Our Team
Meet the team dedicated to advancing the work of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative.
Meet the Vice Provost
Sara Bleich
Sara Bleich is the inaugural Vice Provost for Special Projects at Harvard University, and oversees university-wide implementation of the recommendations of the Report on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery. She has an extensive leadership and research portfolio, and prior to her role as Vice Provost served in several leadership roles in the federal government. She is an accomplished researcher, with over 180 peer-reviewed publications, and additionally serves as director of the social sciences program and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Professor of Public Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Bleich holds a BA in psychology from Columbia University and a PhD in health policy from Harvard University.
Meet the Executive Director
Roeshana Moore-Evans
Roeshana Moore-Evans is the Executive Director of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative. She previously served as the Senior Advisor and Chief of Staff to Dr. Nikhil Wagle, the Director of Count Me In, a patient-partnered research initiative within the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Moore-Evans is the president-elect of the Massachusetts Public Health Association (MPHA), a nonprofit organization that promotes a healthy Massachusetts through advocacy, community organizing, and coalition building. She has served on its board since 2014 and chairs the Racial Equity in Health Committee. She has been instrumental in leading conversations that deepen the understanding of structural racism and facilitating activities that dismantle it.
Moore-Evans holds a B.S. and an M.B.A. from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Implementation Committee Chair
Martha Minow
Martha Minow is the chair of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative implementation committee and is Harvard Law School’s 300th Anniversary University Professor.
Director of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program
Richard Cellini
Richard Cellini is the Director of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP), a program that identifies people enslaved for Harvard’s benefit; locates their direct descendants; and engages with the descendant community. Cellini is an attorney, business executive, and scholar of institutional accountability for slavery. He founded and led the Georgetown Memory Project, an independent research initiative that identified more than 10,000 descendants of enslaved people and changed the national conversation on race. Richard is a Research Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and served as a 2021-2022 Faculty Fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.
Cellini holds an A.B. and a J.D. from Georgetown University, and an LL.M. from the University of Cambridge (UK).
Contact us
We welcome thoughts and questions about the initiative, and how we can work with communities in and around Harvard to address and remediate systemic inequities that are the result of legacies of slavery.