Our Board
Scott Wu, Chair
Mr. Wu has nearly 20 years of private equity and investment banking experience. He is a co-founder of Blue Horizon Equity, a middle market investment firm based in San Francisco. Prior to Blue Horizon, Mr. Wu was on the investment team of a fund focused on private equity investments in public securities, and an advisor to a family office on cleantech strategy. Prior to this, he was a co-founder of Financial Technology Ventures, a private equity firm with over $1 billion of capital to invest. In addition, Mr. Wu has worked at Montgomery Securities, Morgan Stanley & Co. and A.T. Kearney, Inc. Mr. Wu has been actively involved for over a decade as a Director of several local and national non-profit organizations. He has been the President of Aim High for the past eight years, an educational organization focused on inner-city, disadvantaged children. He was a co-founder of a Gates Foundation-funded middle school, and formerly was Director of the International Institute of San Francisco. Mr. Wu received a BA from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Harvard University. Mr. Wu resides in San Francisco, California.
Gene DeFelice, Vice Chair
Gene DeFelice joined Barnes & Noble as Vice President, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary, in September 2010. He is responsible for all legal matters regarding Barnes & Noble, Inc. and its subsidiaries, including coordination with outside counsel. He also provides guidance to the company and its Board of Directors on all corporate governance and Securities and Exchange Commission matters, complex litigation, mergers & acquisitions, and other significant legal matters.
Mr. DeFelice is an experienced General Counsel with a wealth of experience in a range of areas, including technology, business management and corporate governance. Most recently, he was the Senior Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary, with Savvis, Inc., a publicly traded global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises. Prior to Savvis, he was General Counsel for Spacelabs Medical, Inc., and held various legal, as well as sales and marketing executive positions, with Hoffman-La Roche in the United States and at their headquarters in Switzerland.
Mr. DeFelice graduated from Rutgers University, received his doctorate of Law degree from Seton Hall University and a master’s of Business Administration with distinction from Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland.
Lawrence M. Rosenthal, Treasurer
Mr. Rosenthal is a real estate developer and venture capitalist. He is a member of a number of corporate boards and is also Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of GTL, Inc. His business activities have required him to spend substantial time in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Mr. Rosenthal resides in New Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Mindy W. Saffer, LEED AP Principal, Secretary
Mindy Saffer is a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Accredited Professional and Principal at West, Lane & Schlager, a commercial real estate firm based in Washington, D.C. Ms. Saffer specializes in representing tenants such as non-profit organizations, trade associations, and corporations on their office space needs. Her clients include Save the Children, Feeding America, Air Transport Association, and FOX News Channel. Throughout her 25-year career in the industry, Ms. Saffer has completed more than 1 million square feet of transactions and has consistently been awarded top producer at West, Lane & Schlager. In addition to serving USCRI, Ms. Saffer currently serves on the board for the Greater Washington Commercial Association of Realtors (after being awarded their Rising Star Award in 2005). She is a member of both the Realtors Multi-Million Dollar Leasing Club and the District of Columbia Building Industry Association. Additionally, Ms. Saffer is an active member of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) and the Finance and Administration Roundtable (FAR). Prior to joining West, Lane & Schlager Realty Advisors in 1999, Ms. Saffer spent over 10 years in the commercial design and construction industry. Ms. Saffer is a graduate of the University of Maryland and received her Master's at Johns Hopkins University. She resides in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Thomas H. Belote, Esq., Vice Chair
Mr. Belote is a partner at Belote & Belote, a law firm specializing in immigration and consular law. Prior to joining Belote & Belote, he participated in the United States Attorney General Law Honors Program and served as Special Assistant to the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Chief of the Immigration and Visa Unit, and Special Attorney to the Associate Attorney General of the United States with responsibilities for anti-terrorist and war crimes prosecutions.
Mr. Belote is a recipient of the U.S. Department of Justice award for Exceptional Performance and a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service award for Outstanding Performance. He has a BA from Clark University and a JD with honors and law review from the University of Connecticut. Mr. Belote resides in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Kenneth Blackman
Mr. Blackman is a corporate partner resident in the New York office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, LLP. He joined the firm in 1966 and became a partner in 1973.
Mr. Blackman has a wide-ranging practice that includes representing domestic and international clients in a variety of corporate transactions. His areas of expertise include the representation of Canadian companies in connection with cross-border financing, as well as merger and acquisition transactions and other matters involving the application of U.S. securities laws to foreign issuers.
Mr. Blackman received his LLB, cum laude, from Columbia University Law School where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and his MBA from Columbia Business School. He received his AB, magna cum laude, from Brown University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Mr. Blackman resides and is barred in New York.
