Speakers

DPhil (Oxon), BA (Hons) (UWA), Executive MBA (McKinsey & Co), GAICD, IPAA Fellow

Bronte is a leading thinker and advisor in Australian public policy and strategy.

She founded dandolopartners to apply the logic, discipline and approaches she learnt in top level management consulting to achieve public impact.

A former CEO, McKinsey & Co consultant and senior government executive, Bronte was an advisor to a reformist state Treasurer and went on to lead the Victorian Government’s technology arm, reforming government through the use of technology, managing major procurements, attracting foreign investment and stimulating the uptake of technology across commercial, public and community sectors.

Bronte is actively involved in public life. Current and past appointments include: Museums Board of Victoria, Innovation and Science Australia, Australian Institute of Company Directors, UNESCO High Commission, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne University Publishing, Australia Council’s New Media and Visual Arts Boards, Innovation Economy Advisory Board, Health Innovation and Reform Council, Rhodes Trust in Australia, John Monash Foundation National Selection Committee,  and a range of other innovation, science and technology advisory and commercialization bodies, and ICT and Gov2.0 advisory bodies.

Harsh Agrawal is a 2021 Rise Global Winner from India and a freshman at Imperial College London. In high school, he conducted research on a potential salivary biomarker for early detection of Pancreatic Cancer earning recognition as the recipient of the highest civilian honor under 18 in his country by the President of India. Followingly, Harsh served as the lead data scientist for Paraswap, one of the largest crypto exchange aggregators, for a year where he developed critical infrastructure. 

Currently, Harsh's focus lies in the realm of proteins, exploring their dynamism to develop a programming language for protein manipulation and exploring the creation of smart drugs. Alongside this scientific pursuit, Harsh finds joy in playing the guitar, singing, and indulging in long-form podcasts.

Allard’s activities as a Rhodes alumnus include long service as the 1974 Class Secretary. Stories drawn from over 900  pages of his annual class letters published in The American Oxonian are forthcoming in a book titled “The Long and Winding Rhodes.” For the reunion he is sharing excerpts to prompt conversations among Scholars of all ages and backgrounds. Nick is the Founding Dean of Jacksonville University’s new College of Law in Florida. Previously he served as President and Dean of Brooklyn Law School. In addition to significant  government service and political experience he was a senior partner in some of the world’s most respected law firms. A Bodley Fellow at Merton, is President of the Merton College Charitable Corporation, AARS Secretary, Trustee of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C., an advisor to Cambridge’s  Lucy Cavendish College, and chairs the ABA’s Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress.

Ugwechi Amadi is currently Vice President, Head of Strategy - Global Operations and Technology at NIKE Inc., where she partners with the COO to identify opportunities to disrupt inertia and drive outsized value across the portfolio. Prior to this, Ugwechi led NIKE’s Enterprise Strategy and Communications Strategy teams. 

Prior to NIKE, Ugwechi was a Principal at The Boston Consulting Group where she partnered with global retail clients on their brand strategy, specializing in personalized marketing, digital analytics, and consumer insight. She holds a DPhil in Clinical Neurology from the University of Oxford and bachelor’s degrees in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Literature from MIT. 

Peter is a journalist and technologist interested in how structural changes in technology, policy, and law impact how news is produced and consumed. He is currently a Master in Public Policy Candidate at the Blavatnik School of Government and a visiting researcher at the Index on Censorship studying defamation law and anti-SLAPP legislation in the UK and Ireland. Last year, he completed an MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, where his thesis research explored the novel relationship between journalists and audiences mediated by email newsletters. Prior to coming to Oxford, he worked as a data visualisation journalist at The Washington Post and The Guardian, and studied at the University of North Carolina (B.A., Journalism & Computer Science) and Duke University as a Robertson Scholar. In his free time, Peter is President of his Middle Common Room at Exeter College, plays tennis (often losing to his friends), and is attempting to picnic in every college garden in Oxford.

Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage venture firm backed by Bloomberg L.P. that was the first venture capital fund to focus on the future of work, and also the first fund to focus on artificial intelligence.

Roy was a commissioner on the California Governor's Future of Work Commission (following work he did with think-tank New America to understand the 10-20 year future of work and automation in America).

He was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, has served in government, and led a non-profit in addition to his work at established corporations and day zero startups.

He serves on the board or as an advisor to several non-profits including Stanford's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and the Economic Security Project.

Roy graduated from Harvard College, where he ran the student public service nonprofit, and Oxford University. He also serves on the faculty at U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Rahul Bajaj is the co-founder of Mission Accessibility, an organisation that works on advancing the rights of the disabled in India, particularly in the realm of digital accessibility. He is also a practising lawyer, a legal policy maker on disability rights and a young legal academic.

Andrew Banks and Royce Yudkoff co-founded Abry in 1989. Prior to forming Abry, Andrew and Royce were affiliated with Bain & Company, an international management consulting firm, where they shared responsibility for Bain’s media practice. Andrew is a graduate of Harvard Law School, a Rhodes Scholar with a Master’s degree from Oxford University, and an honors graduate of the University of Florida.

Dame Pamela is serving her fifth year as the Chair of the Selection Committee for the Rhodes
Scholarship Global Constituency. She has previously chaired the US District 6 and Bermuda Rhodes Selection Committees. She was also a member of the Schmidt Science Fellows Selection Committee. She was particularly honoured to receive the George Parkin Service Award as well as a Distinguished Friend of Oxford recognition.

Knighted by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 for Service to Country, Dame Pamela
received this honour for being the first woman Premier of Bermuda.

Inducted as a member of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum, she
was also a member at the Inaugural Summit of the Council of Women World Leaders.
Her MBA is from Queen’s University Canada and she serves on their Global Council Board.
Married to Rhodes Trustee, S. Andrew Banks they have 4 children and 4 grandchildren.

Amer is an entrepreneur with a track record of award-winning companies. His most recent venture, a fast-growing fintech, is backed among companies like Google, Stripe, and Airbnb by prominent investors such as Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, and SV Angel.

He is a governance, policy, and finance expert, holding two degrees from the University of Oxford where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

He built properties in Europe, served as the founding president of the Oxford Syria Society, and advised clients ranging from government authorities to a Premier League FC. He is a tireless optimist, an expert problem solver, and secretly, a music composer.

Dylan Barry is a recovering physicist and economist who writes on physics, neuroscience and genetics for The Economist.

James Basker is President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and
Richard Gilder Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. At Gilder Lehrman, Basker has overseen the development of educational initiatives nationwide, including the National History Teacher of the Year, Hamilton Education Program, teacher seminars, and traveling exhibitions serving 34,000 schools.
An elected member of the Society of American Historians, Basker serves on the boards of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and Marymount School in New York.

Basker was educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and (as a Rhodes Scholar) Oxford. He
taught for seven years at Harvard before coming to Barnard, and since 1985 has directed summer programs for high school students at Oxford, currently "Oxford Academia" at University and Worcester colleges.
His publications include Amazing Grace: Poems about Slavery 1660–1810 (2002), Early American Abolitionists (2005), and American Antislavery Writing: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (2012).

Sir John Bell GBE, FRS is Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University. President of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2006 to 2011); Chair, Office for the Strategic Coordination of Health Research until 2017; Chair, Rhodes Trust; UK Life Sciences Champion since 2011. Appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in 2015 for services to medicine, medical research and the life science industry. Co-developed and wrote both 2017 UK Life Sciences Industrial Strategy and 2021 Life Sciences Vision providing recommendations to HM Government on ensuring the long-term success of the life sciences sector.

Neeti Bhalla Johnson is President of Global Risk Solutions at Liberty Mutual Insurance, the sixth largest global property and casualty insurer. In this role since July 2021, she leads the company’s commercial and specialty insurance business unit, with operations in 24 countries producing $15 billion in net written premium. She joined the company in 2013, as President and Chief Investment Officer, Liberty Mutual Investments. Neeti is a member of the board of directors of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the International Council of the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the board of trustees of the Rhodes Trust at the University of Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Neeti earned an MBA and an MSc in Social Anthropology. She also holds a BA in Economics from Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya.

Sameer Rashid Bhat is a DPhil candidate in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. His doctoral research focuses on the interaction of legal regimes in armed conflicts.

Before his DPhil, Sameer read for the MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy and for the Master of Public Policy. Prior to Oxford, he obtained an undergraduate degree in law from Gujarat National Law University, India and is qualified to practice law in India.

At Oxford, Sameer has been involved with several research and student action groups, having served as the Chair of Oxford Pro Bono Publico (OPBP), Student Chairperson of Oxford Transitional Justice Research Network (OTJR) and, President of Linacre College CR.

Sameer is a co-founder of Project EduAccess, a non-profit initiative aimed at increasing access to higher education and creating opportunities of personal and professional growth for learners from marginalised communities in South Asia.

Sameer is the first Rhodes Scholar from Kashmir (India).

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at the University of Oxford. Previously, she served as Director of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. A Rhodes Scholar from South Africa, she is a founding figure in the field of postcolonial studies and empire. She is a Fellow of the English Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature, and of the Royal Historical Society. Her books include: Postcolonial Poetics; Indian Arrivals 1870-1915; Nelson Mandela; Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920; Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation; Resistance in Interaction; and Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Her fiction includes To the Volcano, and other stories; The Shouting in the Dark; Sharmilla, and Other Portraits; Nile Baby; Bloodlines; and Screens against the Sky.

Camille is a historian, writer, and poet invested in unearthing the lived experiences of African American women. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Princeton University. Camille graduated magna cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018 with a B.A. in History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. After graduation, she moved across the Atlantic, studying at the University of Oxford as a 2018 Rhodes Scholar. There, she received her MPhil in US History with distinction. Last summer, she was the inaugural Program Director for the African American Heritage House at the Chautauqua Institution.

