Month: September 2022

As a public board director, chief marketing officer, and private investor, Tamara Bohlig has helped drive billions in aggregate revenue and accumulated assets under management for companies at the intersection of technology, financial services, and consumer products.

Over her thirty-year career, Tamara has led corporate and product marketing teams in developing, launching, and managing more than 30 enterprise and consumer products and services, including the marketing of 250+ investment products and 100+ platform services.

Today, Tamara serves as an Independent Board Director for Axos Financial, a publicly-traded fintech company. She is also owner operator of IMAGE Studios 360 in San Ramon, established to help women entrepreneurs thrive on their own terms.

Earlier, Tamara served as CMO of AssetMark and SmartBiz Loans, helping the former take its asset management platform public on the New York Stock Exchange. She also served as a senior executive across business development, client experience, and marketing for Charles Schwab & Co., Inc.’s investor retail and investment management divisions.

Her early career included vice president roles in marketing for JPMorgan Chase, N.A. (formerly WaMu and Providian), as well as product management, sales, and marketing roles for Hewlett-Packard, P&G, and General Mills.

Tamara holds two degrees from Northwestern University, including an MBA from The Kellogg School of Management, and a bachelor of arts in sociology. She attributes her career-long team leadership approach to her time as a dual-sport athlete at Northwestern, where she played lacrosse and earned All-American honors in field hockey and a trip to the Final Four. Tamara’s daughter, Emerson, is currently a sophomore on Northwestern’s lacrosse team.

Sammy Nettling is a Customer Success Manager at Google where she has worked in the AdTech space since graduating in 2018. She supports some of the largest accounts in their retail sector, including Amazon, Target, and Home Depot, by managing and optimizing the unification of their advertising and analytics products within the Google Marketing Platform. Sammy has also led multiple DEI contributions across the LatinX, Women@ and PRIDE@ Google communities, leaning into the community building space that was so prevalent throughout her time in Evanston.

While at Northwestern, Sammy served as an Executive Board member on both the Student Athlete Advisory Committee and NU for Life’s Advisory Board, and was also a student athlete representative on the NCAA Competition Oversight Committee. She was a 2x Big Ten Distinguished Scholar, and was awarded the Pomeranz Family Willie Award during her senior season. She continues to keep softball close to her heart, spending the majority of her spring months as the Big Ten Network’s studio analyst and a broadcaster for their in-conference productions, most recently covering the 2022 Wildcats on their return to Oklahoma City.

Meghan McKeown is a sports broadcaster and basketball analyst for the Big Ten Network, ESPN, Field of 68, and the Chicago Sky. Although she loves covering college football and men’s college hoops, her passion is rooted in growing women’s sports.

A Northwestern University class of 2014 graduate, Meghan played on the basketball team and served as a captain her senior year. She received her degree from the Medill School of Journalism.

Deputy Director of Athletics (Administration and Policy)/SWA Janna Blais began her Northwestern career on February 15, 2010. As Deputy Director of Athletics and Senior Woman Administrator at Northwestern, Blais leads and manages five departments for the Wildcats: compliance, academic services and student development, sports medicine, sports performance, and the David G. Kabiller NU for Life Program. She serves as the department’s liaison at Big Ten and NCAA meetings, and internally, is the liaison to the admissions, financial aid, provost, general counsel, dean of students and student conduct offices, as well as the Committee for Athletics and Recreation (CAR). Blais also manages and leads the sport administrator program for the department and works directly with women’s basketball and the women’s lacrosse program.

From February 2021 through April 2021 Blais served as the Interim Combe Family Vice President for Athletics and Recreation at Northwestern. In addition to her responsibilities in Evanston, Blais has been a leader in the broader landscape of college athletics in a variety of ways. In the summer of 2021, she was selected by the Women Leaders in College Sports Board of Directors (a board she has now been appointed to) to serve a three-year term as the Senior Woman Administrator (SWA) Appointee on the 24-seat NCAA Division I Board of Directors. Then in January of 2022 she was appointed to the 21-seat NCAA Division I Transformation Committee charged with providing recommendations to the NCAA Board of Directors that seeks to embrace forward-looking change during unprecedented times in intercollegiate athletics.

Blais works closely with the Title IX office on campus as a Deputy Title IX Coordinator involved with discrimination and harassment prevention.  She also is a co-chair of the department’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee and provides support to the diversity and inclusion initiatives created for the department.

Within the Big Ten, Blais serves on the Joint Group and Administrators Council and continues to be an active member within the conference serving on several subcommittees including the Sports Management Committee, Academics and Eligibility Committee and the Legislative Review Committee.  She has also served on the Budget Review Committee, Compliance and Reinstatement Subcommittee, and the Drug Testing Review Subcommittee.

In 2015 Blais was appointed to the NCAA Division I Women’s Lacrosse Committee and served as chair of the committee in 2016-17 and 2017-18. In 2013, she was nominated by her peers and honored as the Women Leaders in College Sports (formerly NACWAA) Division I FBS Administrator of the Year, presented annually for significant contributions made in athletics administration.

Andrea Crane is the Chief Operating Officer at Discover Health, a network of independent concierge medical practices which are focused on primary care. Discover Health is backed by Pacific Lake Partners, and Andrea is part of its Executive Leadership Program. Previously, she was part of Alpine Investors CEO-In-Training (“CIT”) program where she worked for two Alpine portfolio companies. Andrea was most recently CEO of e-Courier Software, a last-mile logistics SaaS company within the Alpine Software Group family. Prior to e-Courier, she was Director of Strategy & Business Development for YDesign Group, an online retailer of luxury lighting and future.

