Joanne V. Creighton is an outspoken champion of the American liberal arts tradition who believes that such an education is “at its best, revolutionary. It transforms students; it awakens them to a fuller life of the mind.”

A teacher, literary scholar, and experienced academic administrator known for her expertise in strategic planning and implementation, Ms. Creighton assumed the presidency of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts on January 1, 1996.

During her first eighteen months as president, Ms. Creighton led a comprehensive and highly consultative planning process that culminated in unanimous faculty and Board of Trustees endorsements of The Plan for Mount Holyoke 2003. All of the major benchmarks and goals of the Plan were met or exceeded: applications for admissions to the College broke records for four consecutive years; fund-raising exceeded the campaign's $250 million goal, and major building and renovation on campus--including a state-of-the-art new science complex--was completed. Following the success of The Plan for Mount Holyoke 2003, the College completed a second round of strategic planning under Ms. Creighton's leadership, culminating in The Plan for Mount Holyoke 2010. The new Plan reaffirms Mount Holyoke's mission: educating a diverse, residential community of women at the highest level of academic excellence and fostering the alliance of liberal arts education with purposeful engagement in the world. In service of that mission, the Plan has commissioned further enterprises, including the creation of the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives, a new 185-bed residence hall, and increased support for faculty and students, that will build on the excellence that has earned Mount Holyoke its long-standing reputation as one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the nation.  

In 2003 Ms. Creighton co-founded Women’s Education Worldwide, an organization bringing together the presidents and chief academic officers of women’s colleges and universities from around the world and other leaders in women’s education.  Ms. Creighton is the past chair of the Women’s College Coalition and of Five Colleges, Incorporated.  She currently serves on both boards as well as that of NOVA Chemicals Corporation.

Prior to coming to Mount Holyoke, Ms. Creighton served at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut as vice president for academic affairs and provost and professor of English from 1990-1994, and as Wesleyan's interim president from 1994 to 1995. Ms. Creighton is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and holds a master of arts in teaching from Harvard University and a doctoral degree in English The author of four books, Ms. Creighton has concentrated much of her scholarly work and teaching on the authors William Faulkner, Margaret Drabble, and Joyce Carol Oates. Her books are William Faulkner's Craft of Revision (1977), Joyce Carol Oates (1979), Margaret Drabble (1985), and Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years (1992). The author of numerous scholarly articles and reviews, she is a frequent commentator on contemporary literature and issues affecting higher education.

Barbara A. Cassani ’82 is executive chairman of Jurys Inns – the fast-growing European hotel group. She also founded the low cost airline Go and spearheaded the successful London 2012 Olympic bid.

Jurys Inns has 24 hotels, positioned in the marketplace between the economy hotels and full-service four star properties, in the UK and Ireland and has firm plans for further significant expansion in the UK and Europe. Cassani joined in 2008 and is working with investors Quinlan Private, the Dublin-based private equity group and the Omani Investment Fund to oversee the development of the business.

Cassani started her career in management consulting, then held a variety of strategic and general management roles at British Airways. The low cost airline, Go, was started up from scratch in 1997 with £25m as an internal start-up at British Airways. It became profitable in less than three years. In 2001, Barbara and her colleagues led a management buy-out for £110m. In 2002, Go was sold to easyJet for £374m. Go was known for its low prices, good service and great people – winning the UK’s top travel consumer awards. Cassani was named UK Businesswoman of the Year and co-authored the book Go: An Airline Adventure.

Cassani’s role in the London Olympic Bid as chairman and then vice-chairman was to hire the winning team, create the blueprint for the Games, and develop UK public support. She was awarded an honorary CBE in 2007. Her involvement going forward has been to work with the equestrian sports to develop a horsey legacy for London. Thus Hoof was launched, to spearhead programmes that will help school children take riding lessons and will create new riding facilities in London – among other initiatives.

Cassani majored in international relations at Mount Holyoke College, graduating in 1982 magna cum laude. She then earned an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1984. She currently splits her time between London and New Hampshire, USA, with her husband, Guy, and children, Lauren and James. In whatever free time she has left, she is invariably found on a horse as she is an avid rider, competing at low levels herself and owning a high level eventer in the UK.

Donal B. O'Shea, Mount Holyoke dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs; Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, is a well-known geometer, internationally recognized for his work in singularity theory and in computational algebraic geometry. O'Shea became dean in 1998 after serving on the faculty since 1980. His research deals with the interplay between the geometric, algebraic, and topological properties of singularities of higher dimensional spaces.

A native of Canada, O'Shea is author of numerous books, monographs, and articles. From 1994 through 1997, he served as the College's officer of sponsored research. Since coming to Mount Holyoke, he has spent a year each in France and Germany and two at the University of Hawaii conducting research on singular points of real and complex hypersurfaces. He is especially interested in improving the teaching of geometry at the college level, as well as making the study of mathematics in general more accessible to students of differing abilities and interests. His current research projects also include the singular behavior of real analytic hypersurfaces; effective methods in local geometry; and the computational geometry and biophysics of cardiac abnormalities. He has translated over 130 Russian-language mathematics articles into English.

O'Shea has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and other funding organizations to support both his research and his curricular work. Most recently, he was co-principal investigator with H. Pollatsek, L. M. Hsu, and S. Rachootin on a National Science Foundation grant for institute-wide reform in science laboratories at Mount Holyoke. He has been senior staff and/or author on other grants to Mount Holyoke totaling more than $1.5 million from the Dana Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.

