Our Team
Amelia Miazad
Founding Director & Senior Research Fellow
Amelia Miazad is an expert in sustainable capitalism and founded and leads the Business in Society Institute at Berkeley Law. The Institute’s mission is to define and advance a legal and policy agenda that encourages companies to account for stakeholders and the environment.
Amelia teaches several courses at the intersection of stakeholder capitalism and corporate governance including: Introduction to Sustainable Capitalism & ESG, Business in Society Seminar, Corporations in Crisis, Social Enterprise Law, and Business and Human Rights. In addition to her in-residence teaching at Berkeley Law, Amelia has designed and teaches several executive education courses for C-Suite executives and board members around the world.
Amelia’s recent publications explore stakeholder governance and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) as a process for overseeing risk and a powerful tool for transforming corporate culture.
Amelia’s curriculum and scholarship rely heavily on input from experts who are implementing environmental and social considerations into their business and investment practices. She regularly presents to audiences of corporate executives in the US, South America, and Europe.
Education
J.D., UC Berkeley School of Law (2002)
Danielle K. Santos
Research & Project Associate
Our Advisory Board
Allison A. Bennington
Partner in the Strategic Advisory Group | PJT Partners
Allison Bennington is the Global Head of ESG at PJT Partners and is based in London. Ms. Bennington has extensive experience in global corporate strategy, ESG business strategy and solutions, and corporate governance.
Prior to joining PJT Partners, Ms. Bennington was a Partner and the Chief Global Relations Officer of ValueActCapital, a $multi-billion investment fund that works constructively with its portfolio companies to build sustainable value for the long‐term. While at ValueAct Capital, she led many of its ESG efforts, and helped to found the ValueAct Spring Fund, a $1.5 billion impact investment fund that invested in companies
solving social and environmental problems.
Over her 17 year tenure, Ms. Bennington also led ValueAct’s global strategy and engagement efforts with a diverse set of stakeholders. Prior to joining ValueAct, Ms. Bennington was the General Counsel and helped to found Atriax Ltd., an institutional electronic foreign exchange trading platform formed by Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Reuters. Before joining Atriax, Ms. Bennington was a Managing Director and ran the legal department for Robertson Stephens, a full-service investment bank. Ms. Bennington was appointed by former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton to the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee (IAC) and is on its Investor as Owner Subcommittee, and she continues to act as an informal advisor on ESG matters. She is a member of the American Legal Institute and the Advisory Board of the Berkeley Center for Law, Business, and Economics. Ms. Bennington is a former member of the Advisory Board of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).
Heidi DuBois
Executive Vice President & Head of ESG | Edelman
Heidi DuBois is an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) expert with two decades of experience in the legal, corporate governance, and sustainability areas. Heidi has advised numerous companies on ESG strategy, execution and reporting; engagement with investors and other stakeholders; and partnerships with NGOs and civil society organizations to advance ESG objectives.
Heidi is passionate about defining the evolving role of business in society, grounded in the proposition that companies with a clear sense of purpose are better positioned for long-term success. As Head of ESG Heidi works with boards and senior executives on the design, execution, and communication of their ESG strategies to multiple stakeholders. Prior to joining Edelman, Heidi was ESG Director for the Society for Corporate Governance, where she developed new programs and managed thought leadership and engagement on emerging ESG trends for boards of directors, business leaders, and corporate governance professionals. Previously, she oversaw the corporate social responsibility and philanthropic functions for BNY Mellon and was instrumental in redesigning the firm’s approach to ESG reporting and communications, as well as executing partnerships with external stakeholders, including the United Nations Foundation. She also co-authored reports on the opportunities inherent in gender-lens investing, one of which launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Earlier in her career, Heidi practiced law at Debevoise & Plimpton before serving in positions of increasing responsibility in governance and sustainability at Assurant and PepsiCo. She helped establish the Berkeley Sustainable Business and Investment Forum, focusing on evolving concepts of risk management, capital allocation, and sustainable business practices as contributors to long-term value creation.
Heidi holds an A.B. from Harvard College and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. She serves on the Advisory Boards of the Business in Society Institute at Berkeley Law School and the GreenBiz GreenFin Summit. She is a past member of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Leaders Forum, a past president of the New York chapter of the Society for Corporate Governance, and serves as a Trustee for the Unitarian Church of All Souls.
