Alumni-Faculty Forum: Evolving Employee Experiences: Reimagining the Future of Work

McCosh Hall, Room 10

Sponsored by the Alumni Association of Princeton University.

Moderator

Leah P. Boustan ’00 
Professor of Economics, Princeton University

Panelists

Joyce Zhang Gray *15
CEO, Alariss Global

Alicia Yvonne Christy ’77
Deputy Director of Reproductive Health, Veterans Health Administration

Lisa Belkin ’82
Journalist and Author

Matthew Boyle ’97
Senior Reporter, Bloomberg News

Moderator

Leah P. Boustan ’00
Professor of Economics, Princeton University 

Leah Boustan is a professor of economics at Princeton University, where she also serves as the director of the Industrial Relations Section. Outside of Princeton, Boustan is co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Boustan was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2012 and won the IZA Young Labor Economists Award in 2019. Boustan’s research lies at the intersection between economic history and labor economics. Her first book, “Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets,” examines the effect of the Great Black Migration from the rural South during and after World War II. Her recent work, including her forthcoming book, “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success,” is about the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Panelists

Joyce Zhang Gray *15
CEO, Alariss Global

Joyce Zhang Gray is the co-founder and CEO of Alariss Global, a Silicon Valley-based global expansion tech startup. She was previously the first employee and vice president of sales for Human Interest, a fintech unicorn providing financial security for SMB employees. In Asia, she worked for the president of Microsoft Asia-Pacific in Singapore and as a regional manager for Groupon China (joint venture with Tencent). And in Africa, she worked for the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation in Nairobi, developing the East Africa Community’s Common Market Protocols, as well as for a behavioral economics firm doing work in public health in Zimbabwe. In government, she previously worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on financial regulatory reform policy during the Global Financial Crisis and for the U.S. Department of Labor. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an elected director on the Harvard Alumni Association board of directors. She received her BA from Harvard University, MPA from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

Alicia Yvonne Christy ’77
Deputy Director of Reproductive Health, Veterans Health Administration

Alicia Yvonne Christy is an African American artist, physician and Army veteran. As a physician, she has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications and 16 book chapters. She holds the rank of professor at the Uniformed Services University and adjunct professor at Howard University School of Medicine. The majority of her published work has been in the area of racial disparities in reproductive health outcomes. Christy’s writing and artwork have been published in multiple medical journals. Her artwork “When Will Black Lives Matter” was selected for the online Art Against Racism exhibit. She was the former class artist for the Princeton Class of 1977. Her watercolor tiger was the previous class logo, and the image was also used in the Annual Giving drive. Her collection of portraits, “Faces of the Fallen: Women Proudly Served,” and her children’s book will be part of a Woman Veteran Artist exhibit at the Library of Congress. She shares these paintings as broadly as she can in order to honor the subjects and to tell their stories.

Lisa Belkin ’82
Journalist and Author

Lisa Belkin has spent a career covering American social issues as a newspaper journalist, a magazine writer and a book author. During nearly 30 years at The New York Times, she was variously a national correspondent (based in Houston), a medical reporter, a business reporter, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the creator of the Life’s Work column and the Motherlode blog. She has spent the past decade in the digital realm, in senior positions at HuffPost and Yahoo News. She has taught writing at Princeton University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Belkin is the author of three books — “Life’s Work, Confessions of an Unbalanced Mom,” “First, Do No Harm,” and “Show Me A Hero,” which was made into an HBO miniseries of the same name. She is currently finishing her next book, about the murder of a police officer in 1960 and what it meant for three generations of three American families — one of them her own. It is due to be published by W.W. Norton in 2023. Her own personal life/work balance includes her husband, Bruce, her two sons, and her rescue mutt, Pippa.

Matthew Boyle ’97
Senior Reporter, Bloomberg News

Matthew Boyle is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News in New York, covering management and workplace trends across all of Bloomberg’s content platforms. Before this, he covered the U.S. retail scene with a focus on Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer. He was previously the London-based leader of the European Consumer team at Bloomberg, managing a group of reporters and editors across Europe and Africa. He joined Bloomberg in 2009 after writing for Businessweek and Fortune magazines. He lives in Harrison, New York, with his wife and two teenagers.