Diane Dailey Frey, longtime faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, passed away on January 24. She was 81 years old.
Born in Boston and raised in Norwell, Massachusetts, Dr. Frey earned her bachelor’s degree from Keuka College in New York and her doctorate in Eastern European history from the University of Washington. While completing her doctoral degree, she served as a Fulbright Scholar in Krakow, Poland, in 1974.
In 1979, Dr. Frey joined the Penn community as assistant dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. Three years later, she took on a role directing undergraduate advising in the college, helping students find faculty advisors and mentors on campus. In 1989, she was named director of advising, a role she held until her retirement in 2009.
Throughout her long tenure at Penn, Dr. Frey served on several committees, task forces, and working groups, lending her expertise to projects on conduct and misconduct on campus, student affairs, the Penn Women’s Center, advising, student retention, undergraduate education, and electronic degree planning. In 2006, she was a key contributor on a project that allowed Philadelphia-area students who had been attending New Orleans-area universities and had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina to apply to be guest students at Penn.