Our Team

Rebecca is an entrepreneur in both business and philanthropy. Most recently, Rebecca co-founded Ethiopia Education Initiatives, a not-for-profit organization that seeks to provide world class educational opportunities for talented Ethiopian students and help ignite positive change in education in Ethiopia more broadly. EEI’s first project is the Haile-Manas Academy, a premier co-ed secondary boarding school for four hundred students in central Ethiopia that has been built in three years and is slated to open its doors in January 2021. Rebecca serves currently as Executive Director of EEI.

Rebecca advises the firm on strategy, operations and human resources. She also supports client teams that advise emerging growth companies. Rebecca helped found the firm in 2009 and served as the firm’s Executive Vice President of Finance and Operations from the firm’s founding through October 2020.

Rebecca began her career on Wall Street in the Mergers & Acquisitions group at Davis Polk & Wardwell. Before joining Davis Polk, she was a litigation attorney at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C.

Rebecca is the author of Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia, a memoir about her return to Ethiopia after her family’s forced exile following the 1974 revolution and twenty-five years in the United States.

Rebecca serves as a Board Chair of EMILY’s List, the national organization that works to elect Democratic pro-choice women to political office in the United States, and of The Brearley School, an independent K-12 girls’ school in New York City. She is a former Trustee of Freedom House, the human rights organization.

Rebecca received a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a B.A. from Williams College. After law school, she clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.