Aimée Eubanks Davis Founder and CEO, Braven (formerly Beyond Z)
Aimée Eubanks Davis is the founder and CEO of Braven, a nonprofit organization that was established in 2013 to ensure that first-generation and low-income college students have the skills, confidence, networks and experiences they need to land strong first jobs. Growing up in low-income and underrepresented communities in Chicago and working with young people from similar backgrounds, Aimée was inspired to start Braven based on her deep passion and belief that our next generation of leaders will emerge from everywhere. Braven operates in the Bay Area, Chicago, Newark, and New York City and has worked with 1600 Fellows.
Aimée spent the majority of her career at Teach For America. In 2002 she joined the TFA staff as Vice President of New Site Development, helping to grow the organization’s presence into Miami and Philadelphia, as well as doubling TFA’s presence in New York City. In 2003, Aimée moved to the regional operations team, where she managed Teach For America’s executive directors and helped ensure maximum impact in each of the organization’s 22 regions. In 2005, Aimée became the Chief People Officer, and oversaw the organization’s staff growth from 200 to over 1800 staff members. Additionally, she worked on the development of a comprehensive competency model for staff recruitment, selection, performance management, and learning and development, and ensured that the Human Assets team was positioned to fuel the growth and success of Teach For America through being a strategic business partner to organizational leaders and teams. In 2011, Aimée took on the expanded role of executive vice president of People, Community and Diversity, leading our work to uphold TFA’s commitment to diversity and to build an organization that is a model of fairness and equality. From 2013 to early 2015, she led TFA’s Public Affairs and Communications teams before departing to devote her full energies to Braven.
Before joining Teach For America’s staff, Aimée was a program officer at The Breakthrough Collaborative (formerly Summerbridge National) and, prior to that position, she led the Summerbridge New Orleans site to become one of the most successful sites in The Breakthrough Collaborative. Aimée, a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College, was a 1995 Teach For America corps member and taught sixth grade social studies and language arts in New Orleans.
Aimée holds many affiliations, including being an Obama Fellow, Pahara-Aspen Fellow, a member of the Global Aspen Leadership Network, a Braddock Scholar, a Draper Richards Foundation Entrepreneur and a Camelback Ventures Fellow. She also sits on the boards of Education Pioneers, Relay, and OneGoal. Aimée is a 2020 Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow as well as 2019 Obama Foundation Fellow and was #13 on Essence Magazine’s 50 Black Women Founders to Watch list. Braven has been featured in New York Times bestselling author George Anders’ book You Can Do Anything: the Surprising Power of a ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Education, in author Kathleen Kelly Janus’ book Social Startup Success, The Atlantic, the San Jose Mercury News, The New England Journal of Higher Education, EdSurge, Forbes, The Clayton Christensen Institute, The Chicago Tribune, and on WBEZ . She recently gave a TED talk for The Way We Work series. Aimée resides in Chicago with her husband, Marcus, and their three children, Hudson, Aïda, and Esmé.
April 13 | 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM ET
Sheryl WuDunn Business Executive, Writer, Lecturer, and Pulitzer Prize Winner
Sheryl WuDunn, the first Asian-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, is a business executive and best-selling author. She co-founded FullSky Partners, a consulting firm focusing on double-bottom line ventures in new media, technology and healthcare services. She is a venture partner at Piedmont Partners Group Ventures, which invests in growth companies in the U.S. She is also nominated for the Board of Overseers at Harvard University, running as a graduate of the Harvard Business School to serve as many faculty, students, and alumni as possible to help keep the university as great as it can be.
Previously, Ms. WuDunn has been vice president in the investment management division at Goldman,
Sachs & Co. and a commercial loan officer at Bankers Trust. She is also one of a small handful of people
who have worked at The New York Times both as an executive and journalist: in management roles in
both the strategic planning and circulation sales departments at The Times; as editor for international
markets, energy and industry; as The Times’s first anchor of an evening news headlines program for a
digital cable TV channel, the Discovery-Times; and as a foreign correspondent for The Times in Tokyo and
Beijing, where she wrote about economic, financial, political and social issues. In 2011, Ms. WuDunn was
also a Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs where she taught about
challenges facing China. She has been a Hauser Visiting Leader at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2017
and 2018.
