Thomas Hiatt

Thomas Hiatt joined the World Learning Inc. Board of Trustees in 2010. He previously served as board chair from 2014-2016, chair of the Advancement Committee, and as a member of the Academic Affairs and Investment Committees. He is a strong advocate of the value and importance of study abroad experiences and of international exchange programs. Hiatt has worked with entrepreneurial growth companies and held leadership positions in nonprofit organizations for more than 25 years. As a founding partner of Centerfield Capital, one of the largest private equity firms based in Indiana, he has raised and invested capital in a number of privately held firms across a wide variety of industries. In the process, he has served as a director of a number of private and publicly held companies, including firms in the financial services, health care, manufacturing, information technology, and business services industries. Prior to establishing Centerfield, Hiatt founded and served as president of a venture-backed biotechnology company based in Palo Alto, California. He also worked for Eli Lilly and Company in the U.S. and Europe for five years, and, prior to that, for the Ford Foundation, working on international technical assistance programs, principally in Pakistan. In addition to his work with World Learning, Hiatt has been involved with a number of other nonprofit organizations. He is currently chair of the Board of Governors of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He is the founder and former chair of the Advisory Board of Grameen Indianapolis, a nonprofit which provides microloans to women living below the poverty line. He is a past chair of the Board of Governors of the Small Business Investors Alliance, a national industry association, and the past president of the Midwest Region of Small Business Investment Companies. He is a life trustee of the Indiana Nature Conservancy. He has twice served as president of the Indiana Venture Club. He is the founder and a former board member of Friends of Holliday Park. Hiatt is also a director of Lake City Bank, a publicly traded financial institution based in Warsaw, Indiana, and chairs the bank's corporate risk committee. Hiatt graduated magna cum laude from Wabash College where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He also holds a MSc from the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he served as editor of the Sloan Management Review. Hiatt is an alumnus of the International Honors Program (1968–69) and edited a book, The Young Internationalists, about the experience with Mark Gerzon. He also lived in Austria for a year as a high school exchange student.