Rene Haas
Chief Executive Officer, Arm
Rene was appointed Chief Executive Officer and to the Arm Board in February 2022. Prior to being appointed CEO, Rene was President of Arm’s IP Product Groups (IPG) from January 2017. Under his leadership, Rene transformed IPG to focus on key solutions for vertical markets with a more diversified product portfolio and increased investment in the Arm software ecosystem. In addition to his role as CEO, Rene also sits on the boards of Arm China, AstraZeneca, and SoftBank Group.
Rene joined Arm in October 2013 as Vice President of Strategic Alliances and two years later was appointed to the Executive Committee and named Arm’s Chief Commercial Officer in charge of global sales and marketing.
Before joining Arm, Rene held several applications management, applications engineering and product engineering roles, including seven years at NVIDIA as vice president and general manager of its computing products business. Prior to NVIDIA, Rene held executive roles at Scintera Networks and Tensilica.
Rene earned his Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Clarkson University and is a graduate of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business Executive Education Program.
Luis von Ahn
CEO and Co-Founder, Duolingo
Luis von Ahn is the Co-Founder and CEO of Duolingo (NASDAQ: DUOL), the world’s most popular language-learning platform, serving hundreds of millions of users worldwide with a mission to make education free, accessible, and engaging. Born in Guatemala, Luis was a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a recognized pioneer in the fields of crowdsourcing and human computation.
Prior to founding Duolingo, Luis created reCAPTCHA, a system acquired by Google that digitized books while simultaneously protecting websites from automated abuse. A recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, he has been celebrated for his innovative approaches to leveraging human interaction at scale. Through Duolingo, Luis continues to advance his philanthropic vision of inclusive education, blending cutting-edge technology with a commitment to expanding global access to learning.
Ted Decker
Chair, President & Chief Executive Officer, The Home Depot
Ted Decker is chair, president and CEO of The Home Depot, the world’s largest home improvement retailer with more than 2,300 stores and approximately 475,000 associates. He is also a member of the company’s board of directors. Under Ted’s leadership, The Home Depot is creating a seamless interconnected shopping experience for Pro and DIY customers, while championing the company’s unique culture.
From 2020 to 2022, Ted served as president and chief operating officer and was responsible for global store operations, global sourcing operations, global supply chain, outside sales and service, real estate, as well as merchandising, marketing and online strategy. While he was in this role, the company enhanced its capabilities to blend the online and in-store worlds and better serve customers however they choose to shop.
Previously, Ted served as chief merchant and executive vice president of merchandising for more than six years, where he was responsible for store and online merchandising departments, merchandising strategy, marketing and vendor management and in-store environment.
Ted joined The Home Depot in 2000 as director of business valuation. Over the past two decades, he has held several strategic positions across the company including senior director of business valuation, vice president, senior vice president of strategic business development and senior vice president of retail finance. His experience across the business enables him to blend the art and science of retail.
Before joining the company, Ted worked in business development, strategic planning and finance at Kimberly-Clark Corp. and Scott Paper Co. Prior to that, he held various corporate finance, lending and credit positions at PNC Bank. He has extensive international experience, having lived and worked in England and Australia.
Ted serves on Carnegie Mellon University’s Board of Trustees and also sits on the Atlanta Committee for Progress board. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from The College of William and Mary and a master’s degree in business administration from Carnegie Mellon University.
Edda Fields-Black
Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Professor, CMU Department of History, and Director, Dietrich College of Humanities Center
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research specialty is the trans- national history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the antebellum South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. Throughout her career, Fields-Black has used interdisciplinary sources and methods to uncover the voices of historical actors in pre-colonial West Africa and the African Diaspora who did not author written sources.
Fields-Black was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for her book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War. COMBEE recounts a crucial chapter in American history when Harriet Tubman, working with the Union Army, led a daring Civil War raid to attack rice plantations owned by Confederate slave owners in the South Carolina Lowcountry. This is an untold chapter in the life of one of America's best-known and loved heroines.
Tubman and her crew of spies, scouts, and pilots piloted 300 Black US Army soldiers (all formerly enslaved men) and their white abolitionist commanders up the winding Combahee River in three armed US Army boats. In six hours, they torched seven rice plantations and liberated nearly 800 enslaved people, many of whom spoke a Creole language (today called Gullah Geechee) Tubman could not even understand. Based on US Civil War pension files, planters’ documents of slave transactions, and abolitionists’ personal correspondence, COMBEE tells the story of Harriet Tubman's Civil War service and brings to life the enslaved families, neighbors, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps who were sold and separated during slavery, then liberated and reunited in the raid. It was the largest slave revolt in US history.
