Team Members Archive • Page 2 of 7 • The Aspen Institute Economic Strategy Group

Virginia “Ginni” Rometty

GINNI ROMETTY is a leader, innovator, and convener who believes that how we work and lead is as important as what we achieve. As the ninth Chairman, President, and CEO of IBM, Ginni transformed the 100-year-old company, reinventing 50 percent of its portfolio, building a $25 billion hybrid cloud business, and establishing IBM’s leadership in AI and quantum computing. She drove record results in diversity and inclusion and supported the explosive growth of an innovative high school program, P-TECH, to prepare the workforce of the future in more than twenty-eight countries. Through her work with the Business Roundtable, she helped redefine the purpose of the corporation.

Today, she is a champion of SkillsFirst learning, hiring, and advancement—a movement to connect more people without college degrees with good jobs. In 2020, she co-founded OneTen, a coalition of companies and educators committed to upskilling, hiring, and promoting one million Black Americans without four-year degrees by 2030 into family-sustaining jobs and careers.

She is the author of the bestselling book Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World (Harvard Business Review Press), a moving combination of memoir, leadership lessons, and big ideas. The book shares milestones from her life and career while redefining power as a way to drive meaningful change in positive ways for ourselves, our organizations, and for the many, not just the few—a concept she calls “good power.”

Ginni serves on multiple boards, including JPMorgan Chase and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and was named Fortune’s #1 Most Powerful Woman three years in a row. She has been honored with the designation of Officier in the French Légion d’Honneur and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Her bestselling book, Good Power: Creating Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World, offers leadership lessons through the lens of her life and career.

Erik Brynjolfsson

ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He also is the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), Professor by Courtesy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Department of Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

One of the most-cited authors on the economics of information, Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. He has done pioneering research on digital commerce, the Long Tail, bundling and pricing models, intangible assets and the effects of IT on business strategy, productivity and performance.

Brynjolfsson speaks globally and is the author of nine books including, with co-author Andrew McAfee, best-seller The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future as well as over 100 academic articles and five patents. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Harvard University in applied mathematics and decision sciences and a PhD from MIT in managerial economics.

Adena T. Friedman

ADENA FRIEDMAN became President and Chief Executive Officer of Nasdaq on January 1, 2017, and has served as Chair of the Board of Directors since January 2023. She brings more than 20 years of industry leadership and expertise, and is credited with significantly shaping Nasdaq’s transformation into a leading global exchange and technology solutions company with operations across six continents. Prior to being named CEO, Adena served as President and Chief Operating Officer throughout 2016 and was responsible for overseeing all of the company’s business segments with a focus on driving efficiency, product development, growth and expansion. She rejoined Nasdaq in 2014, after serving as Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director of The Carlyle Group from March 2011 to June 2014 and playing a critical role in taking the company public in May 2012. Before Carlyle, Adena was a key member of Nasdaq’s management team for over a decade, serving in a variety of roles, including head of the company’s data products business, head of corporate strategy and Chief Financial Officer. She played an instrumental role in Nasdaq’s acquisition strategy, overseeing the acquisitions of INET, OMX, and the Philadelphia and Boston Exchanges. She originally joined Nasdaq in 1993 as an intern. Since December 2018, Adena has served as a Class B director to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She was elected to the Board of Directors of FCLTGlobal, a non-profit organization that researches tools to encourage long-term investing, in January 2020. Adena began her term as a member of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust on July 1, 2020. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Williams College in Massachusetts and a Master of Business Administration from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management.

Brad Smith

BRAD SMITH, as Microsoft’s vice chair and president, is responsible for spearheading the company’s work and representing it publicly on a wide variety of critical issues involving the intersection of technology and society, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, privacy, environmental sustainability, human rights, digital safety, immigration, philanthropy, and products and business for non-profit customers. He leads a team of roughly 2,000 business, legal and corporate affairs professionals located in 54 countries and operating in more than 120 nations. In Smith’s bestselling book, coauthored with Microsoft’s Carol Ann Browne, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, he urges the tech sector to assume more responsibility and calls for governments to move faster to address the challenges that new technologies are creating. In his podcast by the same name, Smith and his guests expand on the themes in the book, exploring potential solutions to the digital issues shaping the world today. The New York Times has called Smith “a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large” and The Australian Financial Review has described him as “one of the technology industry’s most respected figures.” He has testified numerous times before the U.S. Congress and other governments on these key policy issues. Smith joined Microsoft in 1993, first spending three years in Paris leading the legal and corporate affairs team in Europe. In 2002, he was named Microsoft’s general counsel and spent the following decade leading work to resolve the company’s antitrust controversies with governments around the world and companies across the tech sector. Smith grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin. He attended Princeton University, where he met his wife, Kathy. He earned his J.D. from Columbia University Law School and studied international law and economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn and find the Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith podcast wherever you like to listen.

