Mohamad Ali

SVP & Head of consulting, IBM

Mohamad leads IBM Consulting, IBM’s global professional consulting services unit, an organization in 150 countries with deep industry expertise and market-leading capabilities in business transformation and technology implementation. In this role, he leads an organization solving complex problems for clients using technology-based assets and AI from IBM, as well as our expanding ecosystem of strategic partners.

Mohamad was most recently CEO of IDG, a leading market intelligence and demand generation company serving the technology ecosystem. Before this, Mohamad was CEO of Carbonite, a publicly traded data-protection and cybersecurity company where he grew revenues four-fold in four years.

Mohamad also previously served as the Chief Strategy Officer at Hewlett Packard, where he played a pivotal role in the company’s turnaround by directly managing over ten billion dollars of organic cost reductions and leading the process to split HP into two companies.

At IBM, Mohamad acquired and integrated various companies to help create the organization’s multi-billion dollar analytics software business. At Avaya, he oversaw the two-billion-dollar services group, and served as the head of the company’s research labs.

He currently serves on the boards of Henry Schein (NASDAQ: HSIC), and previously on the boards of iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB) and City National Bank (NYSE: CYN). Mohamad is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mohamad holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering, a B.A. in History, and a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, each from Stanford University.

He was named 2022 EY Entrepreneur of the Year for New England; 2018 CEO of the Year by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council; member of 2018 Public Board of the Year by National Association of Corporate Directors New England; 2021, 2020 & 2018 100 Most Influential People in Boston by Boston Magazine; and was a finalist in America’s prestigious 1988 National Science Talent Search.

Roberta Herman

President and CEO, Joslin Diabetes Center

After 5 years of service on its Board of Trustees, Dr. Herman was recruited to serve as Joslin’s CEO and President in January 2020. By November, 2021, she had brokered an affiliation with Beth Israel Lahey Health System (BILH). Joslin has since completed system integration and an Epic implementation while being restored to positive EBIDA performance and is now undergoing a major relocation. In 2024, Joslin was named among the Top 100 Women led organizations in Massachusetts for the 4th consecutive year.

Previously, Dr. Herman spent 4 years as a healthcare consultant in Chicago-based Navigant Consulting (now GuideWell) where she co-led their Healthcare Value Transformation Practice. She returned to Massachusetts to lead the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC) during the Baker Administration.

In her early career, Dr. Herman practiced and was named Chief of Internal Medicine at Harvard Community Health Plan’s Cambridge Center. Dr. Herman went on to become the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Operating Officer of New England’s second largest health plan, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) (now Point32Health.) Under her tenure, HPHC became the #1 Health Plan in the US according to NCQA, a position it maintained under her tutelage for more than a decade.

Dr. Herman has served on many not-for-profit and two public for-profit Boards: (i) Voluntis, LLC., a digital therapeutics company based in Paris, France, since acquired by Aptar and (ii) Triple S Corporation, the for-profit BCBS company of Puerto Rico, since acquired by BCBSFL.

Currently, Dr. Herman sits on the Board and Compensation Committee at Diatribe and the Board and Nominating Committee at the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER); she also sits on the Board and is Co-chair of the Membership Committee of the Massachusetts Chapter of the International Women’s Forum (IWF/MA)

Dr Herman is originally from Montreal, Canada, where she trained as an Internist and Epidemiologist at McGill University and the Royal Victoria Hospital.

Robin Kramer

Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Biogen

Robin Kramer is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Biogen and has served on the Executive Committee since March 2025. Ms. Kramer joined Biogen in 2018 as our Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer and most recently served as our Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer.

Prior to joining Biogen, Ms. Kramer served as the Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer at Hertz Global Holdings from 2014 to 2018. Prior to that, she was an audit partner at Deloitte & Touche from 2007 to 2014, including serving in Deloitte’s National Office Accounting Standards and Communications Group for several years. Earlier in her career, Ms. Kramer served as Chief Accounting Officer of Fisher Scientific International and as Director, External Reporting, Accounting and Control for the Gillette Company. Ms. Kramer also held partner positions in the public accounting firms of Ernst & Young LLP and Arthur Andersen LLP.

Ms. Kramer currently chairs the board and audit committee of Armata Pharmaceuticals. She is also a member of the Massachusetts Society of CPAs and the American Institute of CPAs. Previously, Ms. Kramer served as a Board Member for Samsung Bioepis, the Center for Women and Enterprise, the Massachusetts State Board of Accountancy, and Probus Insurance Company Europe DAC.

Ms. Kramer holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in Accounting from Salem State University and is a licensed Certified Public Accountant in Massachusetts.

