board of The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Palfrey has served as President since 2019. As President of the Foundation, Palfrey serves ex officio on all Board committees.
Juan Salgado is City Colleges of Chicago Chancellor. His career has focused on improving education and economic opportunities for residents in low-income communities. As Chancellor, he oversees Chicago's community college system, serving more than 70,000 students across seven colleges. Under his leadership, City Colleges has worked to remove barriers to college access, strengthen program quality, and enhance student supports to create pathways to upward mobility. Previously, he served as CEO of Instituto del Progreso Latino, where he worked to empower residents of Chicago’s Southwest Side through education, citizenship, and skill-building programs that led to sustainable employment and economic stability. He is also a member of the board of the Obama Foundation. Salgado was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2015.
Salgado was elected to the Board in 2020. He is a member of the Audit Committee, the Ad Hoc Committee on Impact Investments, and the Institutional Policy Committee.
Dr. Ruth Simmons is a leader in the field of academia, recognized for her focus on diversity and inclusion in education. Simmons is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Rice University and Adviser to the President of Harvard University on HBCU Initiatives. She served as president of Prairie View A&M University, until March 2023, and is president emerita of Smith College and Brown University, where she became the first Black female president of an Ivy League school. Simmons is the author of numerous publications including her most recent memoir, Up Home, a 2023 New York Times bestseller. She is a member of the Boards of Morehouse College, the Holdsworth Center, the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Houston Branch and Hines Global Income Trust. Simmons is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Simmons was elected to the Board in 2023. She is a member of the Budget and Compensation Committee.
