Advisory Board
The SRI Advisory Board provides advice and recommendations to maximize the Institute's research and societal impact.
The Schwartz Reisman Institute’s Advisory Board provides advice and recommendations on strategy to maximize the research and societal impact of the Institute. Board members contribute world-class expertise from a variety of sectors, including computer science, education, technological entrepreneurship, public policy, and philanthropy. Get to know each of our distinguished board members below.
The 2024-2026 SRI Advisory Board members are:
Marian Croak
Marian Croak is the vice president of responsible AI and human centered technologies at Google. She was formerly a VP for site reliability engineering for ads, corporate engineering and YouTube, at Google. Marian joined Google in late 2014 after retiring from AT&T as an SVP responsible for advanced research and innovation, and designing and developing one of the world's largest wireless and broadband networks. She managed over 2000 world class engineers and computer scientists. Marian holds over 200 patents mostly focused on IP technology. Marian has received numerous awards, including the 2013 and 2014 Edison Patent Awards, and was inducted into the Women in Technology International's Hall of Fame in 2013. She is a strong supporter of STEM initiatives, served on many boards including NACME and Catalyst, and personally mentors many individuals in STEM. Marian attended Princeton University, and the University of Southern California where she received her doctorate in quantitative analysis and social psychology. She is currently a member of the corporate advisory board for the University of Southern California’s School of Engineering, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society advisory board. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.
Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton received his PhD in artificial intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978. After five years as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon, he became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and moved to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he is now an emeritus professor. In 2013, Google acquired Hinton’s neural networks startup, DNNresearch, which developed out of his research at U of T. Subsequently, Hinton was a vice-president and engineering fellow at Google until 2023. He is a founder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence where he continues to serve as chief scientific adviser.
Hinton was one of the researchers who introduced the backpropagation algorithm and was the first to use backpropagation for learning word embeddings. His other contributions to neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, variational learning, and deep learning. His research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification. Hinton is among the most widely cited computer scientists in the world.
Hinton is a fellow of the UK Royal Society, the Royal Society of Canada, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His awards include the David E. Rumelhart Prize, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, the Killam Prize for Engineering, the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Medal, the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal, the IEEE James Clerk Maxwell Gold Medal, the NEC C&C Award, the BBVA Award, the Honda Prize, and most notably the ACM A.M. Turing Award.
Robert Prichard
J. Robert S. Prichard is chair of Torys LLP, visitor at Massey College and president emeritus at the University of Toronto. He is also a director of Onex Corporation and Alamos Gold and serves on the international advisory board of Barrick Gold. He is an officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of Ontario, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a fellow of the Institute of Corporate Directors. He attended Swarthmore College, the University of Chicago (MBA), the University of Toronto (LLB), and Yale University (LLM), and holds honorary degrees from 11 colleges and universities in Canada and the United States.
Heather Reisman
Heather Reisman is the founder and chief executive officer of Indigo Books & Music Inc., Canada’s largest book, lifestyle, and specialty kids’ retailer.
Reisman is a former governor of McGill University and of the Toronto Stock Exchange. She has served on many North American boards and continues to serve as a director of Indigo, Onex Corporation, and The National Library of Israel.
Reisman has co-executive-produced a number of important documentary films, including Emmy- and BAFTA-winning The Social Dilemma. The Social Dilemma explores the dangerous human impact of social networking and has found resonance around the world, having now been seen by over 100 million people. In 2021, Reisman co-authored Imagine It! A Handbook for a Happier Planet.
Reisman was educated at McGill University, is an officer of the Order of Canada and the recipient of nine honorary doctorates including from University of Toronto, McGill University, and The Weizmann Institute of Science, and The Technion University.
In May 2015, Reisman was inducted into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame.
Reisman is married to Gerald Schwartz, chair and CEO of Onex Corporation. She has four children and 11 grandchildren.
Reeta Roy
Reeta Roy is president and CEO of the Mastercard Foundation—one of the largest private foundations in the world, with approximately $40 billion in assets. Its vision is a world where everyone has the opportunity to learn and prosper.
