James M. Stone

James M. Stone is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a major figure in the insurance industry. He has held leadership positions in several distinguished nonprofit organizations. He founded the Plymouth Rock Company in 1983 and has served as its Chairman and CEO since that time. Under his leadership, Plymouth Rock has grown to become a multistate auto and property insurer with annual revenues over $1.7 billion. He was, in addition, the founder of two national personal lines insurers, a Bermuda reinsurer, and was a founding partner of Lindsay Goldberg LLP, a New York private equity firm. Prior to organizing Plymouth Rock, he was a Lecturer in Economics at Harvard University, where he earned a BA and then his PhD. He also served as Insurance Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Carter administration. A strong advocate of independent journalism, he served for eight years as a Director of The Boston Globe Newspaper Corporation, and subsequently as Vice Chairman of GlobalPost, an international online news service. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of ProPublica. He served for many years as a Director and as Chairman of Management Sciences for Health, a worldwide humanitarian nonprofit organization providing health infrastructure services in over forty countries and is now its Chairman Emeritus. He has also chaired for some years the panel that awards the annual School on the Move Prize to the most improved Boston Public School. He is a Director, Executive Committee Member, and Chairman of the Academic Affairs Committee of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. Dr. Stone and his wife Cathleen have organized and funded eight academic centers at leading universities in the United States and Europe devoted to studying the growing problem of wealth inequality; and they have created an innovative “living laboratory” to study sustainability and approaches to responding to climate change. They have also established the widely respected MAAH Stone Book Prize that awards $50,000 to the best book published in the field of African American history and culture in a given year. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and serves as a member of the Academy’s Trust and Nominating Committees.