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Mr. Darden is the Chief Executive Officer of Cherokee Investment Partners, a private equity fund with over $1 billion of capital for investing in brownfields. Cherokee has offices in North Carolina, Colorado, New Jersey, London, Toronto and Montreal. Beginning in 1984, he served for 16 years as the Chairman of Cherokee Sanford Group, a privately-held brick manufacturing company in the United States and previously the Southeast’s largest soil remediation company. From 1981 to 1983, Mr. Darden was a consultant with Bain & Company in Boston. From 1977 to 1978, he worked as an environmental planner for the Korea Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul, where he was a Henry Luce Foundation Scholar. Mr. Darden is on the Boards of Shaw University and the University of North Carolina’s Environmental Department and Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He is on the Board of Directors of the National Brownfield Association and on the Board of Trustees of North Carolina Environmental Defense. Mr. Darden is a director of Winston Hotels, Inc (NYSE) and serves on the board of governors of Research Triangle Institute in Research Triangle Park, N.C. He was chairman of the Research Triangle Transit Authority and served two terms on the N.C. Board of Transportation through appointments by the Governor and the Speaker of the House. Mr. Darden earned a Masters in Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Doctor of Jurisprudence from Yale Law School and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar. His 1976 undergraduate thesis analyzed the environmental impact of third world development, and his 1981 Yale thesis addressed interstate acid rain pollution. Mr. Darden and his wife Jody have three children, ages 18 to 27. | 