At Princeton, she is writing her dissertation on Black women’s embodied experience of pleasure in the 19^th century. She contributed as a researcher to the Toni Morrison “Sites of Memory” exhibition at the Princeton University Library. Camille’s writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, USA Today, and The Chicago Review of Books.

Janet is a PhD student reading Engineering Science at Oxford. Her research aims to assess the impact of climate change on buildings prone to subsidence and heave damage by modelling the interaction of climate, soil, and buildings. Janet is passionate about climate resilience and adaptation for buildings and hopes to increase knowledge on the threat climate change poses to buildings in her research.

Prior to Oxford, Janet studied a BEng (Hons) in Civil Engineering at Edinburgh University as a MasterCard Foundation Scholar. She begun working in climate change there as a research assistant on the RC3 project. The project aims to evaluate the resilience of traditional buildings in Madagascar to cyclones and assess the adaptive capacity of Malagasy communities at risk. Janet supported the engineering team with understanding building typologies and modelling building response to cyclone wind. In her spare time, Janet usually sings and plays guitar. She also has a newly found passion for fencing.

Eric Braverman is the chief executive of Schmidt Futures. Eric previously served as
CEO of the Clinton Foundation and was a partner and co-founder of McKinsey &
Company’s government practice globally. Eric is also a senior fellow at Yale, where
he teaches about ethics in public leadership, is a member of YPO and the New York
State Bar. Eric also serves as co-chair of the Families and Workers Fund, and is a
member of the boards of Ready and other organizations.

Dr Jonny Broomberg is CEO of Vitality Health International and Global Head of Health Insurance for the Discovery Group. He has been with Discovery for 18 years, including serving as CEO of Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurance business, for 10 years. He is now responsible for Discovery’s global health operations outside of South Africa and the UK. He is deeply interested in improving public and private health systems, public health and global health policy issues. Prior to joining Discovery, he was a founding partner of a specialist healthcare private equity business, and in his earlier career, he worked in in health economics and policy research, and served as Special Advisor to the Minister of Health in South Africa’s first post-Apartheid government.  

Jonny studied Medicine in South Africa, and then read PPE at Balliol College before completing MSc and PHD degrees in Health Economics at the University of London. 

Eleanor Brown is a Co-Founder of DiversiBoard, a Techstars/JP Morgan company that uses AI to enable African and Caribbean technical talent to apply to universities overseas at a fraction of the typical cost. She is also a Professor of Law at Fordham University and an affiliated faculty member at the Rock Ethics Institute of Penn State where she was previously a Professor. She was previously a chair of the Jamaica Trade Board.  Brown was appointed by Andrew Holness, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, to the CARICOM Commission.  She has served on the boards of several publicly traded Caribbean companies and was the youngest director of two subsidiaries of the Bank of Nova Scotia (Jamaica), one of the largest subsidiaries of the largest Canadian bank (by market capitalization). Brown was the youngest director of JPSCo, the electric utility owned by Korea Electric Power Corp., Marubeni Corp. of Japan, and the government of Jamaica. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from Brown University and a master’s degree in politics from Balliol.

Raymond M. Burse until his retirement in 2012, served as Vice President & General Counsel, GE – Appliances & Lighting. He served as General Counsel, GE Consumer Products from 2002 to 2004 and General Counsel for GE Appliances from May 2002 to September 2002.  Burse joined GE in 1995 as Senior Counsel – Commercial Law.  Before joining GE, Burse was a partner in the law firm of Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs, Louisville, Kentucky from July 1989 to August 1995, and President of Kentucky State University from 1982 to 1989.  Following his retirement from GE, Burse served as President of Kentucky State university for a second time from July 2014 until May 2016.

Burse received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and his B.S. in Chemistry/Mathematics from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.  

Burse is married to Kim Burse and they have three sons and five grandchildren.

Edwin Cameron served as a judge for 25 years, the last eleven in the Constitutional Court. Educated at Pretoria Boys' High, Stellenbosch and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he practised as a human rights lawyer under apartheid. He has fought for LGBTI equality, including the historic inclusion of sexual orientation in the SA Constitution. Living with HIV, he fiercely criticised President Mbeki's AIDS denialism and fought for access to antiretroviral treatments. His has written two prize-winning memoirs, Witness to AIDS (2005) and Justice: A Personal Account (2014). He is involved in many charitable and public causes. After retiring as a judge, he was elected Chancellor of Stellenbosch University and appointed inspecting judge of prisons. 

Sanjay is Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Pan Am Equities, a New York City wealth management firm specializing in real estate and dedicated to generational growth by meeting future challenges with innovative, technology-driven solutions.  In this role, he partners with the executive team to develop institutional processes for risk management, portfolio strategy, technology integration, asset management, financial planning, reporting and analysis.

In his previous positions as Chief Operating Officer of A&E, CFO of Jonathan Rose Companies and CFO & Partner at Urban American, Sanjay helped launch multi-disciplinary, green, transit-oriented acquisition and redevelopment funds focused on impact investing in the work force and affordable segments of multi-family housing.   Additional responsibilities included providing strategic and operational support, directing investment strategy, governance, portfolio management and investor relations.  As part of his portfolio management functions, Sanjay managed capital for dozens of limited partners, including many prominent pension plans, endowments, family offices, and high net worth individuals. 

Tinashe Chandauka is a Founder and CEO of Nandi Life Sciences LLC. Nandi is a rare disease, oncology and auto-immune biotechnology company allied to the Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics (ACT), backed by The Texas Medical Center (TMC). He is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence within ACT. Prior to this, he was the Director, Early Pipeline Development at Tarsus Pharmaceuticals. Prior to this, he was at Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE) where he participated in early-stage venture capital investments, in 55 early-stage biotech companies, including the Series B financing and IPO of Vaccitech, inventor of the Oxford COVID-19. He read for a DPhil as a Rhodes Scholar (South Africa-At-Large & Trinity, 2015) and holds a medical degree from the University of Cape Town (distinction and honours). He holds medical licenses in the UK and RSA. He is a Board member of AMREF UK, a global Africa focused healthcare charity.

Professor Shadreck Chirikure is the University of Oxford’s Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science, Director of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art and British Academy Global Professor. His research interests include archaeometallurgy, human material relations, archaeological science and globalisation, heritage science and sustainability.

The Honourable Delroy Chuck was first elected in Jamaica’s General Election of 1997, and re-elected five times, as Member of Parliament for the Constituency of North East St. Andrew.

In 2007-2011 he served as Speaker of the House of Representatives. In 2011, he served a short stint in Office as Minister of Justice. In 2016, after his party, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) returned to office, he was again assigned the ministerial portfolio of Justice.

Mr. Chuck won a scholarship to the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica, where he read for and received an honors degree in Special Mathematics.

He became a Jamaica Rhodes Scholar in 1973 and went on to St. Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford, England, where he read Law.

Minister Chuck is the husband of Gloria and father of four daughters; two grandsons and four granddaughters.  He enjoys tennis, reads extensively and likes to listen to music or hang out with friends.

Mat has worked for the past 23 years as a senior Estates professional in the higher education sector in Oxford, delivering a number of important University of Oxford building projects with a combined value of approximately £200m, which create educational spaces to support 21st century learners. 

Having assisted the Rhodes Trust with the ‘Big Build’ business plan and consultant appointments in 2018, Mat joined the Rhodes Trust full time in 2019 as Director of Estates to oversee the design, planning, procurement and construction of the project which will transform Rhodes House and prepare it for another century of service to the Rhodes Trust.

Mat is a recognised global expert on the subject of Next Generation Learning Spaces, with a particular focus on the impact of technology on pedagogy and self-led learning, and the consequent impact on educational architecture. 

Christopher Eisgruber has served as Princeton University’s 20th president since July 2013. He served previously as Princeton's provost for nine years, beginning in 2004, after joining the Princeton faculty in 2001.

Eisgruber has led efforts to increase the representation of low-income and first-generation students at Princeton and other colleges and universities. These initiatives have attracted attention from The New York Times, The Washington Post, 60 Minutes and other news outlets. Eisgruber has also been a leading voice in Washington and elsewhere for the value of research and liberal arts education. He has emphasized the importance of both free speech and inclusivity to Princeton’s mission; championed the University’s commitment to service; and launched initiatives designed to fortify Princeton’s connections to the innovation ecosystem.

His books include Constitutional Self-Government (2001); Religious Freedom and the Constitution (with Lawrence Sager, 2007); and The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process (2007).

Amidst climate crisis, mass extinction and more, Lawrence’s life is a stand for a sustainable & regenerative, equitable & just, thriving world for all. A complex-systems consulting executive, his engagements have helped produce 25 landmark anti-pollution demonstration projects across the US, dramatically strengthened the language of EPA legislation, and more. He’s the founder of a new initiative for accelerating solutioning to the climate crisis & mass extinction, One Thriving Planet, with an inaugural project in August with 1,700 sustainability directors in urban municipalities in CAN and the US, serving 100+M people. He’s Lead Sustainability Advisor with pioneering coaching company, a)plan coaching. He serves as faculty on mindfulness and sustainability with 900 top leaders in Silicon Valley through American Leadership Forum.

An Indigenous ritualist & Buddhist Teacher, he draws unquenchable inspiration from the wisdom traditions and communities of his Indigenous and Buddhist heritages, which seek to live with the Earth as sacred, and all beings as relatives.

Professor Carolyn Evans has been Vice Chancellor and President of Griffith University, Queensland Australia since 2019. She was educated in Law and Arts at the Melbourne and Oxford universities and held the roles of Dean of Law and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Melbourne. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, President of the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association, former Chair of the Innovative Research Universities, former board member of Open Universities Australia from 2019-2023 and current Board member of Universities Australia. She researches in the areas of religious freedom and academic freedom and has published widely in these areas. She has been awarded a Rhodes Scholar and a Fulbright Senior Scholar. 

Dr. Nadiya Figueroa has a passion for facilitating human, community and organisational development that empowers leaders to transform themselves, their societies and the wider world. She has honed her grounded, holistic and dynamic approach to developmental processes through roles across the public, philanthropy, education and advocacy sectors.

