Nadia Aziz serves as Policy Counsel of the Stop Hate Project, where she works to ensure individuals and organizations targeted by hate have the resources they need to combat hate in their communities. Prior to joining the Lawyers’ Committee in 2017, Nadia worked at the Arab American Institute in Washington, DC as Director of Government Relations where she represented the interests of nearly 3.7 million Arab Americans to their elected and public officials on Capitol Hill and Executive branch agencies. Nadia is a graduate of Clemson University and Charlotte School of Law. She writes and speaks on issues relating to the representation of minorities in politics, hate crimes, and the securitization of communities of color.

Tara Bahrampour is a staff writer for the Washington Post covering aging, generations and demography, with topics ranging from Alzheimer’s Disease to the sex lives of millennials to the census. She has also written for the Post about immigration and education, and reported from the Middle East and North Africa and from the Republic of Georgia, for which she was awarded the German Marshall Fund’s Peter R. Weitz Prize for reporting on European affairs. She has taught journalism at New York University and at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs in Tbilisi, and is the author of "To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America," a memoir about revolution and growing up in two cultures. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Andrea Malkin Brenner, PhD is a sociologist who consults with colleges that wish to create their own first-year transitions courses. She served as a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at American University for over twenty years. She created the nationally-recognized American University Experience (AUx) Program, now a mandatory full-year course that serves as a college transition course and a cross-cultural communication class focused on race, inclusion, and discourse across difference.

She is a co-author of How to College: What to Know Before You Go (And When You’re There), and an upcoming book on productive discourse in the college classroom. Andrea is a 2019-2020 fellow at the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.

Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law.

Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law. Before that he was a professor at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School.

He is the author of eleven books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent books are, We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century (Picador Macmillan) published in November 2018, and two books published by Yale University Press in 2017, Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable and Free Speech on Campus (with Howard Gillman). He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.

In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In January 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States.

Christine Chen, the founding executive director from 2006-2008 returned to APIAVote in January 2011 to serve as its current Executive Director. During her tenure she had strengthened and expanded APIAVote's partners into 28 states. APIAVote’s research and polling of Asian American voters and their regional trainings and field programs have strengthened the local grassroots programs in reaching and mobilizing Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. Through all these efforts, APIAVote has played a key role in elevating the Asian American and Pacific Islander electorate to an unprecedented national level in recent years.

In addition Chen serves as President of Strategic Alliances USA, a consulting firm specializing in coalition building, institutional development, and partnerships among the corporate sector, government agencies, and the nonprofit and public sector.

Vanessa Crow serves as the Complete Count Committee Chair for the League of Women Voters of Wake County and is also the 2020 Census Engagement Fellow for NC Campus Compact. She is currently a graduate student at North Carolina State University studying policy analysis. Prior to going back to school, Vanessa was an intelligence analyst for the Department of Defense and deployed to Iraq twice as part of her duties. She graduated with a Master of Science in Intelligence Studies from the National Defense Intelligence College, now the National Intelligence University, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies and Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is passionate about advancing the rights of women and preserving the democratic process through fairness, accountability, and participation.

Michelle N. Deutchman is the inaugural Executive Director of the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. Formed by the UC Office of the President, the Center explores how the fundamental democratic and academic principles of free speech and civic engagement should enrich the discovery and transmission of knowledge in America’s colleges and universities. In this role, Deutchman oversees a multidisciplinary national fellowship program and works across all 10 UC campuses to study and shape national discourse about free speech.

Before joining the Center, Deutchman served as Western States Civil Rights Counsel and National Campus Counsel for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a non-profit organization that has been a leader in combating bigotry, prejudice and anti-Semitism for over a century. As National Campus Counsel, Ms. Deutchman focused on emerging trends and challenges pertaining to free expression at colleges and universities. She trained campus stakeholders – including administrators and law enforcement – on how to safeguard free speech at universities while simultaneously maintaining a safe and inclusive campus climate.

