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About President Roger H. Brown

	President Roger H. Brown and Linda Mason
	Farnsworth Blalock Photography

When Berklee College of Music President Roger H. Brown assumed his post at the college in 2004, he brought a rich palette of professional and life experiences to the job. Skills accrued playing recording sessions as a drummer in New York, administering United Nations humanitarian operations in Southeast Asia and Africa, and founding a company with his wife that became a corporation valued at over $1 billion and employing 19,000 people have contributed to his effective leadership at the world's largest college of contemporary music.

Music has been a compelling theme reprised in all of Brown's pursuits. He honed his drumming skills in high school and by playing with bands as an undergraduate at Davidson College. Immediately after earning his bachelor's degree in physics from Davidson, Brown spent a year in Kenya teaching math. While there, he moonlighted by playing drums with an award-winning Kenyan gospel choir. Upon returning home, he enrolled in an M.B.A. program at Yale, but interrupted his studies to help alleviate a humanitarian crisis on the Thai-Cambodian border. Brown administered the Land Bridge food distribution operation under the auspices of CARE and UNICEF. The effort that Brown, his future wife Linda Mason, and others masterminded was the largest famine relief program ever attempted at the time. The program fed 25,000 people per day and within six months had averted starvation for countless Cambodians.

While in Southeast Asia, Brown also helped provide nourishment for the spirits of the people by making recordings with refugees in camps to preserve their traditional Cambodian music that Khmer Rouge rulers had suppressed. Subsequently, Brown and Mason cowrote a book about the operation titled Rice, Rivalry, and Politics.

After returning to the U.S. and finishing his studies at Yale, Brown and Mason heeded the call to serve as codirectors of a Save the Children Federation initiative for famine relief in Sudan. The innovative program served more than 400,000 people and is estimated to have saved over 20,000 lives. The operation Brown, Mason, and the humanitarian community successfully executed became the blueprint for future large-scale U.N. relief undertakings. Brown's penchant for seeking opportunities for further immersion in cultures different from his own prompted him to play drums with Sudanese musicians during his stay.

After spending nearly five years outside America, Brown returned home in 1986 with a desire to serve American families. To that end, Brown and Mason secured venture capital and launched Bright Horizons. Their company provided quality child care and early education for the children of working parents by opening facilities located near large corporations. Within a decade, Brown and Mason had built a multi-million dollar, publicly traded company that operated centers for universities, hospitals, and corporations around the U.S. and the U.K. In 1996, Brown and Mason received the Ernst & Young/USA Today Entrepreneur of the Year award. Other accolades and awards, including the White House's Ron Brown Award for Corporate Leadership, followed.

Brown utilized his musical talents within the company to write, produce, and perform on six CDs of children's music that featured Ziggy Marley, Vinx, Raffi, and others. The profits from the discs went to a foundation aiding homeless children. After 16 years of successfully leading Bright Horizons, Brown decided to turn his sights to higher education and accepted the position as Berklee's third chief executive.

In 2007, Brown launched Giant Steps, the college's first capital campaign with a goal of raising $50 million. He has initiated Berklee's Presidential Scholars and Africa Scholars programs that provide full-ride scholarships to give top musicians around the globe a Berklee education. He has overseen the expansion of the City Music Program beyond Boston in an effort to provide educational opportunities for talented but economically disadvantaged urban youth. The program now has partners in cities across America. As well, Brown has led Berklee to adopt a more selective admissions policy that requires an interview and audition for all applicants to the college. In tandem with that effort, Brown's leadership has led to the creation of a model advising program to support all entering students, utilizing both faculty and trained upper-semester student advisors.

Brown has helped the college enhance the student experience by establishing semester-abroad programs in Greece and Germany, and by expanding the Boston campus facilities through real estate acquisitions. Brown signed a partnership with the city of Valencia, Spain and the Spanish Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers to build a Berklee satellite campus in Valencia that will offer graduate studies programs in a variety of music and music technology areas beginning in 2012.

