For immediate release: December 6, 2002

Steven Barnes (609) 258-5094, sbarnes@princeton.edu
 

CARE president, U.S. senator to receive top alumni honors

PRINCETON, N.J. -- Two graduates of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs who have dedicated their careers to public service have been selected as the 2003 recipients of the University's top honors for alumni.

Peter Bell, president of CARE USA, and William Frist, U.S. senator from Tennessee, will receive their awards and deliver addresses on campus during Alumni Day activities on Saturday, Feb. 22.

Bell, who earned his MPA in international affairs from Princeton in 1964, will receive the James Madison Medal. Named for the fourth president of the United States and the person many consider Princeton's first graduate student, the medal was established by the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni and is given each year to an alumnus or alumna of the Graduate School who has had a distinguished career, advanced the cause of graduate education or achieved an outstanding record of public service.

Frist, who specialized in health care policy and earned his A.B. from Princeton in 1974, has been chosen for the Woodrow Wilson Award. The honor is bestowed annually upon an undergraduate alumnus or alumna whose career embodies the call to duty in Wilson's famous speech, "Princeton in the Nation's Service." Also a Princeton graduate, Wilson served as president of the University and as president of the United States.

On Alumni Day, Bell will present a lecture titled "Where the End of Poverty Begins" at 9:15 a.m.

Frist will speak on "The Floor of the U.S. Senate as the Operating Theater: Is Transplanting Ideas Any Different From Transplanting Hearts?" at 10:30 a.m.

Both lectures will be in Richardson Auditorium of Alexander Hall.

Madison Medalist

Bell is a well-known leader in global philanthropic and humanitarian endeavors. For the past seven years, he has been president of CARE, one of the world's largest private international relief and development organizations. He is credited with expanding the scope of the organization from providing immediate relief to focusing on the root causes of poverty. CARE has become a force in sustainable development and emergency aid, reaching tens of millions of people each year in more than 60 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Before becoming president of CARE, Bell had been a member of the organization's board of directors for seven years, the last five as its chair. He served as president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation from 1986 through 1995, working in that position to improve conditions for the poor and disadvantaged in the United States. He has been senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, held senior positions at the Ford Foundation and served as president of the Inter-American Foundation, where he supported grassroots development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Bell served in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, overseeing the program for Indochinese refugee resettlement. He was deputy undersecretary of the department in 1979.

Bell's volunteer positions include being co-chair of the Inter-American Dialogue, trustee of the Bernard Van Leer Group Foundation and trustee of the World Peace Foundation. He formerly was a director of Human Rights Watch and chair of both the board of trustees of the Refugee Policy Group and the advisory council of the Woodrow Wilson School. The author of "Fulfilling the Public Trust: Ten Ways to Help Nonprofit Boards Maintain Accountability," he also has written articles on international affairs for major newspapers. His undergraduate degree is from Yale.

Wilson Award winner

After graduating from Princeton, Frist earned his M.D. degree from Harvard and went on to become a heart and lung transplant surgeon. In 1986, he joined the teaching faculty at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he founded and subsequently directed the multidisciplinary Vanderbilt Transplant Center. Under his leadership, the center became internationally renowned for multi-organ transplantation. He has performed more than 150 transplant procedures.

Frist was elected to the Senate in 1994, becoming the first practicing physician elected to the governing body since 1928. In 2000, he was elected to a second term in the Senate by the largest margin ever received by a candidate for statewide election in the history of Tennessee. Frist currently serves on the budget, foreign relations, and health, education, labor and pensions committees, and is the ranking member on both the Subcommittee on Public Health and the Subcommittee on African Affairs. In 1999 he was named a deputy whip of the Senate; in 2000 he was tapped to head the National Republican Senatorial Committee; and in 2001 he was named one of two Congressional representatives to the United Nations General Assembly.

Frist has written more than 100 articles, chapters and abstracts on medical research and four books: "When Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know About Bioterrorism From the Senate's Only Doctor," a comprehensive guide to dealing with the realistic threat of bioterrorism published earlier this year; "Transplant," which examines the social and ethical issues of transplantation and organ donation; "Grand Rounds in Transplantation," which he wrote with J.H. Helderman; and "Tennessee Senators, 1911-2001: Portraits of Leadership in a Century of Change," which he wrote with Lee Annis.

Frist is a former member of Princeton's board of trustees. The University's Frist Campus Center, dedicated in 2000, is named for the senator's family, several of whom are Princeton graduates.

Editors: Photographs are available at: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/a-f/frist/ and http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/a-f/bell_peter