Northwestern names three to the Board of Trustees

Northwestern University recently named three distinguished individuals to its Board of Trustees. This year’s appointees are Du Chai, a managing director at Horsley Bridge Partners; visual artist Tara Peters and global business executive Annette Rippert. 

Du Chai

Du Chai is a managing director at Horsley Bridge Partners, a global private equity fund-of-funds based in San Francisco with additional offices in London and Beijing. He serves on the executive and investment committees of the firm as well as on advisory boards of several venture capital and buyout funds.

Prior to joining Horsley Bridge Partners, Chai spent 10 years at Northwestern University Endowment managing the Private Investments and Real Assets portfolios.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Northwestern and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. He also serves on the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Board of Visitors.

Chai was born in Korea, grew up in the Chicago area and now resides in Menlo Park, California, with his wife and three children.

Tara Peters

Tara Peters lives and works in New York City as a visual artist. Her work includes abstract and representational oil paintings, as well as works of collage using literary text and her own writing. She is currently working on a series of paintings based on drawing and movement. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, including venues in New York, Paris, Geneva, Seville, Dresden and Cuba.

Peters received a bachelor’s degree from the School of Communication. She double-majored in painting and theatre, and she worked closely with the late Ed Paschke. She has served as a member of the School of Communication National Advisory Council since 2017.

Peters and her husband, Michael Peterson, were both raised by two Wildcat parents, and their son, Beau, is an economics major in Northwestern’s Class of 2023.

Annette Rippert

Annette Rippert is a global business executive with 29 years of experience as a digital technology leader, partnering with Fortune 500 clients and the world’s leading technology companies to deliver shareholder value through digital transformation. Rippert is group chief executive of strategy and consulting at Accenture, responsible for leading and transforming a $13 billion portfolio of strategy, consulting and technology advisory services by accelerating use of technology, data and artificial intelligence to drive new, differentiated services. Rippert also sponsors Accenture’s $3 billion investment in “cloud first” to deliver a broad range of cloud-based services to the market.

Prior to this role, Rippert led Accenture’s $10 billion technology business in North America, where she delivered significant growth of technology services in the company’s largest market by rapidly expanding the business in new practice areas such as data, cloud, platform services and software engineering.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Northwestern and holds a master’s degree in management from Kellogg. She serves on the McCormick School of Engineering Advisory Board and resides in Virginia with her husband and five sons.