Council on Anti-racism and Equity

Nicholas Barberis is a faculty member in the finance group at SOM; he joined the school in 2004. His area of research is behavioral finance, which tries to make sense of financial markets and the financial decisions of households using ideas from the field of psychology. Nicholas teaches the subject to students in the full-time MBA program; the MBA for Executives program; the Master’s in Asset Management program; and the PhD program. Over the years, in addition to teaching and research, he has taken on a number of administrative roles, including: senior faculty hiring; junior faculty hiring; PhD admissions; Dean Search committee; curriculum review; finance group’s representative to the school’s Appointments, Curriculum, and Strategy (ACS) committee; and numerous promotion committees.

Nicholas accepted the dean’s invitation to join the council because it is trying to make progress on issues that are important to the school and to society at large. He will do his best to help, drawing on his experiences at SOM in the past 15 years.

Teresa Chahine is the inaugural Sheila and Ron ’92 Marcelo Lecturer in Social Entrepreneurship at the Yale School of Management. She is the author of "Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship," a twelve step framework for building impactful ventures in new and existing organizations. Dr. Chahine's research focuses on developing tools to characterize and advance social and environmental determinants of health. She launched the first social entrepreneurship program in the context of public health, at Harvard University. She was also responsible for launching the first venture philanthropy organization in her home country of Lebanon, providing tailored financing and critical management support to social enterprises serving marginalized populations through education and job creation for youth and women.

Dr. Chahine has published widely on financing, measuring, and scaling social impact. She has worked on social innovation and sustainable development within corporate, governmental, academic and non-profit organizations. Among these are the United States Environmental Protection Agency, United Nations Populations Fund, Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs, Malaysian Directors Academy, Sichuan University, Kazakhstan School of Public Health, and Amani Institute in Brazil. She was the recipient of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's inaugural Elizabeth T. Weintz humanitarian research award in 2016 and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's emerging leader in public health award in 2017.

Kristen is a mission-driven leader passionate about enabling others to succeed. Kristen brings 20+ years of experience driving organizational strategies to attract, engage, and develop talent across industries. Her subject matter expertise includes leadership development, relationship management and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Currently Kristen serves as the Senior Director of Learning Success for Executive Education at the Yale School of Management. Most recently, Kristen served as the school’s inaugural Assistant Dean of Inclusion and Diversity, and previously held leadership roles in career development and admissions functions during her tenure at Yale. Outside of higher education, Kristen worked as an HR leader at The Hartford specializing in diversity and talent management. Earlier in her career, Kristen was a recruiter and organizational development associate at Cambridge Associates and Boston Medical Center.

Kristen graduated magna cum laude from Providence College with a B.A. in Psychology and holds a M.Ed. in Human Resource Education from Boston University. In addition to her career, Kristen enjoys her other roles as a wife, mom, soccer coach, and small business owner. Kristen loves travels and adventures with her family, enjoys food and wine, and living on the coastline of Connecticut.

Dean is Founder and Principal of Forenoon Ventures, LLC., focusing on social impact investing. He scales startups, advises social impact fund managers, and guides institutional and private investors in finding mission related investments. He has 25 years institutional investments experience including the Yale Investments Office and the Private Equity Team at The Church Pension Fund.

Dean has an MBA in Finance from the Yale School of Management and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. He has been an entrepreneurship teacher and judge at the Queens (NYC) Economic Development Corporation StartUP! Business Plan Competition and a judge at the Columbia University Venture Competition Tech Challenge. He is a speaker and advisor for the BAJ Accelerator at Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in NYC and was recently a member of the Product Development Committee of The Board of Directors for Oikocredit US. He is also a Board Member of the St. Paul’s Community Development Corporation in Patterson, NJ. He resides in New Jersey.

Dean’s participation in diversity initiatives at SOM began in 1997, while a first-year student, when he worked under the leadership of Richard Silverman, the former Director of Admissions. He was co-chair of the Minority Student Group and also a member of the mixed SOM Soccer team that won the Yale Intramural Championship Cup.

Sharicca Boldon helps organizations disrupt inequity by elevating their focus on people, processes, and purpose. She currently serves as the Director of Strategy and Compliance for Operations at Baltimore City Public Schools and leverages improvement science to address complex, stubborn issues across the social sector. She began her career as a manufacturing engineer for Procter and Gamble and has enjoyed roles in the private, nonprofit, and education sectors. Her work has taken her around the world, but it is the deep challenges in the US education system that have captured her heart and her devotion.

Self-dubbed the "education engineer", Sharicca combines her corporate experience and her commitment to justice to help students, families, and communities achieve their desired outcomes. She is a member of the inaugural cohort of the master's in public education management program with the Broad Center at Yale and a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Sharicca resides with her husband and three children in Baltimore where she serves as a board member for the United Way of Central Maryland Region United Network.

