Merit and Biographies

Ed Breen - 2018 Outstanding Corporate Reinvention Leadership Award

Edward Breen is CEO of DowDuPont. At $130 billion it is the largest merger in the chemical industry and the fourth largest in history. He became the chair of the board and CEO of DuPont on Nov. 9, 2015. He joined the DuPont Board of directors in February 2015. He served as chairman and CEO of Tyco International from 2002 until 2012. He transformed Tyco into a strong market leader, reviving the company from near bankruptcy and overseeing successful spin-offs including Covidien and ADT. He worked at Motorola from 2000 to 2002, including as president and COO leading the company back to profitability. From 1994 to 2000, he held senior positions including chairman and CEO of General Instrument. He serves as a director of Comcast and in the advisory board of New Mountain Capital. He was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics" by Ethisphere.

Marilyn Simons - 2018 STEM Philanthropy Leadership Award

Marilyn Hawrys Simons is President of the Simons Foundation, one of the country’s leading private funders of basic scientific research. She has more than 25 years of experience actively supporting nonprofit organizations in New York City and Long Island. She has been involved in K-12 education for underserved communities. Simons is vice president of the board of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an outstanding U.S. research facility specializing in molecular biology and genetics, and a board member of the Turkana Basin Institute that supports projects in Kenya, the LearningSpring School which helps autistic children and the East Harlem Scholars Academy in New York City. Simons received a B.A. and Ph.D. in economics from The State University of New York at Stony Brook.

James Simons - 2018 STEM Philanthropy Leadership Award

James Simons - Simons Foundation Chairman and board chair and founder of Renaissance Technologies. Prior to his financial career, Simons was chairman of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University, taught mathematics at MIT and Harvard, and was a cryptanalyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, New Jersey. He holds a B.S. from MIT and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1976, he won the Veblen Prize of the American Mathematics Society for his work in geometry. He is a trustee of the Stony Brook Foundation, Rockefeller University, MIT, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, New York Genome Center and the Institute for Advanced Study, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Henry Kravis - 2018 Lifetime Achievement Leadership Award

In his role as Co-Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Kravis is actively involved in managing KKR and serves on each of the regional Private Equity Investment Committees. Mr. Kravis currently serves on the boards of First Data Corporation and ICONIQ Capital, LLC. He is Chairman of The Business Council and also serves as a director, chairman emeritus, or trustee of several other cultural, professional, and educational institutions, including Columbia Business School (co-chairman), Mount Sinai Hospital, the Partnership Fund for New York City (founder), Rockefeller University (vice chairman), Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (chairman).  He earned a B.A. from Claremont McKenna College in 1967 and an M.B.A. from the Columbia Business School in 1969. Mr. Kravis has more than four decades of experience financing, analyzing, and investing in public and private companies including Hospital Corporation of America, Nabisco, Playtex, Beatrice Foods, Safeway, Toys "R" Us, Borden, First Data and Duracell. As of October 26, 2017 KKR estimated $153 billion in AUM.