Trustees Trustee Biographies

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Bonnie Barsamian Dunn ’86 was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2023. She is a trusted advisor and market-recognized former law firm partner with decades of experience advising public and private companies, financial institutions, investment banks, private equity sponsors and others in capital markets, securities, mergers and acquisitions, and other transactional and advisory matters. Also a veteran counselor to boards of directors and C-suites across a range of strategic, corporate governance and sensitive matters, she is well versed in the business, financial, operational and legal challenges that face management and boards, and the impact of transformative transactions. 

Formerly a partner at Clifford Chance and also at some of the nation’s other largest global law firms, Barsamian built and led successful law firm capital markets/securities practice groups and served as Global Co-Head of Corporate Finance at Dechert LLP, and as Chair of the Capital Markets & Securities Team at Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP. Regularly ranked as one of the top capital markets lawyers in the United States, she served as an expert commentator to major media, was a member of Law360’s Capital Markets Editorial Advisory Board and has authored numerous publications. 

Nominated by President Obama to serve on the board of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) in 2016, Barsamian also was vetted and shortlisted in 2018 as a candidate for federal nomination as a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner. Among other recognitions, she was selected to the Crain’s New York Business 2019 “Notable Women in Law” list and received Global M&A Network’s 2019 “Top USA Women Dealmakers” award.

Barsamian Dunn currently serves on the board of directors of Fund for Armenian Relief (FAR), a charitable organization focused on general relief, education and economic development programs in Armenia, and previously served on the board of trustees of the Emma Willard School, among other nonprofit boards.

She graduated from Amherst with a B.A. in economics and English, and spent a semester at The London School of Economics and Political Science while an Amherst student. She received a J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School, where she was a member of The University of Chicago Law Review. She was an inaugural member of Yale School of Management’s Women on Boards executive program. 

She is married to Daniel Dunn ’85 and resides in New York City.

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Ted Beneski ’78 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2012. He is the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Partner of Insight Equity Holdings LLC.

Insight Equity currently manages four buyout equity funds and a mezzanine debt fund. Insight’s total assets under management is approximately $3.2B. Its institutional investors consist primarily of insurance companies, academic endowments, foundations, state investment funds and pooled funds.

Beneski is currently chairman or vice chairman of the board at the following Insight Equity portfolio companies: Versatile Processing Group, MB Precision Holdings, Dustex Holdings, Panolam, VirTex Holdings, Eddy Packing, Strauss Brands, CSAT Investment Holdings, Easy Way Holdings, Sustainable Packaging Co., and Clearly Clean Products. Insight Equity’s current cumulative gross equity returns since inception is 2.7x with an IRR of 47% which is top quartile performance.

Prior to founding Insight Equity, Beneski was a founding principal and senior vice president of the Carlyle Management Group (CMG), a private equity group that yielded annual investment returns of over 60 percent during his tenure there. This group was The Carlyle Group’s special situations and turnarounds entity, which also managed its own dedicated fund.

Before CMG, Beneski was the co-founder and managing director of Bain & Company’s Dallas office. Bain is a global leader in strategy-based management consulting services. As a senior partner at Bain for nearly 10 years, Beneski advised Fortune 100 clients across a wide range of industries in the areas of portfolio and business unit strategy, mergers and acquisitions, operational improvement, organizational and process redesign, new product introduction and growth strategy.

Prior to Bain, Beneski worked for five years as a commercial banker with Bankers Trust in New York and Shawmut Corporation in Boston.

In addition to his service on the Amherst Board, Beneski is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Trinity University, in San Antonio, TX.

He received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a BA from Amherst College, majoring in economics.

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Beth Cisneros ’89 was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2018. She is an attorney with Holland & Knight, representing and advising charitable organizations primarily in trust and estate matters.

Before returning to private practice, Cisneros served as the Deputy General Counsel at the Barack Obama Foundation and the American Red Cross. Working as an in-house counsel, she advised board members and senior management in all areas of nonprofit operations, including labor and employment law, fundraising, governance, tax-exempt compliance, marketing, and corporate transactions. She also represented the organizations in connection with congressional investigations and inquiries from federal and state agencies, as well as state attorneys general. Prior to joining the nonprofit sector, she was a labor and employment lawyer at Epstein Becker & Green.  