Nadiya has degrees in anthropology and history from Stanford, in political-economy from the University of the West Indies and in international development from Oxford University, where she studied as a Jamaica Rhodes Scholar. Her doctoral research examined the legitimization of emergent leaders and institutions in a post colonial developing society, their contestation of the status quo via currencies of trust, respect and morality.

Jory Fleming works at the University of South Carolina as a climate scientist and education specialist. He holds an MPhil in environmental change and management from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, an MBA from the Quantic School of Business & Technology, and a BS in geography and marine science with a minor in geophysics from the University of South Carolina. Alongside his service dog Daisy, Jory is invested in children’s education and raising awareness about disabilities. He loves the ocean and hopes to keep the planet beautiful and alive for the next generation. Jory lives with several disabilities, including autism. In his spare time, Jory is an avid bird watcher, board game enthusiast, and Scottish country dancer. 

Aria is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Liberation Ventures (LV), a field catalyst and intermediary accelerating the Black-led movement for racial repair in the US. Previously, she was an Engagement Manager in McKinsey & Company’s Washington D.C. office, where she served clients on issues related to strategy, organizational design, racial equity, and financial sustainability. Aria also helped develop the firm’s early thinking on how to support clients on topics of racial equity and inclusive growth, which has now evolved into the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility. She co-authored several research reports on the topic.

Prior to McKinsey, Aria helped launch the first-ever round of programs for civic leaders at the Obama Foundation, and was a nonprofit practitioner and organizer in East Palo Alto, California. Aria received a BA from Stanford University, an MBA from The Wharton School, and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Nanette Fondas is an author, activist, mother, and former professor of business administration. She writes about the work people do and the care they give. Her scholarship focuses on leadership, work-family, and the care economy; it has been published in scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines, including The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Ms., and Psychology Today. Her 2010 book, The Custom-Fit Workplace, argues that flexible work arrangements are prudent, practical, efficient, and necessary. Currently she is writing a book about early Rhodes women and a second book about lost World War II men.

Elena is a documentary photographer and feminist economic researcher. Her work focuses on capturing the still moments in often sensationalised environments and disrupting traditional power imbalances in art. Growing up in Kosovo in the aftermath of the conflict there, and having worked with various nonprofits in refugee camps across MENA as a young adult, her exposure to the misuse of humanitarian aid underpin both her artistic practice and academic work. She specialises in co-creative portraiture and writes philosophically on the classism and power imbalances of art narrative. A 2019 Rhodes scholar, she holds an MSc in Economic and Social History and an MBA. Currently based back home in the Balkans, she is working on a intersectional intergenerational exploration of “feminisms” in Kosovo 20 years since the genocide (to be exhibited in Oxford and Prishtina in 2023.)

Dr. Atul Gawande is the Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID. He is a surgeon, writer, and public health leader. Prior to joining the Biden-Harris Administration, he was a practicing general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

He was founder and chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and of Lifebox, a nonprofit making surgery safer globally. He also co-founded CIC Health, a public benefit corporation supporting pandemic response operations across the United States. He served as a member of the Biden transition COVID-19 Advisory Board.

In addition, Atul was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine and has written four New York Times best-selling books: Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the winner of two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on healthcare, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Award for writing about science.

Mark German is the Executive Director, Rise. An initiative of Schmidt Futures and the Rhodes Trust, Rise will build a lifelong community of students, teachers, and institutions across sectors who aim to serve others. In this role, Mark leads the Rise team and manages a wide array of partners and stakeholders in bringing the program from concept to reality.

Formerly supporting initiatives for Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, E-Line Media, Intel Education, XPRIZE, World Science Festival, and other organizations, Mark has led the development of over 200 products and a dozen large-scale programs that have enhanced the lives of more than 12 million students and educators in 75 countries.

Mark has a Master of Arts in Communications Management from the University of Southern California, a Master of Arts in Teaching from National College of Education, and a Bachelor of Science in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University.

Helen Ghosh recently stepped down as a Rhodes Trustee after 12 years.  Following a career as a UK civil servant, Helen spent six years as head of Europe’s largest environmental and heritage charity, The National Trust.  She is now Master of Balliol College.  Both at Balliol and in her work at The National Trust, she had been engaged in the question of how historic institutions should come to terms with the legacy of the past and how these can be represented in buildings, installations and the history that is told.  In particular, at Balliol, she commissioned a study of the proceeds of slavery in the College endowment and the College is in the process of taking forward reparative action.  Many National Trust historic properties now tell the story of the origins of the wealth that built them.

Don Gogel is Chairman of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a private equity investment firm that he joined in 1989. CD&R currently manages approximately $70 billion in capital and holds investments across 42 portfolio companies in Europe and the U.S. that together generate more than $100 billion in revenues and employ approximately 600,000 people.

Prior to joining CD&R, Don was a partner at McKinsey & Company, as well as a founder of the merchant banking group at Kidder Peabody & Co., Inc. He is a member of the Business Council and the Trilateral Commission. He also is serves as a Vice Chairman of Mount Sinai Medical System, Cancer Research Institute, and SeriousFun Children’s Network.

Don received a B.A. with highest honors from Harvard College in international relations and then studied politics on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University’s Balliol College where he received an M.Phil. He also received a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Sean Gourley is the founder and former CEO of Primer, a San Francisco based Artificial Intelligence company building mission critical defense and intelligence applications for those who protect our security and democracy. Previously, he was CTO of Quid, a data visualization company he co-founded in 2009. Prior to Quid, Gourley worked on self-repairing nano circuits at NASA. He holds a PhD in physics from Oxford, where his research as a Rhodes Scholar focused on complex systems and the mathematical patterns underlying modern war. This research was published on the cover of Nature and the findings were delivered to the United Nations in Vienna. He is a two-time New Zealand track and field champion. Gourley sits on the Atlantic Council commission on Defense Innovation Adoption, has served as a member of the Board of Directors at Anadarko (NYSE: APC). Sean is an investor in deep technology startups and was an inaugural TED Fellow.

Dr Andrew Graham is a political economist and the former Master of Balliol. He is now a Senior Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute, which he founded, and a Trustee of the Europaeum, where he created the Europaeum Scholars Programme, and, through this, has driven the expansion of the Europaeum from a network of ten of Europe’s top universities in 2016 to nineteen today. For the latter achievement, Charles University (Prague) awarded him a Gold Medal.  Earlier in his career, he was (twice) Economic Adviser to the UK Prime Minister, and Tutorial Fellow in Economics at Balliol. He held the Wardenship of Rhodes House, 2012-13, and was a Rhodes Trustee 2013-2016. He has been a Trustee of Reprieve, and a Director of the Scott Trust (which owns the Guardian and the Observer), and of Channel 4 Television. He remains a passionate windsurfer.

Dr. Vishal Gulati is a specialist venture capital investor backing scientists and tech founders bring their innovations to market. Vishal’s investment thesis is based around the convergence of healthcare, data and engineering.

In his venture capital career, Vishal has held roles at leading firms such as Atlas Venture, Oxford Science Enterprises and Molten Ventures, whilst making independent private investments in ground breaking healthtech companies.

Vishal has served on the boards of over fifteen public and private health and life sciences companies; from Horizon Discovery to the world’s most scalable DNA synthesis platform (Evonetix). His portfolio of over 30 VC and angel investments makes him one of the most active investors in this space.

Vishal chairs the investment committee of Cancer Research UK seed fund, and holds similar roles at The Francis Crick Institute, (KQ Labs), British Heart Foundation, Medical Research Council, and Innovate UK. Vishal also serves on the advisory board of Reuben College.

Dr. Menaka Guruswamy is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India.

Through her litigation practice, she has successfully sought reform of the bureaucracy in the country through fixed tenure, defended federal legislation that mandates that all private schools admit disadvantaged children, and overturned section 377 the 150 year old colonial-era law that criminalises consensual same-sex relations. She has also litigated the case for marriage-equality before the Supreme Court of India.  In her private law practice she litigates in the areas of  civil law, commercial law and white collar crime.

Dr. Guruswamy has co-edited a volume of essays on Founding Moments in Constitutionalism (Hart/Bloomsbury, 2019). She has written widely for publications including the New York Times,  the New York Review of Books and the Indian Express.

Cameron Hepburn is Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.  He also serves as the Director of the Economics of Sustainability Programme, based at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School.

Cameron has published widely on energy, resources and environmental challenges across disciplines including engineering, biology, philosophy, economics, public policy and law, drawing on degrees in law and engineering (Melbourne University) and masters and doctorate in economics (Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar).  He has co-founded three successful businesses and provides advice on energy and environmental policy to government ministers (e.g. China, India, UK and Australia) and international institutions (e.g. OECD, UN). 

Glen James studied law at Oxford as an undergraduate, before qualifying as a solicitor and following a career as a lawyer in the City of London with Slaughter and May, in which he was a partner for 29 years. Upon retiring in 2012, he continued his voluntary involvement in the field of education and began work with the Rhodes Trust, where he was appointed a Trustee in 2014, chairing the Audit and Risk Committee. He also chairs the Trust’s newly established Partnerships Committee, and participates as a member of some of the Trust’s other Committees.

Professor Prabhat Jha is a University Professor at the University of Toronto, Endowed Professor in Global Health and Epidemiology and Canada Research Chair at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and the founding Director of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael's Hospital.

Professor Jha is the lead investigator of the Million Death Study in India, which quantifies the causes of premature mortality in over 3 million homes from 1998 to current. His publications on tobacco control have enabled a global treaty now signed by over 180 countries. He founded the Statistical Alliance for Vital Events, which focuses on reliable measurement of premature mortality worldwide.

Earlier, Professor Jha served in senior roles at the World Health Organization and the World Bank. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012. Professor Jha holds an M.D. from the University of Manitoba and a D.Phil. from Oxford University.

