Every year, the Wellesley College Alumnae Association (WCAA) selects a number of outstanding graduates to honor in the annual Alumnae Achievement Awards. On Oct. 18, President Johnson presented the award to two pioneers in the health industry.
Carol Remmer Angle ’48 graduated from Wellesley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature and went on to earn an M.D. at Cornell Medical College. From there, she moved to Omaha, taking on a residency at the University of Nebraska Hospital. In 1971, she served as the chair of the University of Nebraska Medical Center Pediatrics Department, becoming one of the first women in the country to serve as the chair of an academic department.
Angle was among the first to discover the devastating levels of environmental lead exposure in Omaha, after finding abnormally high lead levels in local children. She is credited as a major influence behind Nixon’s Clean Air Act and the following 1996 amendment that banned the sale of leaded gasoline, which reduced overall lead levels in children by over 80 percent from 1977 to 1999.
As a distinguished pediatrician, toxicologist and nephrologist, Angle has served as a medical expert witness in numerous circuit courts. Some of Angle’s other accomplishments include founding one of the country’s first poison control center along with Mount Holyoke alum Matilda McIntire ’42, serving as professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, founding and serving as a prior president for the American Association of Poison Control Centers, and providing editorial leadership at the Journal of Toxicology — Clinical Toxicology.
Diane Rowland ’70 graduated from Wellesley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and American studies, before continuing to earn a Master of Public Administration at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Doctor of Science at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at John Hopkins University. Rowland went on to later teach at John Hopkins in the Department of Health Policy from 1987 to 1993.
From 1991 to 2003, Rowland served as the Executive Director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a non-profit organization dedicated to being a “non-partisan source of facts, information, analysis, polling, and journalism [in health policy] for policymakers, the media, the health care community, and the public.” In 1995, Rowland became the foundation’s Executive Vice President. Through her duration at KFF, Rowland oversaw much of the Foundation’s analytic work, including women’s health policy, privatized health insurance, healthcare for disadvantaged populations and global health policy.
Rowland is a noted authority in health policy, testifying frequently as an expert witness regarding Medicaid, Medicare and general health policy, and has written and edited several books on the subject. Her government work includes working on the staff of the Committee of Energy and Commerce in the U.S. House of Representatives; serving as the inaugural chair of the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, a committee designed to inform Congress on matters related to the Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program; working as a senior staff in the Department of Health and Human Services; and being an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
The ceremony was held in the Diana Chapman Walsh Alumnae Hall at 5pm. The program featured a guest performance from the Wellesley College Choir and concluded with a mass singing of the Alma Mater. A reception followed downstairs in the ballroom.
