JAMES A. KIERNAN, chairman of the Board of Directors, is a former partner with and is currently of counsel to Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, the New York-based international law firm. He has spent most of his legal career in Europe, first in Paris and then in London, where he played a leading role in building the firm’s European practice. Jim has a longstanding interest in public affairs and international relations, beginning in 1961 when he spent the summer in Germany as an AFS exchange student, and then in 1966 when he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Jim was one of the initial members of the editorial staff on the award-winning PBS public affairs series, The Advocates, from 1969 to 1971 while still in graduate school. He has also served as the lead independent director of the Fondation des Etats-Unis in France for more than 25 years. Jim is an honors graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and was a Littauer Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
RICHARD M. LOBO, co-vice chair, is an entrepreneurial leader in American broadcasting, a veteran of NBC, CBS, PBS and international media who started in front of the camera in Miami and New York in the turmoil of the 1960s. A second-generation, bilingual Cuban American, he was born and raised in a community of cigar factory workers in Tampa, Florida. Educated at the University of Miami, Lobo has held senior roles in media organizations in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Miami, Tampa, Denver and Cleveland. He describes his specialty as innovation and transforming organizations by building effective management teams, a diverse and dynamic workforce and establishing relevance in the community. In 1994, President Bill Clinton named Lobo the Director of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting in the United States Information Agency. In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed him Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau, the administrative and technical arm of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Lobo resigned in December 2013 and retired to South Florida. He is a member of the Latino Advisory Council of the Kennedy Center. He’s also a father of three, grandfather of five and lives in Miami and New York City with his wife, Caren.
PAUL CHEUNG joined the Center for Public Integrity as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in 2021. Prior to leading Public Integrity, Cheung worked at the Knight Foundation, where he managed a multi-million dollar investment portfolio to scale artificial intelligence, improve business sustainability and mitigate misinformation as the director of journalism and technology innovation. Previously, he led cross-functional teams of journalists, technologists, data-scientists and interactive producers at NBC, The Associated Press, Wall Street Journal and the Miami Herald. He has been a leader in pushing newsrooms and other journalism institutions to advance principles of diversity, equity and inclusion and actively dismantle racist decisions and policies in hiring, management and coverage. He currently serves on the board of the News Leaders Association. As president of the Asian American Journalists Association from 2013 to 2016, he helped raise more than $2 million for training programs for journalists of color. Cheung is the first Asian American leader for Public Integrity and one of the only persons of color to lead an national investigative news organization. Cheung holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from New York University and has taught at Columbia University, where he was also a Punch Sulzberger media executive leadership fellow.
GEORGE ALVAREZ-CORREA is an international investment manager with a history of senior roles in private and public sector organizations, including Strategic Investment Group, of which he was a co-founder, and the World Bank, where he was Senior Investment Officer in its pension fund. Born and raised in Santiago, Chile and with Dutch nationality, Alvarez-Correa has lived in Switzerland and worked in Venezuela and Curacao, among other locations. He earned both his Master of Science and Bachelor of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is fluent in English, Spanish, French and Italian. He lives in Virginia.
BRUCE A. FINZEN, past board chair, is a former partner with and currently of counsel to the law firm of Robins Kaplan LLP, in Minneapolis. As a mass-tort litigator, Finzen is recognized as a highly successful manager of cases involving multistate, multiple plaintiff and class-action issues, and he has played a leading role in some of the most important product safety and consumer health cases of the last several decades. He was one of the partners from his firm in charge of litigation on behalf of the government of India arising out of the Bhopal gas leak disaster, and he was the firm’s principal negotiator in the $6.4 billion settlement of the State of Minnesota/Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota tobacco case. He graduated from the University of Minnesota and the University of Kansas, School of Law.
JAMAAL GLENN is an entrepreneur, venture capital investor, university professor, writer, speaker, and consultant. He is the Founder & CEO of JG Holdings, an investment and advisory firm as well as an adjunct professor at New York University (NYU) and the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches graduate and executive education courses on finance, marketing, and entrepreneurship. Previously, he founded Glenn Media Group, a boutique consulting firm with clients that have included Google, Harvard University, and the City of New York. He is the board chair of The Pivot Fund, a venture-philanthropy fund investing in community-led news organizations and a board director and treasurer at LION Publishers, the nation’s largest membership organization for independent news publishers. Jamaal is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Marshall Memorial Fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and a New Urban Progress Fellow with Das Progressive Zentrum, Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft, and Progressive Policy Institute. He received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and bachelors degrees in finance and journalism from the University of Missouri.