Deutchman teaches a course on contemporary free exercise issues at UCLA School of Law.
She earned her Juris Doctor from University of Southern California Law Center, where she graduated Order of the Coif. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of University of California at Berkeley and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.

Leslie Garvin is the Executive Director of North Carolina Campus Compact a collaborative network of 40 individual colleges and universities committed to educating students for civic and social responsibility, partnering with communities for positive change, and strengthening democracy. There she serves as the liaison to presidential members, facilitates faculty engagement initiatives, and builds strategic partnerships to develop and expand higher education civic engagement. Garvin leads the Compact’s deliberative dialogue initiative and has trained hundreds of faculty, staff, students, and community partners across the state and nation in this method. Garvin has co-authored chapters in Critical Intersections in Contemporary Curriculum & Pedagogy (Info Age Publishing, 2018) and Practical Wisdom for Conducting Research on Service Learning: Pursuing Quality and Purpose (Stylus Publishing, 2019).

Garvin holds a Master of Social Work with a concentration in social and economic development and a specialization in management, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in political science, both from Washington University in St. Louis. Garvin is a member of the Board of Directors of the United Way of Greater High Point, where she chairs the Community Impact Committee and she serves on the Service Year NC Advisory Council for the Institute for Emerging Issues. She is also a proud AmeriCorps alum.

Howard Gillman became the sixth chancellor of the University of California, Irvine in September 2014. He is an award-winning scholar and teacher with an expertise in the American Constitution and the Supreme Court, and holds faculty appointments in the School of Law, the Department of Political Science, the Department of History, and the Department of Criminology, Law and Society.

Under Chancellor Gillman’s leadership, UCI has accelerated its ascendency among globally preeminent research universities. It has been ranked in the top 10 of all public universities in the nation by U.S. News & World Report; furthered its national leadership in sustainability; solidified its status as a “first choice” school for undergraduates by receiving more than 117,000 freshman and transfer applications for fall 2019; received special recognition for advancing student success and promoting social mobility; fostered regional economic development through UCI Beall Applied Innovation; and expanded its capacity to improve lives in our region and around the world.

A native of Southern California, Chancellor Gillman grew up in North Hollywood and was a first-generation college student. He earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in political science at UCLA.

Katie is the public policy director for global elections at Facebook, a position she’s held since 2011. In her position, Katie works with elected officials, politicians and advocacy groups on both sides of the aisle to help them understand our policies and how the platform works. Prior to Facebook, she was the chief digital strategist at the National Republican Senatorial Committee from 2009 to 2011.

Spoma Jovanovic, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Since 2001, she has been teaching students there how to collaborate with community members on programs and activist strategies designed to enhance ethical conversations and action related to civic literacy, cultural understanding, democratic participation, and social justice.

She is the author of the book, Democracy, Dialogue and Community Action: Truth and Reconciliation in Greensboro, and editor of Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement. Dr. Jovanovic’s scholarship has been featured in dozens of academic journal articles and book chapters, as well as in national magazines, daily newspapers, and a 2013 TEDx Greensboro talk.

Her communication activism has included launching, with the community, the first U.S. truth and reconciliation process, bringing participatory budgeting to her city, and advancing political engagement with an urban high school, as well as expanding spaces for free speech.

Tamara Keith is a White House correspondent for National Public Radio and co-host of The NPR Politics Podcast. On Mondays she joins the PBS NewsHour for its weekly Politics Monday segment. Keith previously covered Congress and business for NPR and before that worked at member stations KQED, KPCC and WOSU. She got her start in journalism while in high school as an essayist for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, thanks to an effective letter-writing campaign, and after completing her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, became the youngest person to graduate from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She serves on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Katherine Mangan is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, which she joined in 1986. She serves on the daily news team covering a variety of general-assignment topics, including free speech, student activism, and college completion.

