Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
Ms. Townsend has a long history of accomplishment in the public arena, and for six years she has worked in the private sector. She is a Senior Vice-President at Rock Creek, a hedge fund of funds founded by Afsaneh Beschloss, the former treasurer of the World Bank. She also worked as a Senior Advisor for two years at Lehman Brothers where she focused on client development and diversity issues. As the State of Maryland’s first woman Lt. Governor, Ms. Townsend was in charge of a multimillion dollar budget and had oversight of major cabinet departments, including Economic Development and Transportation, State Police, Public Safety and Correction and Juvenile Justice. Prior to being elected Lt. Governor, Ms. Townsend served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States. In that role, she led the planning to put 100,000 police officers into the community and she ignited the Police Corps, a program to give college scholarships to young people who pledge to work as police officers for fouryears after graduating. Prior to serving at the Department of Justice, Mrs. Townsend spent seven years as the founder and director of the Maryland Student Service Alliance where she led the fight to make Maryland the first—and still only—state to make service a graduation requirement. She taught foreign policy at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and currently is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. She has been appointed the Paul Nitze Senior Fellow at St. Mary’s College and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow by the Council of Independent Colleges. In the mid-1980s, she founded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. Ms.Townsend is Chair of the Institute of Human Virology founded by Dr. Robert Gallo, and serves on the board of directors of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, Chair of the Leadership Center for the Common Good, and is on the Board of the the Robert Kennedy Memorial, The Center for American Progress, the Brady Campaign, the Center for International Policy, and the YMCA of New York City and Lightbridge. She is the Vice-Chair of the Annual Future of Science conference held in Venice, Italy. Ms. Townsend is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Inter-American Dialogue.