Mason Ji (Washington & St Antony’s 2016) is an attorney practicing international sanctions law, cross-border regulatory/trade law, and complex litigation and a lecturer of law at the University of Washington School of Law on international law. Mason is a former delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, where he negotiated nuclear disarmament, climate change, and human rights treaties. Mason was also a White House Ambassador for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders under President Obama in 2015-2016. Mason recently founded several non-profit organizations to address racial inequality issues and hosts a monthly Chinese language radio show on civic engagement and international relations. Mason regularly publishes on international sanctions, climate change, and international trade. Mason graduated from Harvard Law School, obtained a Master of Public Policy and an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from the University of Oxford, and a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University.

Janet Jobson joined the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in June 2022.
She comes to the Foundation from a career in activism and in the development sector, both locally and globally. Most recently, Janet was the Deputy CEO (and Acting CEO for the period Feb 2021 to Feb 2022) at the DG Murray Trust (DGMT) – South Africa’s largest private foundation.

At DGMT Janet worked to grow the organisation as a public innovator aiming to build a South Africa where all people can fulfil their potential.
Alongside her overall organisational leadership, at DGMT Janet specifically led strategies focused on creating platforms for youth leadership networks, tackling school dropout and youth unemployment, and growing an innovative and inclusive society. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Janet led the implementation of a national communications campaign on behalf of the National Department of Health, broadcasting daily on 15 national radio stations in 12 languages. She also oversaw the implementation of an innovative food relief programme, which delivered support to over 100 000 people while enriching local economies through the deployment of a digital voucher system redeemable at local informal ‘spaza’ shops.

Janet has held governance roles and worked in various capacities with a range of organisations such as Activate! Leadership, Amandla.mobi, Life Choices, Amnesty International South Africa, CIVICUS, and the South African Girl Child Alliance.
Janet’s brings to her work a drive to build a more compassionate, connected, and just world, with the technical skills to build strategies to fulfil this vision.

Janet completed a BA (Hons) degree in History at Rhodes University as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar. Her academic work then took her to Oxford University, where she completed an MPhil in Development Studies as a Rhodes Scholar. In 2009-10 she was a Jeanne Sauvé Public Leadership Fellow based in Montreal, Canada.

Susan L. Karamanian is Dean of the College of Law at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha.  She was previously the Provost at the American University of Sharjah and the Associate Dean for International and Comparative Legal Studies and Burnett Family Professorial Lecturer at the George Washington University Law School. Before joining GW Law, she was a Partner in Locke Lord LLP in Dallas. She serves on the governing bodies of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), the Center for American and International Law (CAIL), and Texas Appleseed. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Council on Germany and a life fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Texas Bar Foundation.

Dr. Aly Kassam−Remtulla is a globally-minded leader with a profound commitment to education, philanthropy, and environmental and social justice.
 
As Vice Provost for International Affairs at Princeton University, Aly leads a team of 250 people on three continents.  His portfolio includes oversight of a 48,000-acre campus in Kenya, one of the leading research institutes on the African continent.  Prior to Princeton, he worked at the MacArthur Foundation, where he awarded more than $60 million in grants across three portfolios.
 
Aly is a governance expert and has served on numerous non-profit boards.  He currently chairs the board of the United World College-USA and serves on the board of Allegheny College.  He was recently a consultant to the Luce Foundation.
 
Born in Kenya and raised in Canada, Aly is a graduate of Stanford and Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.  His commentary has appeared in numerous publications, and he was recently inducted into Stanford’s Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame.

Professor Chimène Keitner is Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California Davis. Her recent publications include a treatise (International Law Frameworks, 5th ed. 2021) and a co-authored casebook (International Law, 8th ed. 2023). She is an active member of the American Society of International Law, the American Branch of the International Law Association, and the American Law Institute, and she serves as an Editorial Board Member of the Canadian Yearbook of International Law. After graduating from Yale Law School, she clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and spent several years in private practice before entering the academy. More recently, she served a term as the 27th Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State.

Sara leads the Planetary Health Informatics Group at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine (Oxford) and the Machine Learning Team of the Health Data Sciences Section in NDORMS (Oxford) She is also affiliated with the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (Oxford) where she completed her doctoral and post-doctoral research in the Biomedical Signal Processing and Image Analysis Groups, and has been an Oxford Ambassador for Women in Data Science.

Her research applies artificial intelligence to international real-world health data, in order to further our understanding of disease and fills the gaps in global health, leveraging common data models and federated network analytics. She works closely with clinicians, engineers, clinical and environmental epidemiologists, conservationists, data scientists, and public and patient groups in the UK, Europe, Latin America, South Asia, and Africa to co-create models for equitable and ethical solutions for planetary health problems. 

Dr Elizabeth Kiss (pronounced ‘quiche’) became Warden of Rhodes House and CEO of the Rhodes Trust in August 2018, the first woman to hold this position. She has launched the 125th Anniversary Strategic plan for the Rhodes Trust which will expand the annual number of Scholars to 125 with a wider global profile. It also includes an ambitious fundraising campaign, deepening the alumni lifelong fellowship, and increasing the connection and impact of our partnership programmes which include The Mandela Rhodes Foundation, Atlantic Institute, Schmidt Science Fellowship programme and Rise.  

Before joining the Rhodes Trust, Dr Kiss served for twelve years as president of Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia. From 1997 to 2006 Dr Kiss served as the founding director of Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. She has also taught at Randolph-Macon College (Virginia), Deep Springs College (California) and at Princeton University for eight years. She is a scholar of moral and political philosophy and she has published on moral education, human rights, ethnic conflict and nationalism, feminist theory, and transitional justice.  

Lisa is a founder and Director of the SA SME Fund, capitalised by 52 corporates to stimulate entrepreneurship in South Africa by providing catalytic capital to venture capital and debt funds, and supporting accelerators that scale high impact entrepreneurs.  

She sits on the steering committee of Business for SA, a collective of business associations and companies set up to support the Government to combat the Covid-19 pandemic and rollout the national vaccination programme and, since 2022, implement priority national interventions in energy, logistics and crime and corruption via public private partnerships.

Previously, Lisa was Head of M&A at Discovery Group and a consultant at McKinsey & Co.

She is a Trustee of the Discovery Fund, a Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and African Leadership Initiative, President of the Southern African Association of Rhodes Scholars (SAARS), and co-chair of the Rhodes Trust’s Global Alumni Advisory Board.

She obtained her DPhil in Politics from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

Desmond is Founder and CEO of The Compassion Group and Compassion Capital.  He brings 20+ years of professional and management experience across diverse areas of business and finance, and has also founded several businesses across different industries.  

An engineer by training, Desmond is an ex-Olympian who thrives in competition. He's an entrepreneur at heart and identifies as a ‘recovering banker’ with ADHD. His greatest inspiration is the Dalai Lama.  A 1995 Rhodes Scholar from Singapore, Desmond continues with his learning journey through trying and failing forward, and embraces his journey of growth and impact. 

Desmond enjoys giving his time to nonprofit causes and charities, and serves on boards of nonprofit organisations in the areas of sustainability, education, and well-being.

Desmond aims to inspire and catalyze the movement of 'Compassion Capital' into the hearts and minds of investors and asset owners. The idea is that everyone may positively impact People and Planet by making compassionate decisions with their capital.

Rachel Kolb is a writer, scholar, and deaf and disability advocate. After her time at Oxford, she completed her Ph.D. in English literature at Emory University and has since been a Junior Fellow in Harvard's Society of Fellows.

In 1972 Eileen Lach challenged the exclusion of women from being Rhodes Scholars and became instrumental to the first women becoming eligible for Rhodes Scholarships in 1976. She is now an international lawyer and American senior business leader with forty-five years of service in the technology and life sciences fields. She has experienced many additional ‘“first female’” accolades in her career, including as a partner in a ‘Wall Street’ law firm, a senior executive in a Fortune 100 corporation, and the lead lawyer in a premier global technology organization working in AI regulation.  Ms. Lach serves on the Board of Governors of the University of St. Thomas Law School, USA, volunteers as an arbitrator in New York City Civil Court, and works with victims of gender violence and international trafficking.  She is admitted to practice law before the United States Supreme Court and several U.S. federal courts.

Vivian Lee, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., is an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and author of The Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone. Having led a large academic medical center, she helped build multiple successful health/tech start-ups within Alphabet (Google), and recently has pivoted to focus on climate change and especially the intersection of tech, climate change, and healthcare.

A member of the US National Academy of Medicine, Vivian received a D.Phil in medical engineering from Oxford, earned her M.D. with honors from Harvard, and her MBA from NYU. She serves on the Board of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars.

Tariro Makadzange is a medical social-entrepreneur, infectious disease physician and viral immunologist. Her career has spanned academia and industry in Africa and the United States. She is founder and CEO of CRMG and Mutala Trust in Zimbabwe. CRMG is a research organization focused on diversifying research by including Africa and Africans in clinical trials and understanding immunogenetics in African populations including antibody discovery research for infectious diseases. Mutala Trust is a non-profit research organization that conducts public health and implementation science research in communicable and non-communicable diseases. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Clinical Medicine at Stanford University and Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Centre for Innovation in Global Health.

Trudi Makhaya was appointed in April 2018 as economic advisor in the office of His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa. In this role, she provided technical support to the President on economic policy. This included regular input on key issues and initiatives (such as the Investment Drive, Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan, just transition and green economy, Operation Vulindlela). She interfaced with
relevant advisory councils and economic policy stakeholders. Trudi also served as South Africa’s G20 sherpa, representing the President in the drafting and negotiations ahead of Leaders’ summits and meetings.

Before taking up this role, Trudi was CEO of Makhaya Advisory, a niche consulting firm with a focus on helping business navigate economic policy, including competition policy (anti-trust), that she founded in 2015. She has held non-executive directorships at Vumelana Advisory Fund and MTN South Africa and is an early-stage investor in a data insights start-up.

