2013 College graduation speakers

June 15, 2013

Spring/Summer 2013

This year’s graduation ceremony for the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences featured a speech by P. Roy Vagelos, C’50, a physician, businessman, and philanthropist who has made a global impact on health and science. The event, held on May 12 at Franklin Field, also featured Stephanie Lamb, C’13, as the student speaker.

Vagelos graduated from the College 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 & Co., Inc. 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 Roy and Diana Vagelos Scholars Program in the 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 philanthropy has also included the Roy and Diana Vagelos Science Challenge Award, financial aid, two endowed faculty positions, the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories: Institute for Advanced Sciences and Technology, and a leadership gift to the Neural and Behavioral Sciences Building. A Penn parent, he is also a frequent visitor to campus, meeting with students about their Penn experience and their future plans.

Stephanie Lamb, from Allentown, Pennsylvania, received her degree in health and societies with a concentration in health markets and finance in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science. She was 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 Minority Undergraduate Research (SUMR) scholar with the Robert Wood Johnson Institute, on the growing bedbug problem in Philadelphia. 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.