Edgar Gonzalez is an experienced and proven leader, team-builder, and collaborator with almost 20 years of experience in higher education advancement and program development.  He currently serves as Vice President of University Advancement at Seattle University.  Prior to joining Seattle University, Edgar held leadership roles at Oregon Health and Science University, the University of Washington, and the Alliance for Education.

A native of Argentina, Edgar and his family emigrated to the US when he was 9 years old in pursuit of the American dream.  After earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington, he has dedicated his entire career to working in higher education and ensuring that everyone has access.  Edgar is passionate about the positive impact philanthropy can have on the institutions, communities, and individuals he is fortunate to serve. His career has always been focused on building institutional capacity through cultivating deep relationships, transformative philanthropy, leadership development and impactful storytelling.

As the Associate Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the University of Southern California, Erika Jordan serves as the chief alumni engagement officer for the campus and plays a key role in providing leadership and strategic guidance to ensure uninterrupted engagement for the nearly 500,000 alumni in the Trojan Family. 

Prior to this role, Erika served as the Vice President, Alumni Engagement at Boston University where she led the Alumni Engagement, Annual Giving, and the Development Events & Communications teams. Additionally, she spent six years serving as Assistant Vice Chancellor, Alumni & Constituent Engagement at UC Irvine. Throughout her career she has been instrumental in exponentially growing alumni engagement and annual fundraising, elevating communications and events, establishing UCI’s dual alumni engagement campaign goal and leading special projects.

Erika has spent her career in politics, special events, alumni relations, frontline fundraising, and served as the Director, Alumni Relations and Annual Giving for the USC Marshall School of Business. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Howard University and executive masters in leadership from USC.

“Mo,” as she is called by family, friends, and colleagues is the senior vice president for stakeholder engagement and chief of organizational operations (SVP-COO), with responsibility for driving operational and capital campaign strategy, overseeing key administrative functions, and guiding a culture of inclusivity for the UConn Foundation. Mo oversees the departments of alumni relations, marketing and communications, annual giving, stewardship, and board engagement.

Mo was recruited to join the UConn Alumni Association as the Executive Director and Assistant Vice President for alumni relations in 2014. Mo brought with her a national reputation for strong leadership built over two decades in higher education advancement. Mo is known for her ability to lead across departments while building collaborative relationships to enhance the experiences of staff, students, alumni, and friends.

Mo believes that mentorship and sponsorship of not only her staff and colleagues but also those from other institutions is incredibly important. She gives of her time and talent as much as she can and is currently an active member of the Case Board of Trustees. She has been on the faculty for the Case Minority Institute (MAI), Senior Alumni Relations Institute and was a member of the 2018 Case Summit planning committee.

Previously she was executive director of Bowling Green State University’s Alumni Association. Mo received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from BGSU.

Mo has more than 26 years of experience with higher education institutions in the university advancement field where she has developed exemplary leadership, created strategic plans, cultivated organizational change, and is known nationally as a leader in the industry.

Sherry Main serves as the interim vice chancellor for strategic communications and public affairs at UC Irvine. She leads enterprise-wide communications functions, including marketing, advertising, executive and digital communications, media, and community and government relations. Prior to UCI, Sherry served as UC Santa Cruz’s chief communications and marketing officer.

Sherry has served in a number of staff leadership roles in her tenure at the University of California. In 2017 she was appointed by then UC President Janet Napolitano to serve a two-year term as staff advisor to the UC Board of Regents, having direct input into the board’s deliberations impacting UC’s more than 200,000 staff employees. 

She is a board member of The CLUB Silicon Valley; an advisory forum member of Executive Women’s Forum International; and an executive member of HiPower/UPWARD Women. Among her honors, she received the 2018 Women of Influence award from the Silicon Valley Business Journal and the 2016 International Grand Gold-Special Events award from CASE. Sherry earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Davis, an MBA from UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business, and a certificate in crisis leadership from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Benjamin R. Fiore-Walker, Ph.D. (He/Him) is originally from Southampton, PA in suburban Philadelphia. Ben received a Ph.D. in neuroscience (psychobiology) from the University of Virginia, and has a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. His research area of focus was in the development of brain circuitry as they relate to epilepsy and autism.

Ben comes to his position as the senior director for the Opportunity and Inclusion Center (OIC) after close to 25 years working in the diversity space. Before coming to CASE, Ben was the manager of the Office of Diversity Programs at the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Washington, DC, where he had a broad mandate to develop strategies to build out relationships and initiatives from across the society in order to help ACS live into its core value of diversity, equity, inclusion and respect.   Before ACS, he served as a senior managing director for diversity and inclusion at Teach for America (TFA), where he was responsible for devising and quantifying diversity metrics for TFA for the development of initiatives to diversity staff and corps member populations. Prior to TFA, he spent 19 years at the Georgetown University School of Medicine where he was the Associate Dean for Diversity & Inclusion. This work has taken Ben into many elementary and middle schools in underserved areas of the D.C. metro region, where he uses neuroscience to get kids excited about STEM fields and higher education.

Ben has written on and studied diversity climate in higher education and the workplace and is a firm believer that diversity & inclusion matters.  Ben believes that even though heterogeneity is the key ingredient to success—with diverse teams being more productive and creative than non-diverse teams, it’s all for not if the members of those diverse teams don’t feel their differences are celebrated or valued.  We need both, diversity and inclusion to reach our full potential.