After graduating from Amherst cum laude with a B.A. in American Studies, she received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.  At Amherst, she was a co-captain of the women's soccer, squash, and lacrosse teams and was awarded the Howard Hill Mossman Trophy in her senior year.  She serves as an associate class agent and provides career advice to students.

Cisneros is the board chair of Girls on the Run of Montgomery County and a former board co-chair of the Interfaith Families Project of Washington, D.C.

She is married to Michael Rosenman and they have three children.

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Naana A. Frimpong ’00 was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2022. She is a partner at the law firm of DLA Piper LLP in Atlanta, where she leads the firm’s U.S./Africa engagement, serves as the U.S. representative to the firm’s Africa Board, and serves as a member of the firm's Policy Committee. She also serves as a board member for her firm’s Global Scholarships Program (focused on identifying, training and resourcing promising lawyers in the world’s least developed countries) and as Vice Chair of the Yale University President’s Council on International Activities. She has built a career as a federal prosecutor, white-collar defense lawyer and international practitioner, specializing in global investigations and counseling clients on sensitive civil and criminal investigations and disputes.  She regularly speaks, writes and trains others on anti-corruption and good governance, white-collar crime, corporate compliance, trial advocacy, international arbitration and international disputes, with a particular focus on Africa.

Previously, Frimpong served for four years as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago), where she was the lead prosecutor on dozens of federal felony investigations, including fraud schemes, transnational narcotics trafficking, money laundering offenses and child exploitation crimes. Earlier in her career, she worked as an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York and as a law clerk for the Hon. Marilyn Hall Patel in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (San Francisco).

A dual U.S.-Ghana national, Frimpong was raised in Ghana and Botswana and earned her B.A., magna cum laude, with a double major in History and Black Studies from Amherst College, as well as a Five College Certificate in African Studies. She went on to receive a J.D. in 2004 from Yale Law School and an LL.M. in 2011 from the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute and the University of Turin in Italy. Her native language is Twi/Ashanti, and she lives in Atlanta with her husband and two children.

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Douglas C. Grissom ’89 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2015. He is a managing director at Madison Dearborn Partners ("MDP"). Prior to joining MDP, he was with Bain Capital in private equity, McKinsey & Company, and Goldman Sachs. At MDP, he serves on the Boards of Directors of CoVant Technologies II and Fleet Complete. He was formerly on the boards of @stake, Aderant, Asurion, BlueCat Networks, Cbeyond, Fieldglass, Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, Intelsat, LGS Innovations, Lightspeed Systems, LinQuest Corporation and Neoworld.

Outside of MDP, Grissom is a board member at Churchill Downs, Endeavor Louisville, Harvard Business School Fund Council, James Graham Brown Foundation, Louisville Collegiate School, and METROsquash.

Since graduating from Amherst, Grissom has served as co-chair of the College's Promise campaign, chair of the College’s Lives of Consequence campaign in the Midwest Region, co-chair of the class of 1989’s 25th Reunion Lead Gift Committee, co-president and treasurer of the class of 1989 and associate agent for the Alumni Fund. 

While at Amherst, Grissom majored in European studies and German, graduating magna cum laude. He was a four-year member of the squash team and participated in student government, serving on the College Council and the Student Alumni Association. He earned an MBA at Harvard in 1993

In recognition of his many years of dedication, the College awarded him its Medal for Eminent Service in 2014. 

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Rejji P. Hayes ’97 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2021. He has served as executive vice president and chief financial officer of CMS Energy Corp. (NYSE: CMS) since 2017.

Prior to joining CMS, he served as the executive vice president and chief financial officer of ITC Holdings Corp., a publicly traded electric infrastructure company. Before joining ITC, he held strategy and financial leadership roles with Exelon Corp., Lazard and Banc of America Securities.

Hayes is a board member of Fortive Corp. (NYSE: FTV), where he serves as chair of the audit committee. He also serves on the boards of the Business Leaders for Michigan, and the Detroit Regional Chamber. Hayes previously served on the boards of Phillips Academy Andover, the Cranbrook Education Community, and the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Hayes was a Russian major at Amherst and co-captained the soccer team. He went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School. Hayes lives in Michigan with his wife, Celeste Watkins-Hayes, and their two children.

