Naana A. Frimpong ’00 was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2022. She is a partner at the law firm of DLA Piper LLP in Atlanta, where she leads the firm’s U.S./Africa engagement, serves as the U.S. representative to the firm’s Africa Board, and serves as a member of the firm's Policy Committee. She also serves as a board member for her firm’s Global Scholarships Program (focused on identifying, training and resourcing promising lawyers in the world’s least developed countries) and as Vice Chair of the Yale University President’s Council on International Activities. She has built a career as a federal prosecutor, white-collar defense lawyer and international practitioner, specializing in global investigations and counseling clients on sensitive civil and criminal investigations and disputes. She regularly speaks, writes and trains others on anti-corruption and good governance, white-collar crime, corporate compliance, trial advocacy, international arbitration and international disputes, with a particular focus on Africa.
Previously, Frimpong served for four years as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago), where she was the lead prosecutor on dozens of federal felony investigations, including fraud schemes, transnational narcotics trafficking, money laundering offenses and child exploitation crimes. Earlier in her career, she worked as an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York and as a law clerk for the Hon. Marilyn Hall Patel in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (San Francisco).
A dual U.S.-Ghana national, Frimpong was raised in Ghana and Botswana and earned her B.A., magna cum laude, with a double major in History and Black Studies from Amherst College, as well as a Five College Certificate in African Studies. She went on to receive a J.D. in 2004 from Yale Law School and an LL.M. in 2011 from the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute and the University of Turin in Italy. Her native language is Twi/Ashanti, and she lives in Atlanta with her husband and two children.