by Emily Gold Boutilier
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This summer Kimberlyn Leary ’82 and Paul Smith ’76, P’09 began six-year terms on the College’s board of trustees. Andrew J. Nussbaum ’85, a trustee since 2010, was appointed to serve a second six-year term.

Kimberlyn Leary
Leary is an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she directs the Enabling Change program. She is also executive director of policy outreach at McLean Hospital-Partners Healthcare and a faculty affiliate at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law. 

As a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow, she served as an adviser to the White House Council on Women and Girls. She completed an extension of her fellowship at the White House Office of Management and Budget in the Health Division’s public health branch, where she served as the division lead on the Flint water crisis.

At Amherst she majored in psychology, graduated magna cum laude and was a member of Sigma Xi honor society. She lives in Cambridge, Mass., and is married to Richard Hale Shaw.

Paul Smith
Smith chairs the Appellate and Supreme Court Practice at the law firm of Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C. 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 19 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the 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, Smith graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He began his career as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.

He has received multiple awards for his work promoting civil rights and civil liberties, including the 2010 Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association. Amherst awarded him an honorary degree in 2015.

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