Anne Lonsdale has been Deputy Vice-Chancellor in the University of Cambridge since October 2003. Prior to this she was Pro-Vice-Chancellor for External Relations since July 1998, and a member of the University's Council and a Trustee of Cambridge in America, the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust and Cambridge Overseas Trust. She remains a Trustee of the Cambridge Foundation,the Gates Cambridge Trust, the Newton Trust, and the Cambridge European Trust, and is also Chairman of the Syndicate for the Fitzwilliam Museum.

She has been President of New Hall, one of the colleges of Cambridge University, since February 1996. From 1993-6 she was Secretary-General of the Central European University based in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw and founded by George Soros in 1991. She developed a major interest in environmental research and policy since she was involved in the setting up of a Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy at the CEU Budapest for students from all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR, and was previously Chairman of the University's Committee for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies.

Her career began at Oxford where she read and taught classical Chinese literature before becoming a university administrator, and, in 1990, the first Director of External Relations the University had appointed. She has travelled and worked extensively in America, Europe, Asia and Africa, and has been active for many years in both European and Commonwealth university organisations. Outside the University she is a Trustee of the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe, the Inter-University Foundation and the Moscow School of Social & Economic Sciences. Anne Lonsdale was awarded the CBE in 2004 for services to Higher Education.

Susan J. Smith is a professor of geography at Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge (September, 2009). She is a graduate of Oxford University, where she studied at St. Anne’s, St. Peter’s and Nuffield Colleges, and at the School of Geography. Before moving to Durham in 2004, she held the Ogilvie Chair of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. She has been awarded fellowships of all kinds to work at the University of California, Los Angeles, the European University Institute and the Australian National University, as well as in other UK universities. Susan is an inaugural member of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), a member of the Society of Authors, and became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008 (FBA). She is also experienced in research management, research strategy, and research assessment of all kinds. She has contributed to the work of the ESRC (Research Grants Board, Professorial Fellowships Commissioning Panel, Public Services Programme Commissioning Panel), HEFCE (as a panel member in the 2001 and 2008 RAEs), the Leverhulme Trust, and to research development and monitoring in HEIs within and beyond the UK.

Professor Smith’s research is centrally concerned with the challenge of inequality: with the personal and social costs of insecurity; the exclusionary underpinnings of residential segregation; the discriminatory patterning of health inequalities; and the relevance to markets of an ethic of care. This work has an interdisciplinary flavour and a practical appeal. In 1998, Susan received the Merchison prize 'for publication judged to contribute most to geographical science in preceding recent years'. She currently holds an ESRC Professorial Fellowship, awarded “to support the UK’s top social scientists” who are “acknowledged scholarly leaders in their field with an outstanding track record in conducting leading edge research.” This work is exploring the link between housing, mortgage and financial markets.

Eleanor Updale is the author of the Montmorency Series. She has written four novels and some short stories, and has won several awards for her writing, including the Nestle Smarties Silver Award, the Blue Peter Prize for ‘The Book I couldn’t Put Down,’ the Medway Award, and the Southern Schools Book Award. She was also shortlisted for the Askew’s Torchlight Award and the Branford Boase Award, and longlisted for the British Book Awards.

Montmorency was chosen as a Recommended Read for World Book Day. In the U.S., the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) unanimously voted it onto its 2005 recommended list of Best Books for Young Adults. The novel also won the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, the School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, the Book Sense 76 Pick, and the National Public Radio Recommended Summer Read. The Children’s Book Council of the USA chose Montmorency on the Rocks as one of the Outstanding International Books for 2006.

Updale studied history at St. Anne’s College and graduated in 1974. After graduation, she became a producer of television and radio current affairs programs for the BBC. She studied at the new Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 2007. She is also a trustee of the charity Listening Books. Updale lives in England; Montmorency was her first book.

John Stein is Professor of Physiology and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He read Animal Physiology at New College, Oxford, then an MSc in Neural Control of Respiration in the University Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford, followed by clinical medicine at St. Thomas's Hospital, London. He then started training in Neurology, continuing in London, Leicester and Oxford. He was appointed tutor in Medicine at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1970.

He has a particular interest in the auditory and visual causes of dyslexia in children. His work over the past 25 years suggests dyslexic children have auditory and visual impairments which make it difficult for them to acquire the skills required for reading. Understanding the mechanisms of these impairments has helped to explain why such seemingly bizarre treatments, such as occluding one eye, wearing coloured spectacles, playing music into the right ear and eating fish oils, may help some dyslexic children to overcome their problems.

His work on such adult movement disorders as Parkinson's disease, on pain and its alleviation and on negative mood swings continues, as does his enjoyment of tutorial teaching. He believes strongly that the benefits of Oxford's tutorial teaching should be made available to all those with the ability to benefit from it, irrespective of income, class, colour or creed.

Lord Oxburgh of Liverpool, KBE, FRS, is an internationally renowned geologist and geophysicist. He read Classics at University College, Oxford for two years before switching to geology. He went on to Princeton for his PhD, working for famous geologist Harry Hammond Hess and teaching there and then at both Oxford and Cambridge before becoming head of the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge and President of Queens' College, Cambridge. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Caltech and Cornell. From 1988 to 93 he was chief scientific officer to the Ministry of Defence and then Rector of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine from 1993 – 2000. Knighted in 1992 and made a Life Peer in 1999, he sits on the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology.

His research and publications have largely focussed on the thermal behaviour of the Earth's crust and his current interests are climate change, energy and water futures, and global development. His charity work includes chairing the Science, Engineering, Technology and Mathematics Network to promote the subjects among young people and chairing the Board of Trustees of the Natural History Museum in London.