William J. Arnone

William J. Arnone is Chief Executive Officer – Emeritus at the Academy. As a Partner with Ernst & Young LLP for 15 years up to 2009, he was responsible for the strategic positioning, design, management, marketing, and thought leadership of retirement and financial education and counseling in employer-sponsored programs. Prior to joining Ernst & Young, he was Principal, Benefit Consultant, and National Director of Financial & Retirement Planning Services for Buck Consultants, Inc. (now part of Xerox). He joined Buck in 1981 after serving as Director, Senior Security Services, for the New York City Department for the Aging. He also served as Consultant on Employment of Older Workers for the Florence V. Burden Foundation in New York. He previously was Executive Director of Helping Aged Needing Direction in the Bronx. He also served as a staff associate with the New York City Board of Correction. He is co-author of Ernst & Young’s Retirement Planning Guide (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001). He is an Associate Editor of The Columbia Retirement Handbook (Columbia University Press, 1994). He is a Founding Board Member of the Academy and served on the Academy’s Board of Directors from 1986 to 1994. He co-chaired the Academy’s 2010 conference, “Beyond the Bad Economy.” and has served on the Academy’s Strategic Planning Committee and chaired its advisory committee for Ford Foundation organizational awards to enable the voices of vulnerable segments of the U.S. population to participate effectively in the debate on the future of Social Security. He received a J.D. from New York University Law School in 1973. He was selected as one of the first Charles H. Revson Fellows on the Future of New York City by the Columbia University School of Business for 1979-1980.

Fay Lomax Cook

Fay Lomax Cook is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Academy. She is professor emerita of human development and social policy at Northwestern University and faculty fellow of Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research (IPR) where she served as director for 16 years. From 2014 to 2018, Cook was Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and headed the Directorate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE). Her research focuses on the interrelationships between public opinion and social policy, the politics of public policy, public deliberation, and the dynamics of public support for programs for older Americans, particularly Social Security. The author or co-author of many scholarly articles and book chapters, Cook has written five books, including most recently Talking Together: Public Deliberation and Political Participation in America, with Lawrence Jacobs and Michael Delli Carpini.

Ariella Jailal

Ariella Jailal is the Manager of Leadership Development at the National Academy of Social Insurance with a primary focus on the year-round leadership development programs. With a strong events background, she leads the marketing, recruitment, and onboarding processes for the summer internship program and handles the planning for the awarding of the annual John Heinz Dissertation Award, the Robert M. Ball Award, annual membership renewal campaign, and other events. Ariella moved to DC from New York, where she was the catering and special events manager for an alternative-energy mobile restaurant. Before that she enjoyed four years as a preschool teacher, helping to shape the next generation to love books, nature, music, and all things crafty. Ariella received her B.A. in English, Creative Writing with a minor in sociology from Hunter College in Manhattan. When she moved to DC, Jailal sought a nonprofit that works to address hunger and economic insecurity in her community and is eager to contribute to the policy landscape through the Academy. Ariella is happiest roaming barefoot in the Australian Daintree Rainforest and dreams of returning one day but equally enjoys weekends with her niece and nephew!

Tom Novotny

Tom Novotny is the Director of Membership and Operations at the Academy. In this role, he supports the office’s various membership and development programs, helps with the Academy’s technology management including data analysis, assists with the annual conference, and does research on income security. Prior to joining the Academy, he helped manage a branch of a welding supply company and spent time as a full-time stay-at-home parent. He holds a J.D. from The George Washington University and two B.S. degrees from The University of Utah.

Rebecca D. Vallas

Vallas joins the Academy as its Chief Executive Officer after spending nearly 8 years as a member of its Board of Directors, including four as Secretary. Most recently, she spent 2021-2023 as a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where she founded the organization’s disability economic justice work and organized a bipartisan, cross-sector coalition in support of reforming Supplemental Security Income’s antiquated asset limits. She is also the founder of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, a first-of-its-kind project bringing together nearly 50 leading organizations across the policy/research and disability rights and justice communities to work collectively to bring a disability lens across economic and social policymaking in the U.S. Prior to TCF, she spent 2014-2018 helping to build and lead CAP’s anti-poverty work in a range of roles including as the program’s first policy director and later as its vice president—and during her time at CAP she originated the organization’s disability justice work as well as its criminal justice reform work. 

Over the years, Vallas has authored a wide range of policy reports and proposals on social insurance and public assistance, disability policy, and criminal justice/reentry policy—and strengthening Social Security, and especially its disability programs, have been long-time priorities especially close to her heart. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, on MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NPR, as well as an array of other national and local media, and she has testified before Congress on numerous occasions. Forever a legal aid lawyer at heart, Vallas began her career spending several years representing low-income individuals and families as a legal aid attorney in the Aging and Disability Unit at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, including as a Skadden Fellow, and later as a Borchard Fellow in Law & Aging. She also previously served as the deputy director of government affairs for the National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives (NOSSCR). She is also a past co-chair of the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities Social Security Task Force. And in 2019, Vallas cofounded the Clean Slate Initiative, a national organization that supports states in taking up the “clean slate” model of automated criminal record-clearing that she developed in partnership with legal aid leaders in Pennsylvania, and which is now law in a dozen states across the U.S. She is also the host and creator of “Off-Kilter,” a nationally distributed radio show and podcast about poverty and inequality. 

Vallas was the inaugural recipient of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association’s New Leaders in Advocacy Award in 2012, was twice named to Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” for Law and Policy, and to Emory University’s “40 Under 40.” She received her law degree in 2009 from the University of Virginia, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif and received the Margaret G. Hyde Award and the Mortimer Caplin Public Service Award. She graduated summa cum laude in 2002 from Emory University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Vallas was elected to membership in the National Academy of Social Insurance in 2012. She was a member of the Academy’s Economic Security Study Panel that ran from 2019-2022 as well as its Older Workers Retirement Security Task Force that ran from 2021-2023. In her spare time, she works as a practicing astrologer. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and four rescue kitties.