Leadership Team

Lynne Brown, Ph.D.

Lynne P. Brown is Chair of the Board of Advisors of the John Brademas Center, where she works to develop the overall mission, messaging and strategic planning for the Center. Dr. Brown was Senior Vice President for University Relations and Public Affairs at New York University for over four decades. In that position, she was responsible for the University's interaction with government at all levels, outreach to the community, strategic communications, and university events. She oversaw the offices of: Government and Community Affairs, Civic Engagement, University Events, Advertising and Publications, Web Communications, Media Production, and Public Affairs.

In addition to these ongoing responsibilities, she helped create and shape two major initiatives for the University:

Sustainability: She served as the co-founder of the Sustainability Task Force, a university-wide group charged with assessing the University's efforts on sustainability and creating a set of recommendations to reduce the University's environmental footprint.
Campus Planning and Expansion: Dr. Brown led a major effort, the first in NYU's history, to guide strategic thinking about space planning and the University's presence in its urban environment. The result was a long-term blueprint to guide the University's growth over the next two decades, NYU 2031. The Core Plan, a key aspect of that citywide plan, was approved by New York City in 2012.

A political scientist by training, Dr. Brown received her B.A. from Smith College, where she was elected Phi Beta Kappa, and went on to receive her Ph.D. in political science from The Johns Hopkins University. At NYU, she taught a graduate seminar on the politics of higher education for twenty years.

Before coming to NYU, Dr. Brown worked on Capitol Hill for Congressman John Brademas and Congressman Thomas S. Foley during their tenures as Majority Whips in the House of Representatives.

A native New Yorker, Dr. Brown serves on a number of civic boards, including the Union Square Partnership, where she is co-chair; New York Building Congress, where she is Vice Chair, as well as Co-Chair of the Higher Education committee; and the Village Alliance business improvement district. She is a trustee emerita of Manhattan College (Riverdale, New York).

Steve Heuer

Steve Heuer has worked for New York University (NYU) since March 2005, currently serving as Associate Vice President, Government Affairs. Steve represents the university’s policy interests before city, state and federal elected officials and government agencies. NYU’s policy interests include scientific and biomedical research, higher education policy (including federal and state student aid programs), university tax issues, and visa/immigration policy.

Tom is also the Director of External Affairs at NYU Washington, DC where he works closely with the Office of the Provost to identify public programming opportunities for the Washington, DC site. He seeks out and manages VIP speakers, links programs to academic initiatives at NYU, builds audiences, and connects events to other NYU global sites. In addition, he initiates and facilitates the participation of national experts and scholars, policymakers, professionals and entrepreneurs in both classroom lectures and special program events. Coordinating with other NYU administrators and faculty, he creates and maintains a robust program and event schedule including symposium, speaker series, lectures, and extracurricular programming. Tom oversees the NYU DC internship program by managing the relationships with the internship providers and ensuring placements for NYU students. He works with the Assistant Vice President for Government Affairs on State Department and Embassy initiatives in Washington, DC and abroad in order to ensure that technical issues such as visas are addressed and programmatic possibilities are explored. He is the founder and director of NYU Washington, DC's DC Dialogues program.

Prior to joining the Brademas Center, he acted as the office administrator for New York University’s office of government and community affairs. From 1999 until 2004, Tom worked in the U.S. Senate for Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD), and was the Senator’s Director of Correspondence. Tom received his B.A. from The Catholic University of America with minors in Philosophy and Religious Studies and earned his Masters of Public Administration with a specialization in management of public and nonprofit organizations from the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University.

Yvonne McGlue

Yvonne McGlue is a Board Liasion at the John Brademas Center helping with administrative scheduling. Yvonne began her career at NYU in 1986 working with Dr. John Brademas when he was president and later serving as Manager of his NYU President Emeritus office. Drawing on her wealth of institutional knowledge, her portfolio currently includes a wide range of administrative and office duties related to the operation of the Center in New York and coordinating with Washington, DC based staff for the Center’s activities in the nation’s capital.

Alberta Arthurs, Ph.D.

Alberta Arthurs is a Senior Fellow at the John Brademas Center and a consultant and commentator active in the fields of culture, philanthropy, and higher education. She was the Director for Arts and Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation for over a decade and prior to this position served as President and Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. Dr. Arthurs served as Dean of Undergraduate Affairs and Acting Dean of Freshmen at Harvard College and Dean of Admissions, Financial Aid, and Women’s Education at Radcliffe College. She has taught English at Harvard University and has taught and held administrative positions at Rutgers University and Tufts University.

Dr. Arthurs serves on numerous non-profit boards and advisory committees including the League of American Orchestras, Tribeca Film Institute, Philanthropy Committee of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Salzburg Global Seminar, and the Century Association.