Robert G. Eccles
Visiting Professor of Management Practice | Said Business School, Oxford University
Robert G. Eccles is a leading authority on the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in resource allocation decisions by companies and investors. He is also the world’s foremost academic expert on integrated reporting.
Currently, Eccles is a Visiting Professor of Management Practice at the Said Business School, University of Oxford. Eccles has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, and was a Berkeley Social Impact Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He was a Professor at Harvard Business School and received tenure in 1989.
Eccles serves on the Advisory Board of the JANA Impact Capital Fund and advises the non-profit Impact Management Project. He is on the board of the Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets at the Stockholm School of Economics, was the founding Chairman of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, and was one of the founders of the International Integrated Reporting Council. In 2018 Eccles was named by Barron’s as one of the top 20 influencers in ESG investing. Eccles is currently on the advisory board of UC Berkeley School of Law’s Business in Society Institute.
Silvia M. Garrigó
Senior Vice President and Chief ESG Officer | The Royal Caribbean Group
Silvia Garrigó has broad experience providing sustainability, legal, investor relations, communications, and crisis management counsel to senior executives of global publicly held companies. She has a successful track record of creating strategic plans and communications for a wide range of stakeholders, including investors, media, industry groups, business partners, and employees. She has a demonstrated ability to set clear enterprise-wide goals by building consensus across vertical and horizontal lines of management and with diverse stakeholders and working in cross-functional team environments with strong leadership, management, and mentoring skills. She is intuitively sensitive to cultural differences and understands interplay of legal, geo-political, and social and environmental issues in a global business context.
Silvia has served on corporate responsibility boards for UC Berkeley, Haas School of Management, and as Vice-Chair for the CR Committee for the US Council of International Business. She is frequently sought out for speaking engagements on corporate responsibility and as a guest lecturer in many academic institutions. She has served the Advisory Board of Duke University’s Center for Energy, Development and the Global Environment, the UN Global Compact on Human Rights and Labor Working Group and the ABA International Advisory Board.
Keir Gumbs
Chief Legal Officer | Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.
Keir Gumbs is Chief Legal Officer of Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., where he oversees the legal, compliance, and physical security teams. Before Broadridge Keir served as Deputy General Counsel and Deputy Corporate Secretary of Uber Technologies, Inc., where he oversaw Payments, M&A, Finance, Real Estate and Commercial Transactions, Corporate Governance, Marketing, ESG, Capital Markets, and related matters.
Prior to Uber, Keir was a Partner for nearly a decade at Covington & Burling, where he represented a cross-section of constituencies in securities and governance matters, including companies ranging in size from Fortune 50 companies to venture-backed firms, as well as public pension funds, hedge funds, faith-based investors and trade associations.
Keir’s career includes six years of service with the SEC, where, immediately prior to joining Covington & Burling in 2005, he served as Counsel to SEC Commissioner Roel C. Campos. In that position, Keir advised the Commissioner on a variety of matters arising under federal securities law with an emphasis on corporate finance issues under the Securities Act of 1933, issuer reporting obligations under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, corporate governance developments and SEC enforcement actions. Prior to serving as Counsel to Commissioner Campos, Keir spent five years as a staff attorney and later a Special Counsel in the Office of Chief Counsel in the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance.
Seth Jaffe
Executive Vice President and General Counsel | Levi Strauss & Co.
Seth Jaffe is Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Levi Strauss & Co. and leads the global legal department in its support of businesses operating in over 110 countries. He is responsible for all aspects of legal, ethics and compliance, global security, and governance matters, in addition to acting as counselor to the board of directors and executive leadership. He is a member of the company’s Executive Committee and Global Leadership Team. Seth also oversees the Levi Strauss Foundation.
Prior to joining Levi Strauss & Co. in 2011, Seth served as Senior Vice President and General Counsel of specialty retailer Williams-Sonoma, Inc. Before that, Seth was Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel of CareThere Inc., leading a broad range of business and legal areas for a healthcare technology company backed by Johnson & Johnson. Seth had an earlier stint at Levi Strauss & Co., where he held roles in the U.S., Asia Pacific, and European businesses.
