Wendy E. Raymond

Raymond is a molecular biologist and the sixteenth president of Haverford College, a post she has held since July 1, 2019. Haverford’s own biography identifies her as a native of Mequon, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee—the hometown line she still tells.

She left Mequon for Cornell intending to become a lawyer and major in government. A required first-year chemistry class, and a teaching assistant who told her she had promise in a room with few women, changed the plan. She majored in chemistry, graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, earned a Harvard Ph.D. in biochemistry, and completed an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship in genetics at the University of Washington.

Williams College hired her in 1994 as a molecular geneticist with an NSF- and NIH-funded lab that put undergraduates at the bench. She directed Williams’s Howard Hughes undergraduate science program (2004–08), became the college’s first associate dean for institutional diversity, then spent six years as Davidson College’s vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty. From 2014 to 2016 she chaired the National Science Foundation’s Congressionally mandated Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering. Mequon is the origin she claims; the science career and the Haverford presidency are the public record.