She worked in Washington D.C. covering faculty issues for The Chronicle before moving to Austin, Tex. as a longtime regional correspondent. She has written extensively about developmental education, dual enrollment, transfer, and access, as well as sexual assault, campus protests, hazing, and free-speech concerns. She was part of a reporting team honored with an Education Writers Association award for investigative reporting for “The Gates Effect.”

Previously she covered courts and crime for The Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel and was a reporter and world-desk editor for the Associated Press.

A 1981 graduate of Williams College, where she majored in French, Mangan spent her junior year at the Sorbonne.

Janet Napolitano is the twentieth president of the University of California, the nation’s largest public research university with ten campuses, five medical centers, three affiliated national laboratories, and a statewide agriculture and natural resources program. At UC, President Napolitano has launched initiatives to achieve financial stability for the University; achieve carbon neutrality across the UC system by 2025; accelerate the translation of UC research into products and services; focus UC resources on global food security; and create a systemwide program with Mexico. In 2014, she was appointed a tenured faculty member of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and in 2015 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prior to joining the University of California, President Napolitano served as Secretary of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013. She is a former two-term Governor of Arizona, a former Attorney General of Arizona, and a former U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona. In 2019, Napolitano published How Safe Are We? Homeland Security Since 9/11. President Napolitano earned her B.S. degree, summa cum laude, in Political Science from Santa Clara University, and her J.D. from the University of Virginia. She is based in Oakland, CA.

As Campus Counsel at UC Irvine, Kyhm Penfil serves senior leadership on campus and within the UC system as an advocate, a partner, an advisor, a problem solver and an honest broker across a broad range of matters of significance to the University. Of particular note, she leads the UCI team that is comprehensively reviewing and revising the campus’s speech-related policies.

Before joining the University, Ms. Penfil was a partner at Irell & Manella, whereher practice focused on intellectual property and complex business litigation. The National Law Journal named the verdict she and her colleagues won for their client Western Digital one of the top 15 defense verdicts for the year 1999. Prior to law school, Ms. Penfil specialized as an art historian at the Wildenstein gallery in New York; she also has taught intellectual property law classes. Los Angeles Magazine and Law & Politics have named Ms. Penfil one of the Top 50 Super Lawyers in Orange County and Top 50 Female Super Lawyers in Southern California.

Ms. Penfil earned her J.D. at the University of Southern California and her A.B. at Wellesley College. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Anti-Defamation League of Orange County and Long Beach and the Wellesley College Club of Los Angeles, and she formerly served on the Board of the Orange County Bar Association.

Lauren Robel was named provost of Indiana University Bloomington and executive vice president of Indiana University in 2012. She is the Val Nolan Professor of Law in the Maurer School of Law, where she served as dean from 2002 to 2011 and as associate dean from 1991 to 2002. She joined the Law School faculty in 1985.

In fall 2013, Robel initiated a strategic planning process aimed at reimagining and invigorating academic programs across the Bloomington campus in anticipation of Indiana University’s Bicentennial in 2020. Robel’s Bicentennial Strategic Plan for Indiana University Bloomington includes ambitious initiatives for the Bloomington campus such as a new School of Art and Design, a new program in engineering, and the integration of health sciences programs into a new on-campus Academic Health Center. The plan also calls for initiatives to promote student and faculty success in a variety of areas, from financial literacy and career development to work-life balance and diversity recruitment.

As the chief academic officer for the Bloomington campus, Robel oversaw the campuswide implementation of the 2011 New Academic Directions report. The recommendations outlined in the report led to the formation of several new schools and programs on the Bloomington campus, including The Media School, the School of Informatics and Computing, the School of Public Health, the School of Global and International Studies, the Integrated Program in the Environment, and the Office of Scholarly Publishing.

