Helen Kim Bottomly (born January 30, 1946) is an American immunologist and the former president of Wellesley College, serving from August 2007 to July 2016.
[12] Following a feature in The New York Times Magazine in 2014, that was critical of Wellesley College's treatment of transgender students,[13] Bottomly formed a committee to study gender identity, a process that lead in 2015 to Wellesley College changing its admission policies to accept transgender women.
With robust financial and intellectual resources in place, and with efforts to renew our celebrated campus well underway, the college is strongly positioned to move forward.
[9] As Deputy Provost, Bottomly led the university's policies surrounding natural sciences, anthropology, psychology, statistics, and linguistics, and was instrumental to the university's faculty diversity efforts and efforts to recruit and retain women in the sciences and underrepresented minorities in all fields.
[17] She was elected to the 229th class of the prestigious honorary society and center for policy research, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 2009.
[20] Bottomly serves as an Institutional Trustee at WGBH, a public television and radio station in Boston, Massachusetts.
[20] She pioneered research in the physiological factors affiliated with allergic and asthmatic reactions and served as the principal investigator for numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health.
[23][24][25] She has two daughters, Hannah and Megan, a step-daughter, Katherine, and two twin granddaughters with her first husband, the late Charles Janeway.