The Power to Tell Your Story

• share
• favorite_border

Kimberly Dozier, a CBS News correspondent reporting from Baghdad, Iraq, became the victim of a car bombing on Memorial Day 2006. In her subsequent memoir about the attack and its aftermath, she wrote about recovering from injuries including shrapnel in the head, a fractured femur, severe burns and emotional distress. Dozier, a Wellesley College alumna from the class of 1987, will address the approximately 600 members of the Class of 2009 and their friends and families at Wellesley College's 131st Commencement.

• share
• favorite_border

Dan Brabander wants to put the green in "“ and take the lead out of "“ urban gardens. As associate professor of geosciences at Wellesley College, his focus is on environmental geochemistry and public health. To that end, he has received funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and has formed a partnership with Boston's Food Project, a nonprofit organization that helps foster organic urban gardens. For the past five years, Brabander and his Wellesley College student researchers have been testing for lead contamination in urban backyard gardens in Boston neighborhoods.

• share
• favorite_border

The student residents of Wellesley's sustainability co-op housing have made a commitment to buying and cooking locally and sustainably. Also essential to the new model of co-op living on campus is a community-based lifestyle. Nine students currently live in the sustainable housing wing of Simpson Hall on the Wellesley College campus in rooms that share a common living area and kitchen.

• share
• favorite_border

College is supposed to change lives for the better. Higher education, after all, teaches skills and knowledge that often result in better jobs and more income. But what if the most life-changing result of college involved becoming a kinder, gentler person? That's the focus of a Wellesley College study, "Impact of Buddhism on Undergraduates in the U.S. Today," by Professor of Religion James Kodera and Buddhist advisor Ji Hyang Padma.

• share
• favorite_border

At age 7, Mona Minkara started seeing wild colors swirl through her vision. Doctors first dismissed her symptoms, but eventually her family learned a startling diagnosis: Their daughter was suffering from macular degeneration and cone-rod dystrophy. She was going blind.

• share
• favorite_border

As chief operating officer and co-founder of One Earth Designs (OED), Wellesley College senior Catlin Powers has spent as many as 50 hours a week during her college years fighting to bring heat, clean water and other necessities to those in need "” from the high-altitude regions of the Himalayas to economically depressed areas of the Dominican Republic, Ghana and India. Powers has been recognized for her work with several prizes this spring, including $75,000 from the St. Andrews Prize for the Environment.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College graduates are no strangers to the world stage. This preeminent women's college has long educated its students to become global leaders. Now one of its most prominent alumnae, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, will help new generations of Wellesley women to make a difference in the world.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College, one of the country’s premier liberal arts colleges, Olin College, one of the country’s leading engineering colleges, and Babson College, the top-ranked college for the study of entrepreneurship, have formalized a collaborative agreement that builds on their geographic proximity and complementary curricula to explore the synergies in the schools’ three missions.

• share
• favorite_border

City politics have provided Wilbur C. Rich with a most satisfying career as a professor of political science. Now they have brought him honors for a lifetime of achievement. Wellesley College’s William R. Kenan Jr. professor of political science, Rich has been awarded the Norton Long Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association (APSA) at its 2009 annual meeting this month.

• share
• favorite_border

When the stock market and the housing market plummeted, many thought that decimated retirement accounts and lower home equity would force older workers to delay retirement. Instead, the economy may actually force many into retirement, say two Wellesley College economics professors.

• share
• favorite_border

This Halloween, the eerie theme of the Addams Family will ring out over a darkened Wellesley College campus. This and other terrifying tunes will emanate from Galen Stone Tower, which stands 182 feet tall, and the students who play the carillon within. The guild is opening the tower to the brave-hearted who can scale the spine-chilling stairs to the carillon, encountering skeletons, spiders, ghosts and cobwebs on the climb, during a Halloween Haunted Tower, Saturday, Oct. 31, from 5-7 pm.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College political scientist Roxanne L. Euben has published a new book designed to expand the understanding of Islamic thought in the Western world. "Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden" is an anthology of key writings from the early 20th century to the present.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College alumna Catlin Powers, class of 2009, fights to bring heat, clean water and other necessities to those in need -- from the high-altitude regions of the Himalayas to economically depressed areas of the Dominican Republic, Ghana and India. Powers and other investigators, including project advisor Nolan Flynn, associate professor of chemistry at Wellesley, have won $10,000 from the EPA's P3 Awards, a national student design competition focusing on people, prosperity and the planet.