OLIVIER KAMANDA is a Product Manager at Google supporting Google Shopping. Previously he was a Product Manager at Facebook supporting teams in Business Integrity and Data Portability. He is the former Director of Learning and Impact Strategy at the Knight Foundation. In 2016, Olivier served as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, where he was the product lead for Code.gov, America’s platform for sharing and improving government software. He is the founder of Ideal Impact, a civic-tech company that measures the emotional impact of news by giving readers an opportunity to volunteer, donate, advocate and support causes in real time. Prior to Ideal Impact, Olivier served as a speechwriter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Olivier practiced law as an investment funds attorney at White & Case LLP, representing investment managers in establishing private equity, real estate and hedge funds in emerging markets. He is also the founder and former executive editor of Foreign Policy Digest, an online magazine aimed at engaging young Americans in international affairs. Olivier is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the board of directors of the Equal Rights Center and the Landon School. He is a former trustee of Princeton University, and a former chair of the Dulles Justice Coalition, which provides rapid response information services to travelers and immigrants. He is a Halcyon Incubator Fellow, a Truman National Security Project Fellow. Olivier previously served as an elected Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Olivier was named one of D.C.’s “Most Influential Leaders Under 40” by Washington Life Magazine in 2015. Olivier earned his bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Princeton University and his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
JENNNIFER 8. LEE is a journalist and author who spent nine years at The New York Times. There, she covered technology, Washington, crime, poverty and culture. Lee has played a lead role in the Knight News Challenge, a $25 million initiative to support news innovation, and worked on bringing journalism content to the 2011 SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. She is also one of the lead organizers of Hacks/Hackers, a rapidly expanding global grassroots group that brings technologists and journalists together. Lee is also the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. She also serves on the Nieman Foundation advisory board, chairs the Asian American Writers Workshop board and is a past member of the Poynter Institute national advisory board. Lee graduated with a degree in applied math and economics from Harvard.
WESLEY LOWERY is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author and correspondent for CBS News. Lowery was previously a national correspondent at the Washington Post, specializing in issues of race and law enforcement. He led the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016 for the creation and analysis of a real-time database to track fatal police shootings in the United States. His project, Murder With Impunity, an unprecedented look at unsolved homicides in major American cities, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. His first book, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, was a New York Times bestseller and was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose by the LA Times Book Prizes.
CRAIG NEWMARK is the founder of craigslist and a web pioneer, philanthropist and a leading advocate on behalf of trustworthy journalism, voting rights, veterans and military families, women in tech, as well as other civic and social justice causes. He is a founding funder and executive committee member of the News Integrity Initiative administered by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. In 2016, he created the Craig Newmark Foundation, which funded the Craig Newmark Chair in Journalism Ethics at the Poynter Institute. In addition to the Center for Public Integrity, Craig also serves on the board of directors of the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter Foundation, Sunlight Foundation, Blue Star Families, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, VetsInTech, Girls Who Code, Women in Public Service Project and Consumers Union/Consumer Reports. He also serves on the advisory boards of nearly twenty other nonprofit organizations. Born in Morristown, New Jersey, he now lives in San Francisco.
DR. GILBERT OMENN is professor of internal medicine, human genetics and public health and director of the Center for Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics and the Proteomics Alliance for Cancer Research at the University of Michigan. He served as executive vice president for medical affairs and as chief executive officer of the University of Michigan Health System from 1997 to 2002. Omenn was dean of the School of Public Health and professor of medicine and environmental health at the University of Washington, Seattle, from 1982 to 1997. He was associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget in the Carter administration. He chaired the Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management in the 1990s. Omenn has a B.A. from Princeton University, an M.D. from Harvard University and a Genetics Ph.D from the University of Washington.
