About Drew Gilpin Faust
Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian and author who served as the 28th president of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018. She was Harvard's first female president, its first president since 1672 without a Harvard undergraduate or graduate degree, and the first to have been raised in the South. Faust was also the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was repeatedly named one of the world's 100 most powerful women by Forbes, reaching as high as 33rd in 2014. In 2001, Faust was appointed the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which was established after the merger of Radcliffe College with Harvard University. Faust was the first woman to serve as president of Harvard University. In one of her first initiatives, Faust significantly increased financial aid offers to students at Harvard. She followed that with Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996), for which she won the Society of American Historians Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery O.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.