Alexis’s background centers around community development and social impact. After having served as a Community Economic Development Volunteer with Peace Corps - Senegal, and working across a variety of spaces including consumer banking, non-profit, and small busines development, she most recently worked as the Sr. Business Development Associate at BlueMark, a women-owned start-up providing benchmarking and verification services for impact investors. Over the summer, Alexis worked as a Summer Consultant with BCG in their Dallas office, where she’ll be returning to work full-time. At SOM, Alexis currently serves as a Student Ambassador and is this year's Co-Chair for both the Black Business Alliance and Students for Racial Equity.

Brittany serves as a Senior Administrative Assistant in the Academic Affairs and Student Life Office. In this role, Brittany has a unique dual responsibility. As a part of the Academic Affairs team, Brittany works to provide students with the services, resources and information necessary to navigate SOM and achieve a successful academic tenure at the Yale School of Management. As a part of the student life team, Brittany aims to empower students through intentional programming and activities that will aid in enhancing the student experience.

Brittany, a SOM 2023 Community Spirit Honoree, graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor’s Degree in business management from Albertus Magnus College where she also earned a M.B.A. As a member of C.A.R.E., Brittany plans to create opportunities for honest and meaningful conversations regarding racial equity and she is excited about contributing to C.A.R.E’s initiatives and supporting its outcomes.

Nataly has over 10 years of work experience in career education & coaching. She joined Yale SOM in 2011 where she worked in the Career Development Office (CDO) managing on-campus recruitment and developing new employer relationships. Prior to transitioning back to the CDO in 2018, Nataly spent a year in the Office of Community & Inclusion (now the Office of Inclusion and Diversity) supporting diversity strategies and initiatives across student services, recruitment, enrollment and alumni engagement. As a Career Coach, Nataly works with all SOM students to define and articulate career goals, provide strategic resources for their job search and guide students from the preparation stage through offer negotiations.

She has a bachelor’s degree in Justice & Law Administration and got her MBA from a neighboring school, Albertus Magnus College. When not at Yale SOM, she enjoys cooking, dancing salsa, true crime podcasts and spending time with her family.

As an Ecuadorian-born, first-generation college student, Nataly hopes to use this council as a platform to encourage more conversations around racial and socio-economic status inequalities in education and in the workplace.

Dr. Ebonie Jackson serves as Assistant Dean of the Office of Inclusion and Diversity, the co-chair for the Council on Anti-Racism and Equity, and as the Discrimination and Harassment Resource Coordinator (DHRC) for SOM. She is an executive leader with over two decades of professional experience. Her career has spanned the industries of corporate banking, entrepreneurship & small business ownership, and higher education.

Within higher education, she specializes in student success, advocacy, gender justice, diversity, equity & inclusion, and enrollment management. In her previous and current roles she supports and empowers students, staff, and faculty by promoting education and awareness of women’s leadership and mentoring, gender equity, healthy relationships, domestic/ intimate partner, and sexual violence, LGBTQIA+ activism, anti-racism, antisemitism, social justice, and allyship.

Ebonie completed her Doctorate of Education in Executive Leadership where her dissertation explored urban liberal arts graduate employability. She possesses a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia.

Rasanah Goss joined Citizens Bank as the Head of Diversity Recruiting Strategy and Partnerships in January 2021. In the beginning of 2022, Rasanah expanded her responsibilities to include campus recruiting. Additionally in 2022, she also served as the Interim Head of DE&I. Prior to joining Citizens, Rasanah was a Manager at Accenture focusing on diversity recruiting for talent acquisition teams operating in the US, Canada, LATAM, Europe and Africa.

Rasanah has also worked in the media & entertainment and nonprofit sectors. As a marketing manager she worked on award winning multicultural and multigenerational consumer marketing campaigns as well as drove retail and subscriber revenue for some of the most popular magazines including People, Fortune and Food & Wine. In the nonprofit sector her work focused on the arts and diversity.

Rasanah lives in Brooklyn. She currently serves as co-chair of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Ailey Ambassadors Scholarship Fundraising Committee and was previously on the Young Patrons Circle Steering Committee. Rasanah graduated with honors from Stanford University and earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management. She stays connected to Yale SOM by serving on the NYC Alumni Board.

Rasanah joined the council because it is an opportunity to apply her years of professional DE&I experience to remove barriers to access and opportunity as well as ensure equity is woven into the culture at Yale SOM.

Currently, Zanaiya is the Assistant Director for the Office of Inclusion and Diversity at the Yale School of Management. Prior to this, she served as the Assistant Director of the Myatt Center for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of New Haven. A graduate of the University of New Haven with a B.S. in Business Management and an MBA in Strategic Leadership, she has pursued professional opportunities that align with her dynamic interests – which has landed her at Yale SOM where she enjoys working with staff, students, faculty, and the SOM community. Zanaiya is happy to assist the council as it executes the ideas created by the inaugural group and is excited to see the progress that is made at SOM.