• share
• favorite_border

Susan Reverby, professor at Wellesley College, has delved into the shocking and revealing Tuskegee syphilis study as a lesson to us today as we argue over health care reform. In her new book, "Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy" (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), Reverby looks at the study’s racist history, explains how people experienced it and why the doctors thought it was the right thing to do.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College President H. Kim Wellesley College President H. Bottomly announced today the appointment of Lisa Fischman as the Ruth G. Shapiro ' 37 director of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center. Fischman, who will take up her appointment on Feb. 1, has served as chief curator of the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson and Gallery Director at the Atlanta College of Art. Trained as an Americanist, she has focused on investigating the relationships among the fine arts, material culture, design and popular culture, and locates her interest “among creative spheres often presumed not to intersect.”

• share
• favorite_border

Anya Corke has gone by many titles: the top chess player from Hong Kong, a woman grandmaster and, most recently, a Wellesley College first-year student. Since coming to Wellesley this fall, Corke, 19, has added another distinction to her name as the first-ever woman to play for the Boston Blitz, a Cambridge-based team that competes in the United States Chess League.

• share
• favorite_border

Call it a new global network. Forty young women will learn how to become effective world leaders this January at Wellesley College’s first-ever Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College alumna Catherine L. Summa began her new position as director of Wellesley College's Science Center on Jan. 15.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley's Heather Mattila studies honey bee hives to find out how colonies work together to find food. Her research, recently featured in Discover Magazine, has gained importance as honey bee populations have declined dramatically — and mysteriously — in recent years.

• share
• favorite_border

One alumna brought a new appreciation to African-American art. Another promoted education worldwide as the key to human progress. Both are leaders and innovators in their fields, bringing distinction to themselves and Wellesley College. Art historian Alvia Wardlaw, class of 1969, and education leader Janet Parker Whitla, class of 1952, will be presented with the Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award Thursday, Feb. 11, at 5:30 pm in Houghton Memorial Chapel on the Wellesley College campus.

• share
• favorite_border

Coding is often thought of as male activity, but students at Wellesley College, an all-women’s college outside of Boston, are challenging that notion.

• share
• favorite_border

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Korbel Albright will return to her alma mater to meet with 40 promising Wellesley students selected as this year’s Albright Fellows. These young women will spend their winter break learning the ropes on how to change the world from Secretary Albright and an all-star faculty roster of influential leaders, academics, policymakers, business executives, and journalists. The 2014 Albright Institute Wintersession Program begins on January 6, 2014 and runs through January 24, 2014.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study by Wellesley College neuroscientists is the first to directly compare brain responses to faces and objects with responses to colors. The paper reveals new information about how the brain’s inferior temporal (IT) cortex processes information.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College professor Guy MacLean Rogers studies the leadership of Alexander the Great, seeking what lessons can be learned from the enigmatic warrior. Rogers, a world-renowned classicist, researches the leadership of history’s greatest warrior, and sees many similarities for the struggles of national leaders today.

• share
• favorite_border

The U.S. teen birth rate fell rapidly between 2008 and 2012. The Great Recession played the biggest role in the decline, explaining more than half of the drop, but a new study shows that that the timing of the introduction of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant also had a significant impact on the staggering drop in teen birth rates.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

The Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Awards, which have been presented annually since 1970, are the highest honor given to Wellesley alumnae. This year, the award goes to sustainability pioneer Eva Sommaripa and public health advocate C. Tracy Orleans.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley introduces the next generation of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association’s LinkedIn group, now renamed the Wellesley Alumnae Network.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley scientists find that the teeth of the nerpa seal may hold the strongest evidence of the effects of decades of environmental pollution, nuclear testing, and climate change on Russia's Lake Baikal.

• share
• favorite_border

Read My Pins Exhibition Explores Jewelry as a Diplomatic, Political and Social Tool. Wellesley alumna Madeleine Albright returns to alma mater for exhibition on occasion of her 55th reunion.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

Two young ravens, which mate for life, have made their nest in the fire escape of Wellesley College's science center building. This is a rare occurrence -- ravens don't typically nest in populated areas -- and their arrival in a Boston suburb is good news that's emblematic of the rewilding that has taken place in New England. Wellesley scientists are especially excited about this first opportunity to closely observe the ravens' behavior -- and they want to share what they see. This morning, Wellesley has launched Ravencam, a live webcam that will record the birds' behavior at the nest 24 hours per day -- and it's available to anyone with an Internet connection at http://www.wellesley.edu/ravencam.

