Presidential Search (2015-16) – Search Committee

Isaac Stein, JD/MBA ’72, is chair of the Presidential Search Committee, a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, and president of Waverley Associates. He has had a diverse career in the business and nonprofit communities. He co-founded or served as an officer or director of numerous public and private companies, including ALZA Corp., Maxygen, Alexza, and CV Therapeutics in the pharmaceutical/biotechnology industry; Raychem Corp. and Symyx in materials science; and both the American Century and American Funds mutual fund groups in financial services. Much of his nonprofit activity has centered on Stanford University, where he served as chair of the Board of Trustees and continues to serve as a trustee. He also served on the Stanford Management Company Board and, for many years, as a director and chair of the board of Stanford University Hospital and UCSF Stanford Healthcare.

Mark Kelman, the committee’s faculty deputy chair, is the James C. Gaither Professor in Law and has been vice dean at the School of Law since 2005. Over the course of his academic career, he has applied both normative political theoretical and descriptive social science approaches to diverse legal fields, including criminal law, taxation, administrative regulation, and antidiscrimination law (with a particular focus on disability). He has had frequent opportunities to collaborate with scholars from other disciplines, including psychology, business, and medicine. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008, he is the author of many books and articles on such issues as criminal law doctrine, tax policy, job testing, moral reasoning, and, most recently, orthopedic decision-making.

Kathryn Ko Chou, BS ’85, MS ’86, is senior vice president of sales strategy and operations at Informatica. She is responsible for driving sales and partner strategy, processes and tools, sales operations, sales compensation, planning, reporting, analytics and sales enablement. Before joining Informatica, Chou worked at Intuit as vice president of sales operations and strategy. At Hewlett-Packard, she was vice president of sales strategy and operations and worldwide commercial sales for the personal systems group, representing $18 billion in revenue. Chou is a member of the board of the Stanford Institute for Research in Social Sciences (iRiSS) and a director at the Asian Pacific Fund. The Silicon Valley Business Journal selected her as one of the Top 100 most influential women in 2011. In 2013, she was awarded the Stanford Medal for her volunteer work. She earned an MBA from Harvard and degrees in manufacturing systems engineering and mechanical engineering from Stanford.

Robert Chun is a senior from Oak Brook, Ill., majoring in economics. His course of study focuses on policy analysis, national security, and international development. Chun currently serves as the chair of Stanford in Government, the largest nonpartisan political organization on campus. As chair, he is responsible for all programming and operations, as well as one of the largest undergraduate fellowship programs at Stanford. Chun is a member of the National Advisory Board of the Haas Center for Public Service and an active member of Sigma Phi Epsilon. He is also a former peer adviser at the Office of Student Activities and Leadership and the former vice president of the Stanford Speakers Bureau. Outside of Stanford, Chun has worked at the Senate Finance Committee, TASER International, and the White House Office of Management and Budget.

James (Jim) Coulter, MBA ’86, is a Stanford trustee and the CEO and a founding partner of TPG, a leading private investment firm managing in excess of $60 billion in assets in more than 130 countries. He graduated in 1982 from Dartmouth College. In 1986, he received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar. Coulter serves as a member on numerous corporate and charitable boards, including Common Sense Media, Creative Artists Agency, J. Crew Group, Chobani, and Cirque du Soleil. He also serves on the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.

Melinda J. Cromie, PhD ’12, is a postdoctoral fellow in neurology at the Stanford School of Medicine and the Center for Tissue Regeneration, Repair, and Restoration (CTR3) at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. Her research brings together biomechanics, optics, materials science, and cell biology to improve the surgical treatment of neuromuscular disorders and to regenerate skeletal muscle from adult stem cells. Cromie holds mechanical engineering degrees from Stanford University, MIT, and the University of California, Davis. She was a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow and a Bio-X Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow (SIGF). She co-created and co-taught a bioengineering graduate course, Performance, Development, and Adaptation of Skeletal Muscle. She served as a student speaker at graduate student welcome events, Bio-X symposia, SIGF workshops, Bio-X and SIGF outreach events, Leading Matters, and STEM events for students in her hometown of Livermore, Calif.