John McCall MacBain, a Canadian citizen from Niagara Falls, is the Founder and Chair of the McCall MacBain Foundation and President of Pamoja Capital SA, its investment arm.

From 1987 to 2006, Mr. McCall MacBain was the Founder, President and CEO of Trader Classified Media which was the world’s leading classified advertising company. In 2006, he successfully sold Trader Classified Media and set up the McCall MacBain Foundation.

The McCall MacBain Foundation has committed over $500 million of charitable donations for scholarships and education, health and the environment, especially climate change, in Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Africa. 

Mr. McCall MacBain is a Rhodes Scholar and received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, an M.A. in Law from the University of Oxford, and an Honours BA in Economics from McGill University. While at Oxford, he was Co-Captain of the Varsity-winning Oxford University Ice Hockey Club.

John currently devotes a significant amount of his time to philanthropic activities.  In addition to his role as Chair of the MMF, he is also the Second Century Founder of the Rhodes Trust. Mr. McCall MacBain is currently the Chancellor of McGill University.

Anea Moore is an AI for Social Good Program Manager at Google, with expertise in technology, policy, and social impact. She manages the daily operations of the AI for the Global Goals Open Call, Google's current largest philanthropic AI fund that is allocating $25 million annually to non-profits, social enterprises, and universities using AI to advance the UN Global Goals. Previously, Anea served as Deputy Policy Director for the largest successful democratic gubernatorial campaign in the 2018 US midterm elections. As a key advisor to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, she focused on innovation, economic opportunity, technology, and education policy. Anea holds two Master's degrees from Oxford in Public Policy and Social Policy, and a Bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania. With a passion for an economically and racially inclusive AI landscape, she aims to attend law school next year to become an AI and technology legal and policy specialist, working towards equitable and responsible AI deployment.

Dr. Richard Morales, Jr. was selected as the first Hispanic Brigade Commander at United States Military Academy. He then attended Christ Church College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Richard served in the United States Army at Fort Benning, Georgia and Vicenza, Italy as a paratrooper and infantry officer. He continued his 12 years of military service as a US Army physician after graduating from the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Morales was a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco prior to private practice. He was appointed Chief of Staff of his hospital and was a key member of the Hospital Foundation Board. Richard and his wife, Penny, founded The Ricardo Fund in his large hospital system. The theme of this program was “Opening Doors” which provided over 225 scholarships for entry level hospital workers of whom the majority were persons of color. Physician mentorship encouraged their advancement through education, training and certifications. Richard’s father came to New York from Puerto Rico as a six-year old orphan to be raised by his maternal aunt. His father exemplified grace and courage in the face of barriers and indignities, and inspired Richard’s determination and awareness of others.

Muloongo Muchelemba is the inaugural Director of Selection for Rise, an initiative of Schmidt Futures and the Rhodes Trust to find promising young people and give them the opportunity for life as they work to serve others. She also serves the Rhodes Trust in a volunteer capacity in three roles: National Secretary for the Global Rhodes Scholarship; Co-Chair of the Rhodes Trust's Legacy, Equity & Inclusion advisory group on Trust and Africa in the 21st Century; and, penultimate judge for the Äänit Prize, which provides funding for social impact projects run by Rhodes or Mandela Rhodes Scholars.

Prior to Rise, Muloongo spent over 16 years working in oil and gas, management consulting and corporate banking in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. She is the author of The Millennials’ Gaido to Work, a mentoring guide for young professionals navigating the workplace. She is working on her next book: The Secret Lives of Gen Z: What Parents Need To Know.

Justine is a social entrepreneur who has established many innovative non-profit organisations in the areas of education, diversity and social innovation. She works collaboratively to bring together people and organisations to focus on the young people we care about rather than the silos we work within. She is passionate about enabling all young people to thrive and achieve their potential.

Currently, Justine is a Co-Founder of the Neurodiversity in Education Coalition and the CEO of the New Zealand Centre for Gifted Education. Other organisations she founded/ helped to establish are TupuToa, Global Women, Champions for Change, 21C Skills Lab, the New Zealand Centre for Social Innovation, the Springboard Trust and Starpath.

Justine has worked as a lawyer serving indigenous clients in Australia and New Zealand, a McKinsey & Company management consultant, the Executive Director of Education at Social Ventures Australia, and as a director on the board of Z Energy, and a trustee of numerous non-profit organisations, including Teach First NZ.

Lissa’s career has spanned journalism, politics, government, and business. Co-owner of Washington’s premier independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, she previously served as director of speechwriting for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, senior advisor on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, presidential speechwriter and chief speechwriter to the first lady in the Clinton White House, and co-collaborator on Hillary Clinton’s White House memoir, Living History. Prior to working in government and politics, she spent 14 years as a journalist, first at the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville, Mississippi, and then at the Washington Star and Washington Post.

She graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude with a degree in history and was in the first class of women elected Rhodes Scholars.

She is currently working on a book to be published by Penguin Press entitled, Hillaryland.

Lissa and her husband have three adult children and reside in Bethesda, Maryland.

Professor Arthur G.O. Mutambara is the Director and Full Professor of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge (IFK) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in South Africa. He is a world-renowned roboticist, academic, author, Pan-Africanist and technology strategist. Professor Mutambara is also the Director of IFK’s Decentralised Artificial Intelligence and Control Systems (DAICS) Research Group and drives the African Agency in Public Health (AAPH) initiative within the Future of Health (FoH) Research Group. He teaches Control Systems in UJ’s Mechanical Engineering and Electrical and Electronic Engineering Departments.                                                                                                                    Professor Mutambara is the Former Deputy Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. Mutambara was one of the three Principals who created and led the Government of National Unity (GNU) from 2009 to 2013. Professor Mutambara is a distinguished public intellectual across the African continent and globally, where he has conducted presentations on leadership, management, business and engineering, in addition to motivational speeches and seminars.

Atherton Mutombwera is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar (Zimbabwe, 2014) and the Founder and CEO of Hutano Diagnostics Ltd. Hutano Diagnostics Ltd is a start-up developing a quantitative, modular, configurable lateral flow device platform. The first application is a fever management diagnostic in children, by differentiating bacterial from viral illness, as well as providing sepsis prognosis. This diagnostic identifies children suitable for community management (with or without antibiotic administration).

Hutano Diagnostics was named as one of the hottest start-ups in Oxford by WIRED (2021); named on the 2021 list of Game Changers in the Thames Valley, UK; and won the 2019 GE European Whatman Diagnostics Competition.

Atherton completed an MBA (2016-2017) at the University of Oxford as a Louis Dreyfus-Weidenfeld and Hoffmann Saïd Scholar. He holds an MSc in Nanoscience (Nanobiomedicine) for which he was awarded the Coursework Masters Award in the Science, Engineering and Technology fields by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in 2016 for his research developing of a rapid diagnostic device for Ebola. Atherton is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar. He has an undergraduate degree in Pharmacy. 

Zehra Naqvi is an educator, award-winning writer, and the Founder and Creative Director of The Estuary Institute, which offers interdisciplinary programming in the liberal and creative arts for lifelong learners seeking to better understand the pressing issues facing our planet. In the past decade, Zehra has worked in digital media, journalism, academia, publishing, EdTech, and community organizing. She has published fiction, poetry, and non-fiction internationally. Zehra was awarded the 2021 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers by the Writers' Trust of Canada. Her debut book of poetry, The Knot of My Tongue, will appear in bookstores in Spring 2024. At Oxford, Zehra studied Migration Studies and Social Anthropology. Prior to Oxford, she studied English and Creative Writing at UBC.

Syrian Oudist and composer, Mohannad Nasser, has emerged as an innovative and creative musician with years of experience in performing on the Middle East musical scenes and expertise in teaching oriental music.

His musical vision is based on the Arabic traditional music with a strong flavor of the Oriental roots.

Mohannad’s journey with the Oud came from his rich period of studies at the Higher Institute of Music in Damascus, where he perfected his knowledge in traditional oriental music and explored the classical Western music.

During his career, he was able to expand the Oud abilities by adapting it to different musical genres, like the classical music, the jazz music, Brazilian music or the flamenco.

In 2017, Mohannad released the first album of his group Oumi ensemble, “Imaginary Dance”, and started his solo project “L’Oud whispers”.

Mohannad received several prizes at international Oud competitions and he is performing his music all around the world.

Dr. Gladys Ngetich is a Rhodes Scholar and a Schmidt Science Fellow. She recently worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT where her research focused on studying wax-based propellants for the launch and in-space propulsion of small satellites.

Gladys obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford where, in close collaboration with Rolls Royce Plc, she researched advanced techniques for cooling jet engines. Before Oxford, she pursued BSc in Mechanical Engineering at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya.

In July 2022, Gladys was awarded On Deck Founder Fellowship to build Saidiwa Rides; a reimagined ride sharing platform that aims to meet the social, economic, and infrastructural needs of the African market.

Gladys has been a recipient of many notable awards and recognitions including; RMB Africa’s Fearless Thinker, Emerging Space Leader Award, UK Rare Rising Star, Kenya’s Top 40 Under 40 Women, and featured in Nature and BBC Science News.

Professor Loyiso G. Nongxa retired as Ad Hominem Professor of Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in December 2018, having spent 18 years at the university. He attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and obtained his doctorate in Mathematics in 1982. He has taught at the National University of Lesotho, the former University of Natal in Durban, the University of the Western Cape and the University of the Witwatersrand. Prior to moving to university management, his research interests were in Group Theory and over the last few years he his academic interests are in the Mathematical Foundations of Data Science and Machine Learning. For the last few years he has been one of the champions of a National Graduate Academy for Mathematical and Statistical Sciences which focuses on the development of the next generation of mathematicians and statisticians in South Africa

Christopher G. Oechsli is president and CEO of The Atlantic Philanthropies and serves on the Atlantic Institute Governing Board. He led Atlantic’s grant-making through its four program areas and Founding Chairman grants. His responsibilities included working with The Atlantic Philanthropies Board to complete all of Atlantic’s active grant-making by 2016 and conclude all operations by 2020. Christopher has over 35 years of experience in international business, law, philanthropy and policy development in the United States, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. 