In addition, Fields-Black is author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008) and co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (2015). She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” with three-time EMMY™ Award-winning classical music composer, John Wineglass. Fields-Black has worked as an advisor to curators at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and a consultant to the International African American Museum and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She is currently an advisor to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Ambassador Rahm Emanual
Rahm I. Emanuel most recently served as the United States Ambassador to Japan. As Ambassador, Emanuel helped deepen the U.S.-Japan alliance, including support for Japan's increased defense spending and expanded military cooperation. He promoted Japan's leadership in Indo-Pacific key security initiatives and participated in the historic trilateral summit at Camp David that reaffirmed that cooperation between the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea.
Previously, Emanuel was the 55th Mayor of the City of Chicago, a position he held until May 2019. During that time, he made the critical choices necessary to secure Chicago's future as a global capital.
As Mayor, Emanuel added four years to a student’s education. He increased the school day by 75 minutes and added more than 200 hours to the school year, marking the largest single increase in educational time by any city and taking Chicago from having the least educational time of any large school district in the country to being on par with its peers. He implemented universal pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten for every Chicago child, and made Chicago the first city in America to provide free community college.
The Mayor's comprehensive public safety strategy focused on expanded prevention programs for at-risk youth, smarter policing strategies, and empowering parents and communities to reduce violence. The Ambassador made it a priority to bring global companies to the city, helping Chicago to lead the U.S. in corporate relocations and foreign direct investment for seven consecutive years. His administration invested in infrastructure, public transportation, open space, and cultural attractions. From the $8.5 billion O'Hare International Airport modernization program that is cementing Chicago's status as a global leader in travel, tourism, and trade to the development of the iconic 1.25-mile Chicago Riverwalk, the City's investments are creating thousands of good-paying jobs and making Chicago a better place to live, work, and play.
Prior to becoming Mayor, from November 2008 until October 2010, Emanuel served as President Barack Obama's Chief of Staff. In addition to being the President's top advisor, Emanuel helped the Obama administration secure the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Before serving as Chief of Staff, Emanuel was elected four times as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois's 5th Congressional District (2002-2008). As Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Emanuel helped pass legislation to raise the minimum wage and authored the Great Lakes Restoration Act.
From 1993 to 1998, Ambassador Emanuel was a key member of President Bill Clinton's administration, rising to serve as Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Politics. During this time, Emanuel served as a legislative liaison to Congress and spearheaded efforts to pass several of President Clinton's signature achievements, most notably the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, and the historic Balanced Budget Act, which created the Children's Health Insurance Program that expanded health care coverage to 10 million children. Emanuel also worked closely with President Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a U.S. Senator, to shepherd the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 through Congress.
Emanuel graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1981 and received a Master's Degree in Speech and Communication from Northwestern University in 1985. He is married to Amy Rule, and they have three children.
Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, presidential historian for the New-York Historical Society and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the National Archives Foundation, the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress, and both the Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Libraries. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master”. He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies.
Brinkley has written/edited three New York Times bestselling books on Ronald Reagan: The Boys of Point du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion (2005); The Reagan Diaries (2007); and The Notes (2011). More recently, his two-volume, annotated Nixon Tapes (2014-15) won the Arthur S. Link–Warren F. Kuehl Prize. Brinkley has also written on World War II, the Vietnam War, the National Parks system, John F. Kennedy, Rosa Parks, Gerald R. Ford, Bob Dylan, Hurricane Katrina, Henry Ford and Walter Cronkite which all received critical acclaim. Six of his nonfiction books have been chosen as New York Times’s “Notable Books of the Year”. Brinkley has also won two Grammy Awards in the jazz category for the albums Presidential Suite and Fandango at the Wall.
He lives in Austin, Texas with his family.
Sonia Manzano
When you think of Sonia Manzano, you immediately think of children and television. Manzano’s most recent accomplishment was creating a children’s program, Alma’s Way, for PBS KIDs. It has won two Imagen Awards for Best Youth Programing, a 2022 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Program and a 2023 NAACP nomination for an Image Award.
But what Ms. Manzano is best known for is performing the role of “Maria” on Sesame Street for 44 seasons, where her work affected the lives of millions of children and parents and garnered her two Emmy Award nominations, in addition to the National Academy of Arts and Science’s Lifetime Achievement Daytime Emmy in 2016. As a writer for Sesame Street, she took home 15 Emmys. In 2022, Manzano received the Beacon Award from PBS, and the Latino Spirit Award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus Foundation.
She is also the author of four picture books and three Young Adult novels. Her Scholastic Young adult novels include Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx and The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano. Her most recent novel, Coming Up Cuban, is set in 1959, and follows the lives of four children who represent different intersections of race and class during the Cuban Revolution. Proud to have been raised in the South Bronx, she attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York City before attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Please visit her website at soniamanzano.com