Face to watch

Katie Brown Blackburn '86 was raised on football. The daughter of Cincinnati Bengals president Mike Brown soaked up the strategies and skills—in heels and a skirt she can throw a tight spiral 30 yards—and is now poised to become only the second female CEO-president in the National Football League. Blackburn, who majored in economics and math at Dartmouth, is the only woman in the 31-team league whose job description includes contract negotiations. She is the Bengals' in-house expert on the NFL's complicated salary-cap structure, handles the club's media networks and played a major role in lease negotiations for a new stadium. Her take on being a woman in the boys' club that is the NFL: "I don't focus on that issue," she says. "In my mind, if I'm thinking about being a woman, I'm not thinking about the task at hand."