Dr. Ann Olivarius KC (Hon) OBE is Chair of the Executive Committee of McAllister Olivarius, an international law firm specializing in cases of sexual misconduct and discrimination. She advised worked with a number of high-profile clients, from heads of state including Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, and Queen Rania to celebrities like Rose McGowan and Demi Moore. She also advised Nelson Mandela, who described her as “a lawyer who has advised me well and who has courageously advanced the cause of justice, and improved life opportunities, for hundreds of millions of women, blacks and disadvantaged, worldwide.”

Before establishing McAllister Olivarius in 1999, Ann worked in the financial sector. She advised Bill Gates on attracting investment after Microsoft’s initial public offering in 1986, designed the European corporate structure for Perot Systems ahead of its $4 billion sale to Dell, and was CEO of a medical foundation with assets she grew over four years from $7 million to over $100 million. As a negotiator for Mexico in the drafting of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), she introduced the concept of a feminist foreign policy at the trade negotiations, later adopted by countries across the world.

Ann has since achieved landmark settlements for survivors of abuse, successfully suing children’s homes, care homes, prominent schools, and major international religious bodies, including the first ever civil claim brought against the Jehovah’s Witnesses for child abuse. She has also coordinated international efforts to bring perpetrators to justice.

June is currently an MPhil student at the Faculty of Law, researching the potential of expanding the criminalisation of harassment and coercive control among housemates under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Herring. She graduated from the University of Warwick in 2019 with First Class Honours where she was awarded Best Overall Performance across All Degree Programmes for two consecutive years. Thereafter, she completed the LLM in Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) in 2020 under the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn Jean Southworth Scholarship, attaining an Outstanding for the BPTC, a Distinction for the LLM and The City Law School Prize for Outstanding LLM dissertation. She read for the BCL (Distinction) in 2020-21.

 She was Called to the Bar of England and Wales (Gray’s Inn) in 2021 and was admitted as an Advocate and Solicitor to the High Court of Malaya in 2022.

Chris Patten was born in 1944 and educated at St Benedict’s School (Ealing) and Balliol College (Oxford). He was Director of the Conservative Research Department (1974-79), MP for Bath (1979-92), a Minister (1983-92), and Chairman of the Conservative Party (1990-92).

From 1992-97 he was Governor of Hong Kong; and from 1998-99 Chairman of the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland.  He was European Commissioner for External Affairs (1999-2004); and Chairman of the BBC Trust (2011-2014).

He was made a Companion of Honour in 1998, a Life Peer in 2005 and a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter in 2023. He has written ‘The Tory Case’, ‘East and West’, ‘Not Quite The Diplomat’, ‘What Next? – Surviving the 21^st Century’ and ‘First Confession: A Sort of Memoir’.  His latest book, ‘The Hong Kong Diaries’ was published at the end of June 2022.

Chris Patten became Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 2003.

Olana Peters is a DPhil History candidate and Prize Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Her doctoral thesis is on the experiences and political activism of overseas students from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean in 1960s Britain. Broadly, her research encompasses themes of empire, decolonisation, race and resistance. Olana is also interested in public spaces and contested histories and has worked variously with the Rhodes Trust and the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR) in the Netherlands. When she isn’t reading, Olana enjoys taking long walks, playing the piano, and chatting with friends over tea.

Matt is the founder & CEO of Sociability. As a wheelchair user himself, he is passionate about empowering greater equality of opportunity for disabled people everywhere. Prior to this, Matt was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Schmidt Futures – the philanthropy of former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt – and a Visiting Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. Matt holds degrees from the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar

Emelia (Emmy) Probasco is a Senior Fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where she works on the military applications of Artificial Intelligence. Prior to joining CSET, she was the Chief Communications Officer and Communications Department Head at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), the nation’s largest University Affiliated Research Center, leading technical and institutional communications to support and drive APL’s strategic vision. Prior to APL, Emmy served as a Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy, deploying twice to the Indo-Pacific. She also served in the Pentagon as the speechwriter to the Chief of Naval Operations and at the U.S. Naval Academy as an instructor in political science. She has masters’ degrees in Forced Migration and Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a degree in Political Science from the U.S. Naval Academy. She currently serves as the Vice President of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars.

Kate is a researcher and open source investigator interested in how technology is changing the commission, documentation and prosecution of mass atrocity crimes. Prior to coming to Oxford, she was on the founding team of the Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era initiative at the Yale Genocide Studies Program and later became Open Source Investigation Lead on the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab’s ‘Ukraine Conflict Observatory’ project with the US Department of State. She was also a researcher at the Berkeley Human Rights Center where her research focused on the admissibility of digital evidence in international criminal tribunals and resilience skills for human rights investigators. Kate has a BA in Policy and Technology from Yale and is currently completing a MSc in Social Science of the Internet. She will begin a MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy in the fall. In her spare time, Kate is co-captain of the GTC Women’s Rowing team.

Chisanga Chekwe is President of the Masomo Education Foundation, a Canadian charitable organisation that provides scholarships to young men and women from low-income families. He also serves as a member of the Ontario Council of Social Workers and Social Service Workers, sitting on the Discipline Committee as well as the Fitness to Practice committee. 

Before that he served as Deputy Minister of the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration, Women’s Issues, and Seniors’ Affairs, in addition to being secretary general of the Order of Ontario.  

In 1994 Chisanga served as a United Nations Observer and Adjudication Officer to the historic South African election that brought Nelson Mandela to power.  Two years later he served as supervisor of the election in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

In addition to his PPE degree at Oxford, Chisanga has LL. B and LL. M degrees from the Universities of Birmingham and London. 

Chisanga is the author of five books on South Africa, Zambia and Investor Migration Programmes. 

Bob Rae is the Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Canada to the United

Nations in New York. He served as Premier of Ontario from 1990-1995, interim

Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2011-2013 and was appointed as Canada’s

Special Envoy to Myanmar (2017) and Canada’s Special Envoy on Humanitarian and

Refugee Issues (2020). Mr. Rae taught law and public policy at the University of

Toronto and was a partner and senior counsel to the law firm OKT LLP, specializing

in indigenous law and constitutional issues. Bob Rae is a Privy Councillor, a

Companion of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of Ontario.

Aaron Rasmussen is an entrepreneur, inventor, and game designer. He's best known as a founder of educational platforms MasterClass and Outlier.org, the latter known for creating impactful for-credit online college courses with the aim of promoting affordable, equitable education. Students at Outlier receive transcripted transferable credits from the University of Pittsburgh. Outlier recently launched associate degrees with Golden Gate University that cost less than the average Pell Grant award enabling students to receive an education at zero cost to them. At MasterClass, Rasmussen was both Creative Director and CTO, creating courses taught by notable experts. The video game he co-wrote, BlindSide, has won multiple awards and is being adapted into a film.

Jennifer Robinson is an award-winning international human rights barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, London. She has acted in key international human rights, free speech and climate change cases before international, regional and domestic courts. She currently acts for the Government of Vanuatu, which is leading the unprecedented effort to take climate change to the International Court of Justice. Other clients have included the BBC, the New York Times, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Amber Heard and Azeem Rafiq. She co-authored the book How Many More Women? (2022), which examines how the law restricts women from speaking about gender-based violence. In the book, Robinson explores the changes needed to ensure that women’s freedoms, including their freedom of speech, are not threatened by laws that are supposed to protect them. 

David is one of the world’s foremost authorities on ethics and organizational culture. His work has helped to transform the fields of organizational and military ethics, and he advises some of the world’s largest private and public organizations.

A distinguished moral philosopher, David worked for almost two decades at the University of Oxford where he was Co-Director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict and Co-Founder of the Oxford Changing Character of War program.

A Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand, David began his career at Boston Consulting Group. In 2011 he was honored by the World Economic Forum as a “Young Global Leader”, recognizing the most distinguished young leaders in all fields below the age of 40.

Sara is a DPhil Candidate in the Department of Primary Health Care studying how to improve disability training for health workers. She is also a Fellow at the Missing Billion Initiative and a researcher at the International Centre for Evidence in Disability at LSHTM. Before coming to Oxford, her research was based in India focusing on improving the accessibility of the Mumbai Metro for people with disabilities, irrigation governance reform, and developing a collapsible, transportable stool for people with disabilities. Previously, she served as a consultant to the WHO, World Bank, Clinton Health Access Initiative, and Health Canada. In 2022, Sarawas named to the UK’s Disability Power 100 in recognition of her work as a disabled activist and advocacy for a disability-inclusive COVID-19 vaccination campaign. Sara holds a B.S. in Global Health from Georgetown University.

Tim G. J. Rudner is an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Center for Data Science and an AI Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security & Emerging Technology. His research aims to develop methods and theoretical insights that enable the safe deployment of machine learning systems in safety-critical settings by drawing on tools from Bayesian inference and reinforcement learning. He completed his DPhil in Computer Science at the University of Oxford and was a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley and Yale. Before that, he received a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Oxford and a bachelor’s in mathematics and economics from Yale University.

Calvin/Kelvin Runnels is a transmasculine Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, U.S., investigating the mechanisms and evolution of sexual polymorphism in spiders. Kelvin’s interest in sex and gender is not limited to arachnids: while in Oxford, he received a Bachelor’s in PPE with a focus on (human) gender, feminism, and disability. Calvin is spending this summer in Louisiana, his home state, teaching at a summer program for middle schoolers and advocating against the anti-trans bills currently being forced through his own and many other states’ legislatures. Though he was the first Rhodes Scholar to be openly transgender at the time of his election, Calvin is not the only or even the first trans Scholar, and he is excited to connect with others at the reunion. Kelvin’s greatest desires for the world are a free Palestine, the abolition of police and prisons, and noncoercive gender joy for all. 

