​​David A. Thomas, Ph.D., is the 12th president of Morehouse College. Since his installment in January 2018, he has led dynamic, purpose-driven advancement in Morehouse’s strategic and operational effectiveness, programmatic reach, and pedagogical innovation. Among other transformational successes, Dr. Thomas has overseen a fundraising acceleration which has generated approximately $190 million since his arrival—a giving total during his tenure that is higher than during any other presidential tenure in the history of the college. Under his leadership, Morehouse has extended its reach by launching its first online degree programs and has amplified its positioning as a center of intellectual discourse and social engagement in areas such as global leadership, professional equity, social justice, and innovation. Dr. Thomas is internationally recognized for his expertise in organizational management and higher education leadership. Before becoming president of Morehouse, he served as the H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, as dean and William R. Berkley Chair at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and as an assistant professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. While at McDonough, Dr. Thomas led a successful $130 million capital campaign, a redesign of the MBA curriculum, and the launch of the school’s first online degree program. He has consulted on issues relating to organizational change, diversity, and inclusion for 100 of the Fortune 500 companies. An award-winning author and contemporary thought leader in organizational management and executive development, Thomas co-wrote three books: "Race, Work, and Leadership: New Perspectives on the Black Experience;" "Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America;" and "Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County." He has written or co-written almost eighty book chapters, cases, and teaching notes, along with more than two dozen scholarly articles, including Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case, which won the 2020 HBR McKinsey Award as the best Harvard Business Review article of the year. Atlanta Magazine named him one of “Atlanta’s 500 Most Powerful Leaders.” He is the recipient of Washington Business Journal’s “Minority Business Leader of the Year” award and the National Executive Forum’s 2020 Beacon Award, among other honors. He serves on the boards of DTE Energy, Commonfund, Vanguard, and Yale Corporation, where he is the alumni fellow. He is also a senior advisor for Grain Management. Dr. Thomas earned a Ph.D. in organizational behavior studies and a Master of Philosophy in organizational behavior, both from Yale University. He also earned a Master of Organizational Psychology from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Administrative Sciences from Yale College.

Emily Oster is a Professor of Economics at Brown University and the author of Expecting Better, Cribsheet and The Family Firm. She holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard. Prior to being at Brown she was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Oster’s academic work focuses on health economics and statistical methods. She is interested in understanding why consumers do not always make “rational” health choices — why do people not eat a fully healthy diet, or pursue all recommended preventative health behaviors? Her work also concerns methods for learning causal effects from observational data. Oster’s books analyze the data behind choices in pregnancy and parenting. Expecting Better analyzes the data behind many common pregnancy rules, and aims to improve decision-making for pregnant women. Cribsheet does the same for early childhood — what does the evidence really say on breastfeeding, co-sleeping or potty training. Finally, The Family Firm takes this approach to parenting in the early school years, looking at data on school, extracurriculars, sleep and also providing a framework to make unexpected decisions and address the logistical challenges of this period of parenting. Oster lives in Providence, RI with her husband (also an economist) and two children.

Bob is Senior Vice President, Worldwide Ecosystems at IBM. He is focused on ensuring the mutual success of IBM’s ecosystem of partners, developers and customers with our open hybrid cloud platform and AI software. At the center of this work is a commitment to the open-source community. Bob launched Call for Code in 2018 to give developers and problem solvers access to IBM tools and technologies as a means to solve global, societal challenges. Since launch, more than 500,000 developers from 180 nations have built solutions for an immediate and lasting impact addressing climate change, disaster relief, racial and social injustice. Bob joined IBM in 2016 as the company's first Chief Digital Officer and prior to that served as President of AOL and CEO of Razorfish. Bob is a board member of Aqua Finance, a Blackstone Company. earned a BS in Industrial Engineering & Operations Research from Syracuse University and holds an MBA from Harvard University.

