Samer Atiani ’06, Brennen Keene ’91, Ronnie Lowenstein ’73, Paula Barnes Sours ’76 and Harold “Hal” Weaver were recently approved by the board as new members.
Five people with significant experience in business, government, higher education and nonprofit organizations, have joined Guilford College’s Board of Trustees on initial four-year terms.
Samer Atiani ’06, Brennen Keene ’91, Ronnie Lowenstein ’73, Paula Barnes Sours ’76 and Harold “Hal” Weaver were recently approved by the board as new members. The 24-member board meets four times during the academic year, in person or online.
“These dedicated Guilfordians will greatly enrich our board with their impressive and diverse professional backgrounds,” says Jean Bordewich, clerk of the board. “Individually and collectively they are going to make a lasting, positive impact on what is already a strong board.”
Samer graduated from the Ramallah Friends School in Palestine before enrolling at Guilford, where he majored in Physics. He is the Director of Datadog, a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. In 2013, while at Harvard University’s Innovation Lab, Samer helped found liwwa, a crowdfunding and investing platform to address the gap of small businesses not having access to capital.
Brennen was a Political Science major at Guilford. After Guilford, he earned his Juris Doctor at the University of Richmond. Brennen is a partner at McGuireWoods, a national law firm. He serves as co-lead of the firm’s renewable energy team in Richmond, Va., and assists clients with land-use and transactional matters related to real estate development projects. Brennen was a member of Guilford’s Alumni Association Board of Directors.
Ronnie attended Guilford as part of the Richardson Fellow Program and earned an Economics degree. She went on to earn a master’s and doctorate in Economics from Columbia University. Ronnie retired as Director of the New York City Independent Budget Office in 2022 after serving in that role for 22 years. She is a recipient of Guilford’s Alumni Achievement Award.
Paula earned a Mathematics degree from Guilford, and worked for the College as Assistant Director of Computer Services from 1981-87. She earned her Juris Doctor in 1999 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After starting as a summer law clerk, Paula spent 24 years at SAS Institute, where she retired in 2021 as Director of Legal Counsel.
Hal is an Associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. A lifelong cultural ambassador, he has traveled the world breaking down barriers and building bridges between cultures, often using film as the medium through The Black Film Project and the China-Africa-Russia Project. A pioneer in Africana studies, Hal founded and chaired the Africana Studies Department at Rutgers University/New Brunswick. He is the recipient of a Haverford College Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award. Hal’s Black Quaker Project ministry raises the voices of Quakers of color worldwide.