Five New Members Elected to Board of Overseers

Five alumni were elected to Harvard’s Board of Overseers, the University’s second-highest governing body, the Harvard Alumni Association announced at its annual meeting during Commencement on May 30.

The new members, who will serve six-year terms on the Board, include Susan L. Carney ’73, Christopher B. Field ’75, Deanna J. Lee ’84, Sanjay H. Patel ’83, and Gwill E. York ’79-’80.

The five new members were chosen from a pool of candidates who were nominated by an Alumni Association committee. The election to narrow those candidates down to five new Overseers drew 26,798 ballots submitted by Harvard degree holders.

The Board of Overseers works in conjunction with the Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s highest governing board. The Corporation must obtain the Overseers’ approval for many major decisions, such the appointment of a new University president. With a roster of only 13 members, the Corporation is much smaller than the Board of Overseers, which currently includes 30 members.

The Board of Overseers’s new members, like many of the Overseers, occupy prominent positions in business, law, academia, and other professions. Carney serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Field is an environmental studies professor at Stanford University and founding director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Lee is chief communications and digital strategies officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Patel is a senior partner at Apollo Global Management where he leads the international private equity division.

The fifth new Overseer, York, is a managing director and co-founder of Lighthouse Capital Partners. Though not a member of the Corporation, York already serves on a joint committee on alumni affairs and development that includes 15 members of the two governing boards. Until joining the Board of Overseers, York had served as one of only three members of that committee not on either governing board.

Along with the new Overseers, the Alumni Association announced the election of its six new directors, who will serve three-year terms. Those new directors are Richard R. Buery, Jr., ’92, Patrick S. Chung ’96, Shilla Kim-Parker ’04, Barbara J. Natterson-Horowitz ’83, Julie Gage Palmer ’84, and Argelia M. Rodriguez.

—Staff writer Samuel Y. Weinstock can be reached at sweinstock@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @syweinstock.