Princeton University Appoints Seven New Trustees

Princeton University has named seven new members to the school’s board of trustees.

Henri Ford and Philip Hammarskjold were elected by the board to serve for eight years as charter trustees. Blair Effron and Thomas Roberts were elected by the board to serve four years as term trustees. José Alvarez and Derek Kilmer were elected by alumni to serve four years as alumni trustees. Azza Cohen was elected by the junior, senior and two youngest alumni classes to serve four years as a young alumni trustee.

Alvarez, a Boston resident, is a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School. He teaches a retailing course and an entrepreneurship course, and lectures in an international executive program focusing on issues in the global food system. Previously he was the CEO of the Stop and Shop Supermarket Company. Alvarez received his bachelor’s degree in history at Princeton in 1985.

Cohen, an Illinois native, graduated this year with a degree in history and certificates in South Asian studies and urban studies. She directed and produced two documentary films during her time at Princeton, “Refugee Refugee” and “Specks of Dust,” and in 2014 worked as an intern at Forbes India. In 2015-16, she served as program coordinator for the Princeton University Summer Journalism Program, contributed to The Daily Princetonian as an opinion columnist, co-founded the Career Services Student Advisory Board and served on the Commencement Committee for the Class of 2016.

Effron, a New York resident, is co-founder of Centerview Partners, an independent investment banking firm. A member of the Class of 1984, Effron serves on the boards of the Lincoln Center, New Visions for Public Schools, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Council on Foreign Relations and the New York City Partnership. He is a member of The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

Ford is vice president and chief of surgery at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. He is also a vice dean and professor in the Department of Surgery and Keck School of Medicine. Ford previously served as professor and chief of the Division of Pediatric Surgery and surgeon-in-chief at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. After earning his bachelor’s degree from Princeton in 1980, he received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1984.

Hammarskjold is the chief executive officer of Hellman & Friedman and chairman of the firm’s investment and compensation committees. He serves on the board of overseers of the University of California-San Francisco and is a director of Grocery Outlet Inc. He previously served as a term trustee at Princeton and is the chair of the PRINCO board.

Kilmer is the United States Rep. for Washington State’s 6th congressional district, which encompasses Tacoma-Pierce County and the Olympic Peninsula. A 1996 graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, he received a Marshall Scholarship as a senior at Princeton and went to the University of Oxford, earning a doctorate in social policy. A member of the House Appropriations Committee since 2014, Kilmer has been named one of the 10 most effective members of Congress by The Washington Post.

Roberts, of Wellesley, Massachusetts, oversees Summit Partners’ Peak Performance Group and Credit Team and is active in the firm’s equity investment activities in North America and Europe. Since joining the firm in 1989, he has served as a director of more than 30 companies, including Aurora Diagnostics, B&W TEK, Infor Global Solutions and LiteCure. Prior to Summit, Roberts was an analyst at Booz Allen Hamilton. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton and a master’s in business administration from the Harvard Business School.

The new trustees will begin their terms July 1. The following trustees will be leaving the board June 30: Jaime Ayala, Angela Groves, Laurence Morse, Robert Murley, Ruth Simmons and John Wynne.