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Matthew Hulsizer ’91 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2021. He is co-founder and managing partner of PEAK6 Investments, a Chicago-based financial services and technology firm. He started PEAK6 in 1997 as a proprietary options trading firm called PEAK6 Capital Management. Since then, Hulsizer and his co-founder have turned PEAK6 into a multibillion-dollar firm with a diversified portfolio of businesses. Today, PEAK6’s core businesses include PEAK6 Capital Management, PEAK6 Strategic Capital, Apex Fintech Solutions, PEAK6 InsurTech, Evil Geniuses and Poker Power.

Hulsizer looks for underfunded and undervalued opportunities with potential to transform the future. While trading gave PEAK6 its start and still powers the center, Hulsizer and his co-founder have created, turned around or invested in more than 100 companies over the past two decades, from options trading and clearing firms to professional sports teams and consumer products. They also share a Tony Award for co-producing the hit musical Memphis.

Hulsizer earned his bachelor of arts degree in English from Amherst College.

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The Rev. Phillip A. Jackson ’85 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2017. He was named the 19th Rector of Trinity Church Wall Street in Manhattan in February of 2022, serving as the spiritual leader of the parish and managing operations, parish programs, the clergy, staff, and all resources and facilities of the church. Prior to his institution as Rector, he served as priest-in-charge and vicar. 

Before coming to Trinity in February 2015, Jackson was the rector of Christ Church of the Ascension in Paradise Valley, Ariz., where he led reconciliation, congregational growth and community engagement in the Phoenix area.

Jackson has also served parishes in Houston and Detroit, and before being ordained as a priest, he practiced law as a litigator in Hawaii.  He serves on several boards including the Mead Art Museum Advisory Board, the Anglican Communion Compass Rose Society, the Charles H. Revson Foundation, Gilder Lehrman President’s Council, and the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center.

He earned his B.A. in history, cum laude; a J.D. from Yale Law School; and an M.Div. from The Church Divinity School of the Pacific. He is married to Page Underwood, an attorney.

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Chantal E. Kordula ’94 was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2019. She is a partner at the law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and a member of the firm’s Executive Committee. Her practice focuses on international business and financing transactions, particularly involving Latin America. Kordula regularly represents Latin American sovereigns, state-owned entities and corporates in their M&A, financing and restructuring activity, as well as multinationals in their investments throughout the region.

After graduating from Amherst cum laude with a B.A. in political science, Kordula earned a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1997. At Amherst, she was a member of the women’s rugby team and was active in the French House and Students for Educational Equality. As a law student, she was involved with the Harvard International Law Journal and worked at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, where she represented clients in family, housing and administrative law cases.

Kordula lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband, Gary Andrew Gonya ’94, and their three children, Bianca, Carter and Dempsey.

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Simon Krinsky ’96 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2014. He is a managing partner at Hall Capital Partners LLC, an independent investment advisor that manages multi-asset class investment portfolios. Krinsky serves on the firm's executive committee and investment review committee. He joined Hall Capital in San Francisco in 2002, later transferring to New York. He was promoted to managing director in 2006 and into his current role as managing partner in 2016.

Krinsky began his career at Goldman Sachs after receiving a B.A. in economics from Amherst. He had several roles at Goldman Sachs, including convertibles sales and trading in New York, and private client services in San Francisco.

Krinsky serves on the investment committees for the Chapin School in New York City and for the Weizmann Global Endowment Management Trust (W-GEM), a research university in Rehovot, Israel.  He previously served on the board of directors of Summer Search New York City and chaired Summer Search's investment committee. He has also served on the investment committees for the New-York Historical Society, Montefiore Medical Center and the Westchester Land Trust.

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Eunei Lee ’89, was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2018. After graduating from Amherst magna cum laude in fine arts, she received her M.A. from Columbia University in the Department of Art History and Archaeology and continued as a graduate fellow pursuing a Ph.D. in American art.

Since 1994, Lee has been living in Hong Kong and serves on the Board of Directors of the Asia Art Archive and the Board of Managers of the Hong Kong International School.

She is married to Ronald S. Lee and has three children

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Ji-Yeun Lee ’88 joined the board in 2023. She is the managing partner of PJT Partners, based in New York, having joined its predecessor company as one of the founding partners in early 2014.

Previously, Lee was managing director and deputy head of global investment banking at Morgan Stanley. She joined Morgan Stanley in 1988 and spent most of her career in mergers and acquisitions, including six years in the firm’s London office, advising clients on a broad range of transactions across industries and geographies. Lee was appointed the deputy head of global investment banking in 2007 and joined Morgan Stanley’s Management Committee in 2011.

