Dame Louise Richardson

Biography

Dame Louise Richardson joined Carnegie Corporation of New York as its 13th president in January 2023 at the end of her seven-year term as head of the University of Oxford in England. On June 2, 2022, Richardson was appointed a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE) in recognition of her service to higher education by Queen Elizabeth II. Richardson, a renowned academic leader and distinguished expert on terrorism, served on the Corporation’s board of trustees from 2013 to 2022. 

A native of Ireland who came to this country as a university student, Richardson has lived a life of firsts, including being the first in her family to attend university. She was the first woman to lead Oxford as vice-chancellor (2016–2022), the first to serve as principal and vice-chancellor of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland (2009–2015), and she is now the first woman to serve as president of the Corporation.

During her tenure at Oxford, Richardson launched several innovative access initiatives and significantly increased the socioeconomic and ethnic diversity of the undergraduate student body. She secured unprecedented partnerships and funding by working with philanthropic, corporate, and government sources, allowing the university to pursue a range of improvements, including expanded research in the humanities and natural sciences, a new graduate college, a major science park, and housing for students and staff. Throughout the pandemic, her stewardship of the university and its 44 constituent colleges and halls was widely admired. In 2020, in the depths of a global crisis, Richardson negotiated a landmark partnership with AstraZeneca to develop, manufacture, and distribute the Oxford coronavirus vaccine ChadOX at the cost of production to nations around the world.

For more than 30 years, Richardson has written about international terrorism and foreign policy, making a case for interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the political roots of extremism in contrast to traditional responses that focused on military interventions. In 2023, the Irish government asked Richardson to serve as the independent chair of its Consultative Forum on International Security Policy.

At Oxford, she was known for her dauntless leadership in defending freedom of speech and in launching a sustainability strategy and a task force to advance racial equality. At St. Andrews, she recruited large numbers of American students as well as Scottish students from disadvantaged backgrounds. She worked to expand the university’s offerings, including funding for a new library, a music center, and a medical school, as well as land for a new campus, contributing to the institution’s highest-ever national and global rankings.

Richardson was born and raised in Ireland and earned a degree in history from Trinity College Dublin. She first came to the United States on a scholarship from Rotary International. She earned a master’s degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, followed by an MA and PhD in government from Harvard University.

Richardson spent 20 years as a professor at Harvard, where her teaching on terrorism and political science was honored with the Levenson Prize and the Abramson Prize. In 2001, Richardson became the executive dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she was instrumental in shaping the center into an interdisciplinary hub for scholarship across academic fields, an approach that has become her trademark.

Richardson’s publications include Democracy and Counterterrorism: Lessons from the Past (2007), What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (2006), The Roots of Terrorism (2006), and When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations during the Suez and Falklands Crises (1996). On the subject of terrorism, she has participated in numerous media interviews, delivered hundreds of talks, and written extensively for news publications, books, and academic journals.

Richardson’s research has been recognized with awards such as Harvard’s Sumner Prize for work toward the prevention of war and the establishment of universal peace and Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal for vision and leadership. She also holds ten honorary doctorates from universities ranging from Notre Dame in the U.S. to Trinity College Dublin and the University of the West Indies.

Richardson serves as a trustee on several nonprofit boards, including the Booker Prize Foundation and the Sutton Trust, and she is a member of the selection committee of the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity. An honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, Richardson is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Academy of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom, among other learned societies. She is married to Thomas Jevon, a physician based in Massachusetts. They have three adult children.

Learn More

Louise Richardson, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York and the foundation’s first woman in the role, talks with Emmy Award–winning journalist and long-serving Corporation trustee Judy Woodruff — about growing up as a tomboy in rural Ireland, the expectations of women, the dangers of binary thinking, the importance of reclaiming the center, and much more, including the role philanthropy played in her own education as the first in her family to go to college.

Media Inquiries

For media inquiries or photos, please contact Celeste Ford. | CFC (at) carnegie.org