Archives: Team Members

JOSHUA BOLTEN is CEO of Business Roundtable, an association of more than 200 CEOs of America’s leading companies.  Bolten’s twenty years of government service includes eight years in the White House under President George W. Bush as Chief of Staff (2006-09), Director of the Office of Management & Budget (2003-06), and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy (2001-03). For the preceding two years, he was Policy Director of the Bush 2000 presidential campaign. Bolten’s previous private sector experience includes work at Goldman Sachs in London and O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, DC. Bolten received his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1976 and his law degree from Stanford in 1980. He is a member of the boards of Emerson Electric Co., the ONE Campaign, Princeton University, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

ROBERT B. ZOELLICK is Chair of Temasek, Americas, an investment arm of Singapore’s sovereign fund, and Senior Counselor at Brunswick Group Geopolitical. In 2022-23, he was an Adjunct Professor and Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Zoellick serves on the board of Robinhood Markets. He also chairs the International Advisory Council of Standard Chartered Bank, and serves on the Strategic Council of Swiss Re. He is a member of the boards of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Carnegie Endowment, and chairs the Global Tiger Initiative. Zoellick was the President of the World Bank Group from 2007-12, U.S. Trade Representative from 2001 to 2005, and Deputy Secretary of State from 2005 to 2006. From 1985 to 1993, Zoellick served as Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury and Under Secretary of State, as well as White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Zoellick was the lead U.S. official in the negotiations for German unification, for which the German government awarded him the Knight Commanders Cross. In 2020, he published, “America in the World: A History of US Diplomacy and Foreign Policy.” His book has been translated into Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Georgian.

TOM WILSON has been CEO of Allstate since 2007 and Chair of the Board of Directors since 2008. He is a public advocate for business playing a broad role in society. Focused on serving customers, earning returns for shareholder, creating opportunities for employees and improving communities. Wilson has also led Allstate through the global financial crisis and increased severe weather due to climate change by focusing on purpose, operational execution and creating changes rather than following trends. He has brought this approach to the broader business community through leadership of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,  Financial Services Roundtable, Property-liability CEO Council, Get-In-Chicago and other private and public sector coalitions.

LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus of Harvard University. During the past three decades, he has served in a series of senior policy positions in Washington, D.C., including the 71st secretary of the Treasury for President Bill Clinton, director of the National Economic Council for President Barack Obama, and vice president of Development Economics and chief economist of the World Bank. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and was awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982. In 1983, he became one of the youngest individuals in recent history to be named as a tenured member of the Harvard University faculty. In 1987, Summers became the first social scientist ever to receive the annual Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation, and in 1993 he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40. He is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University and the Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He and his wife Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard, reside in Brookline and have six children.

ROBERT K. STEEL has more than 40 years of experience. Prior to joining Perella Weinberg Partners in May of 2014, Mr. Steel was New York City’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Development where he was responsible for the Bloomberg Administration’s five-borough economic development strategy, job-creation efforts, and also led the applied sciences initiative, which established the Cornell-Technion campus on Roosevelt Island, New York University Center for Urban Science, and Progress Initiative in Brooklyn, New York.

He was previously president and CEO of Wachovia Corporation, where he oversaw the sale of the bank to Wells Fargo & Co. and served on the Wells Fargo board of directors until 2010. Prior to that, Mr. Steel was Under Secretary for Domestic Finance of the United States Treasury, where he revived the President’s Working Group, the core group to respond to the global economic crisis of 2008. He managed the Department’s Blueprint for Modernized Regulatory Structure, which recommended several of the reforms since pursued by the Obama administration.

Mr. Steel spent nearly 30 years at Goldman Sachs, rising to Head of the Global Equities Division, Vice Chairman of the firm, and a member of its Management Committee. He also was a member of the board of directors of Barclays from 2005 to 2006.

He is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Mr. Steel is Chairman Emeritus of the Aspen Institute’s Board of Trustees and has served as Chairman of Duke’s Board of Trustees, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion.

Currently, Mr. Steel serves on the board of Perella Weinberg Partners, Bloomberg Inc., General Dynamics, Economic Club of New York, Union Square Hospitality Group, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Hospital for Special Surgery, Aspen Institute, Rockefeller University, The Morgan Library & Museum, and is a member of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group and the Partnership for New York City.

ROBERT E. RUBIN served as the 70th United States Treasury Secretary from 1995 to 1999, after serving as the first director of the White House National Economic Council. In these roles, he helped achieve the first federal budget surplus in a generation, address international financial crises, and resolve a debt-ceiling standoff, among much else. Rubin is the author of In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington, a New York Timesbestseller, and The Yellow Pad: Making Better Decisions in an Uncertain World. He spent twenty-six years at Goldman Sachs, rising to co-senior partner, and was a senior counselor and board member at Citigroup. He currently serves as counselor to the independent investment advisory firm Centerview Partners, as co-chairman emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and as chair of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Rubin is a founder of The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, which promotes broad-based economic growth. A former member of the Harvard Corporation, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude and from Yale Law School.

PENNY PRITZKER is the founder and Chairman of PSP Partners and its affiliates, Pritzker Realty Group, PSP Capital, and PSP Growth. From June 2013 through January 2017, she served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Administration. Ms. Pritzker is an entrepreneur, civic leader, and philanthropist, with more than 30 years of experience in numerous industries. In addition to her work at PSP Partners, Ms. Pritzker launched a number of other businesses over the course of her career, which included founding Vi Senior Living (formerly known as Classic Residence by Hyatt), and co-founding The Parking Spot, Artemis Real Estate Partners, and Inspired Capital Partners. Ms. Pritzker is a member of the boards of Microsoft Corporation, DEPT and Icertis.

Ms. Pritzker serves as President Biden’s Special Representative for Ukraine’s Economic Recovery.  In July of 2022, Ms. Pritzker was elected as the Senior Fellow (chair) of the Harvard Corporation and is the first woman to hold the position. In addition to those roles, Ms. Pritzker is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Economic Strategy Group, member of the Obama Foundation Board and co-chair of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Advisory Council.

Ms. Pritzker previously served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, cofounder and board chair of Chicago-based civic-tech organization P33. She also was formerly a member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the board of trustees of Stanford University, the Harvard University Board of Overseers and founded Skills for America’s Future.

Ms. Pritzker earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Harvard University and a Juris Doctor and Masters of Business Administration from Stanford University. Ms. Pritzker and her husband, Dr. Bryan Traubert, co-founded the Pritzker Traubert Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation that works to foster increased economic opportunity for Chicago’s families.

JAMES POTERBA is the Mitsui Professor of Economics at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology and the president and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit research organization with more than 1800 affiliated economists. His recent research has analyzed the accumulation and draw-down of retirement saving and the economic effects of population aging.  He has served as president of the National Tax Association, vice president of the American Economic Association, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a trustee of the College Retirement Equity Fund.  He holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a D. Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall scholar.

MELISSA S. KEARNEY is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. She is also director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of MDRC and on the Board of the Notre Dame Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities. Kearney previously served as Director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings and as co-chair of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology J-PAL State and Local Innovation Initiative. Kearney’s research focuses on poverty, inequality, and social policy in the United States. Her work is published in leading academic journals and is frequently cited in the press. She is an editorial board member of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and the Journal of Economic Literature; she was previously co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources and a Senior Editor of the Future of Children. She is the author of The Two-Parent Privilege (University of Chicago Press, 2023.) Kearney teaches Public Economics at both the undergraduate and Ph.D. level at the University of Maryland. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.