Darius Adamczyk

Darius Adamczyk is chairman of Goldman Sachs Private Asset Investments. In this role, he works closely with the investing leadership teams, focusing on conducting diligence for potential new investments, advising the leadership of portfolio companies and helping to deliver operational excellence to accelerate growth. Darius was Executive Chairman of Honeywell June 2023 through June 2024. In that role, Darius focused on supporting customer relationships, business development, enterprise strategic planning, portfolio shaping, and global government relations. He was first elected Honeywell Chairman in April 2018. Darius also served as Chief Executive Officer from March 2017 to June 2023. Under his leadership, the company streamlined its portfolio and end markets, simplified and digitized functional operations, and outperformed the market and company’s peer group. Prior to his CEO position, he was President and Chief Operating Officer for one year. He originally joined the company in 2008 when Metrologic, where he was serving as Chief Executive Officer, was acquired by Honeywell. He served as President of Honeywell’s Scanning and Mobility business for four years, doubling the size of the business, before leading a turnaround over two years as President of Process Solutions. In 2014, Darius was promoted to President and Chief Executive Officer of Honeywell Performance Materials and Technologies. Before joining Honeywell, Darius held several leadership positions with Ingersoll Rand and Booz Allen Hamilton. He began his career as an electrical engineer at General Electric in 1988. He earned his MBA from Harvard University, a master’s degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Michigan State University. In 2023, Darius was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He received the Legend of Leadership Awards from Yale School of Management in 2022. In addition, he serves on the Board of Directors for Johnson & Johnson and is a member of Aspen Economic Strategy Group.

Karen Dynan

KAREN DYNAN is a Professor of the Practice in the Harvard University Department of Economics and at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the chair of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics. She previously served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2014 to 2017. From 2009 to 2013, Dynan was vice president and co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Before that, she was on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board, leading work in macroeconomic forecasting, household finances, and the Fed’s response to the financial crisis. Dynan has also served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (2003-2004) and as a visiting assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University (1998). Her current research focuses on macroeconomic policy, consumer behavior, and household finances. Dynan received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and her A.B. from Brown University.

Kaye Husbands Fealing

KAYE HUSBANDS FEALING is the former Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and former Chair of the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she currently holds the title professor. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and co-chair of the Subcommittee on Social and Behavioral Sciences of the Committee on Science of the National Science & Technology Council (NSTC). She specializes in science and innovation policy, the public value of research expenditures, and broadening participation in STEM fields and the workforce. She developed and was the inaugural program director for NSF’s Science of Science and Innovation Policy program. Husbands Fealing is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is an Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and serves on the AAAS Executive Board. She also currently serves on the National Academy of Public Administration Executive Board, the Society for Economic Measurement Executive Committee, the Howard University’s Committee on Arts and Sciences, and the R. Howard Dobbs Jr. Foundation Trustee Board. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in mathematics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Edward L. Glaeser

EDWARD GLAESER is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught microeconomic theory, and occasionally urban and public economics, since 1992. He has served as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He has published dozens of papers on cities economic growth, law, and economics. In particular, his work has focused on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1992. His books include Cities, Agglomeration, and Spatial Equilibrium (Oxford University Press, 2008), Rethinking Federal Housing Policy (American Enterprise Institute Press, 2008), Triumph of the City (Penguin Press, 2011), and Survival of the City: Mass Flourishing in an Age of Social Isolation (Penguin Press, 2021).

Kerwin K. Charles

KERWIN K. CHARLES joined Yale in 2019 as the Indra K. Nooyi Dean and Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management at the Yale School of Management (SOM). He moved to Yale from the University of Chicago, where he was the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergmann Distinguished Service professor. He has studied and published on a range of topics in labor and applied economics. Among other professional duties, he has served as the vice president of the American Economics Association and is on the Board of several academic and nonprofit entities. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is an elected Fellow of the Society of Labor Economics; of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.