PA Events Speaker Request
Campus events can be a great way to attract voter attention, get students to register to vote, and build excitement about Democratic candidates.
The PA Democratic Party can often make special guests available to attend and speak at your event.
Examples of special guests include campaign officials, elected officials (local, state, and federal), administration officials, and celebrities.
If your mentee chapter wants to host an event, they should complete the official Harris-Walz campaign Speaker Request Form and email Nancy Bekavac ([email protected] ) once they have submitted a request.
PA Dems will take your request and let you know who they can make available to you. Hurry, though! Time is running out and PA Dems needs a few weeks’ notice to process requests.
Confirmed Speakers
Cornell William Brooks
Cornell William Brooks is Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also Director of The William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the School’s Center for Public Leadership, and Visiting Professor of the Practice of Prophetic Religion and Public Leadership at Harvard Divinity School. He is the former president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights attorney, and an ordained minister.
Professor Brooks is the recipient of the Harvard Kennedy School Innovations in Teaching Award. Through the Trotter Collaborative, his social justice advocacy clinical class has enabled students to do pioneering policy work with mayors across the U.S. and abroad; nonprofits from the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to Black Voters Matter; as well as organizations from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism to the National Council of Churches.
Prior to coming to HKS, Professor Brooks was the visiting professor of social ethics, law, and justice movements at Boston University’s School of Law and School of Theology. He was a visiting fellow and director of the Campaign and Advocacy Program at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics in 2017. Professor Brooks served as the 18th president of the NAACP from 2014 to 2017. Under his leadership, the NAACP secured 12 significant legal victories, including laying the groundwork for the first statewide legal challenge to prison-based gerrymandering. He also reinvigorated the activist social justice heritage of the NAACP, dramatically increasing membership, particularly online and among millennials. Among the many demonstrations from Ferguson to Flint during his tenure, he conceived and led “America’s Journey for Justice” march from Selma, Alabama to Washington, D.C., over 40 days and 1000 miles.
Prior to leading the NAACP, Professor Brooks was president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, where he led the passage of pioneering criminal justice reform and housing legislation, six bills in less than five years. He also served as senior counsel and acting director of the Office of Communications Business Opportunities at the Federal Communications Commission, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Greater Washington, and a trial attorney at both the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the U.S. Department of Justice. As a DOJ trial attorney, he secured a record-setting settlement for housing discrimination victims and filed the first government case alleging housing discrimination against a nursing home. Professor Brooks served as judicial clerk for the Chief Judge Sam J. Ervin, III, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Professor Brooks holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and member of the Yale Law and Policy Review, and a Master of Divinity from Boston University’s School of Theology, where he was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholar. Professor Brooks has a B.A. from Jackson State University. He is the recipient of several honorary doctorates including: Boston University, Drexel University, Saint Peter’s University and Payne Theological Seminary as well as the highest alumni awards from Boston University and Boston University School of Theology. Professor Brooks is a fourth-generation ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Rep. Seth Moulton
Seth Moulton is a father, a husband, and a veteran who represents a new generation of Democratic leaders in Washington.
Inspired to public service by his most important mentor in life, the great Black Minister Reverend Peter Gomes, he joined the Marines in 2001, days after his college graduation and a few months before the attacks on 9/11. Leading a frontline infantry platoon in the first Marine company to enter Baghdad, he later worked to establish a free and independent Iraqi media, and served as a liaison to senior Iraqi military and political leaders for General Petraeus. While he was an outspoken critic of the Iraq War, he proudly served four tours, sharing the view of many of our servicemembers that he didn’t want anyone to go in his place.
After returning home from Iraq, Seth used the G.I. Bill to earn joint degrees in business and public administration, and then became the managing director of Texas Central, where he worked to build America’s first high-speed rail line. But it wasn’t long before he was called to serve once again, this time in his home district in Massachusetts.
Seth challenged the establishment with a platform of bringing a new generation of leadership to Washington, fighting for progressive values while reaching across the aisle to get things done.
Named the Most Effective Freshman Democrat in his first term, Seth has consistently delivered results in a divided Washington. No House or Senate office has won more Democracy Awards from the Congressional Management Foundation than his team. He earned one in 2018 for Transparency, a second in 2020 for having the best constituent services in all of Congress, and a third in 2022 for Achievement in Innovation and Modernization.
