Regarded as one of the nation’s preeminent lawyers for institutions of higher education, as well as large corporations and organizations facing issues related to the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, Ishan is a go-to lawyer for universities, companies, and organizations facing their most difficult and challenges. He is a Co-Chair of the firm’s Education Practice, a leader of its Technology Practice, and a member of the firm’s Management Committee. In his TED Talk, viewed more than 1.4 million times, he discusses how organizations can foster productive and responsible debate while protecting free speech. His work has been featured in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Fortune. 

Large institutions and companies turn to Ishan when they face complex challenges with significant financial, operational, or reputational consequences. He specializes in commercial, constitutional, and regulatory law and has successfully litigated cases in numerous state and federal courts, including the US Supreme Court. He has substantial arbitration experience and also represents his clients before administrative agencies and in government investigations. Ishan frequently advises public company boards on critical issues of ethical and regulatory risk, including most recently the risks companies face as a result of the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Through the firm’s CLE Relay, Ishan and Lauren Hartz provide clients with the latest legal developments since the Court ruled in SFFA that race-conscious admission policies are unconstitutional. In 2023, they presented DEI Programs: Risks and Strategies in a Changing Legal Landscape."

 In 2024, they will offer a retrospective that describes the landscape one year after the SFFA decision Ishan’s clients include leading educational institutions and major technology companies. Ishan has counseled numerous colleges and universities on issues ranging from free speech and admissions to athletics, Title IX, and research funding. He has represented various institutions in large-scale class actions with multibillion-dollar potential liability and is also a member of the National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA). Likewise, Ishan has advised and defended technology companies on free speech issues, commercial litigation, and government investigations. He regularly consults on how disruptive technologies will be assessed under existing regulatory structures.

 Ishan is a member of the Legal Advisory Council for the McArthur Justice Initiative, the Legal Council for the President’s Alliance for Immigration and Education, and Law360’s Diversity and Inclusion Editorial Advisory Board. He was recognized by both Bloomberg Law and the National Law Journal as one of the 40 best lawyers under 40 in the United States. Prior to joining Jenner & Block, Ishan worked at the US Department of Justice and the Boston Consulting Group. 

Nicholas Campisi, PhD currently serves as CASE’s Director of Data Science, where he uses R to develop benchmarking reports for CASE survey participants. He trained at top institutions in the United Kingdom and Germany, where he served as the department expert in R programming and taught introductory and advanced statistical analysis in R to university students. In his roles working with government bodies in the United States and United Kingdom, he integrated analysis in R with SQL databases and higher education data products.

Before joining PVAMU, Dr. LeGrande served as vice president for strategy, enrollment management and student success at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she led the development and implementation of the university’s strategic plan, priorities, and goals to influence national prominence, strategic partnerships, and student access and success. Other senior level leadership roles prior to VCU include vice president for student affairs and enrollment management at the University of Houston-Downtown, and associate vice chancellor for enrollment management at Winston Salem State University.

Throughout her career, Dr. LeGrande’s focus has been on advancing equity, accessibility, and affordability in higher education. She works to create and sustain engaging and supportive cultures for faculty, staff and students resulting in positive institutional outcomes. She has been prolific in securing resources to support innovation and accelerate progress. In all of her career endeavors, Dr. LeGrande has created “cultures of care” utilizing her expertise in strategic planning, new technology implementation, change management, and policy and business process redesign. With a personalized approach, she engages at all levels of an organization– forming, deploying and managing cross-organizational teams that find solutions to impediments that may impact university progress.

The art of leadership is Dr. LeGrande’s passion. She creates challenging yet supportive environments that embolden the pursuit of wide-ranging and future-focused goals. She embraces developing and cultivating leadership at all levels of an organization and has documented success in procuring funds to support programmatic expansion and change.

As a two-time graduate of HBCUs, and having earned a doctorate in higher education leadership, Dr. LeGrande understands the transformative power of education in helping students dismantle class, social, and cultural barriers. She believes that centered and effective leadership in higher education can amplify and accelerate the social mobility of all students, but especially of those from communities that have been underserved and underrepresented.

At the national level, Dr. LeGrande is actively engaged in issues of access, parity, higher education policy and leadership development. She is a sought-after thought leader, and a regular presenter and facilitator on the topics of enrollment management, educational equity and student success. She testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor in 2019 during a hearing on “Innovation to Improve Equity: Exploring High-Quality Pathways to a College Degree.” She was also the recipient of the Governor’s “Champion for Change Award” for the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2021.

A native of Savannah, GA, Dr. LeGrande earned a B.S. in chemistry from Savannah State University, M.S. in chemistry from North Carolina A&T State University, and an Ed.D. from Texas Tech University.

With over 41 years in higher education advancement, Jeffery L. McLain is the Senior Director of Gift Planning at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Prior to that, he served in advancement leadership positions at large, public research universities, including The University of Texas at Austin, Texas Tech University, Louisiana State University and Kent State University in. McLain began his advancement and fundraising career with Baylor University weeks after he completed his bachelor’s degree in 1982. While at LSU, he earned a master’s in mass communication.

In his time at Texas A&M-Kingsville, he was part of the team that closed the largest individual gift in the school’s history – a $27M planned gift of a working Texas ranch. Twenty months ahead of schedule and during a pandemic, the university closed the largest comprehensive $100 million campaign with gifts and pledges exceeding $114 million.

