Skip Stern

President - harvardclublongisland@gmail.com

Skip is a member of the Harvard's Class of 1981, with an AB in Economics. He is a long-time member of his class's Gift Committee, serving as co-chair for participation. A resident of Mather House, Skip served as House Council Chair and head of the Social Committee. While at Harvard, Skip was a lousy trumpet player, but loved playing in the Harvard University Band. He also served on the Committee on Undergraduate Education, the Committee on Housing and Undergraduate Life, the Student Assembly, and the Standing Committee on the Core Curriculum. Since graduating, Skip's career has been exclusively in finance. He worked as an equity research analyst at PaineWebber, an investment banker at PaineWebber's and The Transportation Group, and Fieldstone financing aircraft; a commercial banker at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (aircraft and securitization); and finally, a private banker at Wachovia Securities, Merrill Lynch, and presently, Wilmington Trust, a subsidiary of M&T Bank. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School (in Finance) and has been a Chartered Financial Analyst since 1985. He serves on the Board of the Community Chest of Port Washington, and actively supports Planned Parenthood of Greater NY. He and his wife (Terry), have a son and daughter, and have lived in Port Washington since 1990.

Sunil Sani

Vice President, Programming - hcliprogramming@gmail.com

Sunil is a member of the Harvard College Class of 1985 with an AB in Economics, and he was a resident of Eliot House. At Harvard, he was actively involved with the Harvard Band and the Harvard Crimson. He is now Vice President of Programming for the Harvard Club of Long Island. He has also been an alumni interviewer for over 35 years.

Sunil is President at CGS Investments, Inc., a family-owned investment company and a Principal at Flying Ventures, LLC, a family-run, early-stage, Venture Capital fund.

He serves as a Trustee of the Sani Family Foundation, which focuses its attention on children’s issues and causes in India, sits on the Executive Committee of the Father’s Day/Mother’s Day Council, and is an Advisory Board member of Children’s Hope India.

Sunil is also a member of the Save the Children Head Start Board and is a member of the Save the Children Corporate Advisory Board.

He received his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1987.

Sunil and his wife, Sharmila, have two sons.
 

Scott Clark

Vice President, Programming - hcliprogramming@gmail.com

Scott Clark is a managing director in the financial services investment banking group at Piper Sandler. Clark’s primary responsibilities include advising a broad range of financial institutions on strategic matters, focusing on mergers and acquisitions as well as capital financing. While Clark focuses on the firm’s Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast clients, he had broad transaction experience across the United States.
   
Previously, he was principal and co-head of investment banking at Sandler O’Neill + Partners, L.P. where he worked on many of the firm’s landmark mergers and capital raises. Clark was a member of Sandler O’Neill’s capital commitments committee and Sandler O’Neill’s merger and acquisition fairness opinion committee.
   
During his career, SNL Financial has ranked Clark as the No. 1 investment banker in the U.S. to depository institutions for several different time periods based on both number of deals and aggregate deal value. Clark has advised on more than 100 financial services company mergers and advised on merger transactions with almost $50 billion in aggregate transaction value. These transactions have ranged in size from the single digit millions to up to almost $20 billion. Clark represents clients of all sizes in the financial services space.
   
Clark has also worked on multiple capital raise transactions for clients, including equity and subordinated debt, with aggregate capital raised for clients of several billion dollars. In addition to transactional work, Clark provides clients with strategic advisory services, functioning as a primary resource in structuring and implementing complex merger and capital markets transactions.
   
Prior to joining Sandler O’Neill in 2003, Clark worked at Braun Consulting, where he assisted financial services companies with customer relationship management strategies.
   
Clark graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in economics with honors. He is an avid tennis player having played Varsity tennis at Harvard and representing his native New Zealand in the Davis Cup.

