Runway Lecture

Past Runway Lecture Speakers

2025 Duncan Hosie ’12 is a legal scholar, writer, and academic fellow at Stanford Law School. He studies constitutional law and theory, with a particular focus on the First Amendment and the intersection of constitutional jurisprudence with political mobilization and polarization. His scholarship has been widely published in national media and academic journals.

2024 Makeda Best PhD ’93 is deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Oakland Museum of California. She is co-founder of Museums Moving Forward, a Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation funded curator-driven initiative to support greater equity and accountability in art museum workplaces through data and research.

2023 Michael Wara '91, P '26, on the pathway to equitably transition our energy, transportation, and housing away from fossil fuels and towards zero carbon solutions. Michael is the Director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program and a senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment as well as Senior Director for Policy at the Sustainability Accelerator within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

2022 Atteeyah Hollie ‘98, deputy director of the Southern Center for Human Rights on ending wealth-based inequality in our justice system.

2021 Aaron Tartakovsky '08, co-founder and CEO of Epic Cleantec: A Journey from Politics to Plumbing:
Stewarding Our Most Precious Resource. Watch the video.

2020 Louise Aronson MD, MFA ’81; Cynthia Brown MSN '91, SB '87; Jeffrey Hom MD, MPH, MSHP '00; Tomás Magaña, MD, MA, FAAP '82; moderated by Jen Rogers '91: Advancing Health Equity in the Time of Covid-19, a conversation with four distinguished alums who work in public health. Watch the video of the event.

2019 Lareina Yee '91, P '21 on the power of inclusion at work, raising awareness on the subject of implicit bias in the workplace. Lareina leads Women in the Workplace, a research partnership with LeanIn.org and the Wall Street Journal. She is also chief diversity and inclusion officer for McKinsey, and member of the global partnership service team.

2018 Louise (Davis) Langheier '99, Co-Founder and CEO of Peer Health Exchange, established in 2003. PHE’s mission is to empower young people with the knowledge, skills, and resources to make healthy decisions. They do this by training college students to teach a skills-based health curriculum in under-resourced high schools across the country.

2017 Ian Haney López (not a UHS alum) is the Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Haney Lopez forcefully connects the growing racial divisions in society and the surging wealth inequality that hurts everyone. Haney Lopez is an engaging educator who has spoken at the Aspen Foundation, Commonwealth Club, National Press Club, and more. He spoke with University High School students following the election in November, 2016.