Sharon Davies is the president and CEO of the Kettering Foundation. Previously, she served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Spelman College and as vice provost for diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer at The Ohio State University, where she was as a member of OSU’s Moritz College of Law faculty, serving as the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. At OSU, she directed the university’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity. She also held an appointment to the Ohio Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. 

 Ms. Davies was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and a Notes and Comments Editor of the Columbia Law Review. After graduation, she worked for Steptoe and Johnson in Washington, DC and Lord, Day & Lord Barrett Smith in New York City. She served for five years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York. 

 She was the recipient of a YWCA Woman of Achievement award from the YWCA Columbus chapter; the Robert M. Duncan Award by the Columbus Chapter of the American Constitution Society in recognition of her contributions to democracy, fostering legal education, ensuring access to justice, and preserving individual rights and the rule of law; and the Liberty Bell Award from the Columbus Bar Association. 

Her writings have been published in Duke Law Journal, the Southern California Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and Law and Contemporary Problems. Oxford University Press published Davies’s narrative nonfiction account of a 1921 murder trial in Birmingham, Alabama, titled Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America, for which the Mayor of Birmingham presented her with a “Key to the City.” 

Ms. Davies has an undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a law degree from Columbia University School of Law.