CHRIS NICODEMUS, FRANCONIA
President / Chair of the Board

Chris grew up on a family farm in eastern Long Island where he developed his passion for land conservation, property stewardship and sustainable land use as a philosophy. His family was active in a long standing community driven effort to preserve of the Nissequogue River Valley and its ultimate designation as a New York State Wild and Scenic River.

Chris and his wife Ping have owned a house in Franconia since 1986 and in the past two decades Chris has headquartered his business as a biomedical research consultant in Franconia with ongoing collaborations at research institutes and hospitals around the world. A graduate of Harvard College and the State University of New York, he is a board certified medical subspecialist in clinical immunology and has extensively published in the fields of molecular biology, clinical immunology and medicine.  He holds multiple patents in the area of therapeutic cancer immunology. He has 35 years of senior management experience working with several biotechnology companies in the greater Boston area.

Chris is an avid outdoor recreationalist with a passion for skiing, hiking, mountain biking, and sailing. He serves on the Franconia Conservation Commission and became actively involved with ACT during the early years of establishing the Cooley Jericho Community Forest as a regional asset. He scouted, mapped and helped construct the trail network on that property and is an active member of the ACT Lands committee seeking to assure responsible stewardship for the many properties being preserved by ACT and its family of volunteers. The mountains and sea meet in New England. It is through the better appreciation of the wonder and vulnerability of both that individuals and society can assure the future for all.

Charlie Wolcott, Sugar Hill
Vice President

Charlie grew up in a large family in Underhill Center Vermont with Mount Mansfield as his backyard. His family raised Morgan horses and skied whenever possible. A graduated of Williams College, he was the last Williams four event skier in the Division 1 carnivals. He went on to graduate from University of Vermont Medical School and intern in Minneapolis Minnesota. Completing his internship he became a Peace Corps Physician and moved with his wife, Paula, to Cameroon, West Africa. In his time there he worked in Cameroon, Chad, Gabon and Central African Republic.

In 1975 they settled in Sugar Hill to be part of a small town with unlimited easy access to hiking and cross country skiing and to raise their two sons. His love of cross country skiing solidified as he competed in marathons for over thirty years.

Charlie held a variety of leadership roles at Littleton Hospital and N.H. Academy of Family Practice, worked as medical director of Lafayette Center and ACTS, a development project in rural Honduras. And joined Ammonoosuc Community Health Services as medical director in the last 10+ years of his practice.

In 2015 Charlie retired from his Family Practice after forty years. Since retirement he has been focusing on fostering healthy lifestyles which has included developing family friendly non-motorized trails (as a member of Friends of Profile Trails as well as an ACT board member), helping to coach Profile School x-c skiing, and being a board member of the Littleton Food Co-op.

Jeff Burt, franconia
Treasurer

Jeff has been actively involved with land conservation for over two decades and currently serves on the board of the Thousand Islands Land Trust (NY) and the Board of Advisors for the Appalachian Mountain Club. After many years of winter and summer treks to the White Mountains with his family, he made Franconia his home, building a house in 2014 after 60 years in Connecticut.

Prior to 2000, Jeff devoted 30 years to the trust investment business in Connecticut, managing personal, institutional and endowment client accounts for Colonial Bancorp, Shawmut Bank and serving as Chief Investment Officer for Webster Trust Company. He received an MBA from University of Bridgeport (CT) and BA from Franklin College (IN).

Jeff is never far from a tennis court and enjoys cross-country and downhill skiing, hiking, woodworking and sailing.

Ellen Pritham, EastoN
Secretary

Ellen was born in Boston and spent her childhood in Cambridge and Melrose.  She graduated from New England Baptist Hospital School of Nursing and Boston College. As an RN Ellen spent most of her time in Pediatrics and the ER and then teaching pediatric nursing.

She and her husband Howard moved to Littleton to raise their three children in the White Mountains. After moving Ellen started a business, Duck Soup, where she spent the next several years in retail.

Ellen first became aware of the importance of protecting the landscape when her aunt and uncle’s dairy farm on Martha’s Vineyard was taken by eminent domain to build a high school.  This was devastating to them and was a huge loss of a beautiful saltwater farm to the community.  If only there had been the knowledge and an organization in place to help protect that land, thus sparking an interest in conservation.

Ellen has served her community throughout many ventures. She has been on the school board in Bethlehem, the Franconia Ski Club Board of Trustees, the White Mountain Mental Health Board, and the Burch House Board.  She is a current member of the zoning board of appeals in Easton.

Harry Robertson, Sugar Hill

Harry was raised on Lafayette Road in Sugar Hill, where he learned from a very young age to love skiing at Cannon, hiking, and being outdoors.

