The board of governors of Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, has extended the contract of President Mary J.C. Hendrix for an additional five years. She became the 16th president of the university in 2013. At that time, Dr. Hendrix was the first graduate of the university to be named president in the institution’s 144-year history. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at Shepherd University in 1974.
The university, in the northeast part of the state, enrolls about 3,400 undergraduate students and more than 300 graduate students, according to the latest data supplied to the U.S. Department of Education. Women make up 58 percent of the undergraduate student body.
Before becoming president of the university, Dr. Hendrix had been serving as president and chief scientific officer of Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago’s Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Previously, she held faculty and/or staff posts at the University of Arizona, the University of California, San Francisco, Saint Louis University, and the University of Iowa.
Dr. Hendrix earned a Ph.D. at George Washington University and did postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School.