Steering Committee

Prior to co-founding Capula Investment Management in 2005, Yan Huo spent most of his professional career at JPMorgan, where he worked in its derivatives research and proprietary positioning business. Huo is a trustee of Princeton University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fudan University and the Huo Family Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Fudan University in China.

Ann Kirschner is a strategic advisor, educator and author whose diverse career centers on understanding technology’s impact on how we work, shop, entertain and learn. Kirschner is university professor at The City University of New York and professor of practice at Arizona State University. She leads philanthropic initiatives at the Meyer Family Foundation and serves on the boards of the Movado Group, Strategic Cyber Ventures, NYC First and the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation. Kirschner’s pioneering work in digital strategy includes NFL Sunday Ticket and nfl.com at the National Football League and Fathom, an online learning project, with Columbia University. She writes about innovation in higher education for Forbes and other publications and is author of “Sala’s Gift” and “Lady at the OK Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp.” Kirschner graduated from the University of Buffalo and the University of Virginia, and received a Ph.D. from Princeton, where she earned recognition as a Whiting Fellow and was elected to the Board of Trustees.

Larry Morse co-founded Fairview Capital Partners, a private equity investment management firm, in 1994. He is a past chairman of the board of the National Association of Investment Companies and a member of the boards of Webster Financial Corporation, Harris Associates Investment Trust (the Oakmark Mutual Funds) and the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former trustee of Princeton University as well as of the Institute of International Education and a former director of the Princeton University Investment Company. From July 2020 to June 2025 he served as chair of the board of trustees of Howard University. Morse graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Howard with a B.A. in economics, having spent his junior year at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics at Princeton and has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. He began his professional career as an economist at The Urban Institute in 1978.

Carol Barash writes and speaks on neuroscience-based storytelling and community-building. A twice-exited EdTech entrepreneur, they built software and taught storytelling to more than a quarter million people, teaching tech and business leaders how to use storytelling to increase their influence and helping CEOs complete and publish their books. Barash sold their company, Story2, in 2023. They have spoken about storytelling on notable blogs and podcasts, including Arlan Hamilton’s Demystifying Faith, and told their stories live on stage at the Barrow Street Theater and The Moth. Television and radio interviews have included CNN, Atlanta Public Radio, WNYC, AM New York and NJ Network. Barash received a B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale University, a master’s degree from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Princeton. They are a past chair of Graduate Alumni Annual Giving, a proud recipient of the Alumni Award for Service to Princeton and parent to two Princeton undergraduate alumni.

A political economist and global strategist, Sophal Ear teaches and writes on international organizations, foreign policy and governance. Born in Cambodia and raised as a refugee, he brings personal and professional insight to questions of global cooperation. Ear serves as president of the International Public Management Network and vice chair of the Public Policy and International Affairs program. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has authored books on pandemics, foreign aid and China’s global influence. His 2009 TED Talk on surviving the Khmer Rouge has reached nearly 1 million viewers, and his scholarship has been featured in The Lancet and major academic journals.

Andrew Finn *23 received his Ph.D. in English from Princeton with a dissertation on medieval English religious poetry and was awarded the Postgraduate Research Associate fellowship. At Princeton, he was involved in the Graduate Student Government as the academic affairs chair, vice president and president; in the English department’s Graduate Action Committee, which championed graduate student needs; and in gradFUTURES. In these roles, he ran workshops to help his peers achieve academic success, built programs to create interdisciplinary community and volunteered his time to better graduate life at the institution across the board. Inspired by these opportunities at Princeton, he has now begun to pursue a career in higher education administration. He is currently the assistant director of Graduate Student Programming and Events at Northeastern University’s Center for Student Involvement, where he designs and implements wellness, professional and co-curricular support programs for graduate students across the university.

Larry Handerhan *12 most recently served as deputy assistant secretary for management at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families. He has spent the past 15 years helping government organizations run better, including stints at the D.C. Department of Human Services, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the City and County of San Francisco. He is an alum of the Presidential Management Fellows program and served in AmeriCorps. As an MPA student at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), he was co-chair of the student government; he currently serves on the SPIA Advisory Council. He received a bachelor’s degree from Bates College and lives in the LeDroit Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C., with his husband, Donnelly McDowell ’06.

Laurence Latimer *01 is the current president of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni. His volunteer experience includes serving as a member of the Venture Forward Campaign Executive Steering Committee, inaugural chair of the Dean for Research Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, chair of Graduate Alumni Annual Giving, co-chair of the Connect leadership initiative, vice chair of the national Annual Giving Committee, and a board member of the Princeton Association of New York City. He was awarded the Alumni Council Award for Service to Princeton and the Harold Helm, Class of 1920 Award. Professionally, Latimer is an entrepreneur and investor focused on financial technology. Latimer received his B.A. in political science from Ohio State University and a master’s in public affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, where he was a Public Policy and International Affairs Fellow.

