PATRICIA KING '63 TO JOIN HARVARD CORPORATION

Patricia A. King '63, Wheaton College trustee and Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Medicine, Ethics and Public Policy at Georgetown Law Center, has been elected as the first female African American member of the Harvard Corporation, the university announced Dec. 4.

A 1969 Harvard Law School graduate who has served on the Georgetown faculty for more than three decades, King is a noted expert in legal and ethical aspects of biomedical science, with broad experience at the intersection of scholarship and public policy. Her extensive service as a nonprofit trustee includes her recently concluded five-year tenure as Wheaton's chair of the board of trustees, as well as leadership roles in major foundations.

''Pat King's bold and discerning leadership at Wheaton--as a trustee, chair of the board and an active alumna--has propelled the college into a new era of excellence,'' Wheaton College President Ronald A. Crutcher said. ''We are fortunate to benefit from her wise counsel and know that Harvard gains one of the most intellectually adept and politically astute colleagues in academia with this addition to its Corporation.''

In a statement, King said she is ''deeply honored to have been selected to share responsibility for governing one of the world's foremost educational institutions. The extremely difficult challenges facing the nation and the world over the coming decades will require substantial efforts and contributions by our institutions of higher education. Harvard, leading by example, can help show the way to developing the wisest, ablest and most diverse group of leaders our society has ever had to deploy.''

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers welcomed King to the Corporation by citing her ''wide-ranging expertise and experience'' in law, ethics and science. ''As a distinguished academic and lawyer deeply interested in science and ethics, and as an accomplished member of various boards and committees concerned with issues of research, education, and policy, she will add a valuable perspective to the governance of the university,'' Summers said. ''I very much look forward to the opportunity to work with her.''

The seven-member Harvard Corporation, formally known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, is Harvard's executive governing board.

King joined the Georgetown law faculty in 1974, and has also served since 1990 as an adjunct professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. In addition, she holds appointments as a faculty affiliate of Georgetown's Kennedy Institute of Ethics and as a fellow of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute. Her scholarship and teaching range across the fields of law, medicine, ethics and public policy, with a particular focus on ethical questions in biomedical science. Her recent publications address such topics as race and bioethics, ethical and policy dimensions of stem cell research, and the ethics of experimentation involving human subjects, and she is co-author of the legal casebook Law, Science and Medicine.

A trustee of Wheaton College 1989, she chaired Wheaton's board from 2000 to 2005. She is the current vice chair of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which focuses on health care issues, and she previously served as vice chair of the Russell Sage Foundation, a leading organization in social science research, where she was a trustee from 1981 to 1991. She is a member of both the American Law Institute and the Institute of Medicine, on whose Council she served from 1998 to 2001, and she is a past member of the advisory committee to the director of the National Institutes of Health (1990-94).

Early in her career, King was a lawyer in the federal government, serving as special assistant to the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1969-71), deputy director of the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1971-74), and deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Division of the Department of Justice (1980-81).

King and her husband, Roger Wilkins, the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History and American Culture at George Mason University, have a daughter, Elizabeth, and live in Washington, D.C.

King will officially take up her duties around May 1, 2006. She will succeed Conrad K. Harper, who stepped down from the Corporation last summer.