Laurie Leshin: A bold stroke for WPI

Laurie Leshin will be the first woman to head WPI in the school's history.

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Laurie Leshin apparently knows a lot about what it's like to breathe rarefied air. After all, she's a geochemist and space scientist who spent six years as a senior leader at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Imagine: a successful woman in a male-dominated field.

And later this year, Leshin, 48, will become the 16th president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), and the first woman to hold the job in its nearly 150-year history. She joins yet another minority group within the United States: female college presidents. In Central Massachusetts, Leshin's company will include Susan West Engelkemeyer (Nichols College), Gail Carberry (Quinsigamond Community College), Paula Rooney (Dean College) and Deborah Hochevar (Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine) as female leaders of higher-education institutions.

But, this being the 21st century, the issue of whether a man or woman should run a university is a moot point. The bigger issue — and a loud message the WPI board of trustees communicated in last month's hiring decision — is that young women in Central Massachusetts and elsewhere who are interested in entering one of the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) have a role model who heads a leading educational institution rooted in STEM. And Leshin's hiring comes at a time when the percentage of full-time female undergraduates at WPI has grown steadily from 28.3 percent in the fall of 2009 to nearly 33 percent four years later. The current freshmen class had 371 women at the start of the academic year, the largest in school history.

“Laurie Leshin is impressive by any measure,” board chairman Warner Fletcher said in the statement from the school that announced her hiring.

On top of her work at NASA, Leshin has served as dean of the School of Science at another noteworthy technical/engineering school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.; as a science team member for the Mars Curiosity Rover mission; and as a member of advisory boards at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. Her scientific expertise is in cosmochemistry. Her work has been focused on deciphering the record of water on objects in the solar system. She has published more than 40 scientific papers, and was the inaugural recipient of the Meteoritical Society's Nier Prize in 1996 for her work.

WPI's decision on who would best follow in the footsteps of the formidable Dennis Berkey, who stepped down last year, is a bold stroke, and a loud one. It has the potential to raise WPI's national profile further, and help lift the rest of Central Massachusetts with it because of the school's strong ties with the business community.

But the broadest message is the one that says to the women of tomorrow who want to study a STEM field: Science is not just for men. Here's what can happen when you pursue your dream.

WPI has recruited a strong candidate, one who has generated a lot of anticipation and excitement. For that, its board of trustees deserves a round of applause.