The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Announces the Appointment of Jane Mendillo and L. Rafael Reif to its Board of Trustees

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Apr 08, 2016, 02:20 ET

NEW YORK, April 8, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has announced the election of Jane Mendillo and L. Rafael Reif to its Board of Trustees.

"Ms. Mendillo and President Reif will offer wise leadership, grounded in deep and broad experience, as well as steadfast commitment to the Foundation's core constituencies in the humanities, arts, higher education, and cultural organizations," said Mellon Board of Trustees Chair Danielle Allen. "We could not be more pleased by their election to the board and enthusiastically look forward to working with them."

"Jane and Rafael are wonderful additions to Mellon's Board," said Earl Lewis, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. "Their wide-ranging experiences will add great value as we continue supporting the creation, curation, conservation, and preservation of scholarly, artistic, and cultural knowledge."

Jane Mendillo served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Harvard Management Company (HMC) since July 1, 2008. She returned to HMC after serving as Chief Investment Officer of Wellesley College from 2002-2008, where she built the college's first investment office and restructured its investment portfolio. Prior to Wellesley, she spent 15 years at HMC, where her responsibilities included oversight of all of the portfolio's outside-managed assets as Vice President of External Management, after serving as a key member of the Internal Equity and Private Equity management teams. She began her business career as a management consultant with Bain & Company in Boston. Ms. Mendillo earned a BA and an MBA from Yale University. She is a CFA charterholder and a member of the Boston Security Analysts Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Boston Committee on Foreign Relations, and the Boston Economic Club. Ms. Mendillo serves as a member of the Board of Directors for both the Boston Foundation and the Berklee College of Music, as well as on the Investment Committee at Partners Healthcare.

L. Rafael Reif has served since July 2012 as 17th President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He spearheaded MIT's latest experiments in online learning, MITx and edX (the joint MIT-Harvard open online learning platform that has engaged seven million unique learners from 196 countries). These efforts earned him the 2012 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award and the 2015 Frank E. Taplin, Jr. Public Intellectual Award. The report of his Task Force on the Future of MIT Education inspired a new MITx MicroMaster's credential and the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili), which seeks to uncover the mechanisms of learning to make teaching more effective. In May 2014, Dr. Reif launched MIT's Environmental Solutions Initiative, anchored by the new Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Laboratory, and in October 2015, he released MIT's Plan for Action on Climate Change. To foster innovation, he launched the MIT Innovation Initiative, created the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node, broke ground on MIT.nano, a major new nanotechnology facility in the heart of campus, and is leading an ambitious redevelopment of nearby Kendall Square. An MIT faculty member since 1980, Dr. Reif directed MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories and headed the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Dr. Reif is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the degree of Ingeniero Eléctrico from Universidad de Carabobo, Valencia, Venezuela, and earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

ABOUT THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION
Founded in 1969, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies by supporting exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. Additional information is available at mellon.org

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SOURCE The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation