Our Team

Jocelyn Sargent is a political scientist and veteran change agent in philanthropy with over two decades of experience advancing democracy and social justice agendas of major institutions. A co-founder of the Center for Social Inclusion, she has spent the bulk of her career devoted to social equity, civil society, and leadership development. Her training as a social scientist combined with her impressive experience in philanthropic management and research coalesce perfectly with institutions seeking to making long-lasting impact for equity and justice.

By virtue of her humble extended family roots, Dr. Sargent possesses a deep personal passion for a fair and just society. Dr. Sargent also brings a professional background in grantmaking, public policy, community development, and research and assessment.

Her most notable work has been with the Open Society Foundation in New York, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Michigan, the Hogg Foundation in Texas, and the Hyams Foundation in Massachusetts.

Dr. Atema Eclai has vast experience working in different parts of the world on Human Rights and Social Justice issues, including quality education, community development, conflict management, and organizational leadership.

Currently, Dr. Eclai is a consultant to three organizations in East Africa. She is also the Interim Director for Chefs4Kids foundation.

Dr. Atema Eclai holds a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and a master’s and Doctorate from Harvard School of Education.

Frederick M. Lawrence is the 10th Secretary and CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the nation’s first and most prestigious honor society, founded in 1776. At Phi Beta Kappa, Lawrence has focused on advocacy for the arts, humanities, and sciences, championing free expression, free inquiry, and academic freedom, and invigorating the Society’s 290 chapters and nearly 50 alumni associations.

An accomplished scholar, teacher, and attorney, Lawrence is one of the nation’s leading experts on civil rights, free expression, and bias crimes. Lawrence has published widely and lectured internationally. He is the author of Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law (Harvard University Press 1999), examining bias-motivated violence and how such violence is punished in the United States. He frequently contributes op-eds to various news sources, such as Newsweek, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, US News and the NY Daily News, and has appeared on CNN and Fox News among other networks. Lawrence serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance, the Editorial Board of the Journal of College and University Law, and the National Commission of the Anti-Defamation League, and has been a Trustee of Williams College and WGBH.

Lawrence is a Distinguished Lecturer at the Georgetown Law Center, and has previously served as president of Brandeis University, Dean and Robert Kramer Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, and Visiting Professor and Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. He was Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law from 1988 to 2005, during which time he served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and received the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, the university’s highest teaching honor. Lawrence’s legal career was distinguished by service as an assistant U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York in the 1980s, where he became chief of the Civil Rights Unit.

Lawrence received a bachelor’s degree in 1977 from Williams College magna cum laude where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a law degree in 1980 from Yale Law School where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

James Houghton is an investor and Chairman of Market Street Trust Company, a shared family office that provides integrated wealth management services to several multi-generational families. Previously, James was a general partner at Megunticook Management, a Boston-based venture capital firm focused on investments in early-stage telecom and technology companies.  Prior to that James worked in several business development and management roles for Corning Inc. and started his career in investment banking at JP Morgan.

In addition to his board experience as an investor in a number of companies, James has served on many non-profit boards, including most recently St. Paul’s School, Shady Hill School and Citizen’s for Juvenile Justice. He is currently a Trustee of the Corning Museum of Glass and a Director of the Triangle Fund, a foundation supporting organizations that work with kids-at-risk in western NY.   James was also a co-founder and co-editor of The Good Men Project, a collection of essays about defining moments in a diverse group of men’s lives that sparked a national conversation about our shared humanity.

James received his B.A. from Harvard College and lives in Boston with his wife and two daughters.

Jeff Rosenthal is the Co-Founder of Summit & Summit Powder Mountain. He currently serves on the boards of Beyond Conflict and Street Soccer USA, and the Leadership Council at Conservation International. Rosenthal also serves as a Senior Advisor to many for-profit and nonprofit organizations, including Inspire Energy, Calm, Scopely, One Community Films, Seed Biosciences, GivePower Foundation, Arabella Advisors, Laurel Strategies, Whistleblower Aid and Save the Waves Foundation, and was a founding board member of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition.

Rosenthal is a Founding Partner of the Summit Action Fund, the Drawdown Fund, and Senior Advisor to TPG Rise and TPG Growth. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He is the recipient of the Tribeca Disruptive Innovator Award, and co-author of Make No Small Plans, releasing in 2021 on Currency Press.

Justin Dangel is the CEO & Co-Founder of Ready Responders. Ready Responders recruits, trains and equips part-time EMTs to improve emergency response times and the efficiency of municipal EMS systems and pre-hospital care generally. Previously, Mr. Dangel founded Consumer United (now Goji) in 2008 and grew it from just a few employees in a small office to over 500 employees across multiple locations within 5 years. Consumer United was named one of the ‘Top 10 Fastest Growing Companies in Insurance’ by Inc. Magazine in 2012. In 1998, Mr. Dangel was the founder and CEO of Voter.com, where he helped create the most popular independent political channel on the Internet with more than 3.5 million monthly users and 500,000 newsletter subscriptions. He led a team that developed strategic partnerships with Microsoft, NBC, CNN, the AFL-CIO, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Democratic and Republican parties and several others. His political and public service background includes the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts High Tech Collaborative – the state’s technology development agency. Mr. Dangel has spoken at numerous events and conferences across the country, including the World Economic Forum in Washington. He is a graduate of Duke University with a degree in Political Science.

