Speaker Bios

Amna Khalid is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She specializes in modern South Asian history and the history of medicine.

Born in Pakistan, Amna completed her Bachelor’s Degree at Lahore University of Management Sciences. She went on to earn an M.Phil. in Development Studies and a D.Phil. in History from Oxford University.

Amna is the author of multiple book chapters on the history of public health in nineteenth-century India, with an emphasis on the connections between Hindu pilgrimages and the spread of epidemics.

Growing up under a series of military dictatorships, Amna has a strong interest in issues relating to censorship and free expression. She speaks frequently on academic freedom, free speech and campus politics at colleges and universities as well as at professional conferences. Her essays and commentaries on these same issues have appeared in outlets such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Conversation, Inside Higher Ed, and The New Republic. She hosts a podcast and accompanying blog called “Banished,” which explores censorship in the past and present.

Amna is a Fellow at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement this 2022-2023 academic-year, along with her colleague Jeffrey Aaron Snyder​. They are completing a project called “Anti-CRT Bills Come to Campus: Documenting and Analyzing Emerging Threats to Free Expression and Academic Freedom from State Legislatures.”

Jeff Snyder is an Associate Professor in the department of Educational Studies at Carleton College. Snyder’s work explores the connections between the history of education and broader trends in U.S. cultural and intellectual history, examining questions about race, national identity and the purpose of public education in a diverse, democratic society.

Snyder has a keen interest in issues of academic freedom and free expression, especially as they relate to liberal arts education. He is a Fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement this 2022-2023 academic-year, along with his colleague Amna Khalid. They are completing a project called “Anti-CRT Bills Come to Campus: Documenting and Analyzing Emerging Threats to Free Expression and Academic Freedom from State Legislatures.”

Snyder is the author of the book Making Black History: The Color Line, Culture and Race in the Age of Jim Crow. He is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic and The Washington Post. He holds a B.A. from Carleton, an EdM in Learning and Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a PhD in the History of Education from New York University.

Erika Cheung is currently the executive director of Ethics in Entrepreneurship, a non-profit whose mission is to foster ethical questioning, culture, and systems in startups and startup ecosystems. We provide programs catered to workers, investors, and founders.

Erika is an advisor to several family offices, venture capital firms, and governmental investment programs focused on healthcare, biosciences, and biotechnology companies. She invests a portion of her time building cross-border networks between the US and the Asia Pacific region to facilitate the growth of companies operating in emerging markets.

Her first job out of college was working for Theranos, where she subsequently was one of the critical whistleblowers reporting the fraud case to regulators preventing the company from providing false lab results to patients. The Theranos scandal has been extensively covered in the media. She’s working towards obtaining her ACFE-certified fraud examiner’s license to educate others on fraud prevention strategies and develop programs to protect business stakeholders from high-risk ventures. She is also an advisor to several whistleblower advocacy organizations to support individuals who may be retaliated against while reporting misconduct.

She is passionate about innovation ecosystem building, development, economic mobility, affordable healthcare, and public-interest technology projects. She is an avid mixed martial artist in her free time and hopes to support efforts that leverage martial arts to empower trauma survivors.