Robin Uriel Russin, Wyoming, Harvard, and Corpus’79, is professor of screenwriting and playwriting at the University of California, Riverside. A WGA member, Robin has written, produced and directed for film, TV, and theater, including directing the multi-award winning features When I Sing, about a late in life Grammy nominee, and The Anxiety of Laughing, about the humor and challenges of disability, which premiered at the Dances With Films festival and is currently available on all VOD platforms. Another feature he co-wrote, 2 Hearts, received a wide theatrical release and is currently among the top 10 world-wide streams on Netflix. In theatre, his play, Painted Eggs, was reviewed by The Los Angeles Times as "ambitious, heart-felt and hypnotic," and his play, The Face in the Reeds, had an sold-out four-month run at the Ruskin Group Theatre in LA.  Robin is co-author of the books Naked Playwriting and Screenplay: Writing the Picture.

Faith Salie is an Emmy-winning journalist on CBS Sunday Morning and a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! She starred Off-Broadway in her solo show, Approval Junkie, based on her memoir of the same title, and her show was named one of Audible’s Best of 2022. Faith is a storyteller for The Moth, with her story viewed over 6 million times and also included in two of The Moth’s New York Times bestsellers. She’s proud to host the podcast Real Good, amplifying the voices of people who are making a difference in the world. She’s hosted over a dozen podcasts for NPR, Audible, Wondery, and Stitcher. She’s written for The New York Times, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, and McSweeney’s.

Faith has a A.B. from Harvard and an M.Phil from Oxford. Faith lives in Manhattan where she’s raising kids who say “y’all.”

Michael Sandel (Massachusetts and Balliol 1975) teaches political philosophy at Harvard University.  His books--on justice, democracy, ethics, and markets--have been translated into more than 30 languages. He has been described as “a rock star moralist” (Newsweek) and “the world’s most influential living philosopher.” (New Statesman) 

Sandel’s books include The Tyranny of Merit; What Money Can’t Buy; Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?; The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering; and Democracy’s Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times.

Sandel’s free online course “Justice” has been viewed by tens of millions. His BBC series “The Global Philosopher” explores the ethical issues lying behind the headlines with participants from around the world. His lectures have packed such venues as St. Paul’s Cathedral (London), the Sydney Opera House (Australia), and an outdoor stadium in Seoul (S. Korea), where 14,000 people came to hear him speak.

Justice Babar Sattar is a judge at Islamabad High Court. Prior to his elevation in 2020, he was partner at an Islamabad-based law firm with a focus on commercial and constitutional law. At the beginning of his legal career, he was based in New York where he worked for a Wall Street corporate law firm.

For 15 years Babar wrote a weekly op-ed column for Pakistan’s largest English daily newspaper on issues related to constitutionalism, governance and politics. He was an analyst for electronic media on legal and constitutional issues. He taught intellectual property law at Lahore University of Management Sciences and military sociology, international law, politics of Pakistan and law and gender at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.

Babar read Jurisprudence at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar after getting an MSc in International Relations from Quaid-e-Azam University. He also has an LL.M. from Harvard Law School.

Kurt L. Schmoke was appointed the eighth president of the University of Baltimore in July, 2014. Prior to that appointment Mr. Schmoke served as dean of the law school and interim provost at Howard University.  Mr. Schmoke earned his undergraduate degree in history from Yale University.  While at Yale he co-founded a child care center that has been in continuous operation as the Calvin Hill Day Care Center and Kindergarten since 1970.  He pursued graduate studies on a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University and earned his Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School.  Mr. Schmoke served as the mayor of Baltimore City for 12 years from 1987 to 1999, and was the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City from 1982 to 1987.

During his tenure as mayor, Mr. Schmoke initiated a number of programs in the areas of housing, education, public health and economic development. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush awarded him the National Literacy Award for his efforts to promote adult literacy, and in 1994 President Bill Clinton praised his programs to improve public housing and enhance community economic development.

Abigail Seldin is a public policy expert with a track record for high impact grantmaking across multiple subject areas, including economic and social mobility, education, civil liberties, and children’s welfare. Abigail’s work with federal and state agencies has generated regulatory changes for Head Start, SNAP, and federal financial aid, and her work on public transit has inspired active federal bipartisan legislation. Her most recent grant -- focused on scaling Head Start childcare at community colleges -- earned the endorsement of The Washington Post’s Editorial Board in 2023.

Abigail's experience beyond public policy includes co-founding and selling a tech start-up, launching a DC-based corporate social responsibility lab, and studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She currently serves on the boards of Open Campus Media, New DEAL Leaders, and the Association of American Rhodes Scholars.

Anasuya Sengupta is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities online. She has led initiatives across the global South (the majority world) and internationally for over 25 years, to collectively create feminist presents and futures of love, justice, and liberation. She is committed to unpacking issues of power, privilege, and access, including her own as an anti-caste savarna woman. She is a co-founder and advisor to Numun Fund (the first feminist tech fund for and from the Global South), the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women. Anasuya is a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the advisory committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Anasuya holds an honorary doctorate from the University of London, and an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She also has a BA in Economics (Honours) from Delhi University. When not rabble-rousing online, Anasuya makes and breaks pots and poems, takes long walks by the water and in the forest, and contorts herself into yoga poses.

Farah Shamout is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at NYU Abu Dhabi, where she leads the Clinical Artificial Intelligence Lab. She is Associated Faculty at NYU Tandon (Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering) and Affiliated Faculty at NYU Langone Health (Radiology). She is interested in developing machine learning methods and systems for real-world multi-modal applications related to cancer, brain health, and women’s health. Dr. Shamout completed her DPhil in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where she focused on developing early warning models using electronic health records to predict clinical deterioration. She worked on global data commons and digital health policy during her time at Oxford, and was awarded the Campus Life Faculty Leadership Award in 2021 at NYU. Dr. Shamout currently serves as the National Secretary for the Rhodes Scholarship for SJLP and regularly teaches in executive-level AI and data science courses.

Judy Sikuza is a mum, Mount Kilimanjaro Summiteer and Chief Executive Officer of The Mandela Rhodes Foundation. A leadership and organisation development specialist, she believes in the power of education and leadership to liberate and create more humane futures. Judy is a non-executive Board Director of Oxford University Press South Africa, and chairs the Board’s transformation and ethics committee. She is also a member of the 2030 Reading Panel convened by previous Executive Director of UN Women, Dr Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, which seeks to influence work being done across sectors to ensure that all children in South Africa learn to read for meaning by 2030.  Some of Judy’s achievements include being an Abe Bailey Fellow, Mandela Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright Scholar, Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans, Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow and Sarie magazine’s top 10 women under 30.

Shmona Simpson is a scientist, strategist and activist who is the Founder & CEO of Paritii - a social enterprise focused on making technology more just.  As CEO, Shmona leads a team of strategists and product developers who work with medtech, edtech and fintech partners to drive the development of equity-aligned technologies, and promote the equitable access to, and use of, technology. 

Prior to founding Paritii, she was a strategist at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a Vaccine Immunologist, and an Infectious Disease specialist serving low-and middle-income countries.  Shmona holds a DPhil in Clinical Medicine from Oxford University.

Shmona considers herself a global citizen and has had the privilege of using technology to improve outcomes for the most marginalized populations in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe and the United States.

Dr. Varun Sivaram is Group Senior Vice President, Strategy & Innovation, for Ørsted, a $40B renewable energy producer. He previously served in the U.S. Biden-Harris administration as managing director for clean energy and senior advisor to John Kerry, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, where he spearheaded the First Movers Coalition. Previously, he's served as CTO of ReNew Power, India's largest renewable company; on the faculty of Columbia and Georgetown Universities; as energy director at the Council on Foreign Relations; and as senior advisor to the Los Angeles Mayor and New York Governor. He's been named to the TIME 100 Next, an MIT Technology Review top 35 innovator, and a WEF Young Global Leader. His books include "Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet (MIT Press)." He holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Oxford University and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University.

Rachel Skokowski is passionate about the power of museums to ignite the imagination and inspire action. She is currently Curator of the Janet Turner Print Museum at California State University, Chico and has worked with museum collections in the US and abroad, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the University of Sydney, and the Ashmolean Museum. She completed her DPhil and MSt in Modern Languages at Oxford, where her research focused on 19th century French literature and print culture. She is an advocate for using technology to bring the arts to new audiences and served as a 2022 Innovation Fellow at JSTOR Labs.

Adam Smith is the Director of the Rothermere American Institute. He is the Edward Orsborn Professor of United States Politics & Political History and a Fellow of University College. His specialism is the political history of the United States in the nineteenth century. In 2017, the University of North Carolina Press published his latest book, The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846-1865, which won the Jefferson Davis Award and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize. His previous books include No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).  In 2019 he joined the a board of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, which awards scholarships to US students wishing to study in the UK.

Dr. Suliman has played a leading role for 25 years in the growth of global biotech sector leaders such as Gilead and Genentech. She has championed creative business models to enable widespread access to novel therapies for HIV in the developing world. 

She is a champion for Board diversity and a program that has enabled >200 women to be recruited to Corporate Boards. She is at the forefront of leading the biopharma industry’s response to support women’s reproductive health care rights in the United States.  

Dr. Suliman was recognized as a 2017 Fiercest Women in Life Sciences, a Power 50 leader (2021) and a top 100 nationally recognized female business leader. She received her M.D. (MB, ChB) at the University of Cape Town Medical School, South Africa, and holds an M.B.A, with distinction, and M.Phil. degrees from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Dr. Suliman serves on the Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical Inc. (NASDAQ: RARE) and 10x Genomics (NASDAQ: TXG) Boards. 

