Dartmouth Engineering Welcomes New Board Chair and Two New Members

New Board chair, Samantha Scollard Truex ’92 Th’93 Tu’95

Effective July 1, Samantha Scollard Truex ’92 Th’93 Tu’95 has been appointed Thayer's Board of Advisors chair for a four-year term. Truex is CEO of Quench Bio, a venture-backed start-up based in Cambridge, Mass. that focuses on developing medicines for inflammatory diseases. She is also an entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlas Venture, an early-stage venture capital firm that focuses on breakthrough biotechnology companies, and currently serves on the board of Hotspot Therapeutics. Truex joined Thayer’s Board in 2015. She previously served on the Corporate Collaboration Council advising Thayer’s MEM program and on Dartmouth’s Alumni Liaison Committee of the Alumni Council.

Truex succeeds Terry McGuire Th’82. McGuire joined the board in 2000, was elected chair in 2008, and will continue to serve as an active member. A founding partner of Polaris Partners, an investment firm that partners with entrepreneurs in healthcare and technology, he is known at Thayer for instilling the metric of “lives touched” in the minds of board members and those who interacted with them. With McGuire at the helm, Thayer has touched the lives of more than 2,500 degree recipients, including record numbers of women.

New Board member, Michael Adams ’83

Also on July 1, Michael Adams ’83 and Ashifi Gogo Th’09 Th’10 joined the Board for three-year terms. Adams is a retired senior leader of Bechtel Group, a global engineering, construction, and project management company. His various positions at Bechtel included serving on the Board of Directors and as chief financial officer and president. Notable projects for which he was responsible included: airports in Muscat, Oman; Doha, Qatar; Las Vegas; and Lima, Peru; as well as motorways in Albania, Croatia, Romania, and Kosovo; the Tacoma Narrows Bridge; and rail projects in the United Kingdom, including the Crossrail, High Speed 1, and West Coast Route Modernisation. He earned his AB in engineering sciences and French literature from Dartmouth and his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Gogo is founder and CEO of Sproxil, providing mobile technology solutions to protect brands from supply chain fraud. Under his leadership, Sproxil developed award-winning solutions that have been used by consumers across six countries to verify the authenticity of over 2.4 billion products and earn instant rewards for their loyalty.

New Board member, Ashifi Gogo Th'09 Th’10

In 2014, he was named the recipient of the Schwab Foundation’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year award, and in 2015, he was named to Fortune’s 40 under 40 list. He has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Social Innovation and on the Meta-Council on the Illicit Economy. Ashifi holds a US patent and is named as inventor on multiple published patent applications in the US and abroad; one such patent received a Patents for Humanity award for its significant positive humanitarian impact. Gogo earned his BA in mathematics and physics from Whitman College and is Dartmouth’s first-ever PhD Innovation Program Fellow.

In addition, after 15 years of thoughtful and dedicated service to Thayer School, Clinton Harris ‘69, Th’70 and Christopher Hu ‘69 Th’70 have been named emeritus members of the board. Thayer is grateful to McGuire, Harris, and Hu for their extraordinary service.