AMIT PALEY, CEO of the Trevor Project, is a former Washington Post foreign correspondent, investigative journalist and associate partner at management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He covered numerous beats at the Post, including as a foreign correspondent based in the paper’s Baghdad bureau, where his work was nominated for a Pulitzer, a financial investigative journalist and the paper’s national education reporter. Amit also worked in The Washington Post Company’s corporate strategy office. At McKinsey, he has counseled numerous Fortune 500 companies, governments and non-profit organizations on strategy, digital, growth and human capital topics. Amit has been an adjunct professor of entrepreneurial journalism at the City University of New York and sits on the boards of The Harvard Crimson and The Trevor Project, the nation’s leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ+ youth. He holds degrees from Columbia Business School, Columbia Journalism School and Harvard College, where he graduated magna cum laude and served as president of The Harvard Crimson.
SUE SUH (she/her) most recently had the joy of serving as Chief People Officer and Chief Impact Officer for the 100-year-old global media company TIME, whose commitment to trust, integrity, equality and courage shines a light on the stories and storytellers who move the world. Before joining TIME Sue’s career spanned philanthropy and public service around the globe. She served in multiple leadership roles with The Rockefeller Foundation – including in the president’s office, human resources, employee services and facilities, the Asia office in Bangkok, and supporting cross-cultural and interdisciplinary convening and residency programs for the Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. Prior to Rockefeller, Sue served in various locations with the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, beginning her federal government career as a Presidential Management Fellow. Sue was honored to be named one of the Top 100 Women Leaders of New York for 2021, a 2021 New Yorker for New York and a 2019 Folio:100 member in the C-Suite category. Outside of media, she serves on the Board of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, and has served in the past on the Boards of Special Olympics Asia Pacific and the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation. Sue graduated from Princeton University (Politics BA) and Columbia University (Political Science MA), and was grateful to earn a Fulbright award to teach in her family’s homeland of South Korea.
DANIEL SULEIMAN is a partner in Covington & Burling LLP, an international law firm headquartered in Washington, D.C. He specializes in white collar defense and investigations, representing institutions and individuals in sensitive matters presenting significant criminal and civil risk. Daniel is a zealous advocate who was previously named one of Washington’s “40 most promising lawyers age 40 and under” by the National Law Journal. Before rejoining Covington in 2013, he served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. Born in Los Angeles and raised in New Jersey, Boston and Paris, Daniel speaks fluent French and conversational Spanish. He maintains an active pro bono practice and writes frequently on issues of criminal law, having published pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun, National Law Journal, Bloomberg, Inside Counsel and Law360. Before becoming a lawyer, Daniel was a high school teacher in Morocco at The American School of Tangier. He earned his law degree from Columbia Law School, where he was a two-time James Kent Scholar and Articles Editor on the Columbia Law Review, and his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he served as Co-Editorial Chair of the Harvard Crimson and won the 22nd Rolling Stone College Journalism Competition for Essays and Criticism. Daniel lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with his wife and four children.
ANDRES TORRES is a program officer at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. He leads the Foundation’s investments in journalism, working to foster sustainable and inclusive reporting for the Chicago region’s diverse communities. The Foundation’s goal is to create an information-rich environment that empowers all residents to take an active part in our democracy. Prior to McCormick, he worked on statewide early childhood policy in Illinois to close achievement gaps that adversely affect communities of color. His work in public policy began at the City of Chicago and continued at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, managing projects ranging from tourism to transportation initiatives. A native Chicagoan, he was raised in a bilingual Spanish/English home while learning German. He studied at Yale University and the London School of Economics.
CHARLES WHITAKER is dean and professor at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He previously served as the Helen Gurley Brown Professor and associate dean of journalism for the school. Since joining the Medill faculty in 1993, he has taught courses in news writing, magazine writing, magazine editing and blogging. For nine years, Whitaker directed the Academy for Alternative Journalism, a summer fellowship program that trained young writers for work at the member publications of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in an effort to address the field’s lack of diversity. Before joining the Medill faculty, Whitaker was a senior editor at Ebony magazine, where he covered a wide range of cultural, social and political issues and events on four continents, including two U.S. presidential campaigns and the installation of the first Black members of the British Parliament. He was the co-director of Project Masthead, a program designed to encourage students of color to consider careers in magazines on both the editorial and business side of the industry, and he is one of the co-curators of the Ida B. Wells Award, presented by both Medill and the National Association of Black Journalists to individuals who are working to increase newsroom diversity and improve the coverage of communities of color. He has received commendations for his work from a number of journalism societies, including the National Association of Black Journalists, Society of Professional Journalists and National Education Writers Association.