College Announces 2013 Graduation Speakers
P. Roy Vagelos will speak at this year’s graduation ceremony for the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences. As a physician, businessman, and philanthropist, Vagelos has made a global impact on health and science. The event, scheduled for Sunday, May 12 at 6:30 p.m. at Franklin Field, will also feature Stephanie Lamb, C’13, as the student speaker.
Vagelos is a Penn alumnus, graduating from the College in 1950 with a degree in chemistry. Following medical school at Columbia University, he had a distinguished academic medical career prior to being recruited in 1975 by Merck. He directed the company as it developed groundbreaking drugs, led its rivals in sales, and was named “America’s Most Admired Company” by Fortune magazine seven years in a row. In 1987, under Vagelos’ leadership, Merck made the landmark decision to donate medication to combat river blindness, a chronic disease in much of the developing world. Today, the Mectizan Donation Program reaches more than 100 million people annually and is widely recognized as one of the most successful public/private health partnerships in the world.
A former chairman of the Penn Board of Trustees, Vagelos has endowed three unique programs to prepare the next generation of scientific leaders: The Vagelos Program in Molecular Life Sciences, the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management, and the new Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy and Research (VIPER). His generosity has also included the Science Challenge Award, financial aid, endowed faculty, the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories, and a leadership gift to the Neural and Behavioral Sciences Building. He is a frequent visitor to campus, meeting with students about their Penn experience and their future plans.
Stephanie Lamb, from Allentown, Pennsylvania, is pursuing a degree in health and societies with a concentration in health markets and finance in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science. She has been a member of the Rodin College House staff for three years, and won the Henrietta M. Keller Prize in German her freshman year. While at Penn, she spent a semester in Washington, D.C., interning with Thomson Reuters, and another teaching financial literacy to West Philadelphia High students. Last summer she simultaneously did fieldwork in urban violence and, as a Summer Undergraduate Minority Research (SUMR) scholar with the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI), on the growing bedbug problem in Philadelphia. After graduation she will work for LEK Consulting in Boston as a healthcare and life sciences consultant, as the first step toward a career in health policy.
