Archives: Team Members

As Co-CEO, Mellody is responsible for management, strategic planning and growth for all areas of Ariel. Additionally, she chairs the board of Ariel Investments’ publicly traded mutual funds. Prior to being named Co-CEO, Mellody spent nearly two decades as Ariel’s President. In 2025, she founded Project Level® to change the game in women’s sports. Mellody co-founded Ariel Alternatives, LLC in 2021 and its inaugural private equity fund, Project Black® to scale minority-owned businesses. Beyond Ariel, she serves as a director of JPMorgan Chase and is the former chairman of Starbucks Corporation. Mellody was a long-standing board member of the Estée Lauder Companies and former board chair of DreamWorks Animation, overseeing the company’s sale in 2016. She is deeply committed to philanthropy and is a well-known advocate of financial literacy. Mellody published a New York Times bestselling children’s book, Priceless Facts about Money. She earned her AB from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Joseph Manchin III served as a United States Senator for West Virginia from 2010 to 2025, bringing decades of leadership and a commitment to pragmatic, results-driven public service. Throughout his tenure, he was a key member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where he served as Chair, as well as the Appropriations, Armed Services, and Veterans’ Affairs Committees. Prior to his time in the Senate, he served as the 34th Governor of West Virginia (2005-2010) and as West Virginia Secretary of State (2001-2005). A staunch advocate for bipartisanship and commonsense policymaking, Senator Manchin focused on energy security, economic development, and national defense. He championed an all-of-the-above energy strategy that harnessed coal, natural gas, nuclear, and renewables, while emphasizing innovation and sustainability to ensure both environmental and economic stability. His leadership helped shape policies that strengthened American energy independence, revitalized domestic manufacturing, and supported job creation in West Virginia and beyond. Beyond public office, Senator Manchin remains deeply committed to his home state, supporting education, workforce development, and civic engagement initiatives. He continues to advocate for responsible governance, fiscal accountability, and solutions that bridge the partisan divide. A graduate of West Virginia University with a degree in business administration, he has dedicated his life to fostering economic growth and ensuring that the American Dream remains within reach for future generations.

JOHN PODESTA is the Founder and served as Chair for the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for American Progress and a Founder and Chair of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Podesta served as Senior Advisor to President Joe Biden and counselor to President Barack Obama, where he was responsible for coordinating the administrations’ climate policy and initiatives. In 2008, he served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition team, where he coordinated the priorities of the incoming administration’s agenda and spearheaded its appointments of cabinet secretaries and senior political appointees. Podesta served as White House Chief of Staff to President William J. Clinton, where he was a member of the president’s cabinet and served on the National Security Council. Additionally, Podesta has held numerous positions on Capitol Hill, including counselor to Democratic Leader Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (1995-1996) and served on the President’s Global Development Council and the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. In 2016, Podesta chaired Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. A Chicago native, Podesta is a graduate of Knox College and the Georgetown University Law Center, where he is currently a visiting professor of law. He is the author of The Power of Progress: How America’s Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate and Our Country.

KEN CHENAULT is the Chairman and a Managing Director of General Catalyst. Prior to joining General Catalyst, Ken was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of American Express, a position he held from 2001 – 2018. Upon Ken’s retirement from American Express, Warren Buffett, the company’s largest shareholder stated, “Ken’s been the gold standard for corporate leadership and the benchmark that I measure others against.” At General Catalyst, Ken focuses on investing in fast-growing companies that have the potential to become large, fundamental institutions. He also provides invaluable guidance to portfolio companies, particularly to those with an eye towards global markets and responsible innovation, as they scale their teams and products. Ken is recognized as one of the business world’s experts on brands and brand management. He has been honored by multiple publications including Fortune Magazine, which named him as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in its inaugural list in 2014 and, most recently, in 2021. TIME celebrated Ken together with Ken Frazier in the TIME100 Most Influential People of 2021 list for their corporate and social activism; specifically, for mobilizing hundreds of corporate leaders to advocate for equitable voting rights in the U.S., and for co-founding OneTen, a coalition of leading organizations committed to upskilling, hiring, and promoting people without four-year degrees into family-sustaining jobs. Ken serves on the boards of Airbnb, Berkshire Hathaway, Bilt Rewards, Campus, Chief, Guild Education, and the Harvard Corporation. He also serves on the boards of numerous nonprofit organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Advisory Council for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Wally Adeyemo served as the 15th Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury and chief operating officer of the 100,000 employee Department during the Biden Administration. Adeyemo led Treasury’s national security and economic inequality work, and implemented some of the Department’s top policy priorities. Adeyemo oversaw the Treasury Department’s use of economic tools in service of protecting U.S. national security, including financial sanctions and the work of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. He led the Treasury Department’s comprehensive review on the effectiveness of sanctions as a national security tool. Adeyemo was the primary driver of the Administration’s approach to considering the national security implications of foreign direct investment.  He also managed Treasury’s implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was the most significant investment in the economy, energy security, and climate change in a generation, as well as the most significant effort in decades to modernize the Internal Revenue Service. Prior to his appointment as Deputy Treasury Secretary, Adeyemo served as President of the Barack Obama Foundation in Chicago, IL. During the Obama Administration, he served as Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council at the White House. Adeyemo is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. He was previously a board member of Demos, a New York-based think tank focused on social, political and economic equity issues, and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at Blackrock.