His legislation created the 988 National Suicide Lifeline, which is now live in all fifty states. Seth has delivered Faster Care for Veterans, modernized Government Travel, and delivered on ALS Disability Insurance. His American High-Speed Rail Act is the most ambitious and forward-thinking infrastructure package before Congress today, and his G.I. Bill Restoration Act would finally restore long-denied benefits to Black veterans of World War II.
Today, Seth sits on three committees. He is a member of the House Armed Services Committee where he serves as Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. At the beginning of the 118th Congress, he was selected by party leadership to sit on the new Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the U.S. and China, which was created to shape a diplomatic, economic, and military strategy toward the Chinese Communist Party that preserves American leadership and avoids war.
As a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Seth is the Congressional leader on high-speed rail and other next-generation infrastructure.
Back home in Massachusetts, Seth works tirelessly to support local small businesses and veterans, advance civil rights, and grow the economy. He created a model intergovernmental task force that has spurred over $1 billion in federal economic development funding for the city of Lynn, and he forged a unique partnership between fishermen and scientists to ensure the long-term sustainability of fish stocks and the local fishing economy.
Most importantly, Seth is the proud father of two girls, Emmy and Caroline. His amazing wife Liz is a sports industry executive, and they live in Salem, Massachusetts.
Wes Oliver
Wesley M. Oliver is director of the criminal justice program, and professor of law at Duquesne University School of Law. His teaching and scholarship have examined numerous aspects of criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence.
His multiple books and journal publications have addressed issues of search and seizure, interrogations, material witness detentions, wiretapping, plea bargaining, the doctrine of chances, approaches to defining terms in criminal statutes, and the history of policing. Most recently, he has focused on the light historical context can shed on the appropriate uses of constitutional criminal procedure decisions.
In 2018, Oliver published a book, The Prohibition Era and Policing: A Legacy of Misregulation (Vanderbilt Univ. Press 2018), that demonstrates how America’s Noble Experiment played a pivotal role in creating many of the judicially created limits on modern police – and suggests that a system more responsive to concerns of police brutality and wrongful conviction would have been possible had state courts in the 1920s – and the United States Supreme Court in the 1960s – not been so bold in guarding against a distinctly Prohibition-Era concern, illegal searches and seizures.
Professor Oliver has presented his current work, an artificial intelligence device to assist police officers in determining whether they have adequate suspicion to search a car during a drug interdiction stop, at national and international conferences on the intersection of computer science and law. He is also working on a popular history of a small Mississippi locale that saw some of the worst civil rights abuses in American history. Kemper County, Mississippi, is best known to lawyers as the location of the infamous tortured interrogation at issue in the Supreme Court case, Brown v. Mississippi (1936) but was already known at that time as the locus of uniquely extreme racial violence, from the ouster of Native Americans that led to its founding, to an extraordinary number of lynchings that doubled any other Mississippi county, to two separate massacres of black citizens that grabbed national headlines. The story of this small county provides a vehicle for describing many aspects of America’s sad history of race relations, from the Trail of Tears, to slavery, to reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Era.
Oliver earned J.S.D. and LL.M. degrees from Yale University and J.D. and B.A. degrees from the University of Virginia. He is licensed to practice law in Tennessee. He began his legal career as a criminal defense lawyer in Nashville and is licensed to practice law in Tennessee.
Joshua Spodek
Joshua Spodek PhD MBA is the premier voice in sustainability leadership. He hosts the award-winning This Sustainable Life podcast, is a four-time TEDx speaker, bestselling author of Initiative and Leadership Step by Step, professor at NYU, and leadership coach.
He speaks on leadership, entrepreneurship, and environmental leadership at institutions such as Boston Consulting Group, Google, IBM, PwC, S&P, Children’s Aid Society, The New York Academy of Science, NY Public Library, Harvard, Princeton, West Point, MIT, Stanford, Rice, USC, Berkeley, INSEAD, the NY Academy of Science, and more.
He holds a PhD in astrophysics and an MBA from Columbia, where he studied under a Nobel Laureate, after formative childhood years in a gang-ridden neighborhood of Philadelphia. He helped build an X-ray observational satellite with the European Space Agency and NASA.