Robel’s tenure as provost has seen a number of construction and renovation projects to key buildings on the Bloomington campus, including Hodge Hall of the Kelley School of Business, the East Studio Building of the Jacobs School of Music, the Global and International Studies building, the repurposing of Franklin Hall to house The Media School, and the creation of the Learning Commons and Scholars Commons in the Wells Library. Upcoming projects include expansions for the School of Informatics and Computing and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and renovations to Wells Quad and the Indiana Memorial Union.

Robel has worked to solidify IU Bloomington’s reputation as a renowned international partner for collaborative research and academic initiatives, as well as a preferred destination for undergraduate and graduate students from around the globe. In recent years, Robel has traveled to Brazil, Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan to explore new partnerships and reaffirm existing partnerships with leading universities in those nations.

Robel received her J.D. from the Maurer School of Law in 1983 and her B.A. from Auburn University in 1978. Her scholarly work focuses on the role of federal courts and addresses issues such as procedural reform and sovereign immunity. Her articles have appeared in numerous leading law journals. She is a frequent speaker on topics ranging from procedural reform to sovereign immunity and co-author of Federal Courts: Cases and Materials on Judicial Federalism and the Lawyering Process (LEXISNEXIS 2005), a casebook on federal jurisdiction written with Arthur Hellman. Robel has also been a visiting faculty member at Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II), where she published a book, Les États des Noirs: Fédéralisme et question raciale aux États-unis, (Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), with Professor Elisabeth Zoller, a frequent visitor to the Law School.

She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools and served as its president in 2011–2012. She has been a member of its Executive Committee since 2006. She is also a member of the Rules Advisory Committee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

As an educator/administrator, Sandra Rodriguez is committed to civic engagement efforts that support the teaching and learning mission of the University through the co-creation and application of knowledge/action by students, community partners, service recipients and the university through democratic processes that lead to self-governance.

Kristen Roman was appointed Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief of Police of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department in January of 2017. She holds a master’s degree in Criminal Justice from Boston University, and a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While a student at UW-Madison, she was a member of the UW Women’s Volleyball team.

Prior to her appointment, Chief Roman served for 26 years with the City of Madison Police Department. During her tenure there, she held a variety of positions including Police Officer, Recruiting Officer, Community Relations Sergeant, Professional Standards & Internal Affairs Lieutenant, Detective Lieutenant, Patrol Operations Lieutenant, Special Events Team Commander, Crisis Negotiation Team Commander, and Community Outreach Captain. In addition, she coordinated department Critical Incident Stress Management efforts and developed and supervised the department’s Peer Support Program.

A defining feature of Chief Roman’s career is her extensive work in the area of improving police services to people with mental illness. A past board member of NAMI Dane County and Journey Mental Health Center, she has conducted multiple local, statewide, and national trainings/presentations on police-mental health response and collaboration. Most recently, she developed and instructed a course for IACLEA’s Universal Issues Series entitled, Mental Health Concerns on Campus. In addition to her work as a trainer/presenter for IACLEA, and Distance Learning Committee member, Chief Roman has presented on various topics throughout her career including Leadership, Police Officer Wellness and Resiliency, and Campus Response to Protests and Demonstrations.

A graduate of the Northwestern University’s School of Police Staff and Command, PERF’s Senior Management Institute for Police, and IACLEA’s Executive Development Institute, Chief Roman is committed to collaborative approaches to ensuring safety and to the practice of always Reaching HIGHER.

Varsha Sarveshwar serves as the President of the University of California Student Association, which represents more than 200,000 undergraduates in the UC system. She concurrently serves as the External Affairs Vice President of the Associated Students of the University of California, the student association at UC Berkeley, where she is a senior majoring in political science and minoring in history and public policy.

Dr. Mark S. Schlissel is the 14th president of the University of Michigan and the first physician-scientist to lead the institution.

