Risk Management Advisory Committee Meeting 2022

Doug Lederman
Co-Founder and Editor, Inside Higher Education 

Doug Lederman is editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed. He helps lead the news organization's editorial operations, overseeing news content, opinion pieces, career advice, blogs and other features. Doug speaks widely about higher education, including on C-Span and National Public Radio and at meetings and on campuses around the country, and his work has appeared in The New York Times and USA Today, among other publications. Doug was managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education from 1999 to 2003. Before that, Doug had worked at The Chronicle since 1986 in a variety of roles, first as an athletics reporter and editor. He has won three National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association, including one in 2009 for a series of Inside Higher Ed articles he co-wrote on college rankings. He began his career as a news clerk at The New York Times. He grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and graduated in 1984 from Princeton University. Doug lives with his wife, Kate Scharff, in Bethesda, Md.

Megan Mann
NAIS General Counsel & Vice President, Legal Education & Support

Megan is the General Counsel and Vice President—Legal Education & Support—at the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), a nonprofit membership association that provides services to more than 1,900 schools and associations of schools in the United States and abroad, including more than 1,600 independent private K-12 schools in the U.S.

Jennifer Hirsch
PhD, Professor of Socio-Medical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health

Jennifer Hirsch's research spans five intertwined domains: the anthropology of love; gender, sexuality and migration; sexual, reproductive and HIV risk practices; social scientific research on sexual assault and undergraduate well-being, and the intersections between anthropology and public health.She has published articles in journals such as American Journal of Public Health, Studies in Family Planning, AIDS, and Culture Health and Sexuality. Her books include A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families (University of California Press, 2003), which explores changing ideas and practices of love, sexuality and marriage among Mexicans in the U.S. and in Mexico, and the coauthored The Secret: Love, Marriage and HIV (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), which analyzes the social organization of extramarital sexual practices in Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua-New Guinea and the implications of those practices for married women's HIV risk. Along with Dr. Claude Ann Mellins, Hirsch co-directed the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), a study supported by Columbia University that examines sexual health and sexual assault among Columbia and Barnard undergraduates. She is the co-author, with sociologist Shamus Khan, of the Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus, which was named an NPR best book of 2020. Hirsch has been involved in many state-level legislative advocacy campaigns. She is currently working with the Caring Majority on Fair Pay for Home Care workers, and with a statewide coalition to pass legislation ensuring access to comprehensive sexuality education.

Rebecca Benghiat
President & COO, JED Foundation

Rebecca Benghiat has dedicated her career to working in service of the mental health and well-being of children and young adults. Most recently, Rebecca served as the Chief Operating and Advancement Officer at The Quad Preparatory School, a nationally recognized K-12 independent school in New York City that integrates an academically rigorous curriculum with evidence-based social emotional learning, specifically designed to support gifted children with learning differences. Prior to Quad Prep, Rebecca served as Executive Director of Facing Addiction with NCADD, responsible for all executive management functions for this leading national opioid addiction advocacy organization. Previously, Rebecca supported the rapid scaling of citiesRISE, a multi-million-dollar international youth mental health organization, to ensure the organization’s strategic and operational success. Rebecca has also spearheaded the launch of several multi-million-dollar philanthropic organizations, including the Child Mind Institute, the Seleni Institute, and the New Space for Women’s Health. Rebecca is a graduate of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, certified in alternative dispute resolution and she has mediated a wide variety of claims in New York County civil and small claims courts. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy, with a focus on organizational analysis, from The University of Chicago.

Shamus Khan
PhD, Professor of Sociology and American Studies, Princeton University

Shamus Khan is Willard Thorp Professor of Sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He is the author of over 100 articles, books, and essays, including Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton), The Practice of Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation (Oxford, with Colin Jerolmack), and Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (W.W. Norton, with Jennifer Hirsch), which was named a best book of 2020 by NPR. He was a co-principal investigator of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. He directed the working group on the political influence of economic elites at the Russell Sage Foundation, is the series editor of “The Middle Range” at Columbia University Press, and served as the editor of the journal Public Culture. He writes regularly for the popular press such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and has served as a columnist for Time Magazine. In 2016 he was awarded Columbia University’s highest teaching honor, the Presidential Teaching Award, and in 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize from Upsala University for “the best sociologist under 40”.

Todd Adkins – Director of Risk Management, University of Kentucky

Fernando (Ferd) Alonso – Assistant Head for Operations and Finance, Phillips Academy – Andover

Virginia Arbour – Chief Financial Officer and Head of Operations, Emma Willard School

Denielle Burl – Director of Risk Management, College of the Holy Cross

Donal Christian – Vice President of Administration & Chief Financial Officer, Hudson Valley Community College

Sytovia (Sy) Dunn – Associate Director of Budget & Risk Management, Clark Atlanta University

Jack Hardcastle – Chief Information Officer, Chief Risk Officer, McDonogh School

Kathy Hargis – Associate Vice President, Risk Management and Compliance, Lipscomb University

Susan Harrington – Chief Financial Officer, Brewster Academy

Sue Liden – Director of Risk Services, Pacific Lutheran University

Brenda McDonald – AVP, Insurance and Risk Management, Howard University

Tina Paredes – Director of Asset Management, Webb Schools

Will Saxe – Director of Risk Management, Colby College

Michael Toohey – Chief Financial Officer, George School

Keesha Trim – Director, Risk Management & Insurance, University of Richmond

Nakeschi Watkins – Director, Office of Risk Management, Cornell University

Tim Wiseman – Chief Risk Officer, University of Wyoming

John Zhang – Director Treasury and Risk, Fordham University