Ouellette named administrative dean at Radcliffe

Helen T. Ouellette has been appointed the administrative dean at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, effective Sept. 22. With a distinguished career in administration, Ouellette’s leadership in higher education includes chief financial roles at Williams College and the New England Conservatory. At Radcliffe, she will succeed Louise Richardson (who was appointed principal and vice chancellor of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland) and will help the dean oversee administrative areas, such as operations and finance, and align them with Radcliffe’s programmatic agenda and academic mission.

“Helen Ouellette has an outstanding record of collaborative and strategic administration in higher education. Having spent more than a decade at Williams and the New England Conservatory, she has dedicated her career to planning for resources that will benefit research and the arts over the long term. As we plan for the future, Helen’s skills will be essential to maximizing Radcliffe’s roles as a leading institute for advanced study and as an important source of new scholarly, scientific, and artistic ventures within Harvard,” said Barbara J. Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe Institute.

Most recently, Ouellette served in chief operating roles at Earthwatch Institute, the world’s largest environmental volunteer not-for-profit, and at Oxfam America, an international relief and development organization. From 1998 to 2005, she was vice president for administration and treasurer for Williams College, where she oversaw finance, human resources, facilities and construction, and planning, among other areas. She served from 1992 to 1998 as the vice president of finance and administration at the New England Conservatory in Boston.

Familiar with the Radcliffe and Harvard communities, Ouellette worked in finance at Radcliffe and the Harvard Kennedy School in the late 1980s and early 1990s, earned her Ph.D. in classical philology at Harvard in 1971, and received a certificate in business from Harvard in 1981. She also has experience in community relations and helping plan collaborative university initiatives, with professional activities that include serving as president of the Williamstown Chamber of Commerce and chair of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.