Since beginning as president in July 2014, he has launched initiatives including Academic Innovation; Biosciences; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Poverty Solutions; and Precision Health. As part of his commitment to college affordability, President Schlissel in June 2017 announced the Go Blue Guarantee, a new financial aid program that provides up to four years of free undergraduate tuition to in-state students from families in Michigan making $65,000 or less. U-M is perennially the nation’s top public university in research productivity and is consistently ranked as the No. 1 or among the top public universities in the nation.

A graduate of Princeton University (A.B., summa cum laude, 1979, Biochemical Sciences), he earned both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (1986, Physiological Chemistry). He completed residency training in internal medicine at Hopkins Hospital and conducted postdoctoral research as a Bristol- Myers Cancer Research Fellow under David Baltimore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute. President Schlissel is a board certified internist.

President Schlissel previously was provost of Brown University, where he was responsible for all academic programmatic and budgetary functions within Brown's schools and colleges, as well as its libraries, research institutes and centers.

President Schlissel began his career as a faculty member in 1991 at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he earned a number of awards and fellowships for his research and teaching. He moved to the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California-Berkeley in 1999 as associate professor, advancing to full professor in 2002, and serving as the department’s vice chair from 2002 to 2007. He taught undergraduate and graduate courses in immunology, as well as a large introductory course in biology for life science majors.

He was UC-Berkeley’s dean of biological sciences in the College of Letters & Science beginning in 2008 and held the C.H. Li Chair in Biochemistry until his appointment as Brown’s provost in 2011.

His research has focused on the developmental biology of B lymphocytes, the cell type in the immune system that secretes antibodies. His work has contributed to a detailed understanding of genetic factors involved in the production of antibodies and how mistakes in that process can lead to leukemia and lymphoma. He is the author or coauthor of more than 100 scientific papers and has trained 21 successful doctoral candidates in his lab.

Nationally, he has served as member and chair of the Immunobiology Study Section at the National Institutes of Health and on the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Scientific Review Board. President Schlissel was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigators in 1998 and the American Association of Physicians in 2013.

He has been a member of the American Association of Immunologists since 1992. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013 and as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015. He has helped organize major international scientific meetings and is a frequent seminar speaker at universities through the United States.

In January 2018, the Rainbow PUSH Automotive Project presented President Schlissel with one of its inaugural Let Freedom Ring Awards, in recognition of the Go Blue Guarantee and for his proactive work in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion on the Ann Arbor campus. The awards pay tribute to the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for his legacy in uplifting the human condition.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., President Schlissel is married to Monica Schwebs, an environmental and energy lawyer. They have four grown children.

Jonathan Schwartz is a junior at Yale University. Jonathan is a founder of Every Vote Counts, a student-led, nonpartisan organization dedicated to increasing voter turnout and expanding voter access nationwide. Started at Yale in 2017, the organization now has nearly 50 university-based chapters around the country. Jonathan’s work at Every Vote Counts is primarily focused on increasing voter turnout among college students and encouraging civic leadership on campus. In this capacity he has created several best-practice guides and resources specifically tailored to college students which are used at Yale and many other chapters.

At Yale, Jonathan studies Economics and Statistics. In addition to Every Vote Counts, Jonathan is a member of the Yale Varsity Sailing Team, a research assistant in the Department of Economics and an intern at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. He has previously worked as a Legislative Assistant at the Anti-Defamation League and on Sen. Joe Donnelly’s campaign for re-election in 2018. Jonathan is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana where he graduated from North Central High School in 2017.

Nancy Thomas directs the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, conducting research and providing assistance to colleges and universities to advance student political learning and participation in democracy. The Institute’s signature initiative, the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE), is a large dataset for research and a service, providing more than 1,100 participating colleges and universities with tailored reports containing their students’ aggregate voting rates. Her work and scholarship center on higher education’s democratic mission, college student political learning and participation, political equity and inclusion, discourse, free speech and academic freedom, and deliberative democracy on campuses and in communities. She is the author of multiple book chapters, articles, and the monograph, Educating for Deliberative Democracy. She has a law degree from Case Western Reserve University and a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.