Sophia Piliouras

Chief Operating Officer (COO) & Corporate Secretary,
MCCA

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Sophia M. Piliouras is the Chief Operating Officer and Corporate Secretary of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA), the preeminent advisor on diversity, equity, and inclusion to C-suites across corporate America. Ms. Piliouras’ longstanding commitment to racial and gender equity goes hand in hand with her belief that leaders become changemakers when they strive to always do better. By consistently advocating for sustainable DEI strategies and modeling effective allyship, she empowers today’s leaders to take action beyond the status quo. 

As both a seasoned attorney and an expert in managing successful organizational partnerships, Ms. Piliouras brings a wealth of insight to MCCA’s leadership team, where she directs programming and events, strategic partnerships, membership, and more. Since joining MCCA in 2016, she has served as Senior Counsel, Director of Education and Research and as President of MCCA’s Advisory Practice (MAP). 

Prior to joining MCCA, she served as Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at JP Morgan Chase, where she led teams in Auto Finance and Student Lending, Business Banking, and Asset Wealth Management, and as a litigator at Seyfarth Shaw LLP. In addition, she provided pro bono legal counsel to refugee and immigrant children through Kids in Need of Defense (KIND).

Ms. Piliouras is a frequent presenter and guest lecturer on topics in diversity, law, and strategic planning. She is a Trustee of the Foundation for Advancement of Diversity in Intellectual Property Law. Follow Ms. Piliouras on LinkedIn. 

Ms. Piliouras holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Wisconsin and an M.S. from Columbia University. She received her J.D. from New York Law School, where she served as the United Nations Editor for the New York Law School Journal of Human Rights. Prior to law school, Ms. Piliouras was a project manager for CrossCom National and Hewitt Associates LLC.

Janice P. Brown

Principal,
Meyers Nave

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Janice Brown is a Principal in Meyers Nave’s Labor and Employment Practice, Workplace Investigations Practice, and Commercial Litigation Practice. She has more than 35 years of trial, arbitration, and appellate experience in state and federal courts.

Janice’s distinguished career began in the U.S. Justice Department where she quickly demonstrated outstanding legal expertise that earned her membership in the Honors Program and the “Outstanding Trial Attorney” and “Trial Lawyer of the Year” awards in under three years.

Janice is recognized as a pioneer in the legal profession as the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Brown Law Group, a woman- and minority-owned employment and business litigation firm in San Diego that served local corporations and Fortune 50 companies headquartered throughout the U.S. for over 20 years. She is a trusted advisor to clients, an inspirational mentor to colleagues and an influential leader in advancing diversity throughout the legal profession. For example, San Diego SuperLawyers magazine published an article about Janice titled “Chief Executive Optimist: Janice Brown took an uncommon approach to the law and built an uncommon firm.” Janice is also a speaker and consultant for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion issues.

Employment Law and Litigation: Janice provides employers with a comprehensive range of employment law advice and counseling, training, internal investigations, and administrative hearings and litigation. She is an expert in drafting and revising personnel policies, employee handbooks, and employment and severance agreements, as well as providing advice on complex issues such as employee classification, discipline and terminations, leaves of absence, disability issues, employee privacy, and whistleblower laws. She also advises on HR assessments and compliance audits.

Janice advises on the myriad of laws and regulations that impose a significant compliance burden on employers. She also helps clients understand the extensive number of state, federal, and administrative agency decisions that construe ever-changing and increasingly complex employment laws.

Janice’s approach to employment litigation focuses on understanding that legal disputes between employers and employees can be highly charged, intensely personal, and problematic when made public. Employment disputes can also impact a client’s general employer-employee relationship.

When litigation is unavoidable, Janice defends employers in single- and multi-plaintiff lawsuits involving allegations of wage-and-hour violations, wrongful termination, sexual harassment, racial discrimination, age discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination, medical leave, disability accommodation, defamation, pregnancy, and retaliation, among others. Janice also has a unique specialty handling Private Attorneys General Act lawsuits which are similar to qui tam cases involving different processes, penalties and damages than traditional employment suits.

Business Litigation: Janice serves as a strategic partner with clients that are involved in commercial litigation as defendants or plaintiffs. She studies and understands each client’s business and develops litigation strategies that are legally efficient, cost effective and practical. Her goal is to minimize the distraction and disruption that litigation can cause at all levels of the daily operation of a client’s business.

Janice’s commercial litigation clients include local businesses and national corporations in the economic sectors of insurance, financial services, telecommunications, retail, professional sports, food and beverage, manufacturing, transportation, construction, real estate and entertainment. For these clients, she has handled an extensive scope of litigation, including breach of fiduciary duty, corporate governance, shareholder derivative actions, trade secret misappropriation, trademark infringement, fraud and breach of contract, business disparagement and defamation, partnership or corporation creation and dissolution, unfair competition, and tortious interference with a contract or prospective business relations.

Janice is well known for her legal expertise as well as her commitment to local community service. She has been featured on the local San Diego affiliates of CBS, Fox, ABC and NBC for her insights on topics such as sexual harassment and wrongful termination. Janice also is a frequent speaker on economic development and personal and business success.

Courtney D. Cogburn Ph.D.

Associate Professor,
Columbia University

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Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn joined the faculty at the Columbia University School of Social Work in July 2014 as an assistant professor and she was also invited to join the Faculty of the Columbia Population Research Center.

Her research aims to characterize and evaluate the function of toxic social environments in producing racial disparities in health and disease. She is particularly interested in examining associations between multiple dimensions of racism and stress-related disease as well as in identifying psychosocial processes that attenuate those effects. In one line of research, Dr. Cogburn is using data science techniques to develop a model and measure of media-based cultural racism and psychophysiological approaches to examine the effects of exposure to cultural racism on physiological, psychological and behavioral stress responses. She is also working closely with a community health center and global non-profit to educate and build community activism around social and structural inequities and health.

Dr. Cogburn completed the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar program at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Education and Psychology as well as her MSW from the University of Michigan. She received her BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia.

Her current research projects examine:

the effects of cultural racism in the media on physiological, psychological and behavioral stress reactivity and moderating effects of cognitive appraisal processes; the role of structural racism in producing disease risk; and chronic psychosocial stress exposure and related implications for understanding Black/White disparities in cardiovascular health and disease between early and late adulthood. At the end of 2014, Dr. Cogburn received an award from the Provost’s Grants Program for Junior Faculty Who Contribute to the Diversity Goals of the University for a project titled “Black Face to Ferguson: A Mixed Methodological Examination of Media Racism, Media Activism and Health.”

In addition to her academic research, Dr. Cogburn works with the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston andis a senior advisor at the International Center Advocates Against Discrimination in NYC to educate and build community activism around issues of racism and health.

Before coming to Columbia in July 2014, Dr. Cogburn was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health. She received her BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia, MSW from the University of Michigan School of Social Work and PhD in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology from the University of Michigan.