Our Team

Joseph Y. Bae is Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer of Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts (KKR), a global investment firm with over $365 billion in assets under management.

In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, Bae and the KKR leadership established a $50 million global relief fund to help people affected by COVID-19. The fund supports the immediate needs of frontline medical workers, ensures food security to vulnerable communities, provides benefits and financial coaching for affected employees among KKR portfolio companies and assists small businesses facing difficulties.

A proud Korean American, Mr. Bae grew up in Long Island, New York and now lives with his wife Janice and their four children. He holds a B.A., magna cum laude, from Harvard College. Mr. Bae serves on the boards of a number of non-profit educational and cultural institutions including as a trustee for Phillips Andover Academy, the Global Advisory Council at Harvard University and a board member of Lincoln Center.

Jonathan Greenblatt is the CEO of ADL (Anti-Defamation League) and its sixth National Director. As chief executive of ADL, Jonathan leads all aspects of the world’s leading anti-hate organization. Since becoming CEO in July 2015, Greenblatt has modernized ADL while refocusing it on the mission it has had since its founding in 1913: to fight the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.

Jonathan is an accomplished entrepreneur and innovative leader with deep experience in the private, public and nonprofit sectors. Before ADL, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Social Innovation. He co-founded Ethos Brands, the business that launched Ethos Water, the bottled water that helps children around the world access clean water. Ethos was acquired by Starbucks Coffee Company in 2005. Following the acquisition, Jonathan was named VP of Global Consumer Products at Starbucks and joined the board of the Starbucks Foundation. Jonathan also founded All for Good, served as CEO of GOOD Worldwide, and VP of Consumer Products at REALTOR.com

Jonathan has been recognized on multiple occasions for his leadership at ADL. He has been named by The NonProfit Times to its list of Top 50 Nonprofit Leaders from 2016-2020. Recode named Jonathan to its inaugural “Recode 100,” a list of the top 100 people in business and technology. He has been named among the Top 50 Most Influential Leaders in the global Jewish community by The Jerusalem Post and as one of the Top 50 Jews to follow on Twitter by the JTA.

Jonathan has served as an adjunct faculty member at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA and as a senior fellow at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jonathan graduated cum laude with a BA from Tufts University and earned his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Sheila Lirio Marcelo is a Filipina American Founder, former Chairwoman and CEO of Care.com. Marcelo founded her company in 2006, and under her leadership, Care.com became the world's largest marketplace for providing care, serving more than 35 million people across 20 countries and growing more than 100% year-over-year from its founding in 2006, until the company went public in 2014. Committed to building a company that can be both profitable and mission-based, Sheila drove innovation across Care.com's platforms and services to enable families to find care, and for caregivers to receive meaningful work, while also leveraging the company's data and reach to drive systemic change across the care economy as a whole. In 2020, Care.com was acquired by holding company IAC.

Over the course of Care.com’s growth, Marcelo has also been honored with numerous accolades, including one of the "Top 10 Women Entrepreneurs" at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit and Fortune Magazine. She is a Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute, a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, was awarded a Marshall Memorial Fellowship, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Marcelo also co-founded Landit, the career-centric online platform that connects women and diverse groups with such resources as career coaching and personal branding tools; and is also Executive Chairwoman of TheWing, the leading co-working and community space for women to grow their companies or advance their careers. In January 2021, Marcelo joined venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), where she's focused on helping other female founders get the funding they need.

Born and raised in the Philippines, Marcelo graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Mt. Holyoke College, which also conferred upon her an honorary Doctorate of Human Letters in 2015. Marcelo earned both her JD and MBA with honors from Harvard University, and in 2014, was the youngest recipient of the Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award.

Sonal Shah is the founding President of TAAF. One of the foremost global leaders on social impact and innovation, Shah has started and led social impact efforts in academia, government, and the private and philanthropic sectors for over twenty-five years. Prior to her appointment at TAAF, Shah founded and led Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, a cross-disciplinary center that provided students a first-hand opportunity to work on social impact projects in the public, private and social sectors.

Shah has extensive experience in both the public and private sectors. She served as Deputy Assistant to President Obama and Director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, where she was tasked with creating innovative approaches to using technology for social programs across the federal government and with building public private partnerships at scale. Previously, she worked as an international economist at the Department of Treasury, setting up the central bank in Bosnia, working for post-conflict reconstruction in Kosovo, and implementing poverty reduction strategies in Africa. In the private sector, Shah led technology initiatives for civic voice and impact investing as the head of Global Development Initiatives at Google.org.

