Articles

This year’s recipients are Lulu Chow Wang ’66, investment trailblazer and philanthropic leader; Laura Wheeler Murphy ’76, public servant and civil liberties and civil rights advocate; and Mara Prentiss ’80, physicist and environmental revolutionary.

Tributes to Wellesley alumnae by family and friends

Philip L. Kohl, professor of anthropology and Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies emeritus, served on the Wellesley faculty for 42 years before retiring in 2016. He was a founding member of the College’s anthropology department. Over his years of service, including for more than a decade as chair, Phil helped establish a vision of the anthropology department as the most broadly conceived of social sciences, stretching from the ancient past to our imagined collective future.

Rebecca Summerhays, lecturer in the College’s Writing Program, was funny, irreverent, brilliant, and beyond kind. She taught those she loved so many, many important lessons—about teaching, about living, about laughing, about caring, about yoga, about meditating, about walking, about searching, about decorating, about loving, and finally, about finding all that is good in this world and celebrating and cherishing it.

“Our bond with Janet McDonald Hill began 57 years ago when we arrived at Wellesley as members of the class of 1969. … Her voice is now stilled, and our own circle has lost a vital link that can never be replaced,” her classmates write.

Since starting her jewelry business, Porcelain and Stone, in 2012, Kimberly Huestis ’05 has made pieces for celebrities, big brands, and private customers. For Madeleine Korbel Albright ’59, she made a mint-colored, gold-speckled brooch based on her best-selling uni necklace—uni means sea urchin in Japanese, and sea urchins are adaptive, tough, and well-traveled—which the former secretary of state received at a Washington Wellesley Club event.

A personalized vaccine to fight cancer? It may sound like science fiction or wishful thinking, but it is an idea whose time may finally be coming thanks in part to the work of Nina Bhardwaj ’75, director of immunotherapy at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai in New York City.

Carol Sanger ’70, professor of law at Columbia and renowned scholar of reproductive rights, is the author of About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First Century America, which addresses new connections between abortion law and American culture and politics.

A few years into teaching her constantly oversubscribed course on culture and mental illness, Holly Walters, a visiting lecturer in anthropology, noticed something interesting about the students in the class. “I started to realize that the mix of the student body that I was getting was much more diverse than just anthropology majors,” she says.