• share
• favorite_border

Susan L. Wagner, co-founder and Director of BlackRock, will address the Class of 2014 and an international audience of their family and friends at Wellesley College’s 136th Commencement Exercises Friday, May 30, at 10:30 a.m.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

Civic and political organizations around the country are in a pitched battle for power over government. A new book by Hahrie Han, Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College, is the first to provide an in-depth look at the models and strategies civic associations use for engaging activists in the digital era.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

A new study demonstrates that the immune system can produce cells with stem cell properties. The study was conducted on crayfish, but the mechanism proposed may also be applicable in evolutionarily higher organisms, perhaps even humans.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College brings one of of the world’s most famous playwrights to the digital stage for its newest offering on the College’s edX platform, WellesleyX, starting October 1. “Shakespeare: On the Page and In Performance,” taught by Wellesley’s Yu Jin Ko, professor of English, and Diego Arciniegas, senior lecturer in theatre studies, provides an opportunity to study Shakespeare’s works in the interdisciplinary context of literature and theatre.

• share
• favorite_border

A Wellesley College mathematics professor says that the key to reversing the country’s Math Crisis lies in tapping into the everyday examples of math hidden in the world around us and changing the way we instruct math in America's classrooms.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College today released an updated version of its groundbreaking college cost estimator. My inTuition: Wellesley’s Quick College Cost Estimator asks just six basic financial questions before providing a personalized estimate of an individual’s cost to attend Wellesley.

• share
• favorite_border

The Davis Museum at Wellesley College presents Parviz Tanavoli, the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the influential Iranian artist’s work to be mounted by a U.S. museum. On view February 10-June 7, the exhibition will survey the breadth and richness of the artist’s career from the 196os to the present day, marking the 50th Anniversary of Tanavoli’s famed ‘Heech’ project.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College welcomes former Secretary of State and Class of 1959 alumna Madeleine Korbel Albright back to campus for the 2015 Albright Institute Wintersession. On January 22, 2015, Secretary Albright joins Elizabeth Cousens, U.S. Representative on the UN Economic and Social Council and Alternate Representative to the UN General Assembly, and Dr. Homi Kharas, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and deputy director for the Global Economy and Development program, for a public dialogue on ending poverty and transforming economies through sustainable development.

• share
• favorite_border

The Davis Museum at Wellesley College presents seven exhibitions this spring. The first U.S. museum retrospective of Iranian master Parviz Tanavoli, along with Rembrandt and the Landscape Tradition, and Michael Craig-Martin: Reconstructing Seurat will be on view February 10 – June 7.

• share
• favorite_border

The Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Awards, which have been presented annually since 1970, are the highest honor given to Wellesley alumnae. Recipients are chosen for achievement and distinction in their fields.

• share
• favorite_border

The Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute at Wellesley College, a program that brings together 40 students from different fields of study each year to engage with world issues, has made a sampling of lectures from its January 2015 Wintersession available online, for free, to the public.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College hosts Class Action's 3rd Annual First Generation College Student Summit. The summit will convene 175 attendees representing 32 colleges and universities and 4 organizations from around the Northeast.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellesley College has announced participation in the “Let Everyone Dream” Coalition, a national initiative announced Monday during the White House Science Fair that introduces new multi-sector partnerships in support of STEM education for underserved students.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study out of Wellesley College sheds light on the role of beliefs about the value of diversity in fostering attitudinally diverse friendships. Led by professor and social psychologist Angela Bahns, the study demonstrates that people who place a higher value on diversity are more likely to have friends of different races, religions, and/or classes, as well as friends with different sociopolitical views.

• share
• favorite_border

Renowned novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will address the members of the Wellesley College Class of 2015, and an international audience of their family and friends, at Wellesley’s 137th Commencement Exercises on Friday, May 29, at 10:30 a.m.

• share
• favorite_border

New study shows poor nutrition for honey bee larvae leads to compromised pollination capabilities as adult bees; possible link to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)