He began his career at the McCutchen Doyle law firm in San Francisco. Seth has served on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations. He received degrees with honors from both Brown University and the University of Michigan Law School. In 2015, Seth was named Bay Area Corporate Counsel of the Year by the Silicon Valley Business Journal and the San Francisco Business Times.
Susan Mac Cormac
Partner & Co-Chair of the Energy and Cleantech Groups | Morrison & Foerster | Member of President’s Council of Ceres
Suz Mac Cormac is a corporate partner at Morrison & Foerster. Her practice focuses on late-stage financings, secondaries, and other corporate transactions for traditional investors, as well as the top investors dedicated to impacting, from “impact first” foundations, to family offices and private equity funds.
She co-led the drafting group for the first of the new corporate forms (the Social Purpose Corporation in California), has created hybrid/tandem corporate structures and crafted debt and equity investments that blend impact with traditional financial terms, and has used corporate law to develop creative capital market solutions to pressing environmental problems. She also advises the boards of public and private companies on corporate governance and fiduciary duties as applied to sustainability and climate change.
Suz was named the Most Innovative Lawyer in North America in 2015 by the Financial Times and has been listed as one of the Women Leaders in Tech Law by The Recorder in 2016, 2018, and 2019. She was the founding board member of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, a member of the Ceres President’s Council, board member of the Earth Genome Project, and the Business for Social Responsibility. She has joined the faculty at both the Stanford Director’s College and the Northwestern Corporate Counsel Institute and is an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley School of Law teaching a course on Social Enterprise. She was recently engaged as an expert and testified in two public hearings at the CPUC on corporate form and governance for utilities, including PG&E.
Anne Simpson
Managing Investment Director for Board Governance & Sustainability| CalPERS
Anne is CalPERS’ Managing Investment Director for Board Governance & Sustainability, responsible for strategic initiatives across the total fund where she is a member of the Investment Management Committee and reports to the CEO. Anne leads CalPERS’ Sustainable Investment Strategy, which focuses on sustainable value creation through the effective management of three forms of capital: financial, human, and natural. Priorities include data and
corporate reporting, research through the Sustainable Investments Research Initiatives, financial markets regulation, climate change, diversity, and inclusion, including emerging managers and CalPERS’ work as co-founder of 3D (Diverse Director DataSource).
Anne oversees CalPERS’ global partnerships including serving on the Steering Committee and chairing the Asia Advisory Group for Climate Action 100+, a global investor alliance of $54 trillion which CalPERS convened and. co-founded. She was recently appointed to the California Governor's Climate Risk Disclosure Advisory Group. Anne serves on the Senior Advisory Board at the Center for Responsible Business at Haas Business School and as a Senior Advisor at the Institute for Business in Society at UC Berkeley and Harvard’s Institutional Investor
Forum Advisory Council. Anne was formerly Senior Faculty Fellow and Lecturer at the Yale School of Management, where she taught with Ira Millstein on ‘The Role of the Corporation in Society’.
Anne is the author of “The Financial Ecosystem: The Role of Finance in Achieving Sustainability” (Palgrave MacMillan) with Satyajit Bose and Dong Guo of Columbia University, “Fair Shares: The Future of Shareholder Power and Responsibility” with Jonathan Charkham (Oxford University Press) and “The Greening of Global Investment: How the Environment, Ethics, and Politics are Reshaping Strategies” (The Economist). She is an editorial board member of the journal Directors & Boards. She sits on the strategy group for the UN Secretary General’s Global Investors for Sustainable Development,
and steering committee for the UN Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance. Anne is a member of the Leadership Council at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
Anne has served on both the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s Investor Advisory Group. She was formerly an elected Board member at the Council of Institutional Investors and in parallel, its representative to the International Financial Reporting Standards’ Advisory Council. Anne was recognized in 2019 by TIME Magazine as one of 15 women globally leading the fight on climate change and as one of the 100 Most Influential Women in US Finance by Barron’s in 2020. She is cited by the. National Association of Corporate Directors as one of the 100 most influential leaders in the boardroom. In roles prior to joining CalPERS, Anne served as the first Executive Director of the International Corporate Governance Network, and as the head of the World Bank-OECD Global Corporate Governance Forum. Previously she was Joint Managing Director of Pensions & Investment Research Consultants Ltd. Anne read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University, where she was awarded a BA and MA, plus a Slater Fellowship at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.
