The board of trustees of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, has named Jacquelyn S. Fetrow as the 15th president of the educational institution. She will take office next June. The college, founded in 1856, enrolls more than 2,200 undergraduate students. Women make up 61 percent of the student body.
Dr. Fetrow currently serves as vice president of academic affairs at the University of Richmond in Virginia. She has served in that role since July 2014. Earlier, she was the Reynolds Professor of Computational Physics at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
In 1982, Dr. Fetrow was a summa cum laude graduate of Albright College, where she majored in biochemistry. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in biological chemistry at the College of Medicine of Pennsylvania State University in Hershey. She conducted postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the University of Rochester. She is also the co-founder of GeneFormatics Inc., a biotechnology firm, and is the co-holder of five U.S. patents.
In accepting the position, Dr. Fetrow said that “as an Albright alumna, I have experienced for myself how a strong Albright liberal arts education can establish a foundation for a graduate degree and a career in both commercial and educational venues. Albright’s core values align very closely with my passionate belief in the value of a liberal arts education and my dedication to ensuring its access to the broadest range of students of academic promise.”