The Brookings Institution’s Board of Trustees has elected three new members and welcomed back a fourth at its June 9 meeting. Kenneth W. Dam, who was on the Brookings board from 1988 to 2001, will serve alongside Thomas E. Donilon, Mario Draghi, and Laura D’Andrea Tyson.
“These distinguished new trustees bring an especially rich, diverse and timely set of experiences to the board. They represent leadership in public service, academe and business,” said Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution. “Individually and collectively, they will enhance Brookings’s ability to deal with the international dimension of the challenges facing the United States. They know first-hand a great deal about America’s role in the world – a subject that is increasingly important to all Brookings research programs.”
“I’ve been privileged over the years to oversee a board that elects as its newest members smart, involved experts who have been an enormous benefit to Brookings. This year is no exception,” said James A. Johnson, outgoing chairman of the board.
Kenneth W. Dam, the former deputy secretary of the treasury (2001-2003) is the Max Pam professor of American & foreign law at the University of Chicago Law School and a senior fellow at Brookings. Dam has held several other high level government positions, including deputy secretary of state (1982-85), executive director of the White House Council on Economic Policy (1973), and program assistant director for national security and international affairs at the Office of Management and Budget (1971-73).
He also has been the corporate vice president for law and external relations at IBM, the interim president and chief executive officer of the United Way of America—where he headed an investigation into scandals within the corporate leadership that lead to an internal reorganization—and provost of the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching law since 1960.
Dam is well-known for his role as a System Arbitrator from 1996 to 2001 in the collective bargaining agreement between the National Basketball Association and the National Basketball Players Association.
Thomas E. Donilon is currently Fannie Mae’s executive vice president of law and policy. In that capacity, he oversees Fannie Mae’s legal, regulatory, governmental, industry relations, communications, and public policy activities. He also serves as secretary to the Board of Directors. Since joining Fannie Mae in 1999, Donilon has been senior vice president, general counsel, and secretary. Prior to joining Fannie Mae, Donilon was a partner at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers.
From 1993 to 1996, Donilon was assistant secretary of state for public affairs and chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher for three years. In 1996, he received the department’s highest award, the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award.
Donilon previously worked as a political consultant at CBS News, managed two national presidential nominating conventions, and served in the White House Office of Congressional Liaison during the Carter administration.
Donilon is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution’s Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies Advisory Council, and the Aspen Strategy Group.
Mario Draghi has been managing director of Goldman Sachs since January 2002. He is also the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a member of the group’s Commitments Committee.
Prior to joining the corporate sector, Draghi was director general of the Italian Treasury (1991-2001), chairman of the European Commission’s Economic and Financial Committee, a member of the G7 Deputies, and chairman of the Working Party 3 (OECD). He was appointed chairman of the Italian Committee for Privatisations in 1993, served as an adviser to the Bank of Italy in 1990, and, from 1984-1990, was an executive director of the World Bank.
During his time at the Treasury, Draghi chaired the committee that redrafted Italian corporate and financial legislation, producing the law which governs Italian financial markets.
Draghi is on the board of trustees of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies and was a fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.
Laura D’Andrea Tyson was appointed dean of the London Business School in January 2002, when she took leave from her position as the first endowed dean at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (1993-97), where she became a key architect of the Clinton administration’s domestic and international economic policy agenda.
Tyson serves on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards, including Eastman Kodak, Morgan Stanley, SBC Communications, Human Genome Sciences, Inc., the Institute for International Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Brookings Institution is dedicated to independent, nonpartisan research, analysis, education and publication on public policy issues in economics, governance, and foreign policy. The Board of Trustees is comprised of leaders from the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. They oversee the Institution in its mission and in the maintenance of the highest standards of scholarship.