Meet the Hikma Advisory Board

Aaron Mitchell Finegold

Aaron Mitchell Finegold (he/him) currently serves as the Chief Marketing Officer of global, private-equity backed Executive Search firm, Kingsley Gate.  He was previously a Senior Global Director in charge of business operations and strategy for the marketing and communications function at LinkedIn and an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company before that, helping lead the Marketing and Sales and Global Energy and Materials practices.  Prior to joining McKinsey, Aaron worked on brand and direct marketing strategy for global accounts such as IBM, Unilever, American Express, Cisco, and GSK.

Aaron has helped numerous organizations across sectors incorporate humanities frameworks, values, and practices.  He brings expertise in business strategy, leadership development, and diversity and inclusion to Hikma.

Aaron holds a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in English and American Literature and Psychology from Brandeis University and a Master of Business Administration from INSEAD.

Listen to Episode 1.3 of the Hikma Collective Podcast for insights from Aaron about entrepreneurship, social media culture, and taking the long view of your career path.

Ai Mizuta, PhD

Ai (she/her) is passionate about bridging academic insight and real-world impact. She strives to integrate her extensive program management background with her scholarly expertise in education. Her journey has taken her from global institutions like the Asia-Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO to the Consulate General of Japan in Vancouver. These experiences have honed Ai's skill in navigating diverse stakeholder interests, fostering cross-cultural collaboration, and designing innovative programs. Ai's  mission lies in making knowledge accessible and impactful for everyone.

She holds degrees  from University of British Columbia (PhD), University of Toronto (MA), and Keio University (BA).

Simangele Mabena

Over the past year, Simangele has taken on a number of roles at Hikma, from web design and client engagement to piloting new programming. Her work at Hikma increasingly focuses on accessibility and the development of resources to support knowledge mobilization for climate justice and other research areas. Simangele holds degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand (MA) and (BA), and is in progress of competing her PhD from the University of British Columbia.

Patrick Smyth, PhD

Patrick Smyth, PhD is a blind teacher, developer, and entrepreneur who thinks critically about how infrastructure can create—or lower—barriers to entry in the humanities and STEM. He is Chief Learner at Iota, an organization focused on accessible technical training, consulting, and infrastructure development. In 2022-2023, Iota is working with Space Telescope Science Institute on Astronomy Notebooks for All, an initiative to make web-based scientific outputs more accessible to people with disabilities. Patrick was previously the Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities Entrepreneurship at the Publics Lab at the City University of New York, and he has also coordinated Foundations for Research Computing, a cross-campus program at Columbia University to teach programming skills to researchers.

Patrick is a Fulbright Fellow, a Software Carpentry certified instructor, and a blind athlete who recently received funding from the Challenged Athletes Foundation for his participation in blind baseball.

James M. Van Wyck, PhD

James M. Van Wyck is an Assistant Dean for Professional Development in the Graduate School at Princeton University. He co-edited The Reimagined PhD: Navigating 21st Century Humanities Education (2021, Rutgers University Press), and has published articles in venues including the New England Quarterly, the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. He earned his Ph.D. from Fordham University, specializing in 19th Century American Literary History. He serves on a range of boards and advisory councils, including: board secretary and member of the board of directors of the United Way of Greater Mercer County; Alumni Executive Council Member at William Paterson University; Regional Network Leader and Dean’s Advisory Council board member for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo, and is a member of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Leadership Institute for a New Academy.

His current book-in-progress is “Leadership and the Imagination.”

Andrea Webb, PhD

Andrea Webb, PhD  spent more than a decade as a classroom teacher before returning to higher education as a teacher educator. She holds degrees in History and English Literature (B.A. UBC), Social Studies Education (B.Ed. UBC), Liberal Studies (M.A. SFU), and Curriculum Studies (Ph.D. UBC). Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold Concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education.

Andrea co-leads a longstanding research partnership between Hikma and the University of British Columbia. Some learnings from that ongoing work are captured in a piece she co-authored with Hikma Founder Erica Machulak in Inside Higher Ed. 

As a member of our board, Andrea will contribute her academic experience as an educator and her extensive track record in designing educational materials through curriculum development and pedagogical praxis.

Katina Rogers

Katina Rogers is the author of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020) and the founder of Inkcap Consulting. With over a decade of experience as a researcher, administrator, and educator, Dr. Rogers works with colleges and universities to design and implement creative, sustainable, and equitable structures for graduate education. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, LA Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as a wide range of podcasts and public speaking engagements. Her career has included work at The Graduate Center, CUNY, the Modern Language Association, the Scholarly Communication Institute, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder.