Distinguished Alumnae
Who went to Bryn Mawr?
Women whose commitment to excellence and integrity distinguishes them in every field: women who have broken down barriers, expanded scientific knowledge, captivated audiences, enthralled readers, shaped national and international policy, advocated for the powerless, founded corporations, changed the world. Some of them:
1920s
Elizabeth Gray Vining, Class of 1923, was tutor to Emperor Akihito of Japan and a winner of the Newbery Medal for Children's Literature.
Lucy Shoe Merritt, Class of 1927, Ph.D. 1935, was the first archaeologist to observe that the moldings on classical buildings changed over time. Her documentation and analysis of these changes provided a chronological tool for dating ancient buildings and for eliciting the personalities of individual architects.
Katharine Hepburn, Class of 1928, is the only person to have won four Academy Awards for acting. The American Film Institute voted her the nation's leading screen legend of the 20th century.
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1930s
Elizabeth Monroe Boggs, Class of 1931, gave up a career in theoretical chemistry to become a national advocate for the developmentally disabled after an infection disabled her infant son. She was one of a small group of people who wrote and lobbied for the Developmental Disabilities Act of 1970.
Mary Meigs, Class of 1939, is an artist and writer who was featured in the 1990 Canadian film The Company of Strangers .
Emily Cheney Neville, Class of 1939, won the Newberry Award for Children's Literature with It's Like This, Cat .
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1940s
Eleanor Harz Jorden, Class of 1943, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Cornell University, is the author of the world's most widely used Japanese language textbooks.
Alina Surmacka Szczesniak, Class of 1948, was pre-eminent in the field of food science. She pioneered the study of food texture, establishing standards and scales, and developed the General Foods food texturizer, which simulates the chewing motions of the mouth.
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1950s
Emily Townsend Vermeule, Class of 1950, Ph.D. 1956, was a world-renowned archaeologist, classicist and art historian and a professor at Harvard. In 1982, the National Endowment for the Humanities named her the Jefferson Lecturer, the highest honor bestowed by the federal government for intellectual achievement in the humanities.
Hanna Holborn Gray, Class of 1950, was the first woman president of a major university, the University of Chicago.
Susan Band Horwitz, Class of 1958, Rose C. Falkenstein Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, discovered how taxol inhibits tumor growth. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
. Anna Kisselgoff, Class of 1958, is the principal dance critic for The New York Times and the pre-eminent critic and historian of dance in the United States.
. Maxine Lazarus Savitz, Class of 1958, director of technology partnerships at Honeywell, serves on the National Science Board and is one of just a few women named to the National Academy of Engineering.
. Catharine R. Stimpson, Class of 1958, was the director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program from 1994 to 1997.
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1960s
Frances K. Conley, Class of 1960, was the first woman to become a tenured full professor of neurosurgery in the United States.
Maria Luisa Crawford, Class of 1960, professor of science, environmental studies and geology at Bryn Mawr, has used much of her 1993 MacArthur "genius grant" stipend to help geology students do field work.
Matina Souretis-Horner, Class of 1961, was the president of Radcliffe College from 1972 to 1989.
Elaine Showalter, Class of 1962, is one of the nation's most renowned feminist critics. She is the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities and professor of English at Princeton University and the author of numerous books; she has been a television critic for People magazine and a regular commentator on BBC radio and television.
Mina Bissell, Class of 1963, director of the life science division at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, UC Berkeley, is a member of the National Institute of Medicine.
Shirley Daniel Peterson, Class of 1963, was the first woman commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.
Sheila Nickerson, Class of 1964, has served as the poet laureate of Alaska.
Karen Durbin, Class of 1966, was editor of The Village Voice .
Nora Clearman England, Class of 1967, received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1993. She is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and founding director of the University's Center for Indigenous Languages of Latin America.
Genevieve Atwood, Class of 1968, was the first woman in Utah to be named State Geologist.
Susan Irene Rotroff, Class of 1968, received a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1988. The Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Rotroff teaches classics, art history and archaeology and works at the archaeological excavation of the Ancient Agora of Athens.
Lynne Meadow, Class of 1968, has been artistic director of Manhattan Theatre Club since 1972. She has produced more than 100 American and world premieres by American and international playwrights.
Dora Obijula Chizea, Class of 1969, developed a medical clinic in Nigeria to serve as a model of how good medicine can be practiced.
Mathematician Fern Hunt, Class of 1969, has received the Arthur S. Flemming award for achievement in public service. Winners are up-and-coming innovators, visionaries, leaders and entrepreneurs from across the spectrum of government.
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1970s
Margaret Morrow, Class of 1971, was the first woman president of the State Bar of California.
Judith Resnick, Class of 1972, is a professor at Yale Law School and was recently named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Rhea Graham, Class of 1974, was the first woman and first African-American to be named director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines.
Susan Kelly Barnes, Class of 1976, has been the financial leader of several high-profile, multimillion dollar enterprises, including NeXT Computer and Intuitive Surgical, an industry pioneer since 1995 in the development of advanced surgical systems for use in hospitals.
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1980s
Lori Perine, Class of 1980, served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from February 1997 until the Bush administration was installed, rising to the position of deputy associate director of technology. Today, she 's president and CEO of Interpretech LLC, a consulting group that focuses on advancing innovation.
Leslie Kurke, Class of 1981, received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1999. Kurke is an interdisciplinary scholar of classic Greek antiquity, an expert in archaic Greek poetry and a professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.
Joan Breton Connelly M.A. 1979, Ph.D. 1984, an associate professor of fine arts at NYU, won a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1996. Connelly made news with a unique analysis of a carving from the Parthenon.
Reed Abelson, Class of 1983, is a financial writer for The New York Times
Ingrid Muan, Class of 1985, is a founder and curator of Reyun, a contemporary art gallery and cultural center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Salima Ikram, Class of 1986, is the director of the Animal Mummy Project at the Cairo Museum and an assistant professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. She has published six books.
Sasha Torres, Class of 1986, is a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Living Color: Race and Television in the United States .
Superior Court Judge Katrina West, Class of 1986, is the first African-American woman to be named to the bench in San Bernardino County, California.
Farar Elliott, Class of 1987, protects the art and history of democracy as the first curator of the Office of History and Preservation of The U.S. House of Representatives.
Doreen Gillespie, Class of 1987, is at work on a method to speed up the identification of antibiotics in soil by cloning DNA directly from soil rather than isolating it and growing it in a culture.
Betsy McKay, Ph.D. 1987, was part of a Wall Street Journal reporting team that won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
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1990s
Zvezdelina Stankova-Frenkel, B.A. and M.A. 1992, has coached the National Math Olympiad Team and is the founder of both the Bay Area Math Olympiad and the Berkeley Math Circle. She is an assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at Mills College.
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