Summia Tora is the founder of Dosti Network, an organization dedicated to empowering persecuted Afghans. In the aftermath of the fall of the Afghan government in 2021, Dosti Network initiated a global effort to connect Afghans with resources for resettlement and support within Afghanistan. Through their funding initiatives in immigration, housing, healthcare, and education, Dosti Network has made a significant impact.

 Having experienced life as an Afghan refugee, Summia Tora has been actively involved in refugee resettlement and promoting global education accessibility. She has worked with renowned organizations such as the World Bank, Malala Fund, United Nations, and Schmidt Futures to advocate for education for displaced students. Summia, as the first Rhodes scholar from Afghanistan, holds a Master's in Public Policy and is currently pursuing a Master's in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. Her achievements include being recognized as an Echoing Green fellow, recipient of the Open Society Prize, and a notable inclusion in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Professor Irene Tracey CBE FRS FMedSci is Vice-Chancellor at the University of Oxford and Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, a department she led for several years prior to becoming of Warden Merton College, her alma mater, at Oxford. She was tenured in 2001 to the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics with Tutorial Fellowship in Medicine at Christ Church. Additionally, she held the Nuffield Chair in Anaesthetic Sciences for 12 years with a Fellowship at Pembroke College.

She is also President of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS), which represents 44 national and single-discipline neuroscience societies across 33 European countries and more than 22,000 member scientists.

Professor Tracey's research on the neuroscience of pain has contributed to a better understanding of pain perception and its relief in the human brain. She has also used neuroimaging to better understand anaesthesia-induced altered states of consciousness. Irene has served and continues to serve academia through her election to the Councils of the International Association for the Study of Pain, British Neuroscience Association, and Medical Research Council. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Medical Research by Her Majesty The Queen in 2022.

Professor Tracey held a postdoctoral position at Harvard Medical School, working at the Martinos Centre for Biomedical Imaging, before returning to Oxford in 1997, when she became a founding member and then Director for ten years of the world-leading institution now known as the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. She has won many academic and international prizes throughout her career, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Professor Tracey is married to Professor Myles Allen and they have three children.

Dr Helene-Mari van der Westhuizen is doing a Fellowship in Global Health with the Rhodes Trust and Global Health Security Consortium. She co-convenes postgraduate global health teaching and supervises students at Oxford University in Translational Health Sciences. After training as a medical doctor in South Africa and working in the rural Eastern Cape, Helene-Mari completed her doctoral research at Oxford University focussing on TB prevention in rural, low-resource contexts. Her research on Tuberculosis and COVID-19 prevention have been relied on for national and international policy, and she has led evidence syntheses for the World Health Organisation on infection control and TB diagnostics. She is co-founder and vice-chair of the Board of the award-winning Tuberculosis non-governmental organisation, TB Proof, which aims to improve TB prevention and care globally. Helene-Mari enjoys science communication and has presented her research on live television interviews and podcasts including with the BBC and South African news.

After obligatory stints at Goldman and McKinsey following his D.Phil in International Relations, Pierre spent two decades in and around CDC (now BII), the UK’s development finance organisation (interrupted by periods setting up a private equity fund in Afghanistan in 2006-8 and running a logistics business in Nigeria in 2011-13). 

In 2019, he founded Natural Heritage Capital, a specialist investment firm dedicated to addressing challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and poverty by scaling nature-positive enterprises in Africa. In that role he was a catalyst for the establishment of the largest forestry fund in Africa, the $200m African Forestry Impact Platform managed by New Forests, and guided BII, Norfund and DFC into a $90m investment into AgDevCo, a leading agribusiness investment platform in Africa. He is now busy raising a new Nature Ventures Fund, fccused on investing in responsible agriculture, nature based solutions and other nature-positive enterprises on the continent.

Dr Van Rooy is a former senior researcher at Canada's North-South Institute, senior policy advisor at Global Affairs Canada, and special advisor at Vancouver Island University, including work on the university’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Action Plan.  She earned a DPhil in International Relations and devoted most of her career to policy research on international development and good governance.

Prof. Alisha Wade is a Clinician Scientist at the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit at the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand and a specialist physician and endocrinologist at the Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre, both in Johannesburg, South Africa. A native of Barbados, she graduated from the University of the West Indies in 2000 as the Clinical Gold Medalist and with a MBBS (Honours) degree. She subsequently attended the University of Oxford as a Commonwealth Caribbean Rhodes Scholar, graduating with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Clinical Medicine. She then completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Centre and a fellowship in Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania. She currently holds an Emerging Global Leader career development award from the Fogarty International Centre of the National Institutes of Health (USA) to investigate endocrine and metabolic disorders in rural South Africa.

Claire Wang is a 2019 Rhodes Scholar (Utah & Linacre 2019), 2018 Truman Scholar, and 2018 Udall Scholar focused on climate change and energy policy. While at Oxford, Claire received an MSc in Environmental Change and Management and an MSc Contemporary Chinese Studies. She is currently a Senior Policy Advisor to U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry.    
 
Claire received her bachelor's degree in Environmental Sciences & Policy from Duke University, where she led a successful two-year grassroots campaign to stop a series of natural gas plants from being constructed across North and South Carolina. She has previously worked for Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), Evergreen Action, and the Sierra Club.

Jacob Weisberg is CEO and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. In that role, he recently published the audio novel Death of an Author, a story about AI and creativity co-written by journalist Stephen Marche with an AI chatbot. He was previously CEO of the Slate Group, co-founder of Megaphone, and editor-in-chief of Slate Magazine. He has written for publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Financial Times. He is the author of several books and a former lecturer at Yale University. Jacob is Chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists, reflecting his long-standing involvement with issues of global press freedom and independent journalism.

Meg Whitman was confirmed in a unanimous vote by the U.S. Senate as the eighteenth United States Ambassador to Kenya on July 14, 2022. She presented her credentials to then President Uhuru Kenyatta, on August 5, 2022.  

Ambassador Whitman has significant experience leading business organizations, from start-ups to large multinational companies in Silicon Valley. She has served as the President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the Hewlett-Packard Company, both multinational information technology companies. She also served as President and CEO of eBay Inc, an online marketplace and digital payments company. 

Ms. Whitman has also been a member of a number of corporate boards of directors, including Procter & Gamble and General Motors. Committed to equality in education and protection of the environment, Ambassador Whitman has been National Board Chair of Teach For America and has been a Member of the Board of Trustees of The Nature Conservancy.  

Ambassador Whitman is married to Dr. Griffith Harsh, a neurosurgeon. They have two grown sons and two grandchildren. 

Maxine Williams is the Chief Diversity Officer at Meta, formerly Facebook, and she serves as a member of Meta’s most senior executive leadership team under the CEO.

Maxine’s team works to increase the cognitive diversity of all Meta teams to integrate diverse perspectives into people, policy and product development.

Prior to Meta, Maxine served as the director of diversity for a global law firm. She has worked as an attorney in criminal, civil and industrial courts in her native Trinidad and Tobago and has appeared at the UK Privy Council. Maxine has also worked with multiple international organizations on development and human rights issues and had a career as a broadcast journalist, actress and on-air presenter. Maxine is a director on the board of Doma Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DOMA). She graduated from Yale University before receiving her law degree with first class honors from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

Brian Wong (HKSAR China, 2020) is a geopolitical strategist and advisor working at the intersection of nascent technologies, political philosophy, and public policy. They are completing a DPhil in Politics at Balliol College, and have taught political sciences to Oxford and Stanford undergraduates. As the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Political Review and Advisor on Strategy to the Oxford Global Society, Brian works extensively with large MNCs and hedge funds in navigating the complexities of international relations, and writes extensively on Chinese foreign policy and the agency of small and medium powers for publications including TIME, Nikkei, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, The China Project, and the US-China Perception Monitor. Brian has authored two Chinese compendiums of works (Metamorphosis, The Era of Geopolitics), and their comments have been featured on Al-Jazeera, UK National Committee on China, South China Morning Post, and The Atlantic. Brian also co-curates the Rhodes Conversations on China series.

Professor Ngaire Woods is the founding Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government and Professor of Global Economic Governance at Oxford University. Her research focuses on how to enhance the governance of organisations, the challenges of globalisation, global development, and the role of international institutions and global economic governance.

She has served as an advisor to the African Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Center for Global Development, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. She is an independent non-executive director of Rio Tinto, Board member of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Education Foundation and Trustee of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and Van Leer Foundation, and a member of the Conseil d'administration of the Institut National Du Service Public.

Jack Zoeller has founded seven companies in 40 years.  Currently he manages Purefy, an award-winning loan comparison site, and a nonprofit, The Aunt Betty Fund, launched to channel funding to assist borrowers burdened by education debt.

Mr. Zoeller is a Visiting Research Professor at George Washington University specializing in 16^th and 17^th century Anglo-American history. Devoting a year of research into the early life of the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Jack’s article, Alain Locke at Oxford: Race and the Rhodes Scholarship, received broad acclaim.

He graduated first in his class at West Point and served as an infantry company commander in the 82nd Airborne and analyst in the Pentagon, on a team credited with preserving the all-volunteer Army.

Jack holds a Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Military Academy, a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard and M.Litt. in Politics from Oxford.  He resides with his wife Kathryn in Washington, DC.

Zinta Zommers is the Climate Science Lead for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, where she works to reduce the impacts of climate shocks on vulnerable communities. An expert in risk management and climate change adaptation, she was an author of the 2023 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report. Zinta has worked with the United Nations in a variety of capacities – in Kenya with the Chief Scientist’s Office of UN Environment, in Germany with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and in Sierra Leone with the Food and Agriculture Organization, where she helped lead the response to the Freetown landslides. In 2015 she joined the UN Secretary General’s Climate Change Support Team, supporting the negotiation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. Zinta has a M.Phil. in Development Studies and a D.Phil. in Zoology from the University of Oxford. She has authored two books on early warning systems and adaptation to climate change and is a visiting Fellow at Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania.