Trustees Welcome Entrepreneur, Tech Expert, Investor

The Board of Trustees welcomed three new members last month. At their April meeting, the trustees elected S. D. Shibulal (MET’88), cofounder, member of the board, and chief executive officer of Infosys Technologies Limited, a global consulting and information technology services company, and Alicia Mullen (CAS’83), founder and principal of the early-stage investment fund Washing Pond Ventures. In addition, Robert Hildreth, the outgoing chair of the Board of Overseers, was elected a trustee.

Elected to the Board of Overseers were Karen Elliott House (Hon.’03), a trustee emerita, and Ryan Roth Gallo (LAW’99). Shamim Dahod (CGS’76, CAS’78, MED’87) was chosen as Overseer chair and became an ex-officio trustee.

“These new trustees and overseers have displayed an uncommon dedication to Boston University through their good counsel and leadership within the University community and their generous support of its programs,” says Robert A. Knox (CAS’74, GSM’75), chair of the Board of Trustees. “We look forward to working with them to help strengthen the University’s position as one of the great international centers for learning and research.”

Shibulal, who cofounded Infosys in 1981 with six partners, started out by first spearheading its project management, followed by client relationships in North America. A decade later, he took a sabbatical to join Sun Microsystems, where he was responsible for designing and implementing the company’s first e-commerce application. He returned to Infosys in 1997 to establish and lead its internet consultancy practice and moved on to several leadership roles at the group level before taking over as COO in June 2007. The company, which reported $6.04 billion in revenues for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2011, now has more than 130,000 employees and offices in the United States, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom, as well as India, China, Australia, Japan, Germany, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Poland, Canada, and many other countries.

A member of the Metropolitan College Dean’s Advisory Board and the University’s International Advisory Board, Shibulal’s other board affiliations include the Seoul International Business Advisory Council, the Globethics.net International Board of Foundation, and the Global Corporate Governance Forum’s Private Sector Advisory Group. In 1999, Shibulal and his wife, Kumari, founded the Sarojini Damodaran Foundation to provide financial support in education and health care to needy people from underprivileged sections of society. In 2004, they started the Advaith Foundation, primarily born out of their conviction that quality education is the cornerstone of all developmental progress in society. These trusts make available continued scholarships to meritorious students. They have also partnered with leading hospitals in India to assist the needy in areas such as pediatric health care, particularly life-saving cardiac surgeries. In 2009, they opened the Samhita Academy, which focuses on providing inclusive education to preprimary to middle school students in India.

Mullen (left), a member of the College of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Leadership Advisory Board, was among the first women to earn a bachelor’s degree in what was then the college’s new computer science department. (She also played on the BU tennis team.) In 2008, she was honored with a CAS Distinguished Alumni Award.

Mullen has served as senior vice president and chief information officer of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as well as the CIO and senior vice president of First Options of Chicago. She is the former president of the board of the Redmoon Theater, an international nonprofit public arts organization based in Chicago. She and her husband, Timothy, manage the Mullen Family Foundation, which has awarded grants to organizations in the arts, education, and human services.

Hildreth (right) is founder and president of International Bank Services, Inc., which trades and services bank loans from Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America. Previously, he was a vice president of Citibank and senior vice president of Drexel Burnham Lambert in New York.

In 2009, Hildreth founded Families United in Educational Leadership, which offers college admissions planning workshops and a matched savings program for first-generation college students and their families in the Boston area. He serves on the CAS Leadership Advisory Board and the University’s International Advisory Board and is a participant and financial supporter of BU’s initiative in the Chelsea public schools.

Dahod (left) is a primary care physician and board-certified internist in private practice in Chelmsford, Mass. She has been a member of the School of Medicine Board of Visitors since 2004 and the University’s Board of Overseers since 2008.

In 2008, Dahod and her husband pledged $10.5 million to MED for the establishment of the Shamim and Ashraf Dahod Breast Cancer Research Center at the school. The gift will also fund assistant professor and international scholar positions at the center and support the construction of MED’s new student residence. The couple has cosponsored several philanthropic projects over the years, including the construction of mosques in Massachusetts and New Jersey, a 280-bed hospital in Bombay, India, a medical clinic in Yemen, where physicians from the United States provide pro-bono specialty services, and schools and health care facilities in underdeveloped areas.

House (right), a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

She joined the Washington, D.C., bureau of the Wall Street Journal as an energy industry correspondent in 1974, and later became a diplomatic correspondent and foreign editor. In 1984, she received a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for her coverage of the Middle East. She has served as vice president and president of Dow Jones International Group, and in 2002 she was named senior vice president of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal. House is a recipient of the University of Texas Distinguished Alumnus Award and is on the advisory committee of the UT College of Communication.

Gallo (left), a member of the School of Law Dean’s Advisory Board, is a lawyer and homemaker. After graduating from LAW, she practiced corporate litigation in the Los Angeles and San Francisco offices of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP. She left the firm to raise her children, and maintains a primarily pro-bono practice focused on immigration and family law. She is married to Ernest J. Gallo, senior director of the spirits division of the E. & J. Gallo Winery.