Shirley Leung

COLUMNIST & ASSOCIATE EDITOR, THE BOSTON GLOBE

Shirley Leung is an award-winning columnist at The Boston Globe, where she examines the intersection of business, politics, and diversity. She also hosts the Globe Opinion podcast “Say More” and is a regular contributor to GBH’s Boston Public Radio. She previously served as the Globe’s business editor and interim editorial page editor, and has been recognized as one of Boston Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.” Before joining the Globe, she was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Princeton University, Shirley began her journalism career at her hometown paper, The Baltimore Sun.

Lynn Perry Wooten

PRESIDENT, SIMMONS UNIVERSITY

Lynn Perry Wooten, a seasoned academic and an expert on organizational development and transformation, became the ninth president of Simmons University on July 1, 2020. She is the first African American to lead the university.

Specializing in crisis leadership, diversity and inclusion, and positive leadership—organizational behavior that reveals and nurtures the highest level of human potential—Dr. Wooten is an innovative leader and prolific author and presenter whose research has informed her work in the classroom and as an administrator. She first joined a university faculty in 1994 and has served in administrative roles since 2008. Dr. Wooten came to Simmons from Cornell University, where she was the David J. Nolan Dean and Professor of Management and Organizations at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.

Dr. Wooten also has had a robust clinical practice, providing leadership development, education, and training for a wide variety of companies and institutions, from the Kellogg Foundation to Harvard University’s Kennedy School to Google.

With leadership at the core of her work, Dr. Wooten’s research has ranged from an NIH-funded investigation of how leadership can positively alleviate health disparities to leading in a crisis and managing workforce diversity. She is co-author of the Wall Street Journal best-selling book Arrive and Thrive: 7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership and the upcoming book The Prepared Leader, along with two previous books, Positive Organizing in a Global Society: Understanding and Engaging Differences for Capacity Building and Inclusion (2016) and Leading Under Pressure: From Surviving to Thriving Before, During, and After a Crisis (2010). Sharing her work at nearly 60 symposia and conferences, she also is the author of nearly 30 journal articles and more than 15 book chapters, as well as managerial monographs and numerous teaching cases.

Dr. Wooten grew up in Philadelphia, where she attended an all-girls high school. She earned a BS in accounting in 1988 from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a Historically Black College, where she graduated as valedictorian; an MBA from the Duke University Fuqua School of Business in 1990; and a PhD in business administration from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business in 1995. She received a Certificate in Advanced Educational Leadership from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education in 2018.

Starting her career as assistant professor of management at the University of Florida Warrington College of Business, Dr. Wooten returned in 1998 to the University of Michigan, where she served on the faculty of the Ross School of Business for nearly 20 years. There she taught undergraduate, graduate, and executive education courses and served as Co-Faculty Director of the Center for Positive Organizations as well as Co-Faculty Director of the Executive Leadership Institute. She became engaged in student life as an associate dean, ultimately serving as Senior Associate Dean for Student and Academic Excellence. She left Michigan in 2017 for the deanship at Cornell.

Dr. Wooten is an active member of several national volunteer leadership organizations, including Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Jack & Jill of America, Junior League, and The Links Inc. She is an advisory board member for the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program and on the boards of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and the University of Michigan Alumni Association. In addition, Dr. Wooten is actively involved in the Boston philanthropic and civic community. She currently serves on the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, the Association for Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts (AICUM) Board of Directors, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Trustee Advisory Board, the JFK Library Foundation Board of Advisors, the Fenway Alliance Board of Directors, The George School Board of Trustees, the MASCO Board of Directors, and the WBGH Board of Trustees. In addition, Dr. Wooten serves on the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan Board of Directors and the North Carolina A&T University Board of Trustees.

She is a past recipient of the University of Michigan Ross School of Business’s BBA Student Award for Teaching Excellence as well as the school’s Andy Andrews Distinguished Service Award. She also was chosen as a “Next Generation Business Thinker” by the Financial Times.

Dr. Wooten is married to David Wooten, a chaired marketing professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, and they have two children, Justin and Jada.

Janet Wu

Anchor/Reporter, Bloomberg News

Janet Wu is a Boston-based anchor and reporter for Bloomberg Radio and Television. She interviews the entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders of the innovation and finance hub primarily for “Bloomberg Baystate Business.” Prior to joining Bloomberg, she held various roles at 7News in Boston, including longtime weekend anchor and healthcare reporter. Her op-eds and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and The Norton Sampler series of essay collections. She graduated from Yale with a dual major in philosophy and psychology and earned a master’s degree in journalism and international affairs at Columbia University. She serves on advisory boards for the New England Conservatory of Music and Franciscan Children’s Hospital. She was named the 2015 New England Girl Scouts Leading Woman of the Year and delivered a TEDxCambridge talk on exploration and resilience. She plays the piano and cello and has traveled to 88 countries, 39 of them alone.