New alumni fellow elected: Dr. Eve Rice, author, psychiatrist, philanthropist

Dr. Eve Hart Rice ’73 B.A., author, artist, psychiatrist, and co-president and treasurer of the Rice Family Foundation, has been elected as the Yale Corporation’s newest alumni fellow in a worldwide ballot of university graduates. Her six-year term will begin on July 1.

President Peter Salovey said, “Eve will bring a valued perspective to the Corporation particularly as we continue to expand and implement new student life initatives.”

Rice graduated from Yale summa cum laude with a B.A. in history in the first co-educational freshman class of Yale College. She spent 12 years as a freelance author and artist of children’s books, writing and/or illustrating some 18 titles for HarperCollins, Macmillan, and other publishers. She subsequently earned an M.D. degree from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and completed a residency in psychiatry at Cornell University. She then served as an inpatient unit chief, outpatient pharmacologist, and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Cornell’s Weill Medical College.

Her philanthropic work has focused on grant-making in the arts, education, health, and the environment. This has included efforts at Yale to help build an urban studies program, foster public service careers for women, support collections at the Yale University Art Gallery and university libraries, and promote international research experiences for students.

Yale has benefited from Rice’s service in a variety of ways, including service on the University Council, an advisory body to Yale’s president, for 16 years, and as council president from 2011 to 2014. She was a member of two Council Committees that reviewed the School of Art, and in 2014 she chaired the Council Committee on Alcohol in Yale College, which produced a report and recommendations for the university. In 2011 Rice helped found YaleWomen, an AYA shared-interest group for all alumnae, and is the current vice chair. She played a key role in producing YaleWomen’s two national conferences in 2013 and 2014, and has been active in governance issues, devising mentoring models, and forging partnerships with campus organizations. In addition, she co-edited the book “Fresh Women,” about the first class of freshman women at Yale, and recently joined the Council of Women’s Health Research at Yale.

Rice currently serves on the board of directors of the Yale Westchester Alumni Association; the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute; Chess-in-the-Schools, which brings chess and mentoring to students in New York City public schools; and the Westchester Community College Foundation; and as a trustee of the Jonathan Edwards Trust. Previously, she served for 10 years as a trustee, vice president, and president of the Byram Hills Central School District Board of Education. 

She is married to Yale classmate Tim Mattison ’73. Their son graduated from Yale College in 2010, and their daughters were members of the Class of 2014.

The Yale Corporation

The Yale Corporation is the governing board and policy-making body for Yale University.  The 19 members are the president of the university; 10 successor trustees, who elect their own successors for up to two six-year terms; six alumni fellows, who are elected by the alumni for staggered six-year terms; and the governor and lieutenant governor of the State of Connecticut, who are ex officio members. 

Brief biographical sketches of the other members of the Corporation are available online: http://yale.edu/about/corporation.html