Board of Directors

Chairman: Howard Ulfelder was a corporate finance executive for fifteen years, and then owned and operated a series of retail businesses for twenty five years. He is now retired and has spent five years doing pro-bono consulting for Boston-area non-profits prior to turning his passions to suggesting to the scientific community that it apply the caution of "sober second thoughts" to the unfolding of biotechnology research and development.
howardu@bioethics-in-action.org

Treasurer: Hal Shear. Hal Shear is Managing Director of Board Assets, Inc., an advisory firm that provides governance services to directors and boards throughout the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. He has served on more than 16 boards and currently is Chairman of the Board of two privately held companies for which he provides strategic and operational advice as well as governance expertise. He is also a director of four non-profit boards, including the FL and NJ Chapters of the National Association of Corporate Directors.

A member of the Boston Bar Association’s nationally recognized Task Force on Corporate Governance, Mr. Shear chaired its Committee on Director Education and Training. He was a regular guest lecturer for the Babson College MBA Entrepreneurial Program and is a Fellow of Kennesaw State University’s Corporate Governance Center.

Mr. Shear regularly advises governmental authorities, CEOs and boards of directors of NYSE, NASDAQ, private, family, entrepreneurial and nonprofit corporations on corporate governance matters, including strategy; director recruitment and selection; board composition; boardroom dynamics; and board, committee and director evaluation. The author of articles on corporate governance, Mr. Shear is a frequent speaker at conferences and presents seminars on topics related to strategy, family businesses, entrepreneurial companies, investor relations, internal audits, conflict, ethics, and directors’ roles and responsibilities.
hals@bioethics-in-action.org

Director: Rae Nelson. Rae has served in high-level positions involving domestic policy. She served at the White House as Associate Director for Education Policy and as Communications Director for the Domestic Policy staff on drug abuse. As Vice President/ Executive Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Workforce Preparation, she developed national initiatives with major foundations.  Her consulting expertise in the private sector includes strategic planning, workforce policy, instructional design, and communications. Along with Karl Haigler, she co-authored The Gap-Year Advantage: Helping Your Child Benefit from Time Off Before or During College. They are currently researching their second book, Gap Year, American Style for Harvard University Press. Rae has a B.A. in English from Cornell University and an M.A. in Communications from American University.
raen@bioethics-in-action.org

Executive Director: Karl Haigler has been interested in philosophical issues that have practical implications throughout his career: as a teacher of philosophy in both secondary and elementary schools, he has mentored teachers in discussion techniques and the process of discovery involved in teaching higher-order thinking skills to young students. He has taught elective courses in philosophy to high school students that centered on the reading of classic texts such as Aristotle’s Ethics, Platonic dialogues, and modern philosophers such as Spinoza, Rousseau, and Machiavelli.

As a curriculum director and high-school principal in a K-12 independent school, he led the development and implementation of a Philosophy for Children program in association with the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) and the University of South Carolina. Karl’s interest in curricular innovation involving the liberal arts and philosophy was most visibly represented in his work at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Chairman’s commission on the Teaching of Humanities in Higher Education (1984), where he was the sole member from the secondary education community.

Karl founded and runs a community discussion group now in its ninth year sponsored by Barnes and Noble in Winston-Salem, N.C.  As BEIA’s Executive Director, he leads collaborative efforts with groups like the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, the Key School in Annapolis, Maryland, and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center (Charlotte).
karlh@bioethics-in-action.org