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April 13, 2006

Rockefeller Foundation head to address commencement

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the first woman to head an Ivy League school, will address Pitt’s April 30 commencement. The ceremony will begin at 1 p.m. in the Petersen Events Center.

Prior to becoming president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Rodin served as the seventh president of her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, from 1994 to 2004. Under her leadership, Penn doubled its research funding and increased annual giving by more than 70 percent.

Rodin also led efforts to revitalize the Penn campus and surrounding Philadelphia community and initiated international projects and programs, especially those that address global health challenges, including women’s health in Saudi Arabia and India.

She held faculty appointments at Penn as a Fox Leadership Professor, a professor of psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences and a professor of medicine and psychiatry in the School of Medicine.

While at Penn, Rodin served on the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and on a panel that reviewed White House security.

In 2005, Newsweek magazine named her one of the 20 most powerful women in the United States.

Rodin came to Penn from Yale University, where she served as provost from 1992 through 1994. She also served as dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Rodin graduated with honors with a B.A. in psychology from Penn and earned her Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia University. She became an assistant professor of psychology at New York University in 1970, then joined Yale’s psychology department in 1972.

Rodin has published 11 books and more than 200 scholarly articles, earning an international reputation as a leader in the health psychology movement.


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