Harvard Elects Five to Board of Overseers

A Nobel Prize winner, a movie producer, and an astronaut are among the five newest members of Harvard’s Board of Overseers.

Sir Ronald M. Cohen, Richard R. Schrock, Richard A. Meserve, Stephanie D. Wilson ’88, and Lucy Fisher ’71 will all serve on the 30-person board for six years.

Meserve, who earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1975, was appointed president of the Carnegie Institution in 2003 after serving as the Chairman of the nuclear Regulatory Commission. He said he sees himself filling a niche on the board as someone with both a law and science background.

Although he has no specific plans yet for his work as an Overseer, Meserve said he feels that Harvard will have an important part to play as an academic and global leader in the coming years.

“We have many pressing national and international problems at which institutions like Harvard must play a part,” he said. “Solving issues like climate change, global poverty, and health care will all require an intelligent application of knowledge, and institutions like Harvard have to be part of the solution set.”

While the Overseers serve in an advisory capacity and cannot directly change policy, their function is to visit the University periodically and to check up on the quality of teaching, administration, and research at Harvard.

One new member, Schrock, will not have far to travel to fulfill these duties.

A professor at MIT since 1975, Schrock, who earned his Ph.D from Harvard in 1972, received the 2005 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on “the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis,” according to the Nobel Prize website.

While Schrock said he will “wait to assess his ideas” for the Board until the new members’ first meeting in September, he hopes he can put his scientific background to use.

Still on the cutting edge of chemistry research, Schrock reduced nitrogen gas to ammonia in his lab four years ago, the first time such a reaction has been carried out artificially.

The other new members have had equally fulfilling careers.

Cohen, a 1969 graduate of Harvard Business School, co-founded Apax Partners, the first venture capital firm in Britain and is now using his position as co-founder of the not-for-profit Portland Trust to work towards Middle East peace using economic measures.

Wilson, who started working at NASA in 1996, saw her first spaceflight as part of the 13-day Space Shuttle Discovery mission to the International Space Station in July 2006.

Fisher has spent her career in Hollywood, where she currently serves as the co-head of Red Wagon Entertainment, a production company whose movies have won 10 Academy Awards.

The Board of Overseers of Harvard College was established in 1642, eight years before the incorporation of the Harvard Fellows, the more powerful of Harvard’s two governing boards.

The Harvard Alumni Association nominated eight candidates for the Board this year, and 28,888 alums cast ballots before the results were announced at the Commencement afternoon exercises on June 7.

—Staff writer Nathan C. Strauss can be reached at strauss@fas.harvard.edu.