The Hauser Leaders Program is the only program of its kind at Harvard Kennedy School, hosting high-profile leaders and practitioners from across public, private, and non-profit sectors. The program features Hauser Leaders-in-Residence and Hauser Visiting Leaders who spend the bulk of their time at CPL advising students and engaging with faculty. Leaders-in-Residence join Harvard Kennedy School for one to two semester residential appointments within the Center, and Visiting Leaders are with CPL for short, richly-programmed visits throughout the academic year.
By providing the community with direct access to experts with broad experiences and deep knowledge sets, the Hauser Leaders Program contributes in vital ways to the academic life of Harvard. In the 2017-2018 academic year, Hauser Leaders reached over 3000 community members, from almost every corner of Harvard, via public events, skill-building and leadership development seminars, and advising sessions. Hauser Leaders have also influenced Harvard curriculum by speaking in the classroom, engaging in case development, and sharing expertise with lead faculty.
For more information on this program and its featured leaders, email hauser_leaders@hks.harvard.edu
Deborah Borda
Hauser Visiting Leader
President and CEO, New York Philharmonic
Deborah Borda is President and CEO of the New York Philharmonic, a role she assumed in September 2017. Previously, Ms. Borda was President and CEO of the LA Philharmonic; Executive Director of the NY Philharmonic; General Manager of the San Francisco Symphony; President and Managing Director of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; and Executive Director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Throughout her career, Ms. Borda has extended the artistic, commercial, and technological boundaries of American symphony orchestras. Within her first few months after returning to the NY Phil in 2017, she assembled a new leadership team to support her and Music Director Designate Jaap van Zweden’s vision for the Orchestra, and announced a $50mm launch fund to usher in a new era of fiscal stability. In her first decade in Los Angeles, Ms. Borda reinvigorated plans to build and launch Walt Disney Concert Hall, oversaw the addition of a new shell for the Hollywood Bowl, and reimagined and diversified programming at both venues. She also spearheaded the appointment of music director Gustavo Dudamel, with whom she invested in groundbreaking educational and social change initiatives, including the founding of YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles) and the national Take a Stand initiative.
In May 2017, she received an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music, and in 2018 she was named Chair, Avery Fisher Artist Program. In October 2018 Ms. Borda will be inducted as a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Alice Chen
Hauser Visiting Leader
Executive Director, Doctors for America (2011-2017)
Alice T. Chen, M.D. is a practicing internal medicine physician and served as Executive Director and a founding board member of Doctors for America. Under her leadership, Doctors for America mobilized a movement of thousands of physicians and medical students in all 50 states to bring their patients’ experiences to policy makers and move the nation to put patients over politics to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, high quality health care and the means to lead a healthy life. She led efforts to educate doctors and medical students about key policy developments, train and support them in advocacy and leadership skills, and organize national, state, and local campaigns. Campaigns included the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and ongoing defense of the law, a four-state Patients Over Politics Bus Tour, ACA outreach and enrollment, Medicaid expansion, defense of the Public Health and Prevention Fund, protection of access to contraception and abortion, efforts to lift the effective ban on CDC gun violence prevention research, and the confirmation of the 19th Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy. She has spoken extensively on health issues and physician advocacy in national media and with physician and public audiences.
In addition, she served as the co-director of the UCLA Residency Elective in Malawi, Africa. As a medical student, she volunteered with the American Red Cross 9/11 Relief Operation in New York City as a caseworker, Chinese translator, and assistant to the director of the largest service center in Lower Manhattan. She received her undergraduate degree from Yale University and her MD from Cornell Medical College. She completed her internal medicine residency at UCLA. She is an Assistant Clinical Professor at George Washington University and an Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently resides with her husband and young son in Washington, DC.
Nicholas Kristof
Hauser Visiting Leader
Op-ed Columnist, New York Times; Pulitzer Prize winner
Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times since 2001, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week. Mr. Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship.
After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. He later was Associate Managing Editor of The Times, responsible for Sunday editions. In 1990 Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, then also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary for what the judges called “his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world.”
In his column, Mr. Kristof was an early opponent of the Iraq war. He among the first to warn that we were losing ground to the Taliban in southern Afghanistan and raise doubts about WMD in Iraq.
Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are authors of China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia. Together they wrote Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which was the inspiration of The Half the Sky Movement that seeks to ignite the change needed to put an end to the oppression of women and girls worldwide. Most recently, Kristof and WuDunn authored A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity that also inspired a PBS-documentary, which both provide a unique and essential narrative about making a difference in the world — and a roadmap to becoming a conscientious global citizen.
