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A palm reader once correctly inferred that “why” is the favorite word of Lulu Chow Wang ’66. The Wall Street leader and philanthropist has always had an insatiable curiosity, she says—a quality that drives her to want to better understand and improve the world.

In high school, Sukin “Dylan” Sim ’15 found themselves captivated by a science textbook excerpt about computational chemistry, a type of chemistry that uses computer simulation to help solve problems. At Wellesley, they sought out professors working on research in the field, then crafted their own major of chemical physics with a minor in math.

COVID-19 isn’t the first pandemic for Erika Willacy ’99. She has spent years at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) managing outbreak responses around the world, with a particular focus on those who are systematically disadvantaged and shut out of health care systems—people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, and in particular migrants and refugees.

Kathryn Bishop ’79 has held many titles in her life: program director, university fellow, board chair, published author. This spring, she added a new one to the list: Commander of the Order of the British Empire, an honor that makes her Kathryn Bishop CBE.

Linda Esslinger Heusser ’54, an adjunct research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, wants women to continue seeing science as a career option

On a frosty night in January, 90 students made the trek across campus to gather in the largest lecture hall in the Science Complex, H101. They were there for ES 125H/PEAC 125H: The Climate Crisis, a class that embodies one of the goals in the College’s strategic plan: “We will renew the structure of our academic program and draw the greatest possible value from finite resources by reducing the siloing of our academic departments and prioritizing interdisciplinary collaboration.”

Like much of the world, Nina Tumarkin was unprepared for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. “My reaction at the time was utter shock,” says Tumarkin, the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies and the longtime director of Wellesley’s Russian Area Studies Program. “An actual full-scale invasion and war seemed so unlikely and impossible.”

Among the hundreds of objects that were rediscovered during the recent move out of Sage Hall, the most remarkable is the almost life-size papier-mâché anatomical model of a woman made in 1928 by Maison Auzoux, a firm founded by French surgeon Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux.

When Daniel Sichel, professor of economics, isn’t doing research on economic growth, technology, and economic measurement, he enjoys woodworking—in particular making furniture. One day, while looking at a catalog of tools, he saw a listing for old-fashioned cut nails. He started wondering how much those nails would have cost in the 19th century, and he began looking at prices that economic historians had gathered.