Lee serves on the board of directors of Good Shepherd Services. She received a B.A. degree in Asian languages and civilizations and economics.

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David W. MacLennan ’81, P’14 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2018. He became executive chair of the board of Cargill in 2023, after serving as board chair and chief executive officer since 2013. He was elected to the Cargill Board of Directors in 2008 and previously served as chief financial officer and chief operating officer in addition to several operating roles in finance, risk management, energy and protein, living in both London and Geneva.

Prior to joining Cargill, he worked in the futures and securities sector in Chicago and as president of fixed-income capital markets at USBancorp Piper Jaffray.

MacLennan is a board member of the board of the Minnesota Business Partnership and also serves on the board of Ecolab and Caterpillar. He has served on several corporate and nonprofit boards, focusing on the needs of underprivileged youth and access to education. An English major at Amherst, he holds an M.B.A. in finance from the University of Chicago.

He lives in Minnesota with his wife, Kathleen Foye MacLennan ’83. They have three adult children.

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David A. Novak ’91 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2018. He is co-president at the private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R), and is based in London. He joined the firm in 1997 and moved to London in 2000. He is responsible for CD&R’s European business and is a member of the firm’s management and investment committees. Prior to CD&R, he worked at Morgan Stanley in the private equity and investment banking divisions.

Since graduating from Amherst, Novak has served as international chair of Amherst’s Lives of Consequence campaign, chair of the executive committee of the Alumni Council, class agent, associate class agent, member of the 25^th Reunion Gift Committee and volunteer for the Amherst Alumni Outreach Volunteer Program.

Novak currently serves on the Board of the Valerie Fund, which supports children with cancer and blood disorders. He is also a University of Cambridge Investment Board member and an Advisor to Ahren Innovation Capital. Other prior charitable activities have included service on boards associated with Maccabi GB, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and Right to Play UK. In 2009 he was selected to join the Forum of Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum.

He graduated from Amherst with a B.A. in economics, cum laude, and received an MBA from Harvard Business School with honors. He and his wife, Jane, have two boys.

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Christine Noyer Seaver ’81 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2015. She started her professional career in foreign exchange sales and trading at Irving Trust Co. After receiving her MBA, she worked in a progression of industries and functional capacities in the Bay Area, including as associate development director for the San Francisco Ballet, in marketing and strategic planning for a computer start-up, and for a boutique executive search firm in Silicon Valley.

An active community volunteer for many years, she has served primarily in her children’s schools and with educational causes both in New Canaan, Conn., and in Palo Alto, Calif., where she lived for 17 years before returning to the East Coast in 2001. She was a member of the Board of Trustees at St. Luke’s School in New Canaan for nine years, serving as board chair from 2008 to 2012. She is on the Board of Trustees of the New Canaan Library and the Emily Dickinson Museum, is a longtime volunteer for Meals on Wheels and has also served on various other community and civic boards.

Seaver has been an active alumna of Amherst and received the College’s Medal for Eminent Service in 2010. She earned her B.A. in economics in 1981, magna cum laude, and an M.B.A. in 1986 from Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is married to Alex Seaver, and they have four adult children.

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Andrew J. Nussbaum ’85 has served on Amherst College's Board of Trustees since 2010, as an elected Alumni Trustee for six years prior to being appointed a term trustee in 2016. He was elected Chair of the Board in 2018. He is co-chair, Executive Committee and partner in the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where he specializes in mergers and acquisitions, cross-border transactions and corporate governance.

Nussbaum was a Russian major at Amherst, a varsity swimmer, and a summa cum laude graduate. He earned a master’s degree from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and later a law degree from the University of Chicago. He was a law clerk to the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from 1991 to 1992, while she was on the U.S. Court of Appeals, and to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia from 1992 to 1993.

Nussbaum is a member of the board of directors of the Partnership for New York City, and of Asphalt Green, a nonprofit organization providing sports and fitness to children in New York City public schools, as well as adults in need. He previously served on the Board of Governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Darcy Miller Nussbaum, and their three daughters.

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Bill O’Malley ’84 joined Amherst’s Board of Trustees in 2020. He is the chief executive officer and co-chief investment officer at Income Research + Management, a Boston-based fixed-income investment adviser. He is a board member of the firm and also chairs the management committee and co-manages the investment team. He joined the firm in 1994 after five years with Wellington Management Co.

