SAMANTHA
Trotman Burman
Samantha Trotman Burman served as one of the Directors and as a member of the Audit Committee of MedAssets, Inc., a publicly traded healthcare performance improvement company based in Alpharetta, GA for 10 years. From 1998 to 2003, Ms. Burman worked as a Principal and then Partner at Parthenon Capital, a Boston-based private equity investment firm. From 1996 to 1998, Ms. Burman served as Chief Financial Officer of Physicians Quality Care, a physician practice firm. From 1993-1996 she served as an Associate at Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm.
Ms. Burman holds a M. Eng. And BA from Cambridge University in England, as well as an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School. Ms. Burman is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (MSPCC) and currently serves on two sub-committees (Finance and Investment). Ms. Burman has been a member of the BID-Needham Board of Trustees since 2010 and is a past member of the Board of Advisors. She currently serves on the Patient Care Assessment Committee. She lives in Dover, MA with her husband, Mitchell Burman, and their four children. She enjoys travel, fitness and nutrition, flowers, reading, and conserving mother earth.
MICHAEL "GUS"
Mills
Gus Mills spent 40 years conducting research on African large carnivores with SANParks in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier and Kruger National Parks. His initial work was on brown hyaenas and spotted hyaenas in the Southern Kalahari culminating in the publication of his book in 1990 “Kalahari hyaenas: the comparative behavioural ecology of two species.” He studied lion and cheetah feeding ecology, ecological relationships between the large carnivores, and wild dog population ecology in Kruger National Park, before returning to the Kalahari in 2006 to undertake a six-year study on the cheetah, under the auspices of the Lewis Foundation, the results of which have recently been published in a book “Kalahari cheetahs: adaptations to an arid region”. He has supervised a number of PhD and MSc theses at Pretoria (South Africa) and Oxford (UK) Universities on aspects of lion, cheetah, wild dog, brown hyaena, caracal, honey badger and African wild cat behaviour and ecology. He was the founder of the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Carnivore Conservation Group. He has written six books and authored or co-authored over 160 scientific papers, as well as delivered over 80 talks at conferences and symposia worldwide. He is a senior member of several IUCN Carnivore Specialist Groups. He has served as a member on several boards of conservation organizations and scientific journals, including Journal of Zoology, London and African Journal of Wildlife Research, and consulted widely on carnivore conservation issues in Africa and Asia. He was an Extraordinary Professor at the Mammal Research Institute, University of Pretoria and a Research Associate at WildCRU, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK. and is currently Research Associate, School of Biology and Environmental Sciences, University of Mpumalanga. He has two children and he and his wife of nearly 50 years, Margie, have retired and are living outside Nelspruit, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. He is now mainly interested in mentoring African students in conservation biology.
JOEL
Berger
Dr. Berger is the Senior Conservation Scientist at Wildlife Conservation Society and a professor at Colorado State University. He received his doctoral degree in biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Joel’s current or more recent projects are situated in the Northern Rocky Mountains, the Arctic in both Asia (Wrangel Island, Chukotka, Russia) and Alaska,, and some areas within central or high elevation Asia [Mongolia, China (Tibet), and Bhutan]. You may even find him dressed as a polar bear trying to determine the effect of the increase of interface between muskoxen and polar bears due to climate change.
Dr. Berger is the author or co-author of six books, including Extreme Conservation: Life at the Edges of the World and Horn of Darkness: Rhinos on the Edge. He has published countless scientific articles and been featured in popular magazines, such as Newsweek, People, and Smithsonian. Joel was also a featured guest in a special issue on the biologist who saves species in the comic series Archie. In the words of Dr. Berger, “As I search for my way forward, I am motivated by conservation and finding ways to protect our planet’s spectacular diversity. This means understanding systems and species, their challenges, and proffering solutions. At the same time, while animals often have no true voices, people in developing areas find themselves caught between two worlds. It is somewhere along this interface, that I try to work.”
RICHARD
Male
Richard Male is a recognized leader, trainer, and consultant, nationally and internationally, in the fields of leadership development, community organizing, social justice and public policy for non-profit organizations, faith-based entities, private foundations, local municipalities and schools. Since 2000 he has served as president of a Colorado-based training, consulting and coaching company that bears his name, specializing in services for nonprofit and NGOs worldwide to survive and thrive in challenging times.
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Grassroots activist: Rich started off his career in the 1960’s in the Mississippi Delta working on civil rights issues with the African American community in the rural south where he was both a community organizer and civil rights worker as well as the Executive Director of a local civil rights organization. He also spent time at the Saul Alinski Industrial Areas Foundation (Chicago) organizing on a wide variety of issues around housing, crime, discrimination and jobs issues in low-income black neighborhoods.
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In 1981, Rich founded the Community Resource Center (CRC), a national nonprofit organization which has provided a wide variety of training, consulting, and leadership services to over 3,000 non-profit organizations in the Rocky Mountain West and throughout the United States. While at CRC, Rich helped organize the Colorado Association of Non-profit Organizations (CANPO), Community Shares of Colorado, published the Colorado Grants Guide and helped organize dozens of grassroots initiatives involving people of color, persons with disabilities, environmental concerns and social justice issues. In 1996 Rich formed Grant Guides Plus, a corporation that published grant guides for New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and California and provided strategic information, training and educational assistance to non-profit organizations, schools and local governments nationally.
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People with disabilities: In the early days of the U.S. disability movement Rich was involved with the forming of ADAPT with Wade Blank and the Americans with Disability Act (ADA). The ADA was the premier model of civil rights legislation in the world for persons with disabilities. Rich’s role was to train the activists and leadership prior to the direct actions and demonstrations that were taking place around the U.S.
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International NGO work: For many years Rich has been intimately involved in supporting grassroots and indigenous nongovernmental organizations in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America, and Africa.
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Educator: Since 1971, Rich has taught both undergraduate and graduate level courses in subject areas such as leadership development, social justice community organizing/public policy; contemporary issues in society; religious institutions in the community; grant writing, fundraising and resource development, and governance. Rich has been teaching at the graduate level at Regis University, University of Colorado- Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Denver and Hawaii Pacific University.