Lynn Pasquerella, president- elect of Mount Holyoke College.

Photo by Mary Noble Ours

Mount Holyoke College on Thursday announced that its next president will be Lynn Pasquerella, a former professor, dean and vice provost at the University of Rhode Island who earned a Ph.D. from Brown University in Providence.

“I’m absolutely thrilled,” Pasquerella said in a telephone interview. “It’s a gift,” added the president-elect, a graduate of Mount Holyoke. “This is an opportunity to be able to give back in such a significant way to the college that transformed my life.”

Pasquerella said her ties to Mount Holyoke run deeper than is commonly known. It was while she was a senior at the college in South Hadley, Mass., that her husband, John Kuchle, a biologist and photographer, proposed. They will celebrate their 30th anniversary this year. The couple now live in Woodstock, Conn., and have 19-year-old twin boys.

The college said that Pasquerella was unanimously recommended by a 16-member search committee. She is to take office in July, succeeding Joanne Creighton, president since 1996, and will be the school’s 18th president.

Pasquerella is provost of the University of Hartford.

The college described her as “an accomplished scholar, medical ethicist, and global advocate for women’s education and empowerment.”

She earned her doctorate in philosophy at Brown after graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1980.

In 2004, after 19 years as a professor of philosophy at URI, Pasquerella became URI’s associate dean of the graduate school, according to a biography supplied by Mount Holyoke. In 2006, she was named vice provost for research and dean of the graduate school. In 2008, she joined the University of Hartford as provost and chief academic officer.

She has written extensively in the areas of medical ethics, theoretical and applied ethics, metaphysics, public policy and the philosophy of law.

Pasquerella is project leader for a research team with the Africa Center for Engineering Social Solutions, focusing on empowering women in an AIDS-ravaged section of Kenya. She was also the principal investigator on a $3.5-million National Science Foundation grant to promote the careers of women in the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines.

Born and raised in Connecticut, Pasquerella transferred to Mount Holyoke in 1978 as a junior from Quinebaug Valley Community College. Still working full-time throughout the academic year to support herself, she graduated from Mount Holyoke magna cum laude and a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1980. She received a full fellowship for her doctorate at Brown.

In 1998, Pasquerella was honored by Change magazine and the American Association of Higher Education as one of the nation’s “Young Leaders of the Academy.” Her leadership has extended beyond higher education into surrounding communities and around the globe, including service on the board of Paul Newman’s Discovery Center in Woodstock, Conn. She also serves on the Rhode Island Health Department’s Institutional Review Board, the advisory board for the Women’s Adult Correctional Facility in Rhode Island, and Day Kimball Hospital’s ethics committee and as chairwoman of its Institutional Review Board.

Pasquerella will also be professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke, as she is at the University of Hartford.

tmorgan@projo.com