Ahmmad Brown

With academic training in sociology and a professional career as an operator and consultant, Ahmmad has developed a deep working knowledge and command of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) best
practices. Ahmmad’s accomplishments in the DEI space include leading a team of senior administrators and faculty at a private college of performing arts to develop a sociocultural pre-orientation program for Black students; development and analysis of a novel survey that was distributed to roughly 2.5K employees of a large municipality to assess workplace culture, as well as the efficacy of recruitment, hiring, advancement and retention policies from a DEI perspective; serving as the primary author of an internal document for The Bridgespan Group to integrate racial equity into its strategy work and case team processes; and serving as the Diversity Recruitment Director at Williams College, where he defined institutional priorities with the College’s senior administration, and managed three staff to lead institutional efforts for the recruitment of first-generation, low-income and student of color populations, accounting for roughly 45% of each enrolling class.

In addition to leading EBDI and serving as a senior advisor to nationally-recognized DEI consultancy Working IDEAL, Ahmmad is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at the Northwestern School of Education and Social Policy where he leads the Leading Equity and Inclusion in Organizations (LEIO) certificate program in the Masters of Science in Learning and Organizational Change (MSLOC) program.

Ahmmad received a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University, where his work empirically examined the experiences of Black students in predominantly-white institutions. He also holds an M.B.A. and M.A in Education from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Sociology & Anthropology and Japanese from Swarthmore College.