Adam Daniel is senior associate dean for finance and administration in Stanford’s School of Humanities & Sciences. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. After attending graduate school at the University of Chicago in modern European history, he accepted a position in academic administration at the University of Virginia. Over the course of a decade there, he rose to become the senior associate dean and COO of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. He came to Stanford in 2008 to assume his current role, with responsibility for strategic planning, finance, IT, human resources, and capital projects. He oversees all aspects of administration and planning for H&S.

(Served on the committee through December 18, 2015.)

Steven A. Denning, MBA ’78, chairs the Stanford Board of Trustees and is chairman of General Atlantic LLC, a global private equity firm. Earlier, he was with McKinsey & Company. He is a director of Engility Corp. and is on the board of directors of The Nature Conservancy, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Next Generation. He is an honorary trustee of The Brookings Institution and the American Museum of Natural History; emeritus chairman of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Board; and an emeritus trustee of the National Parks Conservation Association. He formerly served on the boards of the Bridgespan Group and McKinsey Investment Office Advisory Council, Advisory Board of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, board of trustees of the Connecticut Science Center, Georgia Tech Advisory Board, Georgia Tech Foundation, and the Cancer Research Institute.

Sanjiv Sam Gambhir is the Ludwig Professor and chair of the Department of Radiology, School of Medicine. He received his MD and PhD at UCLA. He came to Stanford in 2003 and was appointed chair of radiology in 2011. He is director of the molecular imaging program at Stanford and the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection. He runs a laboratory that develops and clinically translates strategies for cancer detection and management with an emphasis on multimodality molecular imaging. He has 575 publications in the field and 55 patents filed or granted. Gambhir has received more than $75 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health as a principal investigator, serves on several academic/industrial advisory boards, and has founded multiple startups. He is an elected fellow of both the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academies and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Margot Gerritsen, PhD ’97, is director of Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering and senior associate dean, School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. A native of the Netherlands, she received her MS degree in applied mathematics at the University of Delft and her doctorate in scientific computing and computational mathematics at Stanford. Before returning to Stanford in 2001, she spent five years in Auckland, New Zealand, as a faculty member in the Department of Engineering Science. Now she is a professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford, interested in computer simulation and mathematical analysis of engineering processes. Her research specializes in renewable and fossil energy production. She is also active in coastal ocean dynamics and yacht design, as well as several areas in computational mathematics including search algorithm design and matrix computations.

Ken Goodson is the Davies Family Provostial Professor and Bosch Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He specializes in heat transfer and energy conversion and has 40 PhD alumni, nearly half of whom are professors at schools including Stanford, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Goodson is a Fellow with ASME, IEEE, AAAS, and APS. Honors include the Heat Transfer Memorial Award, the Kraus Thermal Management Medal, the Kern Award and, in 2015, named lectureships at MIT, the University of Illinois, and Purdue. Goodson co-founded Cooligy, which developed cooling systems for Apple desktops. Beyond engineering, Goodson performs as a baritone oratorio soloist with Bay Area ensembles, including the Stanford Symphonic Chorus. His education at MIT includes the BS’89 and PhD’93 in mechanical engineering.

Susan McCaw, BA ’84, is a Stanford Trustee; president of COM Investments; a former U.S. ambassador to Austria; and a founding board member of the Malala Fund. Previously, she worked at Robertson Stephens & Co. in investment banking and venture capital. She started her career as a business analyst for McKinsey and Co. McCaw is the director of the Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation, focusing on education and international economic development projects. She served as co-chair of Stanford’s $1 billion campaign for undergraduate education and is also a board member of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Pacific Council on International Policy. McCaw is a member of Harvard Business School’s Board of Dean’s Advisors, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Council of American Ambassadors. She earned a BA in economics from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Kam Moler, BS ’88, PhD ’95, is a professor of applied physics and of physics and Sapp Family Fellow in Undergraduate Education. She carries out research on the fundamental behavior of electrons in materials by creating a toolbox of sensitive, quantitative, high-resolution local magnetic sensors, enabling routine and noninvasive characterization of small magnetic fields in novel quantum materials; by conducting a systematic survey of the energetic and dynamics of individual quanta of magnetic flux in various superconductors, to elucidate the mechanism of superconductivity; and by conducting a systematic survey of persistent currents in mesoscopic normal metals and superconductors, to understand the mechanisms of quantum decoherence in electrons systems.