Dr. Rana Dajani received her Ph.D. in molecular cell biology from the University of Iowa, and is currently a Cmelikova Visiting Scholar at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, a tenured professor of biology and biotechnology at The Hashemite University in Jordan, and an Ashoka fellow. Previously, Dr. Dajani was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. She has also been an Eisenhower fellow, a Fulbright visiting professor at Yale University, and a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge.

One of the most influential women scientists in the Islamic World, Dr. Dajani is the world expert on the genetics of Circassian and Chechen populations in Jordan and has established stem cell research ethics law in Jordan. She was awarded the Jordan star of science by His Majesty King Abdullah II, as well as the World Literacy Council Award (2018), the Jacobs social entrepreneurship award (2018), the Science, Technology and Innovation Award UN (2019), and the UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award (2020).

A social entrepreneur and educator, Dr. Dajani is studying refugee youth with Yale University and the epigenetics of trauma across generations as a Jordan team leader. She has established a women mentor network, organized the first gender summit for the Arab world 2017, and serves as a member UN women Jordan advisory council. As a higher education reform expert, Dr. Dajani also developed a community-based model “We love reading” to encourage children to read for pleasure.

In 2018, Dr. Dajani authored the book, Five scarves, Doing the impossible: If we can reverse cell fate why cant we redefine success.

Tim Phillips is the founder and CEO of Beyond Conflict. Since 1992, Phillips has led Beyond Conflict in its efforts to help catalyze the peace and reconciliation processes in several nations, including Northern Ireland, El Salvador, Kosovo and South Africa.  He has also advised the United Nations, the U.S Department of State, and the Council of Europe.

In the private sector, Phillips was a founder of Energia Global International Ltd. (EGI), which was a leader in the development and operation of privately owned renewable energy facilities in Central and South America in the early 1990s. Phillips also helped launch and serve on the Advisory Committee of the Club of Madrid, which was founded in 2001 and works with more than 100 former heads of state and government to promote the consolidation of democracy around the world.

Phillips serves on the board of directors, trustees and overseers of numerous international organizations and cultural and educational institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Rose Art Museum, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and the Frameworks Institute.  He also serves as a strategic consultant to a number of early-stage nongovernmental organizations on issues of democratization, civil society, conflict resolution and technologies to bridge the digital divide in the developing world.

Phillips is a frequent speaker in national and international forums, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Salzburg Seminar, the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Department of State, and he has lectured at a number of universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Brandeis. He has published on transitional justice, conflict resolution and national reconciliation, and his work with Beyond Conflict (formerly the Project on Justice in Times of Transition) was featured in the PBS documentary The Visionaries. He has also been a guest commentator on National Public Radio, Radio RTE Ireland and the BBC World Service.

Phillips was educated at Suffolk University and the London School of Economics and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Suffolk University in 2018.

Judy Barsalou, Ph.D., is a political scientist who has held leadership positions in the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Middle East Research and Information Project and the El-Hibri Foundation. Her research focuses primarily on transitional justice, including the role of memorials in social reconstruction; the challenges of teaching history in societies emerging from conflict; and trauma and transitional justice. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in comparative politics from Columbia University.

Currently Managing Director at Humanity United, overseeing the Peacebuilding & Conflict Transformation portfolio, Melanie Cohen Greenberg, JD was previously President and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. Before this, she worked in both philanthropic and academic settings and has helped design and facilitate public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the Caucasus. She has taught advanced courses in international conflict resolution, multi-party conflict resolution, and negotiation and is a writer, lecturer, teacher and trainer.

Joshua D. Greene, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology and member of the Center for Brain Science faculty at Harvard University. He has studied behavioral and neuroscientific methods to study moral judgment and, more recently, examined thought formation and its manipulation into reasoning and imagination in the brain. He is the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Currently a Research Specialist at the Curry School of Education, Lynn Kunkle, Ph.D. previously served as the Director of Philanthropic Research and Impact at the El-Hibri Foundation and has worked for over two decades as a specialist in interfaith peacebuilding, conflict resolution and capacity building. With over ten years living in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, she has worked with government, religious and civil society leaders on a range of inter-religious peacebuilding issues. As Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Resolution at American University, she taught Islamic approaches to peace and conflict resolution to religious leaders and organized interfaith dialogues.

Rose McDermott, Ph.D., is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and M.A. in Experimental Social Psychology from Stanford University and has taught at Cornell, UCSB and Harvard. She has held multiple fellowships at Harvard and Stanford University, and is the author of five books and hundreds of academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines.

Philip Rubin, Ph.D., is the CEO emeritus and former Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories.  He is an adjunct professor, research affiliate and fellow at Yale University and has served in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, led the White House neuroscience initiative, and was a senior advisor on national policy. He is a fellow of many organizations and an elected member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and the National Academy of Public Administration.

Rebecca Saxe is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of BCS and an associate member of the McGovern Institute. Saxe received her BA from Oxford University, and her Ph.D. from MIT. Before joining the faculty, she was a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows. Saxe has authored peer-reviewed papers on the cognitive neuroscience of social cognition, Theory of Mind, and moral judgment. Her TED talk has been viewed millions of times, and has been translated into 33 languages. She was recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.