O’Malley is vice chair of Camp Harbor View, a nonprofit serving Boston’s youth. Previously, he was a board member of St. Sebastian’s School for nine years, co-chairing two capital campaigns and chairing the investment committee. He is also closely involved with Project Place and San Miguel School, both New England nonprofits focused on improving outcomes.

O’Malley was a political science major at Amherst and captained the football and basketball teams. He remained at Amherst after graduation, serving as the school’s sports information director and as the Ives Washburn Fellow. He went on to earn his MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Bill and his wife, Sue, live in Medfield, Mass.

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Dwight Poler ’87, P’19, was appointed to the Board of Trustees in July 2015. Following roles at Morgan Stanley and Bain & Company, Dwight joined Bain Capital in 1994 and was named managing director in 1999. Dwight moved to London in 2000 to open Bain Capital’s European private equity business, which he managed for 18 years through four funds, successfully investing over $10 billion in equity. He retired at the end of 2017 and remains a Senior Advisor to Bain Capital.

Since 2018, Dwight has shifted his focus and investing activities to address three core areas: climate change mitigation, toward which he established and manages AccelR8 Funds investing in mitigation and sequestration technologies; income and opportunity inequality, on which he works actively through The Boston Foundation; and Representative Democracy, which he supports through a number of organizations.

Dwight is a Harvard University Advanced Leadership Fellow ’19 and served as an adjunct professor at London Business School, where he taught private equity courses for more than a decade. He also devotes time to charitable activities, and sits on or has sat on the boards of trustees of The Boston Foundation, the MIT MediaLab Advisory Council, Alta Advisors, The Private Equity Foundation in London, The American School in London, Right To Play UK and the Camp Dudley Foundation.

Dwight received an MBA, with distinction, from the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College, where he was a Tuck Scholar. At Amherst, he majored in history and completed the Five College Certificate Program in International Relations.  Dwight met his wife, Kirsten ’88, at Amherst. They have three children, including a daughter who graduated from Amherst in 2019.

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Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne ’01 was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2020. She is a writer whose nonfiction has been published in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The New Republic and Amherst magazine, among other venues. Her short fiction has appeared in Broad River Review and Barren Magazine. Her debut novel, Holding On to Nothing (Blair, 2019), won a Gold Medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best Regional Fiction from the South.   

For reporting on infectious diseases in Uganda and South Africa, respectively, Shelburne has held a Gates Family Foundation Fellowship at the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University and a Kaiser Family Foundation Global Health Reporting Fellowship. She was an interviewer for the Louisiana State Museum/New Haven Oral History Project after Hurricane Katrina. She has worked as a writing teacher and as an editor, including five years on the editorial staff of The Atlantic.

Shelburne was a longtime board member and co-chair at the Cambridge Ellis School and is a current board member at WBUR, Boston’s public radio station. In 2016–17, she served on the board of Peer Health Exchange Boston. She and her husband have been active supporters of the Broad Institute’s tuberculosis research program.

Originally from East Tennessee, Shelburne graduated from Amherst College magna cum laude with a B.A. in English. She is also a 2013 graduate of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program. She lives in Cambridge, Mass., with her husband, Mike DeMichele ’00, and four children.

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Gretchen Sisson ’06 joined the Board of Trustees in 2023. She is a research sociologist with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research examines abortion and adoption in American politics and culture, including her forthcoming book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood (2024). Sisson is also the principal investigator for the Abortion Onscreen program, studying the content and impact of abortion storytelling in American popular culture. Her research has been featured in outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post and NPR, and cited in the Supreme Court dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Sisson is a member of the Women Donors Network, where she serves on the board for WDN Action. She is a co-founder of WDN’s Abortion Bridge Collaborative Fund, a movement-led philanthropic effort to address needs in abortion provision and protection across the country after the Dobbs decision. Additionally, Sisson serves on the board of directors for Emerge America and the steering committee for Electing Women Bay Area (part of the Electing Women Alliance) and writes frequently on political giving for a reflective democracy.

Sisson graduated from Amherst with degrees in psychology and women’s & gender studies, and also holds a doctorate in sociology from Boston College. Prior to serving as a trustee, she served as president of her class, an associate agent, and an advisory board member for the College’s Loeb Center for Career Exploration and Planning. She and her husband, Andrew McCollum, live in San Francisco with their three young children.