Dr. Vivek H. Murthy
Hauser Visiting Leader
19th United States Surgeon General (2014-2017)
Vivek H. Murthy, M.D., M.B.A., (@vivek_murthy) served as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States from 2014-2017. As Surgeon General, Dr. Murthy commanded the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a uniformed service of 6,600 public health offices serving vulnerable populations in 800 locations domestically and abroad. During his tenure, he helped address critical public health issues, including the Ebola outbreak, the Zika virus, low rates of physical activity, and the explosion in e-cigarette use among youth. In 2016, he launched the TurnTheTideRx campaign to combat the opioid epidemic. Dr. Murthy also issued the first Surgeon General's report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health to mobilize the nation to address our addiction crisis, and he released the first.
Dr. Murthy has called emotional well-being one of the most important and most underappreciated drivers of health. In particular, he has drawn attention to the profound impact that loneliness and social disconnection have on health, productivity, and education.
Dr. Murthy received his Bachelor’s degree from Harvard and his M.D. and M.B.A. degrees from Yale. He completed his residency training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School where he later joined the faculty as an internal medicine physician and instructor. As a clinician-educator, Dr. Murthy has cared for thousands of patients and trained hundreds of residents and medical students.
In addition to clinical practice, Dr. Murthy has dedicated himself to improving health through the lens of service, research, and entrepreneurship. He co-founded VISIONS, an HIV/AIDS education program in India and the United States and the Swasthya project (“health and wellbeing” in Sanskrit), a community health partnership in rural India that trained women to be health providers and educators. As a research scientist, Dr. Murthy conducted laboratory research on vaccine development and studied the participation of women and minorities in clinical trials. He also co-founded TrialNetworks, a software technology company that accelerates collaboration in clinical trials.
Sheryl WuDunn
Hauser Visiting Leader
Founder, FullSky Partners; Pulitzer Prize Winner
Sheryl WuDunn, the first Asian-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, is a business executive, lecturer, and best-selling author. Currently, she is a senior managing director with Mid-Market Securities (MMS), an investment banking boutique helping growth companies, including those operating in the emerging markets.
Previously, Ms. WuDunn served as a vice president in the investment management division at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and as a commercial loan officer at Bankers Trust. She also worked at The New York Times as both an executive and journalist notably as a foreign correspondent for The Times in Tokyo and Beijing, where she wrote about economic, financial, political and social issues.
She is co-author of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a New York Times best-selling book about the challenges facing women around the globe.
With her husband Nicholas D. Kristof, she has co-authored two best-selling books about Asia: Thunder from the East and China Wakes. She and her husband are recipients of a Pulitzer Prize for their work covering China. Most recently, WuDunn and Kristof authored A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity that also inspired a PBS-documentary, which both provide a unique and essential narrative about making a difference in the world — and a roadmap to becoming a conscientious global citizen.
Ms. WuDunn received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2011. That year Newsweek cited Ms. WuDunn as one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World.”
She graduated from Cornell University, where she is a member of the Board of Trustees. She earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. She is a recipient of honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College. She was a Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs in fall, 2011.
Incoming Hauser Leaders
John Kroger, Hauser Leader-in-Residence (2018-2019)
Former President, Reed College (2012-2018); Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School and Research Fellow, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
Karen Mills, Hauser Visiting Leader (Fall 2018)
23rd Administrator, U.S. Small Business Administration (2009-2013); Senior Fellow, Harvard Business School
Ellen Ochoa, Hauser Visiting Leader (Spring 2019)
11th Director, Johnson Space Center (2013-2018)
Henry Timms, Hauser Visiting Leader (2018-2019)
President and CEO, 92nd Street Y
Former Hauser Leaders
Geoffrey Canada (Fall 2017)
President, Harlem Children’s Zone
Carol Caruso (2017-2018)
CEO and Co-Founder, Bloom Impact; Innovator-in-Residence, Social Innovation + Change Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School
Nicholas Ehrmann (2017-2018)
President and Founder, Blue Engine; Visiting Innovator, Social Innovation + Change Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School
Claude Grunitzky (2017-2018)
Entrepreneur, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, TRUE Africa; Visiting Innovator, Social Innovation + Change Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School
Donald Kaberuka (2015-2016)
President, African Development Bank (2005-2015)
The Hon. Mitchell Landrieu (Spring 2018)
61st Mayor, New Orleans, Louisiana (2010-2018)
Linda Mason (2014-2017)
Chair, Mercy Corps; Founder, Bright Horizons
