TrusteesTrustee Biographies

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 three buyout equity funds and a mezzanine debt fund. Insight’s total capital under management is approximately $1.4B. 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, A.P. Plasman, Micross Holdings, MB Precision Holdings, Dustex Holdings, Panolam, Riverbend Investment Holdings, VirTex Holdings, Eddy Packing, Strauss Brands, CSAT Investment Holdings and Easy Way Holdings. Insight Equity’s current cumulative gross equity returns since inception is 2.7x with an IRR of 49% which is top quartile performance.

Jeff Bleich ’83 was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2017. He currently serves as the Chief Legal Officer and Chief Risk Officer of Cruise LLC.  He previously served as a Special Master for the U.S. Courts, arbitrator, and as the chair of the boards of PG&E Co. and Nuix USG, Inc.  He formerly served as special counsel to President Obama in the White House, and as the 24th U.S. Ambassador to Australia from 2009 to 2013.

After receiving his B.A. in political science, magna cum laude, Bleich earned an M.P.P. from Harvard with highest honors in 1986, and a J.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Law with highest honors in 1989. At Berkeley, he served as editor-in-chief of the California Law Review. He clerked for Judge Abner Mikva on the D.C. Circuit and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist on the U.S. Supreme Court, before clerking at the international tribunal in the Hague.

The Hon. Sarah Bloom Raskin ’83 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2017. She is the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is a visiting professor of the practice of law, a distinguished fellow of Duke Law School’s Global Financial Markets Center, and a senior fellow of the Duke Center on Risk in August 2020 after serving as a Rubenstein Fellow at Duke University since 2018. 

As the second-in-command at Treasury, Raskin oversaw the various agencies of the entire Department and promoted innovative policy solutions to advance prosperity, fairness and resiliency throughout the American economy.

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.  

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 and serves as the U.S. representative to the firm’s Africa Board. 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 a member 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.

Douglas C. Grissom ’89 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2015. He works at Madison Dearborn Partners as a managing director on the Business and Government Software and Services team, focusing primarily on software and software-enabled services. In this capacity, he serves on the Boards of Directors of BlueCat Networks, CoVant Technologies II, and Fleet Complete. He was formerly on the boards of @stake, Aderant, Asurion, Cbeyond, Fieldglass, Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, Intelsat, LGS Innovations Lightspeed Systems, LinQuest Corporation and Neoworld.

Outside of work, Grissom also serves on the Boards of the Harvard Business School Fund Council, Lincoln Park Zoo, METROsquash, the Museum of Science and Industry and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and Churchill Downs.

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.

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.

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, after serving 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.

Arthur Koenig ’66 was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2012. He graduated from Amherst cum laude in political science and is involved in various philanthropic activities focused on education.

He supports the Koenig Scholars program at Amherst, which brings students from Africa and Latin America to the college. He serves on the Mead Art Museum Advisory Board and is a trustee of the New York Public Library and a member of the executive committee and co-chairman of the program and policy committee. His focus is on the development of the educational programs in the branch libraries. He also supports ARTLINK, a community action and education program in Baltimore.

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, where 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 a 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kimberlee Wyche-Etheridge ’87, M.D., M.P.H., was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2021. Based in Nashville, Tenn., she is an assistant professor of pediatrics and public health and a practicing physician with a focus on adolescent medicine at Meharry Medical College. She also works as a consultant, speaker and trainer through 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.

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.