Alfred E. Osborne, Jr., Ph.D.

As senior associate dean of UCLA Anderson, Dr. Osborne oversees a variety of key areas and initiatives within the school, including development, alumni relations, marketing and communications, corporate initiatives and executive education.  He is also a professor of global economics, management and entrepreneurship and is the faculty director of the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

The Price Center, which Dr. Osborne founded in 1987, oversees all teaching, research, extracurricular, and community activities related to entrepreneurship at UCLA Anderson. The center provides a set of academic and extracurricular experiences designed to prepare MBA students for the challenge of business management in entrepreneurial environments.

A corporate governance expert, Dr. Osborne established the Director Training and Certification Program designed to educate officers and directors of public and private firms, on fiduciary duties with attention to legal and business responsibilities, and the current best practices in corporate governance.

Dr. Osborne is also an expert in social entrepreneurship who has developed several programs that apply entrepreneurial business models to the nonprofit world. For more than 13 years, The Price Center has created and run innovative management development programs, including three in partnership with health care giant Johnson & Johnson: Head Start - Johnson & Johnson Management Fellows Program, UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Health Care Institute and the Johnson & Johnson/UCLA Health Care Executive Program. Other programs include The Institute for the Study of Educational Entrepreneurship (ISEE) and the UCLA/Los Angeles County Office of Education Head Start Leadership Institute.

Dr. Osborne currently serves as a director of Kaiser Aluminum and the Heckmann Corporation and Fist Pacific Advisors and has served on the corporate boards of K2, Inc., the Times Mirror company, US Filter Corporation, Greyhound Lines, Inc. and Nordstrom, Inc. among others.

He has served as an economic fellow at the Brookings Institution and directed studies at the SEC that contributed to changes in Rule 144, Regulation D, and other exemptive requirements to the securities laws designed to lower costs and improve liquidity and capital market access to venture capitalists and emerging growth companies alike.

He has received many awards and honors, including the Richard J. Riordan Spirit of Entrepreneurship Award and the BridgeGate 20 Award, which recognizes contributions to the high technology community in Southern California. In 2004, the faculty of the UCLA Anderson School presented him with the 2004 La Force Award for exemplary service and leadership to the Anderson community. In 2008 he was inducted into the Minority Business Hall of Fame for his pioneering contributions to minority business development.

Dr. Osborne was educated at Stanford University where he received his Ph.D. in business economics, MBA in finance, M.A. in Economics, and B.S. in electrical engineering.

Abigail Owen-Pontez

Hailing from Houston, TX, is an International Studies and Psychology major at Yale University. She has already made her mark as member and founder of several student organizations on campus. Her primary focus revolves around the organization known as Global21 - a network of student-run international-affairs magazines at premier universities around the globe - of which she is currently the Director of Alumni Affairs and remains an integral asset to the program's success both on and off campus. She assists Global21 in connecting high-achieving students around the world in ways that will help them become tomorrow's leaders in business, the non-profit sector, and government.

Apart from school, Ms. Owen-Pontez has taken strides to broaden her horizon, studying overseas and interning with members of the Senate Council on Foreign Relations. She is the founder of the "Harmonizing" initiative: a program seeking to advance the understanding, appreciation and cooperation between American students and international students. The program recently made its debut on college campuses nationwide and has successfully eased the tensions that separate cultures and often lead to adversity.

In a world that promises to become more and more inter-dependent, Ms. Owen-Pontez advocates the importance of sustaining peaceful, balanced relations coupled with an intimate understanding of other nations, cultures and people: "At times, the disparity between nations is important and substantive; other times, it is fabricated or misperceived. These differences are often reified in lines drawn across the planet, invisible from outer space, yet powerfully real to those who living within them. Therefore, it is necessary to discern those lines drawn politically, physically, and psychologically to promote a more efficient system for cooperation between countries."

Along with cooperation, Ms. Owen-Pontez is dedicated to refining internal mechanisms underlying our country's international health system, utilizing tailored approaches to amass information on a country by country basis, and solving certain issues on the individual level: "Hopefully this approach will foster awareness and eventually promote a response on the global level. We must concentrate on the quantitative and qualitative approaches employed to study the influence of political, social, and cultural research methods in global health and the restrictions posed by a resource-constrained setting all too common in developing nations." Her solution lies, not in the offices of international diplomats, but in the decisions and actions of the citizens themselves, regardless of their position in society.