Sharda Cherwoo is a board member and senior C-suite executive with over 35 years of governance and professional services experience. Known as one of the hardest working collaborators and connectors, Cherwoo has a compelling executive track record of achieving significant market growth by pioneering and building billion-dollar businesses, leading go-to-market strategy, and executing successful business transformations.

Cherwoo is a strategic global thinker with the proven ability to ask insightful questions that spark new ways of thinking and innovating. As a C-suite leader, she is recognized for her collaborative style and is skilled at influencing people to expand innovative thinking and build relevance in a world of data and digital innovation. Her combination of financial acumen, global leadership, digital transformation, and governance experience has enabled her to contribute and engage with people with strategic, leading-edge insight. Her areas of advising include C-suite leadership, audit and finance, consulting, business strategy, private equity, technology and digital transformation, and corporate governance.

Cherwoo retired as a senior partner from Ernst & Young LLP (EY) in the United States after more than 37 years. Her nonlinear, unique, and diverse career at EY began in the audit practice, but she worked in each of the firm’s service lines—audit, tax, management consulting, and mergers and acquisitions practices—and served as a global coordinating partner for Fortune 100 and significant global clients of EY. She has consistently mentored, built, and led high-performing teams that represented both cognitive and cultural diversity.

Cherwoo has held CEO roles, pioneered and led EY’s first award-winning offshore global delivery center in India, and has a legacy of creating enterprise value through building, starting, and operating successful businesses and leading cultural transformation. She has led complex business and digital and talent transformations internally for EY and for global clients.

Cherwoo’s depth and breadth of purpose-driven leadership success also includes significant governance experience. She is a member of the boards of The Carlyle Group (Nasdaq: CG) and World Kinect Corp. (NYSE: WKC), a Fortune 100 company, and is an advisory board member at Land O’ Lakes Inc., a Fortune 250 company. She serves on the audit, nomination and governance, operations and technology, corporate responsibility and sustainability, finance, and risk and policy committees of corporate boards.

Cherwoo is an immigrant to the United States and was born and raised in India through high school. She has a deep passion for growing people and businesses and has been distinguished as one of the most influential leaders in the community for her advocacy in the areas of community building, democratizing opportunity for underrepresented communities, access to education, and fostering cross-cultural understanding and building lifelong connections between the world’s next changemakers.

Cherwoo serves as a mentor and advisor to several innovative hyper-automation technology, low-code/no-code, generative pre-trained transformer (GPT)–based artificial intelligence technology start-ups. She also serves on the nonprofit board of the NACD New York Chapter and the think tank Tax Analysts as well as on the board of trustees of International House, whose mission is to empower the next generation of global leaders and foster cross-cultural understanding. Cherwoo is also an executive-in-residence at Columbia Business School’s pioneering program, which prioritizes mentorship, linking C-suite leaders with master of business administration students, to bridge the gap between theory and real-world business practices.

Cherwoo has forged a career of firsts in her profession and in academics. In 1991, she was the first woman of Indian origin to be admitted to US partnership in a “Big 8” professional services firm. Her vision and leadership in implementing cutting-edge technologies has won innovation and global business leadership awards.