Over the past four years Brown has presented honorary doctor of music degrees to a range of high achievers representing many disciplines. The list includes McCoy Tyner, Aretha Franklin, Ornette Coleman, Clint Eastwood, Melissa Etheridge, Steve Winwood, Earl Scruggs, Philip Bailey, and Gloria and Emilio Estefan, to name a few. Brown himself has been recognized for his accomplishments at Berklee with the Cruz de Honor from the provincial government of Valencia, Spain and the March of Dimes Franklin Delano Roosevelt Humanitarian Award.

Brown sums up his aspirations for Berklee in a few far-reaching sentences. "Berklee has produced artists who have won a collective 175 Grammy Awards, composed some of the great film scores of our time, written jazz and rock standards, and transformed the way people play their instruments and teach contemporary music. We have the opportunity to be a powerful force in the world to help train the next generation of leading music entrepreneurs, teachers, and artists."

About Linda Mason

Linda Mason has spent a large part of her career creating and building Bright Horizons Family Solutions, now a $1.3 billion education company. Mason and cofounder Roger Brown created the company in 1986. As the largest worldwide provider of worksite child care and early education, Bright Horizons operates more than 650 high-quality child development centers for employers in 40 states and Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada. Clients include the U.S. General Services Administration, United Nations, European Commission, Time Warner, Cisco Systems, IBM, Yale University, MIT, Universal Studios, and Paramount Pictures, among others. Bright Horizons also operates eight elementary schools, private and charter. The company employs 19,000 people and serves more than 80,000 families.

Bright Horizons was selected by Fortune magazine in January 2009 for the 10th time as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work for in America." Bright Horizons was one of five corporate recipients of the Ron Brown Award for Corporate Leadership, presented by President Bill Clinton. Mason and Roger Brown were the 1996 recipient of the Ernst & Young/USA Today "National Entrepreneur of the Year," and one of Business Week's 1997 "Best Entrepreneurs." Mason was also selected as one of Working Mother Magazine's 1998 "25 Most influential Working Mothers in America."

Mason is the author of The Working Mother's Guide to Life, published in November 2002 by Random House. She has written and spoken broadly on early education and the issues of corporate work/life policies and challenges, including participating on White House work/life panels and initiatives during the Clinton administration.

Mason also cofounded, with Roger Brown, Horizons for Homeless Children, a Boston-based organization that serves the needs of homeless children throughout New England. HHC has trained over 9,500 volunteers to work in 150 playspaces established by HHC in homeless shelters. In addition, HHC operates three full-service childcare centers for homeless children, also providing assistance to mothers to reach self-sufficiency. HHC is a national model for the care and early education of homeless children.

Mason served as a founding member of the board of directors for the new Massachusetts State Department of Early Education and Care. She was also a member of the Governor's Education Transition team in 2003.

She is also serving as chair of Mercy Corps, a $300 million international relief and development agency headquartered in the U.S. Mercy Corps operates in 37 countries serving 17 million people, with major programs in some of the most difficult environments in the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia, and North Korea, among others. Mason is engaged with the strategy and development of the agency; serves a representational role abroad with foreign governments and at home; and develops support, visibility, and funding. In her capacity as chair, Mason has traveled frequently to the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Balkans. During a recent trip to Darfur, she was posted with the African Union military on their patrols, giving her an unusual opportunity to see and report on the problems and issues from the inside.

Earlier in her career, Mason managed large-scale refugee relief operations overseas. She served as Co-Country Director of Save the Children's emergency program in Sudan during the African famine of 1984-85, creating a national program that served 400,000 Sudanese famine victims. She also was responsible for the operation of emergency services for two refugee camps serving over 40,000 Eritrean refugees. Mason directed a large feeding program for malnourished children in Cambodian refugee camps along the Thai border after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia of 1979. She coauthored, with Roger Brown, the book, Rice, Rivalry, and Politics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), which looked at the politics and the challenges of the Cambodian relief operation, based on her experiences there.

Mason spent the late seventies in France. She studied French language and literature at the Sorbonne and classical piano at the Rachmaninoff Conservatory in Paris.

Mason has a B.A. from Cornell University and an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management. She has held leadership positions on the boards of several important nonprofit institutions, serving as chair of the Africa Committee, Human Rights Watch; trustee of Yale University; and chair of the Yale School of Management Advisory Board.