With her husband, Nicholas D. Kristof, Ms. WuDunn is co-author of their new book, Tightrope: Americans
Reaching for Hope (2020), which chronicles the different struggles facing working-class America. This
story is told, in part, by following the lives of some of the children whom Kristof grew up with, and why
one quarter died prematurely in adulthood while others had journeys of resurgence involving recovery
and commitment to helping those less fortunate. In addition, they co-wrote A Path Appears:
Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, a New York Times best-selling book about altruism and how to
bring about change in our society using evidence-based strategies. Published in late 2014 by Knopf, A
Path Appears was turned into a three-part PBS documentary airing in January and February 2015 and
was featured on numerous network television shows. They also co-authored Half the Sky: Turning
Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a No. 1 New York Times best-selling book about the
challenges facing women around the globe, published in 2009 by Knopf and featured on The Oprah
Winfrey Show and The Colbert Report, among other shows. Ms. WuDunn also helped launch the
development of the Half the Sky multi-platform digital effort that included a highly popular documentary
series that aired on PBS in October 2012, mobile games and an online social media game on Facebook
that hit No. 9 in its second week on the platform.
Ms. WuDunn has co-authored two other best-selling books about Asia: Thunder from the East and China
Wakes. She won a Pulitzer Prize with her husband for covering China, along with the Dayton Literary
Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She has also won other journalism prizes, including the George
Polk Award and Overseas Press Club awards. Ms. WuDunn has also won a White House Project EPIC
award, and she has been a judge for the State Department “Secretary’s Innovation Award for Women’s
and Girls’ Empowerment.” She has won other awards, including the Asia Women in Business Corporate
Leadership Award, the Pearl S. Buck Woman of the Year Award, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Prize,
among numerous other awards.
In 2011, Newsweek cited Ms. WuDunn as one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World.” In 2012, she
was selected as one of 60 notable members of the League of Extraordinary Women by Fast Company
magazine. In 2013, she was included as one of the “leading women who make America” in the PBS
documentary, The Makers. She was also featured in a 2013 Harvard Business School film about
prominent women who graduated from HBS. In August 2015, Business Insider named her one of the 31
most successful graduates of the Harvard Business School.
Ms. WuDunn earned an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where she is a
former member of its Advisory Council. She was a member of Princeton University’s Board of Trustees.
She earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She graduated from Cornell University, where she is
an emeritus member of the Board of Trustees and served on Cornell’s various Board committees,
including the Finance Committee, the endowment’s Investment Committee and as co-chair of the
Academic Affairs Committee.
Ms. WuDunn received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury
College. She lectures on economic, political and social topics related to women in the developing world,
the global economy, China and the emerging markets and has been asked to address a wide range of
audiences including former Vice President Al Gore, the IMF and World Bank. Ms. WuDunn has discussed
China and economic issues on television and radio programs, such as Meet the Press, Fox Business News, and The Colbert Report, and on NPR and Bloomberg TV. She has discussed philanthropic issues on
programs such as NBC’s Dateline.
April 14 | 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM ET
Paul LeBlanc
President, Southern New Hampshire University
Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc is President of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). Under the 18 years of Paul’s direction, SNHU has grown from 2,800 students to over 170,000 learners and is the largest non-profit university in the country.
Paul serves on the American Council of Education (ACE) Board, and served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Board on Higher Education and Workforce. He has worked as a Senior Policy Advisor to Under Secretary Ted Mitchell in the US Department of Education. In 2018, Paul was awarded the prestigious TIAA Institute Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence in Higher Education.
Paul immigrated to the United States as a child, was the first person in his extended family to attend college and is a graduate of Framingham State University (BA), Boston College (MA), and the University of Massachusetts (PhD). From 1993 to 1996 he directed a technology start up for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company, was President of Marlboro College (VT) from 1996 to 2003 and became President of SNHU in 2003.
Sheryl WuDunn
Paul LeBlanc