34th Annual Awards Dinner
On November 9, 2017, the Aspen Institute hosted the 34th Annual Awards Dinner at The Plaza Hotel in New York City. The dinner was chaired by Mrs. Mercedes T. Bass.
The Institute honored President and CEO Walter Isaacson with the Henry Crown Leadership Award. Dr. Priscilla Chan, Co-Founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and CEO of The Primary School, received the Institute’s Public Leadership Award and joined Walter in a conversation on her work with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Priscilla Chan is a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, through which she and her husband seek to advance human potential and promote equal opportunity by improving education, health and opportunity for the generations to come. Dr. Chan is a pediatrician and a former teacher, as well as CEO of The Primary School, an integrated health and education model serving children and families in East Palo Alto and the Belle Haven neighborhood in Menlo Park, California. She earned her BA in Biology with Spanish Citation at Harvard University and her MD at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She completed her pediatrics training in the UCSF/PLUS Pediatrics Residency.
Walter Isaacson is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has been chairman and CEO of CNN and editor of TIME magazine. Isaacson’s new biography, Leonardo da Vinci, is due for release in October 2017. His previous books include The Innovators (2014), Steve Jobs (2011) and several other best-selling biographies. He is vice chair of Partners for a New Beginning, a public-private group tasked with forging ties between the United States and the Muslim world. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the board of United Airlines, Tulane University, the New Orleans City Planning Commission, the New Orleans Tricentennial Commission, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Society of American Historians, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and My Brother’s Keeper Alliance.