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Paul Smith ’76, P’09, was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2016. He is a Professor from Practice at Georgetown Law School and Senior Vice President at the Campaign Legal Center, which seeks to protect voting rights, to defend reasonable campaign finance regulation, and to enforce government ethics rules.  Before taking these positions in 2017, he practiced law at the firm of Jenner & Block LLP, where he became one of the most prominent Supreme Court advocates of his generation.  He has handled many cases involving civil rights and civil liberties, notably in the areas of free speech, voting rights and gay rights. He has argued 21 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including a landmark gay-rights case, Lawrence v. Texas, and Brown v. EMA, which established the First Amendment rights of video game producers.

A political science major at Amherst, Smith graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa before earning his law degree at Yale. He began his career as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Smith has received multiple awards for his work promoting civil rights and civil liberties, including the 2010 Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association. He is a former board chair of the American Constitution Society, and Lambda Legal. He currently serves on the boards of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Castleton Festival

He has served Amherst as class chair for the 1821 Society and has regularly participated in the Colloquium on the Constitution and the Imagining of America. Amherst awarded him an honorary degree in 2015.

Smith is married to Michael Dennis and has two children, Samuel and Scott ’09.

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Shirley Tilghman was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2013. She was president of Princeton University from 2001 to 2013, during which time she oversaw the hiring of more women to the faculty, extensive growth in the role of creative and performing arts on campus, multiple major initiatives in the sciences and engineering, an expansion of the undergraduate student body and the addition of four-year residential colleges, as well as the university’s $1.88 billion Aspire campaign.

Prior to her presidency, Tilghman had served on the faculty of Princeton since 1986 as the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences. She was also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and founding director of the university’s multidisciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Before arriving at Princeton, she made a number of groundbreaking discoveries as part of the team that cloned the first mammalian gene, as an independent investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and as an adjunct associate professor of human genetics and biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tilghman holds an Honors B.Sc. in chemistry from Queen’s University in Ontario, a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Temple University in Philadelphia and an honorary doctorate from Amherst.

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Kimberlee Wyche-Etheridge ’87, M.D., M.P.H., was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2021. Based in Nashville, Tenn., she serves as the senior vice president of Health Equity and Diversity Initiatives for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, a national organization focused on state-level public health leadership and practice. She is also an assistant professor of pediatrics and public health and a practicing physician focusing on adolescent medicine at Meharry Medical College. In her free time, she is a national speaker, a public health consultant, and the CEO of WycheEffect LLC. 

Previously, Wyche-Etheridge served as interim director of the Meharry Master of Science in Public Health Program and assistant director of the Division of Public Health Practice. She held a similar role at Tennessee State University prior to transitioning to Meharry. Before that, she directed the Family, Youth and Infant Health Bureau of the Metropolitan Nashville/Davidson County public health department from 2001 to 2013.

Wyche-Etheridge majored in English and Spanish while fulfilling premedical requirements at Amherst. She earned her M.D. from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester in 1993; trained in pediatrics at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.; and continued her education with an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health while completing a fellowship in minority health policy in 2000. 

Wyche-Etheridge has won numerous awards for her work in public health—particularly maternal, infant and adolescent health in urban populations. In 2003, she founded the Nashville chapter of the Birthing Project, an international infant mortality reduction initiative. Involved with many school health committees, nonprofit groups and advisory boards, she has served as medical director for Birthing Project USA and was the longtime chair of the board of directors for CityMatCH, a national urban maternal/child health organization. Her Amherst alumni activities have included holding the College’s Wade Fellowship from 2000 to 2002 and again from 2013 to 2014. In 2021 she hosted an introductory public health class for Amherst students during Interterm.

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Nick Zerbib ’93 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2018. He is a managing director at Stone Point Capital, an alternative asset management firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Nick joined Stone Point in 1998. He is a member of its investment committee and is actively involved in all of Stone Point’s portfolio investments.

After Amherst, Nick worked as an analyst in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs and as a summer associate at the Boston Consulting Group. A history major, he played on the varsity tennis and squash teams. He received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Nick is married to Lynn Rosenstrach Zerbib (Yale ’91). They live in Larchmont, N.Y., with their three children.