After college at the University of Colorado and UNH (BA), he moved to the Boston area for his IT career, where he and his wife Patty raised a family (Allie and Ben) and he earned an MBA from BU. The years away from Sugar Hill were filled with frequent visits home to see family, hike, ski, mountain bike, rock climb – anything to do with the out-of-doors and mountains. Harry continues these favorite activities today, some of which are on ACT properties. Harry also spent his younger years working in his father’s construction business and always has a personal carpentry project underway.

Harry’s father Phil was part of the group that worked to make Sugar Hill its own town - creating the youngest town in NH. His father was also an avid environmentalist. Phil would be thrilled to know of the preservation efforts of ACT and Harry hopes to do his part to continue these efforts. 

Harry has been an active member of the ACT Lands Committee for a few years, loving monitoring, searching for boundaries, trail and view clearing.

Alayna Signorello, North Woodstock

Alayna grew up in Portsmouth, NH, and spent her childhood summers at her family’s cabin in Thornton.

She holds a BA in International Development Studies and Linguistics from Dalhousie University, a MA in International Development Studies from Saint Mary’s University, and an M.Ed in Elementary Education from the Teacher Residency for Rural Education (TRRE) program at the University of New Hampshire.

When she began working as a public school teacher, she moved to North Woodstock from southern New Hampshire. In addition to her classroom teaching, Alayna’s background includes environmental education and outdoor leadership.

Caleb Winder, Franconia

Caleb co-leads the investment activities of the MemorialCare Innovation Fund (MCIF). With over 20 years of venture capital investment experience, he works closely with portfolio companies to develop scalable commercial and marketing strategies to maximize value for founders and shareholders. 

He has both private and public company board experience and is currently (or formerly) a Board Director or Observer in a broad spectrum of companies. Additionally, he serves on ACT’s Board and Finance Committee as the Assistant Treasurer.

Early in his career, Caleb was an award-winning sales and marketing executive at medical equipment and diagnostics companies, Midmark Corporation and MGC Diagnostics. He graduated magna cum laude with an MBA from Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, where he was a Fellow in the Center for Technology Enterprise. He earned a BA in Biology and a minor in Economics from Colby College.

He grew up in Boston, spending much of his free time in the Lakes Region and White Mountains of New Hampshire, where he started to develop a deep love and appreciation of the wildlands of Northern New England.  He currently lives in Franconia, where he can often be found skiing, hiking, fly fishing, or upland game hunting with his dog, Jack.

Anwiti Bahuguna, landaff

Anwiti is Chief Investment Officer of Multi-asset Strategies at Northern Trust Asset Management. As CIO she overseas various functions and business units covering Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA), Portfolio Construction Group (PCD), and the Multi-Manager.

With more than 25 years of investment industry experience, her broad executive responsibilities include building and strengthening investment teams both domestic and international, developing multi-asset investment strategies, utilizing a broad array of proprietary and non-proprietary investment capabilities, quantitative equities, fixed income, alternatives and private markets.

She serves as a key member of the Investment Policy Committee (“IPC”) and as principal spokesperson for the multi-asset business, both externally and internally.

Anwiti joins Northern Trust with over two decades of success in managing multi-asset products as Head of Multi-asset Strategies and Senior Portfolio Manager for Columbia Threadneedle Investments.

Previously, Dr. Bahuguna worked at Fleet in its Corporate Strategy and Development group, where she provided investment banking analysis on transactions such as mergers and acquisitions in all types of financial services companies.  Prior roles have also involved strategic planning for restructuring and positioning the corporation and its components for growth and expansion. She has been a member of the investment community since 1998.

Anwiti earned a PhD in economics from Northeastern University in Boston and a B.S. in economics and mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University.

She grew up in New Delhi, India and comes from a family of avid mountaineers from the Himalayan State of Uttarakhand. She resides in Chicago and spends her free time hiking and skiing in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Conservation of wilderness of Northern New England is a cause near and dear to her heart. She splits her time between Chicago, Illinois and Landaff, New Hampshire.  

E.H. Roy, Stewartstown

E. H. grew up in northern NH on the lake where he now resides again. In the interim he lived in Washington State, Texas, Louisiana, and Vermont pursuing education and careers, first in Petroleum Geology and later in Solar Electricity. Seeing the marked changes in the landscape over the years, prompted him to get involved with others seeking a means of conserving as much of the remaining open space as possible to preserve the character of the North Country.

He is pleased that ACT has chosen to expand into Coös County and has served on ACT’s Lands Committee since January 2023, joined the Board of Trustees in July 2024, and actively pursues potential conservation projects for the organization.

He is still involved in the Solar Industry in a reduced role, serves on the Colebrook Fire Department, is a Deputy Forest Fire Warden, does his own sustainable timber harvests on his woodlands, and maintains two rental properties.

He lives off-grid in a lakeside cabin, drives an electric car, and enjoys snowshoeing, X-C skiing, jogging, and bicycling, but currently his primary outdoor passion is kayak racing.