Advisory Board

Howard H. Stevenson
Chair of the Board, NPR; Baker Foundation Professor and the Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School.

Howard Stevenson is Baker Foundation Professor and the Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. From 2004 to 2006, he held the position of Vice Provost for Harvard University Resources and Planning. A member and former chair of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit, he has served as the School’s Senior Associate Dean and Director of External Relations, Chair of the Latin American Faculty Advisory Group, Senior Associate Dean and Director of Financial and Information Systems, and Faculty Chair of Executive Education’s Owner/President Manager (OPM) Program. He has also held various other academic appointments at Harvard University, specializing in real property asset management and general management.

Professor Stevenson was a founder and first president of the Baupost Group, Inc., a wealth management firm which he helped grow to assets of over $400 million by the time he resigned from active management. He is now co-chairman of the advisory board of Baupost LLC, a registered investment company with over $15 billion under management. He has also served as Vice President of Finance and Administration and a Director of Preco Corporation, a privately-held manufacturing company, and Vice President of Simmons Associates, an investment banking firm specializing in venture financing. He received his B.S. in mathematics, with distinction, from Stanford University and his MBA, with high distinction, and DBA degrees from Harvard University. He was a Thomas Watson National Merit Scholar and a recipient of the ALCOA and Ford Foundation Fellowships for graduate study.

Professor Stevenson’s research focuses on the life patterns that create entrepreneurship, predictability and enduring success. He has authored or coauthored more than 150 case studies, numerous articles, and eleven books, including Do Lunch or Be Lunch: The Power of Predictability in Creating Your Future, Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life (with L. Nash), Make Your Own Luck: 12 Practical Steps to Taking Smarter Risks in Business (with E. Shapiro) and Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector (with J. Wei-Skillern, J. Austin, H. Leonard). He has created several successful companies. He is Chair of the Harvard Business School Publishing Board. Currently, Professor Stevenson is a director of Camp Dresser & McKee and a director of several non-profit organizations and trustee of several private trusts.

Barbara O‘Connor
Professor of Communications
Director, the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media
California State University, Sacramento

Dr. O’Connor is a nationally recognized expert in the fields of political communication and telecommunications policy and applications. She is the author of numerous publications in both of these areas.

Her numerous appointments, boards and chairs, include the: California Educational Technology Committee; Washington, DC based Alliance for Public Technology; Alliance; California Public Broadcasting Commission; Network Reliability and Interoperability Council; Bellcore’s Advisory Board; ATT’s Consumer Advisory Panel; Verizon’s Consumer Collaborative Council; ETS international ICT literacy effort; National ICT Policy Council; and California Educational Technology Industry Task Force. Dr. O’Connor is an expert consultant and has served a wide array of business, media, telecommunications, federal and state clients and task forces.

Awards and honors include: an by 1990 California State University outstanding teaching award; 1994 California State University Alumni Distinguished Professor Award; 1996 Technology Leadership award; 1998 Technology Pioneer Award.

Recent research grants and projects, include: Ten California Public Utilities Commission Telecommunications Graduate Fellowships; and the Sacramento County Communications Audit and Web Portal development project.

Dr. O’Connor received her Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Southern California in 1974. She was featured in Newsweek’s 1995 “50 for the Future” a feature on the fifty people who will set policy and direction for global communications.

Dr. O’Connor has always blended her teaching, research and community service into a consistent commitment to explain the role of media in society and its impact on citizens, institutions and the democratic process and continues to teach a full load.

Kelly Porter
Managing Director
Woodside Capital Partners

Kelly Porter specializes in advising media, consumer software and enterprise software companies. He has extensive experience in corporate finance, corporate strategy and venture finance as a CEO, venture capitalist and private investor, having participated-in or completed dozens of transactions, including financings, acquisitions and IPO’s.

Prior to Woodside Capital Partners, Porter was Managing Partner of a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, ZAP Ventures, where he evaluated approximately 3,000 technology, software and media companies. As both a venture capitalist and private investor, he had made investments in 22 companies in all stages of growth, and has participated on the boards of 17 companies. Prior to ZAP Ventures, Kelly was Chairman and CEO of CatchTV, an interactive TV software firm where he oversaw acquisition of the firm by Liberty Media/ACTV. He also held positions as Executive Vice President of InterActive Corp/HSN-Home Shopping Network where he worked closely with Barry Diller; and Vice President of Fox Television in Los Angeles, where he was one of the founders of the company’s cable television division.

A native of Palo Alto, CA, Kelly earned a Masters as a Sloan Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and earned an undergraduate degree in broadcast management from the University of Southern California. His father is Bill Porter, founder/former CEO of E*TRADE and founder/former chair of the International Securities Exchange. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the USC Alumni Association and former Co-Chairman of Silicon Valley Social Ventures.

Jessica T. Feezell
Lecturer of American Politics and Political Communications
University of California, Santa Barbara

Dr. Feezell specializes in American politics and political communication; particularly the influence of contemporary media and technology on the political and civic engagement of youth. Her most current research, recently presented at the 2009 American Political Science Association conference in Toronto, explores the ability of online social networking sites to foster offline political engagement among youth.

Dr. Feezell is currently a lecturer at UC Santa Barbara in the Department of Political Science where she has won several awards for excellence in teaching.† Additionally, she is a research consultant for the Civic Engagement Research Group at Mills College where she is working on an innovative project that examines new media use, digital literacy and the associated effects on youth in California with funding through the MacArthur Foundation.

Dr. Feezell received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a focus on the quantitative study of public opinion and political behavior in an American context.

Dmitri Williams
Professor of Virtual Communities
University of Southern California

Dr. Williams is a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, where he is a part of the Annenberg Program on Virtual Communities (APOC). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2004. His research focuses on the social and economic impacts of new media, with a focus on online games. Williams was the first researcher to use online games for experiments, and to undertake longitudinal research on video games. He continues to study the psychology of online populations, with projects involving community, identity, sexuality, economics and neuroscience.

Dr. Williams has published in the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Communication Monographs and others. His work has also been featured in several press accounts, most recently on NPR, and in publications including the Economist, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times and others. Williams testified before the U.S. Senate on video games and served as an expert witness and consultant in two federal court cases.