University of Puget Sound Commencement Ceremony Sunday, May 17, 2–4:30 p.m.
TACOMA, Wash. – Carrie Hessler-Radelet, Director of the Peace Corps and distinguished global public health leader, will deliver the University of Puget Sound’s Commencement address for the graduating class of 2015 on Sunday, May 17.
Consistently named one of the nation's leading producers of Peace Corps volunteers, Puget Sound is especially honored to have Hessler-Radelet address this year's graduates. The college will recognize Hessler-Radelet’s exemplary services in public health, international development, and youth leadership with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.
“Carrie Hessler-Radelet chose a life and career that exemplifies the civic, intellectual, and humanitarian values shared by Puget Sound,” said President Ronald R. Thomas. “Her pioneering sense of adventure and devotion to the well-being of others that initially took her abroad as a young Peace Corps volunteer, and her more than two decades of public health leadership since, align with the spirit of this university community. A long tradition of service to humanity, global engagement, and making a difference in the world is ingrained here. Her address will resonate with and inspire our students.”
The Commencement Ceremony will be held from 2 to 4:30 p.m., Sunday, May 17, at Baker Stadium on campus. Everyone is welcome to attend. A link to a map of the campus is below.
Hessler-Radelet had lived and worked in more than 50 countries during a remarkable career that began when she convinced her fiancé to join her as a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa (then Western Samoa) in 1981, just two weeks after their wedding.
Her career trajectory from volunteer schoolteacher to director of the Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., was capped on June 5, 2014, when the Senate confirmed her appointment, as recommended by President Barack Obama. This followed her four years of service as deputy director of the international agency founded by President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
During her five-year tenure in the two lead roles, Hessler-Radelet has spearheaded a comprehensive agency assessment and reform effort to improve the Peace Corps' effectiveness and efficiency in pursuing its mission. She also led the rollout of the Focus In/Train Up initiative, which enhanced the training for volunteers and implemented new policies to improve volunteers' health and safety.
She was instrumental in instituting the new Office of Global Health and HIV to expand and strengthen the agency’s HIV education and prevention programs, and the Global Health Service Partnership, which sends physicians and nurses to teach in developing countries. Both initiatives complement the work of Peace Corps volunteers by meeting the local health needs of the host countries.
Prior to her current post, Hessler-Radelet was vice president and director of the Washington, D.C., office of John Snow, a global public health organization. She oversaw the management of public health programs in more than 85 countries.
Her interest in addressing health issues that affect the most vulnerable led her to participate in several international initiatives. She helped establish the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and she was a primary author of PEPFAR’s first strategic plan. She was a Johns Hopkins Fellow with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Indonesia, where she helped the local authorities implement the nation’s first national AIDS strategy.
She also served as a board member of the National Peace Corps Association and on the steering committee for the U.S. Coalition for Child Survival. In 1986 she founded the Special Olympics in The Gambia, a still-active West African nation.
In 2012 Hessler-Radelet told the Finger Lakes Times of Geneva, New York, that she comes from a family of Peace Corps volunteers and that it was her grandmother who inspired her to join in 1981. She said her two-year experience in Samoa, living with a host family in a thatched hut and seeing women who were powerless to control their own health care in a patriarchal society, “really galvanized my interest in public health.” Today the need for international development and training agencies like the Peace Corps is greater than ever; she told the paper.
“I really believe that our very future depends on our ability to be able to engage with a global world in a way that we never have before experienced,” Hessler-Radelet said. “If we want to retain our position in the world and our economic strength in this world today, we need people who can navigate that world. We need leaders who have those skills.”
Hessler-Radelet earned a master’s degree in health policy and management from Harvard School of Public Health and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Boston University.
At the Commencement Ceremony, two other distinguished individuals will be awarded honorary degrees: Washington Supreme Court Justice Steven C. González and Tacoma civic leader Theresa Pan Hosley. See the link below for more information.
For more about Commencement Weekend: https://www.pugetsound.edu/about/offices-services/commencement
For more about the three 2015 honorands, visit https://www.pugetsound.edu/news-and-events/campus-news/details/1380/.
For directions and a map of the University of Puget Sound campus: pugetsound.edu/directions
For accessibility information, please contact accessibility@pugetsound.edu or 253.879.3236, or visit pugetsound.edu/accessibility.
Press photos of Carrie Hessler-Radelet can be downloaded from pugetsound.edu/pressphotos.
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