He is actively involved with CASE, The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. He served three years as CASE District IV scholarship chair and was the Chair of the 2013 CASE District IV INVINCIBLE conference in in Fort Worth. He served a three-year term on the CASE International Board of Trustees, and is now a CASE Laureate. In 2023, he was recognized by CASE District IV with the Distinguished Service Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Active in his profession, McLain is a former CFRE, a certified fundraising executive. He has held offices in local chapters of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, including service as president of the Baton Rouge AFP Chapter and the Lubbock, Texas Chapter. He serves as the past President of the Charitable Gift Planners of Houston Board of Directors. He earned his Chartered Advisory in Philanthropy (CAP) certification in 2022. In 2011, he was honored as the Outstanding Professional Fundraiser for the Baton Rouge Area Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

A native of Plainview, Texas, his family was involved in agriculture as both cotton farmers and cottonseed delinters.

Dr. Wilson Kwamogi Okello (he/him) is a transdisciplinary artist and scholar who draws on Black critical theories to advance research on knowledge production and human development. Most immediately, he is concerned with how Black critical approaches make visible the epistemic foundations that structure what it means to be human and imagining otherwise possibilities for Black being therein. He is also concerned with how theories of Blackness might reconfigure understandings of racialized stress and trauma, qualitative inquiry, critical masculinities, and curriculum and pedagogy to create conditions of possibility in the education context and society. Widely published, he has over 40 scholarly publications in leading venues such as the Journal of College Student Development, Race, Ethnicity and Education, and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. Dr. Okello is co-editor of “Trauma-informed practice in student affairs: Multidimensional considerations for care, healing, and wellbeing,” a New Directions for Student Services volume, and solo author of the forthcoming book with SUNY Press, “On Blackness, Liveliness, and What it Means to be Human: Toward Black Specificity in Higher Education.” Among other early career awards, he was selected as the 2023 Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) Early Career award recipient; he received the 2022-2023 Council on Ethnic Participation (CEP) Mildred Garcia Award for Exemplary Scholarship by ASHE, and he was named a 2022 Emerging Scholar by the American College Personnel Association. Currently, Dr. Okello is an assistant professor of higher education at Penn State University, where he is a research associate at the Center for the Study of Higher Education and director of the Black Study in Education Lab—a research and praxis hub concerned with exploring the potentialities of Blackness in educational research, practice, and policy.

Sergio Rodríguez is the President and CEO of the Hector and Gloria López Foundation whose mission is to provide scholarships and persistence support to Latino students from Texas who are first in their family to pursue their baccalaureate degree. These students come from some of the most under-resourced parts of Texas, including South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, El Paso and the Austin/Central Texas region. The Hector and Gloria López Foundation is the namesake of Sergio’s aunt and uncle, Hector and Gloria López, prominent South Texas ranchers whose ranching estate created one of the largest Latino-funded and Latino-dedicated private foundations in the country. Since its first grants in 2022, the Hector and Gloria López Foundation has granted over $25mm in scholarship support for first-generation Latino students with the goal of creating educated, economically mobile students to be the future leaders of Texas.

In his role as CEO of the Foundation, Sergio manages the endowment as well as 35,000 acres of South Texas ranches and mineral interests in 6 counties of South Texas. He also provides the philanthropic and grantmaking leadership to his team members in Austin and South Texas. Prior to this, Sergio spent 7 years managing GALO OPS, LLC (formerly GALO Land & Cattle Co.), the ranching business begun by his aunt and uncle in 1951. Sergio was also a Vice President and Account Executive for 20 years at CGI Technologies and Solutions, an international professional consulting and technology firm. In this position, Sergio sold and managed complex IT systems integration projects with federal, state, municipal and commercial clients in Washington DC, London, Denver and Austin.

Sergio is a native of Alice, Texas, but grew up in Austin, where he resides with his wife Louise and three daughters. Sergio currently sits on a number of boards, including serving as the Development Committee Chair of the Austin PBS Board of Directors and the Board of Trustees at St. Edward’s University. In the past, Sergio has also served on the boards of Con Mi MADRE, Breakthrough Central Texas and the Austin Community Foundation where he helped to found the Hispanic Impact Fund. He is also currently a member of the Philosophical Society of Texas, the Austin Area Research Organization (AARO) and the University of Texas Chancellor’s Council Executive Committee.

Sergio holds a Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University in Architecture and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. 

Dr. Robert H. Vela Jr. began serving as the 22nd president of Texas A&M University-Kingsville on June 15, 2022. His career has been dedicated to promoting access and opportunity to higher education across the state. Dr. Vela previously served as President of San Antonio College—one of the largest community colleges in the nation— from 2014-June 2022. Under his collaborative leadership, Dr. Vela developed a strategic plan that advanced the Alamo Community College District's goal of transforming San Antonio College into the best community college in the nation.

In 2021, the college earned the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence--the nation’s premier recognition of achievement and performance among America’s community colleges. He has also served in leadership roles at San Jacinto College and Coastal Bend College.

Dr. Vela launched his career in higher education at Texas A&M University-Kingsville in 1997 and served in various roles at the university, including as Upward Bound Program Coordinator and Director of the Teacher Development Center. In 2021, Dr. Vela joined the Board of Directors of Excelencia in Education, an organization accelerating Latino student success in higher education to address the U.S. economy’s need for a highly educated workforce and civic leadership.

A nationally recognized leader in higher education, Dr. Vela has also served as the President of the National Community College Hispanic Council and on the American Association of Community Colleges Board of Directors. In 2018, he received the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce. He has taught courses in higher education administration and leadership and educational leadership and counseling throughout his 20 years in higher education.

A native of Alice, TX, Dr. Vela earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Texas A&M-Kingsville. In 2015, he received the Javelina Distinguished Alumni Award.