Zu Baird

Zu Baird serves as President, Chief Executive Officer & Board Member at The Markle Foundation. Zo Baird joined the Markle Foundation as its president in 1998, after a diverse career as a prominent lawyer and public policy expert. At the start of her tenure, as the internet was poised to become mainstream, she and the Markle Board of Directors redirected Markle's mission to focus on the potential of Information Technology to address some of the nation's most challenging issues in the areas of economic security, national security, and health care. Baird's experience in law, government, and business, along with a lifelong commitment to building a strong and fair nation for generations to come, has led Markle to drive transformative change in these areas and in internet policy. Baird deeply believes in the collective power of diverse leaders working together, and in her first years at Markle, she developed collaborations to expand access to the internet in developing countries and worked to ensure public representation in global internet governance processes. Markle created for the G-8 Heads of State the Digital Opportunity Task (DOT) Force, the first multi-sector collaboration that included nonprofit leaders with business and government, and inspired similar multisector collaborations at the United Nations. Over the past decade, Baird has led Markle's collaborative efforts to reform the intelligence community to meet current threats and catalyze improvements in the quality and cost-effectiveness of health care. Markle's collaborative recommendations have been embodied in law to create a trusted information sharing environment for national security, while protecting traditional civil liberties, and to enable the use of health IT for the private and secure sharing of health information to improve health and health care.