Diana Chapman Walsh
90 Baxter Road
Brookline, MA 02245
617-232-5795
617-833-8319 (cell)
President emerita, Wellesley College
Diana Chapman Walsh is chair of the inaugural board of the Broad Institute of
MIT and Harvard, is a director of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and
the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and a member of the MIT
Corporation. She formerly served as a director of the State Street Corporation
(1999-2007), a trustee of Amherst College (1998-2010), and chair of the board
of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, among other organizations.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of Phi Beta
Kappa, she writes, speaks, and consults regularly on a range of issues related
to higher education.
Walsh was the twelfth President of Wellesley College, from 1993 to 2007, and
the fourth alumna to head Wellesley, a leading college for women and one of
the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. During her tenure, the college undertook a
number of successful educational initiatives, including a revision of the
curriculum and expanded programs in global education, internships and service
learning, and interdisciplinary teaching and learning. The faculty established
new majors in environmental studies, quantitative reasoning, cinema and media
studies, neurosciences, and astrophysics. Japanese, Arabic and Korean
languages were added to the curriculum as well, and a new department of East
Asian Languages and Literatures was launched.
Other innovations included the opening of the Davis Museum and Cultural
Center, the establishment of the Religious and Spiritual Life Program, the
creation of the Knapp Media and Technology Center and the Knapp Social
Science Center, the Newhouse Center for the Humanities, the annual Ruhlman
and Tanner conferences, and other initiatives designed to strengthen the
quality of campus intellectual life. Many of the college’s administrative
structures were strengthened as well.
Also, under her leadership, the trustees approved a comprehensive campus
master plan in 1998, the first since 1921, and implemented major landscape
restoration projects across the campus. The college raised over $700-million in
new gifts during this 14-year period, strengthened the management of the
endowment and increased it four-fold, to over $1.6-billion.
In 2000-2001, Wellesley marked its 125th anniversary and launched a five-year
$400-million comprehensive campaign, with a series of celebratory programs
on the campus and across the country. The Campaign for Wellesley, completed
in June 2005, significantly exceeded its goal (raising $472.3-million) and set a
new record for liberal arts colleges.
The campaign culminated in the opening of an award-winning 11-acre complex
comprising the Wang Campus Center, the Davis parking facility and a
surrounding landscape, Alumnae Valley, which, according to the American
Society of Landscape Architects (in the 2006 citation for its highest award)
“totally transforms the campus and sends a very strong environmental
message.”
Before assuming the Wellesley presidency, Dr. Walsh was Florence Sprague
Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor at the Harvard School of Public
Health, where she chaired the Department of Health and Social Behavior. She
reinvigorated that department and founded the Program on Society and Health
there. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, she was at Boston University, as a
University Professor, and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the
School of Public Health.
Diana Chapman Walsh is a 1966 graduate of Wellesley College, where she
majored in English. At Boston University, she earned an M.S. degree in
journalism (1971) and a Ph.D. in health policy from the University Professors
Program (1983). In 1994, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane
Letters from Boston University. She has honorary degrees from Deree College
of the American College of Greece (1995), the University of Massachusetts
(1999), Northeastern University (2000), Clark University (2008), and Cambridge
(MA) College (2009).
As a Kellogg National Fellow from 1987 to 1990, Walsh traveled throughout the
United States and abroad studying workplace democracy and principles of
leadership, and writing poetry. She has written, edited and co-edited about 60
articles and book chapters, thirteen policy monographs and a study of the
practice of medicine within corporations, Corporate Physicians: Between
Medicine and Management, Yale University Press, 1987. She co-edited Society
and Health, Oxford University Press, 1995, an analysis of social and cultural
determinants of health and illness, and has written on leadership and higher
education.
At Boston University Walsh co-directed a Center for Industry and Health Care
at the Health Policy Institute and was principal investigator of a groundbreaking study of alcoholism treatment, published in the New England Journal
of Medicine, 1991 (September 12); 325:775-782, “A Randomized Trial of
Treatment Options for Alcohol-Abusing Workers,” Walsh, Hingson, Merrigan, et
al.. There, and at Harvard, she published frequently on tobacco and alcohol
policy, prevention and health promotion, social factors influencing health,
workplace health policy, and related concerns.
Diana Chapman Walsh was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and
graduated from the Springside School in Chestnut Hill. In 1966 she married
Christopher T. Walsh, currently the Hamilton Kuhn Professor in the Department
of Molecular Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical
School, former head of the MIT chemistry department former president of the
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and recipient of various awards for his scientific
work including, most recently, the 2010 Welch Prize in Chemistry.
Their daughter, Allison Walsh Kurian, is a graduate of Stanford University and
Harvard Medical School. She completed a residency in internal medicine at the
Massachusetts General Hospital in 2002, and, in 2005, a fellowship in oncology
at Stanford Medical School, where she is now assistant professor of medicine
and health research and policy, maintaining a clinical practice and a research
program there. She and her husband, Thomas Kurian, executive vice president
of the Oracle Corporation, have a son, Sean Rohan Kurian, born in October
2008.