Dr. Steven Klasko
Advisor, General Catalyst. Former President CEO, Jefferson University & Jefferson Health
Dr. Stephen Klasko is a transformative leader and advocate for a revolution in our systems of health care and higher education. After 9 years in Philadelphia re-imagining the future of Jefferson, he is now pursuing his vision of creative re-construction of health care to address health inequities.
As president of Thomas Jefferson University and CEO of Jefferson Health from 2013-2021, he led one of the nation’s fastest growing academic health institutions based on his vision of re-imagining health care and higher education.
Under his leadership, Jefferson expanded from three hospitals to 18 and from a health sciences university to a professional university with multiple campuses. Its revenue grew from $1.8b to $9 billion. His 2017 merger of Thomas Jefferson University with Philadelphia University created a pre eminent national doctoral university that includes top-20 programs in fashion and design and occupational therapy, the first design-thinking curriculum in a medical school, and the nation’s leading research on the role of empathy in health care.
His track record of success has earned him Modern Healthcare’s #2 in 2018’s “100 Most Influential Individuals”; as #21 in Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business 2018”; “Philadelphia Entrepreneur of the Year 2018”; Ernst & Young’s “Greater Philadelphia Entrepreneur of the Year 2018”; and Becker’s Hospital Review’s “100 Great Leaders in Healthcare.”
Dr. Klasko is an internationally recognized advocate for transformation in health care and higher education. He is the author of 2020’s UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance, with Silicon Valley investor Hemant Taneja. In 2019, he spoke about the future of hospitals at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and in 2020, was named a Distinguished Fellow of the World Economic Forum and co-chair of its Board of Stewards for the Forum’s platform on the digital economy.
He has served as dean of two medical colleges and leader of three academic health centers before becoming President and CEO at Jefferson.
He is married to Colleen Wyse, a fashion leader and founder of The Philadelphia Trunk Show, and has three children: Lynne, David and Jill.
Tony Gay
Vice President & General Counsel at PECO, an Exelon Company
Jonathan Holloway
President Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Jonathan Holloway, a U.S. historian, took office as the 21st president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, on July 1, 2020. He also serves as a University Professor and Distinguished Professor.
Prior to accepting the presidency of Rutgers, Dr. Holloway was provost of Northwestern University from 2017 to 2020 and a member of the faculty of Yale University from 1999 to 2017. At Yale, he served as Dean of Yale College and the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies.
President Holloway’s scholarly work specializes in post-emancipation U.S. history with a focus on social and intellectual history.
He is the author of African American History: A Very Short Introduction and The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, February 2023 and February 2021, respectively). He also published Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (2002), and Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 (2013), both with the University of North Carolina Press. He edited Ralph Bunche’s A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (New York University Press, 2005) and coedited Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century (Notre Dame University Press, 2007). He wrote the introduction for the 2015 edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (Yale University Press), and is working on a new book, A History of Absence: Race and the Making of the Modern World.
Dr. Holloway, who began his academic career at the University of California, San Diego, received a bachelor’s degree with honors in American studies from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.
He serves on boards of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gates Cambridge Trust, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Universities Research Association, the Institute of International Education, and the Academic Leadership Institute.
Dr. Holloway is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. He is a Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.
He is married to Aisling Colón. They have a daughter, Emerson, and son, Ellison.