Andrea holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a BA in Public Policy Studies from Duke University, where she was a four-year member of the Varsity Soccer team. In her free time, Andrea enjoys skiing the mountains of Colorado and traveling around the world to places like Everest Base Camp and South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

Dionna Latimer-Hearn is originally from Middletown, OH and received her Bachelor of Science Degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders with a minor in French Studies from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Following the completion of her degree she worked for the French Embassy as an English Language Instructor in Montargis, France. She completed her Master of Arts Degree in Speech-Language Pathology at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She has served as a multilingual speech-language pathologist and educational consultant since 2002, holding positions in Illinois, Japan, Maryland and Texas. She currently works as an educational consultant and continuing education provider in support of a number of organizations in the US and abroad.

Dr. Latimer-Hearn received her Doctor of Philosophy Degree with distinction in Instructional Leadership for Changing Populations at Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore, MD. She is the inaugural recipient of the National Black Association for Speech-Language and Hearing (NBASLH) Clinician of the Year Award. Dr. Latimer-Hearn is also a recipient of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Minority Dissertation Fellowship Award, the World Education Research Association (WERA) Innovative Poster Award and the CREATE Doctoral Scholarship. She has presented her research on African American English at more than a dozen conferences including: the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, World Education Research Association World Congress, and American Educational Research Association Conference. Dr. Latimer-Hearn is the author of the book Unexpected Places, and is the founder and director of REACT Initiative, a Christian nonprofit organization that promotes equity in education for historically marginalized populations. She is the founder and administrator of Respect the Dialect an online community promoting awareness and understanding of the African American English dialect. She is also the founder and host of The Culture We Speak, a podcast examining the intersection of culture, language, and education.

Ava Thompson Greenwell teaches reporting classes at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. In addition to her classroom duties, she has held several administrative posts, including associate dean for curriculum, director of the Teaching Television Program, co-curator for the nationally recognized Ida B. Wells award and director of the McCormick Tribune Fellows Program.  Currently, she serves as co-director of the South Africa Journalism Residency Program and as faculty mentor for the Posse Program.

The Chicago native is director/producer of Mandela in Chicago, a documentary film about the city’s anti-apartheid movement. She is also author of Ladies Leading: The Black Women Who Control Television News. Greenwell, an academic life coach, has been a freelance correspondent for WGN-TV and Chicago Tonight, a PBS news program. She also worked as a reporter at WFLA-TV in Tampa, FL; WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, MN; and WEHT-TV in Evansville, IN.

Danielle Robinson Bell is an assistant professor and director of the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Professional master’s program. Bell’s area of expertise is strategic communications and its impact on business outcomes for organizations, brands and executives. She specializes in work that advances efforts related to culture, equity, inclusion, women, and BIPOC in the workplace.

Bell teaches strategic communications in the undergraduate and graduate integrated marketing communications programs. Her teaching philosophy can be captured in three words: beyond the classroom. Inspired by her own learning experiences, Bell draws from a variety of teaching materials including case studies, lectures, relevant media, current events and academic texts. She also serves on the Medill Academic Standards Committee and the Medill Curriculum Committee.

Bell spent more than 15 years on the agency side of advertising and branding creating integrated marketing campaigns for some of the world’s most recognized brands. Prior to joining Medill, she served as a trusted adviser to business leaders on matters related to crisis communications, reputation management, public relations and inclusive communications.

New York Times bestselling author Andrew Maraniss writes sports and history-related nonfiction, telling stories with a larger social message. His first book, Strong Inside, received the Lillian Smith Book Award for civil rights and the RFK Book Awards’ Special Recognition Prize for social justice, becoming the first sports-related book ever to win either award. His young readers adaptation of Strong Inside was named one of the Top Biographies for Youth by the American Library Association and was named a Notable Social Studies Book by the Children’s Book Council. His acclaimed second book for kids Games of Deception on the first U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics was a Sydney Taylor Book Award recipient. He is also the author of Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke, which was named one of the “Top 100 Baseball Books Ever Written” by Esquire. Andrew lives in Nashville and is director of special projects at the Vanderbilt University Athletic Department, where he manages the Vanderbilt Sports & Society Initiative. Follow him on Twitter @trublu24 and online at andrewmaraniss.com.

Dr. Amy Wilson serves as the NCAA’s Managing Director of Inclusion where she drives inclusive excellence throughout college athletics by supporting member institutions’ commitment to diversity, inclusion and gender equity among its student-athletes, coaches, and administrators.  Wilson leads the NCAA Office of Inclusion’s efforts to provide resources, education, and support in the core areas of disability, international, LGBTQ, race/ethnicity, and women.  An expert on gender equity and Title IX, she has authored multiple national reports on Title IX.   Wilson’s entire career has been in higher education where she won multiple awards for teaching excellence.  She was a tenured faculty member at Illinois College and served as the Faculty Athletic Representative.  A former student-athlete and member of the Illinois College Athletics Hall of Fame, Wilson has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English and earned a Ph.D. in Health and Sport Studies with a concentration in Athletic Administration at the University of Iowa.  For nearly two decades, she worked closely with nationally recognized Title IX expert Dr. Christine Grant on equity issues in intercollegiate athletics and has given numerous presentations on Title IX, gender equity, and inclusion on both the national and international levels.  In 2018, Women Leaders in College Sports honored Wilson with the Nell Jackson Award for her work as an advocate for gender equity and diversity