Ruth Porat, BA ’79, is vice chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees and senior vice president and chief financial officer of Google and Alphabet, which she joined in May 2015. Prior to joining Google, she was executive vice president and chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley. Porat held several roles in her career at Morgan Stanley, including vice chairman of investment banking and global head of the financial institutions group. She serves on Stanford’s Council of the School of Humanities and Sciences and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Economic Club of New York and the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a member of the Advisory Council of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Stanford, MBA from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), and master’s degree from the London School of Economics.

Jeff Raikes, BS ’80, is a Stanford Trustee and co-founder of the Raikes Foundation, which he and his wife, Tricia, established in 2002. Raikes retired from his role as chief executive officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2014, having guided the global organization through more than five years of significant growth. He came to the philanthropic world from a 27-year career at Microsoft Corp., where he was a member of the senior leadership team and president of the Microsoft Business Division. He serves on the boards of Costco Wholesale, the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Microsoft Alumni Network. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering-economic systems at Stanford in 1980.

Ramón Saldívar, Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences, is a professor of English and comparative literature. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012 and was a co-winner in 2006 of the Modern Language Association Prize in U.S. Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for his book, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Duke, 2006). He is currently working on a new project, tentatively titled “The Racial Imaginary: Speculative Realism and Historical Fantasy in Contemporary American Fiction.” His teaching and research focus on the areas of literary criticism and literary theory, the history of the novel, literary studies from the nineteenth century to the present, cultural studies, globalization and issues concerning transnationalism, and Latino and Latina studies. He has been director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program since 2012.

Srinija Srinivasan, BS ’93, is a Stanford Trustee and co-founder of Loove Music, a startup in Brooklyn, N.Y., developing a new model for the production, presentation, and equitable distribution of creative music. In 1995, she joined Yahoo! Inc. as one of its first five employees, where she served as vice president/editor in chief in her 15-year tenure with the company. Srinivasan currently serves on the Commission on Presidential Scholars, to which President Obama appointed her in 2010. She is a member of the 2000 class of Henry Crown Fellows at the Aspen Institute and she chaired the board of San Francisco-based nonprofit SFJAZZ through the planning and campaign for the SFJAZZ Center, which opened in January 2013. She holds a BS from Stanford University in symbolic systems.

Larissa Tiedens is the Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Organizational Behavior and a senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Graduate School of Business. She received a BA in psychology from Carleton College and a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Michigan. Her research is concerned with the psychology of social hierarchies and the role of emotions in organizational life. Tiedens has focused on the spontaneous emergence of hierarchies and the psychological effects of these hierarchies.
She teaches about leadership and interpersonal and team dynamics in the MBA, PhD, and Executive programs. She designed the leadership development curriculum in the MBA program at GSB and has directed several executive leadership programs. As senior associate dean, Tiedens has overseen the GSB PhD program, The Casewriting Office, Global Innovation Programs, and several faculty areas and research centers.

Vaughn Williams, JD ’69, is a Stanford Trustee and member of the Law School Dean’s Advisory Council, He serves Of Counsel, formerly partner, at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He is currently a director for the Fund for the City of New York (chair); Apollo Theater Foundation; Lawyers for Children Inc.; College of Mount Saint Vincent; and Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at City College of New York. He is a former director of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Harlem School of the Arts; Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Empire State Pride Agenda. He earned a BA at Harvard University in 1966; and a JD in 1969 at Stanford, where he was president of the Stanford Law Review (1968-69).