We are pleased to be hosting our second annual Thouron Award Alumni Symposium on 6-8 February at The Rittenhouse in Philadelphia. The weekend is full of opportunities to connect with friends new and old, as well as to learn from fellow Alumni about their career, expertise, and life experience with the Thouron Award.
Our Featured Alumni
These individuals have excelled in their career and we are so honoured to be hosting them for panel discussions, keynote talks, and interactive workshops.
Marisa Bellack (Am’01)
Marisa Bellack is an editor at The Washington Post, where she leads climate and science coverage. Previously at The Post, she served as the Europe editor, deputy Sunday Outlook section editor and digital editor for opinions. As a Thouron scholar, she earned an MSc in communications from the London School of Economics. She also holds a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She lives in Washington with her husband and two daughters.
Femi Fadugba (Br’10)
Femi Fadugba is an EdTech CEO, sci-fi writer and Dummett Fellow at New College, Oxford. He has given talks to over 10,000 students on topics ranging from time travel physics to the process of writing his debut novel, The Upper World (Coming to Netflix soon!). In prior lives, Femi worked as a science tutor, management consultant and solar salesman, having studied at Penn and Oxford, where he published in the field of Quantum Computing.
Marc A. Feigen (Am’83)
Marc A. Feigen is the founder and CEO of Feigen Advisors, LLC. Called America’s leading advisor for the new CEO by Fortune Magazine, Marc’s CEO clients are leaders of very large, high performing global companies.
Marc founded Feigen Advisors in 2007. The firm has served nearly 50 chief executives with a team of 14 professionals. Expert in the role of the CEO, Feigen Advisors provides decision-support to CEOs in the full range of their work including strategy and value creation, capital management, governance, investor relations, stakeholder loyalty, and leadership. The firm’s CEO clients outperform the S&P and have longer tenures — nearly twice as long — as their cohorts.
Marc built Hercules Solutions LLC, an investor relations software platform, which he sold to the New York in 2021. In 1998, Marc founded KPL. After a successful growth trajectory, the consulting firm was sold to Booz & Company nine years later.
Marc is a Executive Vice Chairman of Cambridge in America, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of the Social Science Research Council, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Cambridge Judge Business School in the U.K. He is an Honorary Fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge.
Marc is a Visiting Lecturer at the Cambridge Judge Business School, and taught an elective course on the “Art and Science of the High Performing CEO.” (The most popular elective at the school.) Marc publishes frequently in The Harvard Business Review. His most recent article on co-CEOs has received wide recognition, including a podcast on Freakonomics. He has also written for HBR on governance, military history, and CEO retirement. Earlier in his career, Marc taught corporate governance at the Wharton Spencer Stuart Director’s Institute. Previously, Marc was an Associate at McKinsey & Company, where he and a team of seven co-authored a best-selling business book on creating growth and performance.
Marc has a BA with honors in History from the University of Pennsylvania, an M. Phil. in International Relations from Cambridge University, where he was a Thouron Fellow, and an MBA from The Harvard Business School.
Casey Thomas-Boyles (Br’10)
Casey Thomas Boyles is a nanotechnology physicist turned Chief of Staff and Culture at Guild Education, and was named Top 25 Emerging Culture Creator 2025 by Culture Amp.
Following her studies in Physics at the King’s College London, Casey knew that she wanted to continue her education. She was torn between continuing her studies at King’s for a Ph.D. in Physics and exploring a completely different scientific field — enter the Thouron Award and Nanotechnology.
After completing her MS in Nanotechnology at Penn, Casey went on to pursue her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in Singapore. However, life had a different plan for her and while the programme was not the fit she needed, a pivot was on the horizon. Moving to the Bay Area to work at a small startup, Casey embarked on a new journey.
“My roles blend culture-building, leading strategic initiatives, and ensuring the business runs smoothly…that’s the kind of work I find most rewarding,” she explains.
At the 2025 Alumni Symposium, Casey led an interactive art workshop, providing a unique opportunity for Alumni to explore their creative side.
“As soon as Bea [Brown] shared the theme [for the 2025 Alumni Symposium], I knew I wanted to contribute something a little unconventional — something that would push people slightly outside of their comfort zones. I do this type of work with teams all the time, and even the biggest skeptics end up having great moments of connection,” she excitedly details.
Claire Wardle (Br’99)
Claire Wardle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. She is considered a leader in the field of misinformation, verification and user-generated content, co-authoring the foundational report, Information Disorder: An interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy for the Council of Europe in 2017. In 2015, Claire co-founded the non-profit First Draft, a pioneer in innovation, research and practice in the field of misinformation.
She went on to co-found the Information Futures Lab at Brown University’s School of Public Health. Over the past decade she has developed an organization-wide training program for the BBC on eyewitness media, verification and misinformation, led social media policy at UNHCR, been a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and been the Research Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania.
Join Us at the 2026 Alumni Symposium
The annual Alumni Symposium is open to all Thouron Alumni and we would love to have you join us. Tickets are limited, so register now to save your spot.