In the 1970s, Alex McDowell studied Fine Art at Central School of Art in London, worked with the Sex Pistols and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, and founded music design studio Rocking Russian Design. In the 1980s, he migrated to America to work in music videos and commercials, and to launch a 30-year career as production designer in cinema, with more than 20 feature films to his credit. He has worked with directors Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Anthony Minghella, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Zack Snyder and many others. In 2010, as visiting artist at MIT Media Lab, he designed the robot opera Death and the Powers for composer Tod Machover, which premiered for Albert II, Prince of Monaco. Alex is currently a professor at USC School of Cinema, where he directs the World Building Media Lab and World Building Institute, and teaches world building as a media-and platform-agnostic post-cinematic narrative design practice. Alex has written and spoken extensively about the future of narrative and world building for publications, conferences and events around the world. He was a Visiting Artist at MIT Media Lab from 2005-2010. Alex also is co-founder and principal creative director at Experimental Design, a design and production studio that uses world building and storytelling to prototype the future and provoke change. He and his network of partners draw on deep expertise in film, games, live experience, architecture, new technologies and infrastructures to create stories and insights for corporations and non-profits that are immersive and unexpected. Experimental visualizes, humanizes and makes understandable an increasingly complex world in which technological advancements are rapidly advancing. Alex has served on boards at the Getty Research Institute, the National Academy of Sciences, Autodesk, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Pancreatic Beta Cell Consortium. His multiple awards include the lifetime RSA Royal Designer for Industry (RDI). He has an Honorary Doctorate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School as Doctor of Public Policy.

In March of 2015, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Ph.D., was named Spelman’s 10th president. She began her career as the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem at a time when the city of New York was on the verge of bankruptcy. Under her leadership, the museum became the country’s first accredited Black fine arts museum and a linchpin in the redevelopment of Harlem. She then served as commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City under two mayors, and from there entered the world of academia as dean of New York University’s renowned Tisch School of the Arts, where she served for over two decades. In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed her vice chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Currently, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she serves as a trustee of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and as a director of Unity Technologies. Viewing Spelman as a “necessity” to “reach an ideal of equality,” Dr. Campbell launched Imagine. Invent. Ascend, a bold new strategic vision for the College that builds on the College’s legendary legacy to educate Black women for the 21st century. Her focus has been on ensuring that every Spelman student graduates with a competitive edge, expanding Spelman’s strategic partnerships, deepening its excellence in STEM, wedding that strength to art, innovation and technology, and expanding signature academic programs that leverage Spelman's scholarly and creative excellence. To support this vision, under Dr. Campbell’s leadership, the College has raised more than $240 million, the largest comprehensive campaign in the history of Spelman. Dr. Campbell has a B.A. in English literature from Swarthmore College, a master’s in art history and a Ph.D. in humanities from Syracuse University. She is the author of the award-winning book, “An American Odyssey: the Life and Work of Romare Bearden,” (Oxford, 2018) and frequently speaks on issues of higher education and African American art and culture. She is the mother of three sons, seven grandchildren and lives in Atlanta with her husband of 52 years, George Campbell, Jr., Ph.D., president emeritus of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science.

Joel Bervell is a third year Ghanaian-American medical student at Washington State University, Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine. In 2017, Joel graduated from Yale University, where he earned a BA in Molecular Cellular Developmental Biology. There, Joel was as an elected member of Yale student government, and director of a longitudinal mentorship program. At Washington State University, Joel served as Medical Student Council President and the co-founder and president of a chapter of the Student National Medical Association. He is committed to fighting health disparities in medicine through education and regularly shares topics about racial disparities in healthcare and other industries on his TikTok and Instagram (@joelbervell) where his platforms have over 300,000+ combined followers and 20,000,000+ impressions. He has been invited to speak on panels at the National Institute of Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Clinton Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and more. He has also spoken on national media outlets including NPR and WebMd and regularly produces digital media content for Aljazeera and Brut Media. He currently is working with the World Health Organization’s Digital Communications, a collection of health professionals combatting the spread of misinformation on social media about COVID-19, and on a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion project with the VA Hospital systems. Joel is the recipient of the National Medical Association Emerging Scholar Award, the highest academic honor presented to a student by the National Medical Association. He was selected as one of 100 inaugural TikTok for Black Creatives, and is the recipient of the TikTok AdColor Awards.