David Panton is now an Adjunct Professor at the prestigious Goizueta Business School at Emory University in Atlanta.

Panton who lives in Buckhead is co-founder and partner of Navigation Capital Partners.

He was born in Mandeville and credits the Rev. Keith Panton, his father, as being an inspiring role model who worked his way “from growing up poor” to becoming the first black chief executive of a Jamaican company. The senior Panton later became a priest, but the allure of business had been embedded in his son.

Panton, a Rhodes Scholar, holds a PhD from Oxford University and was the youngest member of his undergraduate class at Princeton University at the age of 20. Then, at Harvard Law School, he was one of two black presidents in the history of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. The other was President Barack Obama.