A thoughtful leader who is deeply committed to equity and inclusion, Reeta has worked tirelessly to build a foundation that is collaborative and known for bold action and transformative impact. Under Reeta’s leadership, the foundation has focused its work on Africa since 2009; committed to a goal of ensuring 75 per cent of its partners are African organizations; and based the majority of the foundation’s operations, staff, and leadership, including Reeta herself, in Africa. To date, the foundation has committed/deployed more than US$5.7 billion through financial inclusion, education, and youth livelihood programs—and as part of their pandemic response. This includes a $1.3 billion investment under the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, which is enabling nearly 40,000 talented but economically disadvantaged young leaders to pursue and complete their secondary and/or higher education. It also includes the Saving Lives and Livelihoods initiative—a historic $1.3 billion partnership with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) to drive COVID-19 vaccination and health security in Africa.
Today, the Mastercard Foundation’s Young Africa Works strategy, which was launched in 2018, has set a goal of enabling 30 million young people, particularly young women, to access dignified and fulfilling work by 2030.
A strong believer in listening, Reeta can often be found working directly with those the foundation’s programs serve—young people and future leaders. Reeta’s childhood growing up in Malaysia helped her to develop her capacity to listen and the empathy with which she approaches the foundation’s work. Reeta was a beneficiary of scholarships that allowed her to complete her education and mentors continue to support her growth as a leader.
Reeta is a member of the African Transformation Leadership Panel and is regularly called upon by the United Nations, regional bodies in Africa such as the African Center for Economic Transformation, and global funders to advocate for solutions for youth employment. Reeta has represented these ideas on numerous stages, including at the African Transformation Forum, the Council of Foreign Relations, the United Nations, and the World Bank.
Prior to joining the foundation, Reeta was the divisional vice president of global citizenship and policy at Abbott and was vice president of the Abbott Fund, its corporate foundation. She led Abbott’s public-private initiatives related to HIV/AIDS in Africa and a range of global health programs. Before Abbott, Reeta held a number of leadership positions at Bristol-Myers Squibb, working on global health policy issues. Prior to joining the private sector, she worked at the United Nations.
Reeta received a Master of Arts in law and diplomacy from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a Bachelor of Arts from St. Andrews Presbyterian College. She holds seven Honorary Doctorate degrees and has received several awards and recognitions.
Marietje Schaake
Marietje Schaake is international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Between 2009 and 2019, she served as a member of European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs, and technology policies. She writes a monthly column for the Financial Times and serves on the UN’s AI Advisory Body.
Marietje is an (advisory) board member with a number of non-profits including MERICS, ECFR, ORF, and AccessNow.
Janice Stein
Janice Gross Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. She was the Massey lecturer in 2001 and a Trudeau fellow. She was awarded the Molson Prize by the Canada Council for an outstanding contribution by a social scientist to public debate. She is an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded Honorary Doctorate of Laws by four universities. Her most recent publications are “Deterrence as Performance” in The Journal of Strategic Studies and “Managing Nuclear Escalation” in the Texas National Security Review. Her current research focuses on technology and public policy amidst great power competition. She is a regular contributor to CBC and CNN, and is a weekly guest on The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge as well as on Friday Focus.
Richard Sutton
Richard S. Sutton is research scientist at Keen Technologies, professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, chief scientific advisor of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), and fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Amii, and CIFAR. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts in 1984 and a BA in psychology from Stanford University in 1978. Prior to joining the University of Alberta in 2003, he worked in industry at AT&T Labs and GTE Labs, and in academia at the University of Massachusetts. He helped found DeepMind Alberta in 2017 and worked there until its dissolution in 2023. At the University of Alberta, Sutton founded the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which now consists of ten principal investigators and about 100 people altogether. Sutton is co-author of the textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, and his scientific publications have been cited more than 140,000 times. He is also a libertarian, a chess player, and a cancer survivor.