Edward W. Scott, Jr.

Ed Scott co-founded the Center for Global Development (CGD) in 2001 and he serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors. Mr. Scott is an experienced and successful business executive, a former Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Government, and an active supporter of a number of philanthropic initiatives.

In early 1995, Mr. Scott founded BEA Systems, Inc. with the other two principals of the company, Bill Coleman and Alfred Chuang. Mr. Scott served both as President of BEA and as Executive Vice President for World Wide Field Operations, supervising BEA's sales, marketing, and services operations. BEA became the 12th largest software company in the world and was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2008.

Prior to BEA, Mr. Scott spent seven years at Pyramid Technology, where he managed worldwide sales and marketing. Before Pyramid, Mr. Scott was part of the team that started the Federal division of Sun Microsystems where he spent three years. In 1978, Mr. Scott founded Office Power, Inc., an office automation firm that was purchased within the first year by Computer Consoles, Inc. of Rochester, NY.

Before his career in the high-technology industry, Mr. Scott was an executive in the U.S. government for 17 years. Mr. Scott served seven Attorneys General (Republicans and Democrats) and three Secretaries of Transportation. In his last government assignment, he served as an Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of Transportation during the Administration of President Jimmy Carter.

Since withdrawing from direct management at BEA, Mr. Scott initiated a variety of philanthropic initiatives, including the funding and support of several orphanages and child development centers in Central America.

Mr. Scott has provided substantial financial and advisory support to Compassion International, a faith-based children’s development group which aids over 1,000,000 children in 23 countries, including active HIV/AIDS programs in five countries in Africa.

Mr. Scott is a co-founder, along with Bill Gates and George Soros, of DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), an advocacy organization dedicated to building public and political awareness about development problems in Africa, most notably the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The lead singer of the rock band U2, Bono, is the principal spokesperson of DATA (now called ONE). Mr. Scott also serves on the Board of Directors of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (IIE), a long-standing leader in international economic policy analysis.

Mr. Scott established and funded the Scott Family Fellows program in 2007, which is supported by CGD. The program provides to the President of Liberia a cadre of highly trained economists and development specialists, who work directly for the cabinet secretaries of various Liberian ministries helping to reconstruct that war-torn country. Since its inception, the program has been expanded to include other fellows funded by Humanity United, the McCall MacBain Foundation, the Open Society Institute and the Nike Foundation. There are currently 15 fellows in Monrovia working across numerous Ministries and government agencies.

In his most recent philanthropic initiative, the Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty (CIFA), Mr. Scott seeks to improve the capacity and effectiveness of the faith community in its collective effort to reduce global poverty and disease. CIFA achieves this through increased interfaith coordination, best practices and model sharing, innovative mobilization of resources, and influential advocacy to governments and the general public.

Mr. Scott earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in political science from Michigan State University. He also has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Oxford (UK) where he recently endowed a Chair in Psychiatry and two research fellowships dedicated to the study of the causes and possible treatments of autism and Asperger’s syndrome. He established a special program at University College, Oxford for admission to the college of students with severe disabilities.

Mr. Scott serves on the Board of Trustees of the Florida Institute of Technology where he also funded the creation of the Scott Center for Autism Research. The Scott Center aims to study the most appropriate and effective treatments for the disorder.

In addition, Mr. Scott serves on the Board of Malaria No More, as well as the Boards of Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy and the King Center for the Performing Arts in Melbourne, Florida.

In his current commercial activity, Mr. Scott serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Florida Beer Company, where he is the majority shareholder. He is an investor and member of the Board of Directors for Voxiva, a company which develops and deploys applications on cellular phones to collect and manage public health information as well as patient and supply chain data in the health sector. Mr. Scott is also on the Board of Stitcher, a company which provides tools for managing podcasts on the iPhone and Blackberry mobile phones.

Mr. Scott was one of the earliest and largest single investors in StubHub, Inc., a highly successful internet ticketing company. He served on its Board for seven years prior to its acquisition by eBay, Inc. in 2007. Mr. Scott founded, built, owns and operates the Kiwi Tennis Club, which is one of the premier tennis facilities in the United States, in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida.

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