Joel Friedman

Vice President, Membership - HCLIMembership@gmail.com

Joel is a member of the Harvard College Class of 1998, where he received an A.B. cum laude in History. A resident of Lowell House, Joel was a 3x captain of the Harvard wrestling team, where he was also an Academic All-American, 4x EIWA Conference placewinner, NCAA Championship qualifier and a multi-year recipient of the Hardest Worker Award. Joel was also a member of the Fox Club. Joel is the founder & owner of Clearview Capital Management, LLC, a family office investment firm founded in 2009. Joel is also an alum of Morgan Stanley and Guggenheim Partners. Joel & his family are extremely passionate about the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), where Joel’s oldest son (Skylar) received life-saving medical intervention. Joel & his wife (Jami) live in Laurel Hollow with their 2 sons, Skylar & Blake.

Ryan Hirschey

Vice President, Webmaster - webmaster@harvardclubli.com

Ryan graduated from Harvard College with an AB in Economics.  A resident of Cabot House, Ryan was a member of the Harvard Band.  Ryan has served as webmaster for the Club since 1998.  Professionally, Ryan is Director of Product Management for Banking Operations at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he oversees a portfolio of middle and back office products covering payments, settlement, custody, and compliance & risk management.  He and his wife, Kerri, have two sons: Thomas, a United States Marine, and Christian, a freshman and National Merit Finalist scholarship winner studying computer science at the University of Alabama.

Thomas Masterson

Secretary - hclisecretary79@gmail.com

Tom is a member of the Harvard College Class of 1979, where he received an AB cum laude in Economics and was a resident of Quincy House. Tom was a varsity football player, where he achieved All Ivy recognition as a defensive back and was the leading tackler on the team as a senior, and he also played varsity lacrosse. He earned his MBA from Adelphi University in 1984. Tom’s career is in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), initially with Verizon and followed by Con Edison. He has coached PAL youth soccer, girls lacrosse, and boys lacrosse. Tom has been the Club Secretary since 2001 and has enjoyed coordinating the Annual Club Picnic each year since 2002, with former classmate and football teammate Dr. John Cosgrove and Carolyn Hughes, and most recently Joel Friedman. Tom and his wife Joanne are proud of their three children: Chris – Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer and Secretary of Global Net Lease (University of Notre Dame ’04, NYU – MBA), Kate – 2nd grade teacher at the Centre Avenue School in East Rockaway (Boston College ’06, Hofstra University – MA), and Keri – FP&A Manager with AES Clean Energy (University of Notre Dame ‘10, Columbia University – MS). He spends as much time as possible with his six grandchildren: Lily, Alex, Tyler, Dylan, Anna, and Kaye.

Judith Esterquest

Treasurer

Judy graduated in 1972, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in History & Literature; her PhD in English was awarded in 1980. During her undergraduate years, she experienced the 1969 and 1970 Harvard Strikes, the "Non-Merger Merger" between Radcliffe and Harvard, and the beginnings of co-educational housing, becoming the first woman to graduate from Eliot House. She was the Arts & Entertainment editor of the Harvard Independent, from its first semester, her pages helping fuel its early success/survival. She also served for two years on a Radcliffe Trustee committee exploring equal admissions and a Harvard-Radcliffe faculty-student discipline committee. As an alum, she has served on the HCLI Board for twenty-plus years (as President 2003-5). In 2013, the HAA honored her with what is now the Outstanding Volunteer Leadership Award for her work on the HCLI Distinguished Teacher Awards, begun in 2005.

She currently serves as an elected trustee of her local public library, and on the boards of the NY Metro Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program and the Red Bull Theater (a NYC company showcasing classic stories told in heightened language). She serves at the NYS Issues Specialist for Healthcare for the League of Women Voters, having been part of the small team that spent 18 months studying healthcare, writing new policy, and achieving consensus across 30+ NY Leagues. The policy explicitly favors single-payer financing, to achieve affordable, comprehensive, equitable healthcare for every NYS resident. In 2021-22 she led a US-wide team to have LWVUS adopt NYS language at the LWVUS Convention.

Her first full-time job was teaching in the MBA program of the Graduate School of Business for three years, before moving to New York City to join Booz-Allen & Hamilton, where she had global responsibilities; she then founded SOE, Inc, and E&A, Inc, also advising corporate executives. She has worked on six continents and traveled in 95 countries for business and pleasure.

