Joanne Berger-Sweeney, President, Trinity College
https://www.trincoll.edu/president/about-president-berger-sweeney/

Joanne Berger-Sweeney was inaugurated as the 22nd president of Trinity College on October 26, 2014.

Since becoming president, she has overseen several major accomplishments, including the completion of the college’s strategic plan, Summit, which will guide Trinity toward its bicentennial in 2023 and beyond; the creation of the Bantam Network mentoring program for first-year students; the launch of the Campaign for Community, a campus initiative promoting inclusiveness and respect; and the expansion of Trinity’s footprint to Constitution Plaza in downtown Hartford.

Additional achievements under Berger-Sweeney’s leadership also include the establishment of Trinity’s Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Misconduct, the founding of the Center for Caribbean Studies at Trinity College, and the college’s thriving partnership with edX, one of the world’s premier online course platforms. Under Berger-Sweeney’s leadership, Trinity College is a key partner in the Hartford/East Hartford Innovation Places Planning Team selected in June 2017 to receive a share of $30 million in state funding to spark economic development and investment in innovation.

Before coming to Trinity, Berger-Sweeney served as dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University (2010-14), creating the vision and setting the strategic direction for the university’s largest school. She managed a broad set of responsibilities, including oversight of undergraduate admissions, athletics, undergraduate and graduate students, the graduate school, communications, and academic and administrative deans. Berger-Sweeney made significant strides in enhancing the strength of the school’s faculty and in expanding interdisciplinary programs, including the creation of the Center for Race and Democracy at Tufts, which studies the impact of race on the lives of individuals around the world. In addition, she was deeply involved in the creation of the Bridge to Liberal Arts Success at Tufts (BLAST) program, which aims to provide support for college students from underserved high schools.

Before Tufts, Berger-Sweeney was a member of the Wellesley College faculty, which she joined in 1991 as an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and rose through the ranks to become the Allene Lummis Russell Professor in Neuroscience. Her teaching and research career at Wellesley spanned 13 years prior to being named associate dean in 2004. In that role, she oversaw 20 academic departments and programs in addition to her teaching and research and led initiatives relating to faculty diversity, interdisciplinary programs, and non-tenure-track faculty. She also served as director of Wellesley’s Neuroscience Program.


 

Clayton Rose, President, Bowdoin College
https://www.bowdoin.edu/president/president-clayton-rose/index.html

Clayton is now in his seventh year as the president of Bowdoin College. Prior to his appointment, he served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School, where he taught and wrote on issues of leadership, ethics, the financial crisis that began in 2008, and the role of business in society. He spent the first twenty years of his career in finance, retiring as vice chairman at J.P. Morgan, having run several global divisions of the bank. He earned his undergraduate degree (1980) and MBA (1981) at the University of Chicago. In 2003, following his business career, he enrolled in the doctoral program in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania to study issues of race in America, earning his master’s degree in 2005 and his PhD with distinction in 2007. Clayton is the chair of the board of trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest academic biomedical research organization, with an endowment of $27 billion. He is also a member of the board of directors of Bank of America. He and his wife of thirty-eight years, Julianne, have two sons, two daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren. 

Over the past six years, Clayton’s focus has been on furthering the intellectual mission of the College; advancing the imperative of diversity, equity, and inclusion and racial justice; strengthening access and opportunity for all students; ensuring the continued financial strength of the College with an ambitious $500 million comprehensive campaign; enhancing the academic program and student life with the construction of new facilities that further the mission of the College; continuing the College’s leadership in sustainability, and fostering the skills of respectful discourse and engagement with new and challenging ideas and by developing a disposition among students for “intellectual fearlessness.”


 

Yves Salomon-Fernández, Senior Vice President, Southern New Hampshire University

Dr. Yves Salomon-Fernández is a passionate, entrepreneurial, and future-focused leader who has led three different institutions in suburban and rural settings in Massachusetts and New Jersey. She is currently a Senior Vice President at Southern New Hampshire University and formerly served as the President of  Greenfield Community College located in beautiful rural western Massachusetts.  In addition to leading open-access colleges, Dr. Salomon-Fernández has served in varied roles at selective private, public, and urban research universities. Yves is a  nationally recognized thought leader in higher education who is inspired by the challenges and possibilities inherent in the future and in re-imagining higher education and community colleges for relevancy in the new economic realities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.  

Respected around the globe, Dr. Salomon-Fernandez is a multi-lingual scholar and adjunct faculty member working with students and colleagues to transform colleges, making them more equitable and adaptive for a changing future of work.  Yves is a staunch promoter of a transdisciplinary approach to higher education and believes in education for local citizenship with a global impact. Internationally,  Yves has served with the United Nations in Mexico and as a consultant for the  Bermuda Ministry of Education. In March 2018, Diverse Issues in Higher  Education named Salomon-Fernández one of the Top 25 Women in Higher  Education.  

Dr. Salomon-Fernández believes in service to her community and the academy.  She has served as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation and Johns  Hopkins University Press and is a member of the American Association of  Community College’s Commission on Small and Rural Colleges. Yves also sits on  Job for the Future’s Policy Leadership Trust. A Corporator for Greenfield  Cooperative Bank, Salomon-Fernández is also a member of the Federal Reserve  Bank of Boston’s Community Development Council. She serves as a Board member for Cooley Dickinson Hospital and Mass Humanities both located in Northampton,  Massachusetts. In March 2021, Dr. Salomon-Fernández begins her term as a  member of the Board of the American Council on Education.  

A graduate of Boston Latin School, Yves received her undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts Boston and holds a certificate from the University of Oxford. Her Master’s degree is from the London School of Economics and her  Ph.D. is from Boston College. In addition to Haitian Creole, Dr. Salomon-Fernández is fluent in French and Spanish. She is the proud mom of Zavier and Ziomara, and spouse of Dr. Stephen Fernández, an MIT-trained engineer.

 

 

Moderator, Michael Cato, Senior VP, and CIO, Bowdoin College

Michael leads Information Technology (IT) strategy and operations at Bowdoin College, widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost liberal arts institutions. He joined the college in March of 2018 with 17 years of experience in Higher Education IT having served in IT roles at Vassar College, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Michael is an EDUCAUSE Leadership Institute faculty member, a mentor for the State University of New York (SUNY) CIO Leadership Academy, a member of the Society for Information Management (SIM) and the Information Technology Senior Management Forum (ITSMF), an Educause Leading Change/Frye Fellow, an alum of Leadership North Carolina, and serves on the board for the American Institute for the Biological Sciences (AIBS) and the Northeast Computing Association (NERCOMP). He holds a B.S. in Zoology from Andrews University and an M.B.A. from Wake Forest University.

Michael loves to learn, read, travel, eat, occasionally cook, and with his wife Heather is raising a totally awesome 5-year-old son.