Prior to her time at Google.org, she developed the environmental strategy and ran the initiatives for investing in clean technologies at Goldman Sachs.. Shah serves on the boards of Oxfam America, the UBS Optimus Foundation, and The Century Foundation. She also serves as an adviser to the Democracy Fund and is coordinating the Initiative on Tech & Society at Georgetown University. In 2020, she served as the National Policy Director for Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

Joe Tsai is Governor of the NBA Brooklyn Nets and WNBA New York Liberty. He co-founded Alibaba Group, a global Internet technology company headquartered in China, in 1999, and serves as the company’s executive vice chairman. Tsai was born in Taiwan, of parents who originally came from Shanghai with ancestral lineage to Zhejiang Province in China.

Tsai and his wife Clara have taken on active roles supporting social justice and COVID-19 related humanitarian relief. In addition to Tsai’s commitment to The Asian American Foundation, the couple pledged $50 million to advocate for social justice and economic mobility in the Black community through their sports ownership platform, including supporting players to amplify their voice for equality, and addressing income, education and health gaps in communities of color. In April 2020, at the outset of the pandemic, the couple donated personal protective equipment and ventilators to hospitals and underserved institutions in New York, New Jersey, California and the city of Detroit.

Active philanthropists in education and research, the Tsais established the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute at Stanford University, dedicated to understanding how the brain gives rise to mental life and behavior, both in health and in disease. The couple also founded the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University to focus on understanding human cognition and exploring human potential by sparking interdisciplinary inquiry among the psychological, biological, and computational sciences. With Tsai’s support, Yale launched the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY) to inspire students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to seek innovative ways to solve real-world problems from climate change to civic engagement. Tsai is a supporter of the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, a center named after his father dedicated to helping advance legal reforms in China and increasing understanding of China in the United States.

A graduate of the Lawrenceville School (’82), Yale College (BA ’86) and Yale Law School (JD ’90), Tsai played varsity lacrosse for Yale and, in 2017, received the George H.W. Bush ‘48 Lifetime of Leadership Award, which honors Yale alumni athletes who have made significant leadership contributions in their worlds of governance, commerce, science and technology, education, public service, and the arts and media.

Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo! in 1995 with fellow Stanford graduate student David Filo and served on its board and as a member of its executive team until 2012, including as CEO from 2007 to 2009. In 2012, he founded AME Cloud Ventures, a venture fund that invests in seed-stage to later-stage tech companies that build infrastructure and value chains around data.

Yang is set to become the first Asian American to serve as the Chair of Stanford University’s Board of Trustees in July, 2021. At Stanford, he has served twice on the board of trustees, the first time from 2005 to 2015. He joined the board again in October 2017 and has served as its vice chair. Yang and Filo were recognized as Engineering Heroes by the Stanford School of Engineering in 2013. The program recognizes the achievements of Stanford engineers who have advanced the course of human, social and economic progress through engineering.

Yang currently sits on the boards of Alibaba, Workday and Lenovo. He also serves as director of the Monterey Peninsula Foundation and a trustee of Dunhuang Foundation (USA). He is a member of the Committee of 100 and the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served on the boards of Cisco Systems and Asian Pacific Fund of San Francisco.

Jerry Yang was born in Taipei and immigrated to the United States in 1978, growing up in San Jose, California. Yang and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki (also a Stanford graduate), have been active philanthropists At Stanford, Yang and Yamazaki have supported a wide range of programs, including initiatives around artificial intelligence, environment and sustainability, the arts, COVID-19 research, and various scholarships and fellowships. Yang and Akiko were early supporters of UCSF’s Covid-19 Response Fund. Yang and Yamazaki are the lead donors to the San Francisco Asian Art Museum expansion.

‍

Peng Zhao is Chief Executive Officer of Citadel Securities, a global financial services firm with offices across the United States, Asia-Pacific and Europe. One of the firm’s early architects, he joined Citadel Securities directly out of graduate school as a Senior Quantitative Researcher.

Peng has led the company through a period of continued growth and sustained expansion. He was named to Fortune Magazine’s 40 Under 40 list, which noted that under his stewardship, “Citadel Securities has not only widened its lead as the top market maker in U.S. stocks,” but also emerged as a transformative influence in new and growing markets.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Peng and his wife Cherry, both Chinese Americans, organized the donation of over one million masks to first responders and helped raise funds for medical supplies in Hubei province, aid to families displaced by the pandemic and early resources for vaccine development.

Peng earned his PhD in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Berkeley Fellow, and holds a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Peking University. He serves on the Board of Trustees for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.