Carolyn Hughes

Schools and Scholarship

"What excites you" is the first question Carolyn Hughes '54 asks every high senior she interviews. This question reflects Carolyn's DNA, her intrinsic curiosity - her lifelong love of learning. It helps understand Carolyn's journey.
 

Growing up on the other side of the Charles River and attending a local public high school in Allston, college, let alone Radcliffe, was not part of Carolyn's vision of her future. With her father a prison guard and her mom raising the family at home, graduating high school and finding an administrative job was her goal. However, after taking a college testing exam per a teacher's suggestion, her vision changed. Carolyn said yes to Radcliffe and the scholarship offered by Sears Roebuck and walked daily for the next four years across the river to college. Intrigued by math and science, Carolyn majored in math and supplemented her scholarship each college year working with a Harvard meteorologist. The latter had a grant from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute funded by the US Navy. Carolyn's job was to measure the boundaries of ice in the Arctic Circle from numerous locations on annual maps and then do statistical analysis.
 

After Radcliffe, Carolyn moved to New York with her husband and began her professional career. Teaching herself computer science and systems design she joined the ranks of the first female systems designers first as a consultant, then working full-time for the same client and when that company moved to Texas, for Blue Cross Blue Shield. Meanwhile she and husband Jim Hughes had five children. Four attended Harvard, '81, '83, '85 and '88, and one is severely handicapped, who the other four jokingly say went to Yale. "My Karen" is the heart - the north star of the family. Supporting disabled and underserved youth and families became part of Carolyn's DNA, including volunteering with her church's St. Vincent de Paul's Society, cochairing, with her husband, the Catholic Ministries Appeal for their Jesuit Parish, serving on the local public school district's technology program and the Harvard Alumni Association.
 

Determined to offer other students the same opportunities she had, Carolyn began volunteering in 1969 by interviewing local high school students as part of their application to Radcliffe. When Radcliffe and Harvard officially merged, she began interviewing for Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, and was invited to become a member of the Harvard Alumni Association. During her forty-five years with the HAA, she served as a regional director, elected director and chair of the National Schools and Scholarship Committee. Her consistent commitment evolved into leadership roles with the HAA, president of the Harvard Club of Long Island, and chair of the Long Island Schools Committee. Her role expanded to recruiting, training, and retaining interviewers along with direct-to-student/family/interviewer communications and organization of guidance counselor programs.
 

Now, after 54+ years of service, hundreds of high school students interviewed, numerous commendations including the HAA Award in 1990 and the HAA Clubs Award in 2020, Carolyn continues to be engaged with the Harvard Club of Long Island and the Schools Committee as well as her local church. Her commitment to public service is shared with her husband and children who are community volunteers and HAA interviewers in New Jersey, Texas, and Washington DC.
 

Clyvan Belle

Schools and Scholarship

Clyvan is a member of the Harvard College Class of 1988, with an AB in Economics. After living in Wigglesworth as a freshman, Clyvan lived in Kirkland House, where he became the head librarian. The Kirkland House Library is a quaint structure nestled into the corner of the dorm across from the Kennedy School of Government (check it out when you are in Cambridge!). Clyvan co-founded the Harvard Cricket Club and joined the Caribbean Club to share his culture with the Harvard and Cambridge communities. He served in several executive positions in both clubs, including President. After graduation, Clyvan started his career in consumer banking. Then earned his MBA (in Finance and Strategy) from the Steven M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Clyvan is a business management and strategy professional. At S.C. Johnson & Son and Unilever, he learned and refined manufacturing and consumer frameworks. Then, upon returning to financial services, he leveraged them to unlock strategy and sustain profitable growth. He mentors young professionals and has been a long-time member of the Harvard Club of Long Island and its Schools and Scholarship Committee. Clyvan and his wife, Sheila, have three children (including a twin) and have lived in Albertson or Roslyn Heights since 1998.