Her recent consulting clients include J.P. Morgan Chase, Association of Performing Arts Presenters, and the AG Foundation, among others.

Timothy Naftali, Ph.D.

Tim Naftali is a Senior Fellow at the John Brademas Center where he resides as the principal interviewer for the Reflections Project: Congress in America. With a joint appointment, Dr. Naftali is a Clinical Associate Professor of History and Public Service and co-director of NYU’s Center for the United States and the Cold War. A native of Montreal and a graduate of Yale with a doctorate in history from Harvard, Dr. Naftali writes on national security and intelligence policy, international history and presidential history. Using Soviet-era documents, he and Russian academic Aleksandr Fursenko wrote the prize-winning One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964 and Khrushchev’s Cold War, the latter winning the Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature in 2007 and inclusion on Foreign Affairs’ 2014 list of the ten best books on the Cold War. As a consultant to the 9/11 Commission, Dr. Naftali wrote a history of US counterterrorism policy, published as Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism.

Naftali came to NYU Wagner after serving as the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, where he authored the Library's nationally acclaimed exhibit on Watergate and oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of presidential documents and nearly 700 hours of the infamous Nixon tapes. Naftali, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Slate and Foreign Affairs, is also seen regularly on television as a commentator on contemporary history. Most recently, he was featured in CNN’s The Sixties and The Seventies and in the PBS documentaries Dick Cavett’s Watergate, Dick Cavett’s Vietnam, and The Bomb.

Nessa Rapoport

Nessa Rapoport, a New York-based writer and editor, is Consulting Editor at the John Brademas Center and research scholar at NYU. Her recent editorial projects include: Are the Arts Essential? (Brademas Center/NYU Press, 2022); The Origin Story: An Oral History of the Founding of NYU Abu Dhabi (2021); Standing for Reason: The University in a Dogmatic Age, by John Sexton (Yale University Press, 2019); In Our Own Voice: An Oral History of New York University’s Dramatic Transformation (2015); as well as privately commissioned legacy memoirs by philanthropists. As senior editor at Bantam Books, she edited several best-selling memoirs, including Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, by Jimmy Carter; and Iacocca: An Autobiography, the best-selling book of the decade. She is the author of two novels, Evening and Preparing for Sabbath; a memoir, House on the River; and a volume of her prose poems, A Woman’s Book of Grieving. From 2007 to 2019, she was senior program officer at the Charles H. Revson Foundation. She is married to artist Tobi Kahn, with whom she has collaborated as a poet on books and exhibits.

Leah began her career working in art, science, and natural history museums. Through roles ranging from education to exhibition development, Leah developed broad fluency in national trends and challenges facing the arts. Trained as a program evaluator while working at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, she was recognized by the Visitor Studies Association as an emerging leader in the museum evaluation field. Bilingual in Spanish, Leah acts on her commitment to social justice through volunteer work in arts and immigrant-serving organizations – she is Community Strategic Partnerships Liaison at Puentes de Salud in Philadelphia, and serves on the Board of Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens.

Leah holds a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.

Leah Reisman

Leah Reisman is a sociologist, ethnographer, and nonprofit leader. As a Research Fellow at the NYU Brademas Center, Leah contributed to a Mellon Foundation-funded study of the relationship between arts engagement and social wellbeing in California, and a book project exploring art’s value in society. Leah conducts independent research as an Affiliate at Metris Arts Consulting, with clients including the Wallace Foundation, the Local Initiatives Support Coalition, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She currently serves as a Program Officer at the Barra Foundation in Philadelphia, and on the Board of Directors of Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens. Previously, she worked in partnership with Philadelphia Latinx immigrant communities as Health & Wellness Director at Puentes de Salud. Her original quantitative and qualitative research on strategy consulting to nonprofits, Philadelphia’s arts philanthropic ecosystem, cultural philanthropy in Mexico, and professionalization in arts nonprofits has been supported by the National Science Foundation and featured in academic journals, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog. Leah holds a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.

Polly Terzian

Polly Terzian, a DC native, is an External Affairs Associate with the Office of Government Affairs at New York University. Polly works closely with the Brademas Center internship program helping to promote, select, and support the Center’s cohort during the academic semesters. She also aids in organizing the Center’s events and in managing the Center’s communications. Polly’s portfolio with NYU Government Affairs includes overseeing the team’s communications and assisting with the office’s key financial aid advocacy programs: NYU Albany Day and NYU DC Day. She was previously a member of the Washington, DC staff in the Office of Global Programs where she facilitated public programs and student workshops, coordinated academic administrative matters, and mentored students who produced their own events.