Edward Grode
Mr. Grode has thirty-one years of experience as an inner-city teacher, elementary school principal (and founder of the first "geography-based theme school” in the United States), middle school assistant principal, and high school principal. He served as Director of the Institute for Geography Education at Mercyhurst College for five years and was founder and editor of The Geography Teacher Magazine with subscribers in forty-three countries.
An active community member, Mr. Grode is President of the Notre Dame Alumni Club and a member of the Erie Blood Bank and the Times Publishing Company. He also serves on the School Board of the Fairview School District and previously served as President of the Board of the International Institute of Erie.
He has visited the Kakuma Refugee Camp on the Kenyan-Sudanese border twice in the past year. Mr. Grode received a BA from Gannon University, MA from the University of Notre Dame, and M.Ed. from Edinboro University. He was a Fulbright Scholar in the United Kingdom from 1978-79. Mr. Belote resides in Fairview, Pennsylvania.
Lily O’Boyle, Vice Chair
Mrs. O’Boyle is President of Acacia Book Company, a boutique publishing company in Connecticut. Originally from the Philippines, where she distinguished herself as an actress, she is the author of numerous books on the Philippines including the most recent Tropical Gardens of the Philippines. She is a SEATO scholar and a recipient of the John D. Rockefeller 111 Fund grant for Drama. Mrs. O'Boyle has served on the boards of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the US Committee for UNICEF. She presently serves on the boards of the Children's Orchestra Society of New York, The Center for Art and Thought, and the UNESCO Philippine International Theater Institute. She is a graduate of St. Paul College of Manila and received her Master's in Drama from New York University. She currently resides in Connecticut.
Donna Scarlatelli
Ms. Scarlatelli is an attorney admitted to practice immigration law anywhere in the U.S. and licensed by the Florida Bar Association of the State of Florida. Donna earned her Juris Doctor Law degree cum laude from the University of Miami, School of Law. Ms. Scarlatelli also holds a Master's degree in International Administration from the Experiment in International Living's School for International Training, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree with High Honors from Marlboro College in Vermont.
Donna Scarlatelli began her career in the immigration field with the U.S. Refugee Program in Singapore and Indonesia. She has been involved in immigration services since 1979 and has successfully helped thousands of people from all over the world come to live and work in the United States. She is founder and publisher of Coming to America Magazine. Her articles appear in various publications around the world.
Donna is a frequent lecturer and guest speaker at seminars, professional association meetings, sponsored events and trade shows both in the U.S. and in Europe. In addition to serving as a member of the Board of Directors at USCRI, she is a member in good standing of the Florida Bar Association and the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).
Sam Udani
Since 1999, Mr. Udani has served as publisher at ILW.COM, a website with over 25,000 pages of information on immigration law that receives 150,000 unique visitors per month. Mr. Udani pioneered the regular use of telephone seminars in immigration law and serves as Master of Ceremonies for three such seminars each month. He regularly speaks and writes on labor certification matters for immigration lawyers. Mr. Udani previously co-founded Adnet Advertising Agency in New York, NY. He currently resides in New York.
James Hathaway
Emeritus, Counsel on International Protection
James C. Hathaway, the James E. and Sarah A. Degan Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law at the University of Michigan since 1998, is a leading authority on international refugee law whose work is regularly cited by the most senior courts of the common law world. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Refugee Law at the University of Amsterdam, Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne, Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Programme, and President of the Cuenca Colloquium on International Refugee Law.
From 2008 until 2010 Hathaway was on leave from the University of Michigan to serve as the Dean of Law and William Hearn Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, where he established Australia’s first all-graduate legal education program. He previously held positions as Professor of Law and Associate Dean of the Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada (1984-1998), Counsel on Special Legal Assistance for the Disadvantaged to the Government of Canada (1983-1984), and Professeur adjoint de droit at the Université de Moncton, Canada (1980-1983). He has been appointed a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo, and at the Universities of California, Macerata, Tokyo, and Toronto.
Hathaway’s publications include more than seventy journal articles, a leading treatise on the refugee definition (The Law of Refugee Status, 1991, republished in both Japanese and Russian), an interdisciplinary study of models for refugee law reform (Reconceiving International Refugee Law, 1997) and, most recently, The Rights of Refugees under International Law (2005) – the first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees set by the UN Refugee Convention. He is Founding Patron and Honorary Director of Asylum Access, a non-profit organization committed to delivering innovative legal aid to refugees in the global South. Hathaway also sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Immigration and Nationality Law Reports and directs the Refugee Caselaw Site (www.refugeecaselaw.org), a website that collects, indexes, and publishes leading judgments on refugee law. Professor Hathaway regularly advises and provides training on refugee law to academic, non-governmental, and official audiences around the world.
