Three term trustees and three trustees elected by alumni are selected.
Princeton University has named six new members to its board of trustees.
The board elected Peter Lewis, James McDonnell III and Louise O’Brien to four-year terms as term trustees. Princeton alumni elected three board members Eileen Guggenheim, Olivier Kamanda and Rajiv Vinnakota also to four-year terms.
The board of trustees is responsible for the finances and funds of the university. It approves the operating and capital budgets, supervises the investment of the university’s endowment and oversees campus real estate and long-range physical planning.
The trustees also exercise prior review and approval concerning changes in major policies, such as those in instructional programs and admission, as well as tuition and fees and the hiring of faculty members.
Ms. Guggenheim is an educator and philanthropist who currently serves as vice chair of the Prince’s Foundation, an organization founded by the Prince of Wales in London. She also is founder and president of the Villore Foundation, a philanthropic organization that supports educational institutions in the arts internationally.
Ms. Guggenheim earned her doctoral degree in art and archaeology from Princeton in 1982. She began teaching while at Princeton and went on to pursue a career in education, helping to found what is now the New York Academy of Arts.
Mr. Kamanda, who graduated from Princeton in June, majored in operations research and financial engineering. He was elected a "young alumni trustee" by recent graduates and upperclassmen.
He has served as vice president, class senator and minority-issues action committee chair of the Undergraduate Student Government. As founder and coordinator of the Ideas in Action Lecture Series, Mr. Kamanda has sought to address social awareness and increase student involvement in political and social issues.
Mr. Lewis is chairman and chief executive officer of The Progressive Corp. A 1955 Princeton graduate, he led the transformation of a small Cleveland insurance company into the nation’s sixth largest auto insurer.
With his support, the university recently established the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Mr. Lewis also is supporting the construction of a new science library at Princeton being designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Frank Gehry.
A longtime patron of the arts, Mr. Lewis serves on the boards of the Guggenheim Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Aspen Institute.
Mr. McDonnell retired as vice president of the McDonnell Douglas Corp. of St. Louis in 1991, and has continued to serve as a director since the company’s 1997 merger with the Boeing Co.
He is a 1958 Princeton graduate; McDonnell Hall on Princeton’s campus is named for his father, James McDonnell, a member of the class of 1921.
A longtime advocate for St. Louis institutions, McDonnell also has served as a director of the Arts and Education Council of Greater St. Louis, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Municipal Theatre Association, the VP Fair Foundation, the United Way of Greater St. Louis and the Missouri Historical Society.
Ms. O’Brien retired as vice president for corporate strategy and business development from the Dell Computer Corp. earlier this year. An experienced business executive and strategist, she currently is pursuing nonprofit and business advisory activities in Boston.
She is a 1982 Princeton graduate.
Ms. O’Brien also served as vice president of the industry solutions group, vice president for global account sales and the global enterprise program and vice president for enterprise product marketing at Dell, where she worked for six years.
Mr. Vinnakota is president and chairman of the board of the Washington, D.C.-based Schools for Educational Evolution and Development Foundation.
After graduating from Princeton in 1993, he worked at Mercer Management Consulting for three years.
In 1998, he opened a public boarding school designed to serve the most disadvantaged urban students in the Washington area.
Mr. Vinnakota has received the Princeton Club of Washington’s Community Service Award and "The Oprah Winfrey Show" Use Your Life Award, among other honors.