He left academia to found a venture to market his invention—a technology to show motion pictures to moving subways—installing displays on four continents. He holds six patents and founded two education ventures.
He has been featured on the Daily Show and published in The New Yorker, TIME, Inc., Quartz, Ars Technica, and Psychology Today. He has been called “best and brightest” (Esquire’s Genius issue), “astrophysicist turned new media whiz” (NBC), and “rocket scientist” (Forbes).
His clients include start-up founders, executives of publicly traded companies, and employees of McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Deloitte, JP Morgan Chase, Google, IBM, Exxon, and the US Navy and Army, as well as graduates of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and others. He has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Forbes, Esquire, Entrepreneur, Nikkei Shimbun, the South China Morning Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, Fox, and CNN.
He credits his stellar reviews to his experiential, active, project-based technique with minimal lecture or reading or writing papers.
As an artist he has installed public works in Bryant Park (NYC), Union Square (NYC), and Amsterdam’s Dam Square. He has had solo shows in New York and group shows nationwide, including Art Basel Miami Beach. He studied Meisner Technique at the William Esper Studio. He has taught art at Parsons and NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He devoted years to learning and practicing the social and emotional skills of attraction and dating, becoming the #1 coach in the #1 market for the #1 guru. Since those years were in his late 30s and early 40s, he tended to coach men and women in long-term relationships or newly single from them.
He ran six marathons (3:51 best), rowed two, competed at the world and national level of Ultimate (#5 at nationals, and #11 at worlds), including the first ultimate tournament in North Korea. He swam across the Hudson River twice, did over 230,000 burpees, wrote over 5,300 blog posts, took over 800 cold showers, and jumped out of two airplanes. He visited North Korea twice and swam across the Hudson River twice.
You cannot lead others to live by values you live the opposite of, nor do you know what you’re doing if you don’t practice. Therefore, he takes over 4 years to produce one load of garbage, hasn’t flown (by choice) since March 2016, unplugged his refrigerator since September 2021, disconnected his apartment from the electric grid in May 2022, and his carbon footprint is about 1 ton per year. He has picked up at least one piece of litter per day since April 2017.He has lived in Paris, Ahmedabad (India), Philadelphia, and Shanghai. He lives in New York and blogs daily at joshuaspodek.com.
Howard Salis
Prof. Howard Salis is an Associate Professor of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Synthetic Biology at Penn State University. He earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rutgers University.
He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. His research lab develops predictive biophysical models of gene expression and regulation that have enabled automated computational design of synthetic genetic systems, including biosensors, genetic circuits, metabolic pathways, and synthetic genomes. Researchers in his lab integrate both computational and experimental techniques, developing and testing models at the molecular and system levels. He received the DARPA Young Faculty in 2010 and the NSF Career Award in 2013. He also founded De Novo DNA to provide a user-friendly web-based platform for designing and engineering organisms. Over 10000 registered researchers have used the platform to design over 850,000 synthetic genetic systems.
Zachary Brown
Zach grew up surrounded by the wilderness of Southeast Alaska. With parents in the National Park Service, Zach had ample opportunity as a boy to explore the mountains and fjords of this region, experiences that gave him a lasting love of the natural world. Attending college in Southern California, Zach studied chemistry and biology. When the opportunity came to travel to the Arctic, his life changed forever.
Zach spent a field season in the high Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, observing how seabirds are responding to a changing climate. This unforgettable experience led Zach to pursue a PhD at Stanford University, where he continued to study how changing sea ice affects the marine biological communities of the polar regions, especially the phytoplankton that form the first link of the food chain. During his time at Stanford, Zach was thrilled to undertake multiple research expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic. Completing his PhD studies in spring 2014, Zach set off on a 4-month, 2300-mile solo trek, hiking and paddling from Stanford to his Alaskan homeland, to spread the word about creating Tidelines Institute.
Steve Jennings
Steve Jennings is an accomplished strategy expert, operating executive, and corporate board member with over 30 years of experience advising Global Fortune 500 c-suite executives and Boards of Directors. Steve is recognized for his expertise in helping companies across a diverse set of industries address their most challenging issues including corporate strategy, M&A, organizational transformation, business model transformation and succession planning. He also brings deep corporate governance experience through his work with client boards and service on public, private and non profit boards.