Peter Lighte has come to realize that earning his Ph.D. in Chinese history was vocational, fostering the wherewithal that enabled him to create a family. Little did he expect to find himself in the crosshairs of the history he had studied. When his quest for a child became ensnared in Hong Kong’s handover back to China in 1997, he relied upon lessons learned from the classics and made use of the Chinese language to navigate the landscape, which was more cultural than bureaucratic. Add the bloodymindedness it took to complete his dissertation for the redoubtable F.W. Mote, news of two successful adoptions should come as no surprise. Had Princeton’s gift of the past not been so present, the story might have ended otherwise. Lighte began his career teaching Chinese history. When it ended, he had been founding chair of JPMorgan Chase Bank China, with three decades of international living in between. Princeton is now his home, in a house where he had been a cat-sitter as a student. 

Shin-Yi Lin is a Taiwanese-American, born and raised in California. At Princeton, she studied genetics and development in the Department of Molecular Biology and was active with the graduate student government, the Writing Center and the Princeton Research Symposium. After two decades as a lab scientist, she made what was initially a temporary shift into policy in 2019 — but it stuck when she saw the kind of good local governments could do during the pandemic. Lin has been supporting health policy for New Jersey’s Medicaid program, which provides healthcare coverage for 1.7 million residents. She’s currently the deputy director of Medicaid Policy in the state’s Department of Human Services. She cares about academics in public service (as avocation or vocation), equity and diversity in what we do and where we work, the highs and lows of parenting, reading books and enjoying good food. She lives in the Princeton area with Matt Weber *09 and their kids.

Sally Metzler-Dunea *97 earned her doctorate with distinction at Princeton in art and archaeology. Currently, she is founder and chair of the commission to erect the Global COVID-19 Monument of Honor, Remembrance, and Resilience. Previously, she was director of the art collection at the Union League Club Chicago and a senior fellow and guest curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she curated the international loan exhibition “Bartholomeus Spranger: Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague” and authored the exhibition catalog. She has taught art history courses at Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago. Formerly, she was the director of the Martin D’Arcy Museum of Loyola University Chicago and has held positions at the Field Museum of Natural History, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Alte and Neue Pinakothek in Munich, Germany.

Juan Carlos Pinzón is a visiting professor at Princeton University. Previously, he served as Colombia’s minister of defense and twice as ambassador of Colombia to the United States. Pinzón is an economist from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, with a master’s degree from the same institution, a master’s degree from Princeton and an honoris causa degree from the Colombian War College. Pinzón has taken advanced courses in strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, science and technology policy at Harvard University and smart cities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In 2011, he was appointed as the youngest minister of defense in Colombian history to serve at the height of the internal armed conflict. Following his success as minister of defense, he was appointed ambassador to the United States in 2017 and again in 2021, with the task of bringing both nations together to tackle issues of regional importance.

Mika Provata-Carlone *02 is a London-based independent scholar and researcher, with a long career as a translator, editorial consultant, writer and literary critic. She has also worked as an illustrator and photographer. Her academic fields include classics, philosophy, history of art, English and French literature, European studies, film and drama. She has degrees from the University of Athens (B.A., First Class Honours), the Sorbonne (Diplôme), the University of Sussex (M.A.) and Princeton University (M.A., Ph.D.). She is the chair of the Princeton Alumni Schools Committee of the U.K., the Netherlands and France, and a Princeton Schools Committee mentor for several regions. She has been a GradFUTURES mentor since the program’s launch in 2020, advising doctoral students in several departments at Princeton. For her work as ASC chair she received the Princeton Schools Committee S. Barksdale Penick, Jr. 1925 Award (2010) and the Alumni Council Award for Service to Princeton (2018).

Angelina Sylvain *16 received her B.S. in biological sciences from the University of California-Irvine and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Princeton. As vice dean for graduate education at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, she leads data strategy efforts that inform financial, policy and programming decisions for the Graduate School and the Office of the Provost, while overseeing program development. Sylvain served on the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni (APGA) board and the Alumni Council Executive Committee (ACEC), advocating for graduate alumni as APGA vice president, chair of the APGA Engagement and Impact Committee and a member of the ACEC Careers and Networking group. At Princeton, she was also actively involved in Graduate Student Government and the Women in STEM Leadership Council.

Koshu Takatsuji *18 is the graduate alumni chair for the Princeton Club of Northern California (PCNC), dedicated to fostering a vibrant alumni community. With a master’s in chemical engineering from Princeton, Takatsuji combines his academic expertise with a passion for community engagement and event planning. As a key member of the Asian Alumni of Princeton and the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni, he has been instrumental in orchestrating numerous successful events. These range from intimate monthly dinners to large-scale annual celebrations, including the dim sum Lunar New Year event, the end-of-year holiday dinner, museum visits, movie screenings and the highly anticipated annual BBQ welcoming new students. Through these efforts, Takatsuji has significantly enriched the alumni community, fostering connections and creating lasting memories for all participants.

Raghuveer Vinukollu *11 is the head of Climate Insights and Advisory at Munich Reinsurance America, Inc., based in Princeton, New Jersey. He has a Ph.D. in land surface hydrology from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE); he is also one of the Advisory Council members for the CEE department. He is a passionate advocate for climate adaptation and resiliency with emphasis on the role of insurance and public-private partnerships in building resilient communities. Vinukollu’s expertise in climate resilience is reflected in the recent articles titled “Re|imagining Resilience in a Post Pandemic World” and “Nature’s Remedy: Improving Flood Resilience Through Community Insurance and Nature-Based Mitigation.” He is also the co-chair for Princeton Graduate Alumni Annual Giving.