On the First of July, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed five new members to the UVA’s Board of Visitors (“BOV”). Filling the seats of five outgoing members appointed by former Governor Ralph Northam, the new members comprise a new majority—14 out of 17—of Youngkin appointees on the BOV. The three minority seats are held by Northam-selected members.
The latest wave of appointees includes Daniel Brody of Albemarle County, Virginia; Marvin W. Gilliam, Jr., of Bristol, Virginia; Dr. David Okonkwo of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; David F. Webb of Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Porter Wilkinson of Bethesda, Maryland. Collectively, Brody, Gilliam, and Webb, donated $229,000 to Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign three years ago, according to records collected by the Virginia Public Access Project.
Daniel Brody
Mr. Brody, who received his undergraduate degree in economics from UVA, is the president of Health Data Services (“HDS”), a company which develops software for healthcare providers. He is also the manager of the real estate investment firm Greenwood Partners, and has served on the boards of Insmed Pharmaceuticals, Prolifiq Software, and Plurogen Therapeutics, all of which are related to his work at HDS. Brody also serves on the board of the Brody Jewish Center, a faith-based Jewish organization at UVA, and previously served as the chairman of the advisory board to UVA’s Department of Emergency Medicine. Mr. Brody also served for four years as the chair of the Virginia Medicaid Board. While at UVA, Brody wrote for the Cavalier Daily, was involved with the Inter-Fraternity Council, and was the vice president of the Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity.
Marvin Gilliam, Jr.
Mr. Gilliam, who also received a degree in economics from UVA, owns MAM Development, a real estate firm. He was previously the vice president and part-owner of Cumberland Resources Corporation, an energy company which operated coal mines in the mountains of Virginia and Kentucky, and serves as the board chair of the Wellspring Foundation of southwest Virginia, an organization aimed at providing resources to underserved rural communities. Mr. Gilliam also serves as a trustee of the Barter Theater in Abingdon, VA, and is a former trustee of the Johnston Memorial Hospital and the William King Museum of Art, which are also in Abingdon. Gilliam previously served on the BOV from 2010 to 2014, and currently serves on the boards of the Virginia Athletics Foundation and UVA’s College at Wise.
David Okonkwo
Dr. Okonkwo, who graduated from UVA with a degree in biology, is a professor of neurological surgery at the University of Pittsburgh. His clinical interests include sports medicine, especially relating to traumatic brain and spinal injuries, as well as scoliosis and spinal deformity. He is the director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Neurotrauma Clinical Trials Center, as well as a principal investigator of TRACK-TBI, a nationwide clinical trial network which researches traumatic brain injury. He has published hundreds of research papers, and is a member of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, and the International Neurotrauma Society. While an undergraduate at UVA, he was a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Biomedical Research Scholar, and he later returned to UVA to complete his residency in neurological surgery.
David Webb
Mr. Webb is a vice chairman with capital markets for CBRE, the largest commercial real estate services and investment company in the world. Throughout his career, he has been involved in the financing of more than $50 billion of commercial real estate transactions. He is involved with the Bishop John T. Walker School, a private, tuition-free Episcopal school for boys in southeast Washington, DC; the Jubilee Support Alliance, a charity supporting affordable housing in DC; and the SEED Foundation, a network of college preparatory boarding schools. Mr. Webb majored in economics at UVA, and graduated in 1982. Two of his three children currently attend the university.
Porter Wilkinson
Ms. Wilkinson, a 2007 graduate of UVA Law, is counselor and chief-of-staff for the Board of Regents at the Smithsonian Institution, the largest museum, education, and research complex in the world. Before her stint with Smithsonian, she practiced law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and worked as a law clerk to Justices Brett Kavanaugh, back when he was a judge on the Court of Appeals, and John Roberts. Wilkinson grew up in Charlottesville and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 2002 with a degree in political science. She also played lacrosse at UNC, where she was a three-time All-ACC and All-American selection. She is an inductee in the Virginia Chapter of the U.S. Lacrosse Hall of Fame, and governing board member at Beauvoir, a private elementary school in Washington, DC. At UVA Law, she served on the managing board of the Virginia Law Review, was a member of the Order of the Coif and the Raven Society, and was awarded the Thomas Marshall Miller Prize.
These appointments, which create a majority bloc of Youngkin appointees, come at a time of charged political polarization, in which nationwide debates over freedom of speech, protests, anti-semetism, DEI initiatives, and more seem to have localized themselves around the University of Virginia. The BOV will convene for its next quarterly meeting on September 12th in the northeast wing of the Rotunda. Public broadcast records will be accessible on the BOV’s website for the duration of the meetings.
Leave a Reply