Steve is currently the Lead Independent Director and Chair of the Governance Committee of Analog Devices Inc., a global semiconductor company. Steve’s previous public company board service includes Aspen Technology, Inc., a provider of software and services for the process industries, where he was the Lead Director and the Chair of the Board and LTX-Credence Corporation, a semiconductor test equipment manufacturer now owned by Cohu, Inc., where he was the Chair of the Compensation Committee. Steve helped guide these companies through a broad set of issues including transformational acquisitions, market expansion strategies and private equity exits that positioned these organizations to significantly increase shareholder returns. Steve recently retired as a senior Strategy Principal with a track record of leadership at Deloitte. He has served as a trusted advisor to the c-suites and boards of directors of his clients and was one of the firm’s most sought-after experts on enterprise growth, M&A, organization transformations and strategy. Under his leadership of Deloitte’s U.S Hospitality sector, the practice grew over 25% per year, and he was responsible for the firm’s relationships with their most significant hospitality clients. Steve was a member of the Deloitte Automotive Leadership team and was responsible for the relationship with one of its most important global OEM clients. In addition, Steve worked extensively in the life sciences, healthcare and semiconductor sectors. Steve was a member of both Deloitte’s U.S. Board of Directors and the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Global Board of Directors. He chaired the Governance Committee and ESG sub-committee for the U.S. firm and served on the Compensation, Succession, and Cyber Security Committees of the Global Board. He was also a senior member of Deloitte’s Center for Board Effectiveness. Prior to Deloitte, Steve was the CEO/Managing Partner and Board member of Monitor Group, a top-tier global strategy firm, where he held increasing leadership roles culminating in his election as CEO in 2006. In that capacity Steve had global operational and financial responsibility for the firm and he led Monitor through both the 2008-09 financial crisis and into the successful acquisition by Deloitte. Steve is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the venture philanthropy firm New Profit, Inc. Steve received a B.A. from Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics as a Marshall Scholar. He earned his undergraduate degree in Economics at Dartmouth College. He is also a Certified member of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD).
Gautam Mukunda
Gautam Mukunda is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and innovation. He often jokes that his life’s ambition is to have the world’s most confusing resume and that he’s most of the way there. He is Managing Director of the Two Rivers Group and the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) and Picking Presidents: How To Make The Most Consequential Decision in the World (University of California Press, 2022), He is a Lecturer at the Yale School of Management, teaches in the Senior Executive Fellows Program of the Harvard Kennedy School, and is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He was an Assistant Professor of Management at Harvard Business School and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, where he created and taught the leadership program for the first two classes of the Schwarzman Scholarship.
Gautam was Head of Research at Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm founded by his mentor Clayton Christensen. He has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Security Studies, Slate, Fast Company, Parameters, Politics and the Life Sciences, and Systems and Synthetic Biology on topics including leadership, reforming the financial sector, military innovation, network-centric warfare, the policy implications of synthetic biology, and the TV show Mad Men. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Economist, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and on All Things Considered. He is the Exclusive Leadership Consultant to U.S. Soccer and a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a Senior Advisor to America’s Frontier Fund, the host of Nasdaq’s podcast World Reimagined with Gautam Mukunda, and the regular guest host for GBH’s Greater Boston.
Gautam was a Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center and served on The Chief of Naval Operation’s Executive Advisory Panel. He is on the Board of Directors of Alden Scientific, which simulates health from individual biology with unprecedented fidelity, and the Advisory Boards of Fount Bio, Bionic Solutions, and Atro. He is a member of the board of directors and chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit which provides college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He is on the Board of Directors of Democracy House, a nonprofit devoted to strengthening American democracy by strengthening civic participation among young voters. He was an Overseer of the Boston Ballet and a member of the Museum Council of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. He was a member of the New England Regional Selection Committee for the White House Fellowship and the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership. He was chosen as a Public Voices Fellow of The Op Ed Project and is a Jeopardy Champion.Gautam received his PhD from MIT with a focus in International Relations and Security Studies. There he was a member of the Security Studies Program and the Program on Emerging Technologies, a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly, a Carnegie Endowment Biosecurity Fellow, and a Nuclear Security Fellow of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. For his postdoc he was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at MIT’s Center for International Studies. He received his AB in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude. Before his academic career he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on healthcare.