MINOUCHE SHAFIK is an economist, policymaker, central banker and higher education leader who has spent over three decades in leadership roles across a range of prominent international financial institutions, national governments and academic institutions. She started her career at the World Bank where she became the youngest-ever vice president of the World Bank at the age of 36. She transformed a $50 billion portfolio of infrastructure projects from the worst to the best performing at the World Bank, led private sector policy and investments, worked on the institution’s first-ever report on the environment, and advised governments in post-communist Eastern Europe. Minouche Shafik’s tenure as Permanent Secretary of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development coincided with the department being ranked the best performing in government and helped secure the UK’s commitment to giving 0.7% of GDP to fight poverty in the poorest countries in the world. As Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, she navigated the turbulence surrounding the European debt crisis and the Arab Spring and modernised the approach to building economic policy capacity in member countries. She was also responsible for the IMF’s $1 billion administrative budget and $10 billion pension fund. After that, Minouche Shafik served as deputy governor of the Bank of England, where she led work on fighting misconduct in financial markets and managed the central bank’s balance sheet of around $600 billion. She served on all the Bank’s policy committees which included the Monetary Policy Committee which sets interest rates, the Financial Policy Committee focusing on financial stability and the Board of the Prudential Regulatory Authority which supervises financial institutions. She also reformed the Bank of England’s risk management system and the real time gross settlements system for payments. She was president of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) for six years where she drove academic excellence, improved student experience and raised substantial philanthropic support. She then served as President of Columbia University and has since led a review of international development for the UK government.

Minouche Shafik received her BA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an MSc from LSE, and a DPhil from St Antony’s College, Oxford. She holds a life peerage and is a crossbench member of the House of Lords, received a damehood for services to the global economy, an honorary fellowship of the British Academy and of St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, and has six honorary doctorates. She currently serves as chair of the board of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a member of the board of the Gates Foundation, a distinguished Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Bretton Woods Committee. Her recently published book, What We Owe Each Other has been translated into twelve languages. She has served as deputy chair and a trustee of the British Museum, member of the supervisory board of Siemens, the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and a Governor of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research.

JOHN H. COCHRANE  is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His publications include the books The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and Asset Pricing. He has written articles on monetary policy, inflation, dynamics in stock, bond, option and foreign exchange markets, and their relation to  business cycles, macroeconomics, health insurance, time-series econometrics, financial regulation, and other topics. He writes occasional Op-eds, mostly in the Wall Street Journal, blogs as “the Grumpy Economist” at https://www.grumpy-economist.com/ and as part of the Hoover Goodfellows video/podcast with H.R. McMaster and Niall Ferguson.  Cochrane is also a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), Professor of Finance and Economics (by Courtesy) at Stanford GSB, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and former director of its Asset Pricing program, and an Adjunct Scholar of the CATO Institute. He is a past President and Fellow of the American Finance Association, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has been an Editor of numerous journals including the Journal of Political Economy. Awards include the Bradley Prize, the TIAA-CREF Institute Paul A. Samuelson Award for Asset Pricing, the Chookaszian Endowed Risk Management Prize, the Faculty Excellence Award for MBA teaching and the McKinsey Award for Outstanding Teaching. Previously, Cochrane was the AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and before that at its economics department. Cochrane earned a Bachelor’s degree in Physics at MIT, and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.  Outside of academic and economic pursuits, Cochrane is a competition sailplane pilot, and enjoys cycling, windsurfing, skiing, and other outdoor activities.

BLAIR W. EFFRON is cofounder of Centerview Partners, a leading independent investment banking and advisory firm with offices in New York, London, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Paris, and San Francisco. The firm’s 75 partners and six hundred professionals provide assistance on mergers and acquisitions, financial restructurings, general advisory, valuation, and capital structure to companies, institutions, and governments. Since its founding in 2006, the firm has advised in nearly $4 trillion in transactions and ranks among the most active banking firms globally in strategic advisory. The firm works with public and private companies across a range of sectors including the consumer, energy, financial, general industrial, health care, media, retail, technology, and telecommunications industries.  Mr. Effron serves on the boards of trustees of the Council on Foreign Relations (vice chairman), Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Visions for Public Schools, the Partnership for New York City, and Princeton University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative affiliated with the Brookings Institution, and is a Member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.  Effron holds a BA from Princeton University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.  He resides in New York with his wife Cheryl and has three children.

NATASHA SARIN is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School with a secondary appointment at the Yale School of Management in the Finance Department. She is also the President and Co-Founder of the Budget Lab at Yale. Previously, Natasha served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and later as a Counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at the United States Treasury Department. Her work focused on narrowing the gap between the taxes owed by the American public and those collected by the Internal Revenue Service. Prior to her government service, Sarin was a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the Wharton School. Her research centers on public finance and financial regulation, with work on tax policy, household finance, insurance, and macroprudential risk management. Her scholarship has been covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times, among other publications. Natasha is a Washington Post contributing columnist and a frequent guest on CNBC’s Squawk Box.