Board of Trustees Welcomes Four New Members

Peter J. Levine (ENG’83), a partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Photo by Peter DaSilva

The four recently elected members of the Board of Trustees come from varied fields of expertise—business, finance, medicine, and religion. They are Peter J. Levine, a partner in venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Jorge Morán, former president and chief executive officer of Sovereign Bank and Santander Holdings, USA, Bishop Sudarshana Devadhar of the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church, and outgoing Board of Overseers chair Shamim A. Dahod, a primary care physician and board-certified internist, who as Overseers chair had been an ex officio trustee and is now an elected trustee.

“We are extremely pleased to welcome the extraordinary leadership and vast expertise Peter Levine, Jorge Morán, Bishop Devadhar, and Dr. Dahod bring to the board,” says Robert A. Knox (CAS’74, GSM’75), Board of Trustees chair. “We look forward to working alongside our new colleagues as we continue to strengthen this University’s reputation as an international center for academic and research excellence.”

Levine (ENG’83) is a partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Specializing in the technology sector, the firm focuses on software, back-end infrastructure, cloud computing, enterprise applications, and consumer, mobile-Internet, data-storage, and networking functions. Since its founding in 2009, the company has raised $2.7 billion in assets and its portfolio includes investments in Airbnb, Apptio, Box, Fab, Facebook, Foursquare, GitHub, Jawbone, Lookout, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Levine was CEO of XenSource, the leading provider of open source virtualization solutions. When the company was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2007, Levine became the senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center and Cloud Division. At Citrix, he was responsible for managing relationships with entrepreneurs, start-ups, and venture capital firms. In 2011, the company reported sales of $2.21 billion and had approximately 6,000 employees.

A lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Levine also serves on many boards, among them Actifio, DataGravity, GitHub, Instart Logic, Mixpanel, and Udacity.

Morán is former president and CEO of Sovereign Bank, N.A., and Santander Holdings, USA, where he managed all of the Santander Group’s assets in the United States. In 2011, the company, with 722 branches and 8,700 employees, reported $7.175 billion in earnings.

In 2010, Sovereign Bank and Santander Universities, the education arm of Sovereign’s parent company, gave the University a gift to finance scholarships for School of Public Health graduate students studying abroad and to fund the Hispanic Voices Program, a high school initiative coordinated by the College of Arts & Sciences romance studies department.

Morán joined the Santander Group in 2002 as head of asset management and in 2005 was appointed director of the board and chief operating officer of Abbey, Santander’s business unit in the United Kingdom. Between 2006 and 2010, he was senior executive vice president of Banco Santander and head of its Global Insurance and Direct Banking Division. Before joining Santander, Morán was chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley for Spain and Portugal and was a partner of brokerage and asset management company AB Asesores.

Born into a family of clergy, Devadhar, whose name means “follower of God,” began his pastorate as a deacon at the Church of South India, Mercara Coorg, India.

Upon his election to the episcopacy in 2004, he was assigned to the New Jersey Episcopal Area, where he led the conference to the first net gain in membership in 45 years. Prior to that, Devadhar served for eight years as the district superintendent for the Ontario District of the North Central New York Conference. He became Bishop of the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church on September 1, 2012. The conference includes 632 churches, with 93,000 congregants.

Devadhar has served as a trustee of Drew University, Centenary College, and Pennington School, all in New Jersey. He has taught courses at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, Karnataka Theological College in Mangalore, India, and other institutions and has lectured on religious matters at the US Military Academy at West Point and at the Oxford Institute.

Dahod (CGS’76, CAS’78, MED’87) is a primary care physician and board-certified internist in private practice in Chelmsford, Mass. Since 1995 she has been an active staff member of Lowell General Hospital, where she also serves as a member of the Board of Governors.

Her husband, Ashraf Dahod, was cofounder, director, president, and CEO of Starent Networks, a leading provider of networking solutions and infrastructure equipment used by wireless carriers to offer enhanced voice and data services. The company served over 60 carriers in 25 countries, including Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the United States, until its 2009 purchase by Cisco Systems for $2.9 billion.

In 2008, the Dahods pledged $10.5 million to the School of Medicine for the establishment of the Shamim and Ashraf Dahod Breast Cancer Research Center. The gift also funds assistant professor and international scholar positions at the center and helped support the construction of MED’s new residence, which was completed in August 2012.

A member of the Dawoodi Bohra, a Shiite Muslim sect, Dahod has discussed the role of women in Muslim society in a U.S. News and World Report article titled “Muslim Mainstream.”

With her husband she has cosponsored several philanthropic projects, including a new state-of-the-art building at Lowell General Hospital, which opened in 2012; the construction of mosques in Massachusetts and New Jersey; a 280-bed hospital in Bombay, India, which opened in 2005; and a medical clinic in Yemen, where physicians from the United States provide pro bono specialty services on a two-week rotating basis.

Dahod has been a member of the School of Medicine Board of Visitors since 2004 and the University’s Board of Overseers since 2008; she was elected chair in September 2011.

Tom Testa can be reached at ttesta@bu.edu.