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The Board of Trustees at Washington University in St. Louis has appointed a new trustee for a four-year term and selected a new vice chair for the 2025–26 academic year.
Lal Karsanbhai, MBA ’95, will join the board for a four-year term starting July 1. In 2021, Karsanbhai was named president and chief executive officer of Emerson, a global industrial technology leader valued at $17.5 billion, located in St. Louis. Prior to that, he occupied various roles at the company and was named head of its automation solutions division in 2018, where he spearheaded innovations aimed at enhancing operations in crucial industries.
Penny Pennington has been designated vice chair for the 2025–26 academic year. Pennington serves as the managing partner of Edward Jones, a prominent financial services firm with $2.2 trillion in client assets. Under her stewardship, the firm is devoted to improving the financial health of its more than 9 million clients through all-encompassing financial planning. Additionally, Pennington is a participant in the Business Roundtable.
Moreover, Dean Yamamoto, BS ’87, JD ’90, the founder of the law firm Yamamoto Caliboso Hetherington in Hawaii, will join the board as an ex-officio member following his appointment as chair of the Alumni Board of Governors. The Board of Trustees has also reappointed trustee Andrew Newman for another term as vice chair. Furthermore, Tonya Edmond, a professor at the Brown School, is the newly appointed faculty representative to the board as chair of the Faculty Senate Council.
The board additionally elected four new student representatives for undergraduate and graduate studies for the 2025–26 academic year. The undergraduate representatives are:
Bella Gomez, a rising senior majoring in Latin American studies and global studies, with a minor in educational studies, all within Arts & Sciences. Gomez is passionate about equitable public health policies and aims to pursue graduate education in health law and population health; and
Da’Juantay Wynter, a rising senior from Sacramento, California, majoring in educational studies and American culture studies, both in Arts & Sciences. As the former president of the Association of Black Students and a contributing writer for the WashU Political Review, Wynter seeks to use public policy to create a more fair society, particularly in K-12 education.
The graduate representatives are:
Michael Kudom-Agyemang, a dual-degree student and physician from Ghana, pursuing a master’s in public health alongside a master’s in business administration. Kudom-Agyemang, who serves as a graduate research assistant in Tristan McIntosh’s lab, is dedicated to connecting medicine, business, and public health to devise solutions for health challenges; and
Alyssa Labonte, a fifth-year PhD student in the neuroscience program at WashU Medicine. Labonte is completing her dissertation in child psychiatry under Chad Sylvester’s mentorship, where she investigates the development of functional brain organization in early infancy. She is also deeply engaged in science outreach as the executive director of the Young Scientist Program.
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