ALI welcomes largest group of fellows, seven new faculty

Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) announced the selection of its 2020 cohort, including 53 Fellows and 10 Partners, who will take part in ALI’s intensive, multi-disciplinary program during the coming year. Meredith B. Rosenthal, ALI Faculty Chair and C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, highlighted that this was the program’s greatest number of fellows to date.

ALI aims to deploy a new force of experienced leaders to help address society’s most pressing challenges. Through its fellowship program, the initiative provides a unique combination of education, skill-building, and collaboration opportunities to a global community of leaders, enabling sustainable social impact at scale.

Each year, ALI welcomes a group of fellows to Harvard to spend a year learning, engaging with the resources of the university, and developing a social impact strategy to drive progress on a specific challenge. Past fellows have gone on to address a wide array of issues in fields as diverse as health, education, environmental sustainability, humanitarian relief, financial inclusion, and human rights issues.

ALI Fellows have at least 20 years of leadership experience, a track record of innovation, and are motivated to take on some of the biggest problems facing communities around the world.

In addition to having the program’s greatest number of fellows to date, this year’s cohort also has the greatest number of female fellows—23. The group hails from 16 countries on six continents, bringing diverse professional leadership experiences in law, medicine, technology, finance, manufacturing, government, social enterprise, and the military.

The group also has the largest number of public and social sector leaders in ALI’s history, with nearly a quarter of the cohort having spent the majority of their careers working in public service. The remainder of the group have significant volunteer experience working with public and social sector organizations.

“Above all, this group stands out for its clear commitment to service,” said Rosenthal. “We are excited to welcome a group as diverse and dedicated as the 2020 ALI Fellows and Partners to campus in January.”

This year also marks the first for seven new members of ALI’s faculty board. New faculty board members include Anne Becker of Harvard Medical School, Hannah Riley Bowles and Cornell Brooks of Harvard Kennedy School, Andrew Crespo of Harvard Law School, Eric Mazur of Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Charles Stang of Harvard Divinity School, and Brian Trelstad of Harvard Business School.

“We hope to establish ALI as a hub for social impact at the university,” Rosenthal said. “These faculty bring not only tremendous knowledge and expertise about social impact, but also the opportunity to deepen collaboration with schools across Harvard and broaden our collective impact.”