Presidential Search Committee
In January 2012, the Smith College Board of Trustees appointed a 12-member search committee to identify and recommend a candidate to succeed President Carol T. Christ upon her retirement in June 2013. The committee was chaired by Smith alumna and trustee Louise Parent, Class of 1972.
Search Committee Members
Agnes Bundy Scanlan ’79
Trustee
Agnes Bundy Scanlan has been the chief compliance officer at TD Bank and global chief privacy
officer at TD Bank Group. She is co–vice chair of the Compliance Subcommittee of the American Bar
Association and serves on the boards of the International Association of Privacy Professionals
and the Boston Children’s Museum and on the advisory board of the Massachusetts General Hospital
for Children. She holds a J.D. from Georgetown University.
Yasmine Evans ’13
Student Representative
Yasmine Evans is a government major with a minor in public policy. She is an active member of the Judicial Board, the Otelia Cromwell Day Committee, and the Student Advisory Board for the Center for Work and Life. This past January, Yasmine participated in the Phoebe Reese Lewis Leadership Program. She also represented Smith at the 2011 Women’s Education Worldwide Conference (WEW), hosted by Collegio Nuovo in Pavia, Italy. Yasmine lives outside of Washington, D.C., in the suburb of Fort Washington, Md.
Elizabeth Mugar Eveillard ’69
Chair-elect and Vice Chair of the Board
Betty Eveillard retired in 2003 after a 31-year career in investment banking, including 12 years
at PaineWebber, Inc., as a managing director and head of the investment banking division's Retail
Industry Group. She recently retired as chair of Glimmerglass Opera, is a member of the National
Trustee Council of OPERA America, and a director of Master Drawings, Inc. and the Samuel H. Kress
Foundation. She has served on the Board of Deans’ Advisers and the Visiting Committee of the Harvard
Business School. She holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Laurie Fenlason
Vice President for Public Affairs
Laurie Fenlason serves as the chief public affairs officer of the college and counsel to the president
on matters of strategic communication and visibility. She and her staff are responsible for college
relations, media relations, alumnae, admission and development communications, Web and social media,
special events, community relations and government relations/public affairs. They also oversee
summer programs and the Smith College Conference Center. Fenlason is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College.
Lynn Smith Fox ’77
Trustee; President, Alumnae Association of Smith College
Lynn Smith Fox is senior adviser to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where
she has worked in congressional and public affairs and internal communications since joining the
board in 1985. She spends part of each month in Washington, D.C., and otherwise telecommutes from
Canton, New York. A native of Spartanburg, South Carolina, Fox holds an M.B.A from George Washington
University where she was a University Fellow.
Lois Perelson-Gross ’83
Trustee
Lois Perelson-Gross was formerly a vice president in the Municipal Finance Department of Goldman,
Sachs & Co. She has just completed her term as a member of the board of The Dalton School.
She is a member of the cabinet of the Caring Commission of UJA-Federation of New York and a trustee
of the Children’s Center Foundation at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. Prior to serving
on the Smith board, she was a member of its Advancement Committee, which she later chaired. She
holds an M.B.A. from Columbia University.
Andrew Guswa
Director, Center for the Environment, Ecological Design and Sustainability (CEEDS); Professor, Picker Engineering Program
A civil and environmental engineer, Drew Guswa joined the faculty at Smith College in 2001 to
help launch the Picker Engineering Program. Eight years later he was named director of Smith’s
new Center for the Environment, Ecological Design, and Sustainability (CEEDS). His recent areas
of research include ecohydrologic modeling of water and plants and the development of Smith’s Ada
and Archibald MacLeish Field Station. After graduating from Princeton, he earned his M.S.C.E. and
Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Alexandra Keller
Associate Professor of Film Studies; Director of Film Studies Program
Alexandra Keller specializes in the American Western, cinema and the postmodern, avant-garde and
experimental film, and the relationship between cinema and other forms of artistic and cultural
production. She is the author of James Cameron and a forthcoming exploration of Westerns and American
identity. She is also working on projects about consumer culture and cinema in 1950s America and
experimental moving image practices and their relation to exhibition sites. She received her B.A.
in art history from Harvard and her doctorate in cinema studies from New York University.
Louise M. Parent ’72
Chair, Presidential Search Committee; Vice Chair of the Board
Louise Parent has been executive vice president and general counsel of American Express Company
since 1993. She is a member of the company’s Operating Committee and Global Management Team. She
serves as a trustee of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and is a director of A Better Chance Inc.,
a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Economic Club of New York, and is on the advisory
boards of the Studio in a School and the Calvary Fund Board. She holds a J.D. from Georgetown University.
James Shulman
Trustee
James Shulman serves as the president of ARTstor, a nonprofit organization that provides more
than 1,400,000 images, software and services to over 1,400 colleges, universities, museums, and
schools. He created ARTstor in 2001 at the Mellon Foundation, where he had worked since 1994, writing
about educational policy issues and working in a number of research, administrative and investment
capacities. Among his published works are The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational
Values (with William Bowen). Shulman received his doctorate from Yale in Renaissance studies.
Sharmila (Mona) Ghosh Sinha ’88
Trustee
Mona Sinha is a founder of the project to establish the Asian Women’s Leadership University
in Malaysia. She is also an adviser and director of Impact Investment Exchange Asia, the
first social stock exchange being set up in Singapore. She began her professional career as an
investment banker at Morgan Stanley, followed by a marketing career at P&G and
Unilever. In 2010, she worked on a project for Goldman Sachs Asia on the development of Asian leadership.
She holds an M.B.A from Columbia University and serves as an advisory director to the Columbia
Business School Social Enterprise program.
Nancy Whittier
Professor of Sociology
Nancy Whittier joined the Smith faculty in 1992 and has served as chair of the sociology department as well as helping to establish the Center for Community Collaboration. Her research and teaching focus on the sociology of gender and social movements. She is the author of The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State and Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement. She is co-editor of Feminist Frontiers, an anthology in the sociology of gender, and of Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and the State. She holds a doctorate in sociology from the Ohio State University.
Rebecca C. Lindsey (staff support)
Secretary of the Board of Trustees; Assistant to the President
Rebecca Lindsey has served as secretary of the Board since January 2002, and coordinated the presidential searches for both Carol Christ and Ruth Simmons. Previous positions include associate director of admissions at Columbia University Business School and director of placement at the University of Rochester Business School. She is a graduate of Middlebury College and holds a M.A. from Columbia University.
