Shelby M.C. Davis
Shirley Ann Jackson
Barry Mazur
Bernice Johnson Reagon
Richard Russo

Shelby M.C. Davis
Mr. Davis is the founder of and a senior advisor to Davis Selected Advisers, L.P., a mutual fund management company managing more than $40 billion. A history major at Princeton, Class of 1958, he became the Bank of New York’s youngest vice president since Alexander Hamilton before starting his own firm. Davis and his family have contributed more than $75 million to United World Colleges (UWC) and currently spend almost $15 million annually on various Davis-UWC scholarships. Davis established 100 full scholarships for American students to attend UWC campuses worldwide and he funds more than 350 full scholarships each year for UWC graduates who enroll at Colby, College of the Atlantic, Middlebury, Princeton, and Wellesley. In addition he grants hundreds of partial scholarships for UWC graduates who attend other U.S. colleges and universities. Davis serves on boards of the United World College/USA, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Teton Science School in Jackson, Wyo. His son Andrew Davis ’85 is a Colby trustee.

SHIRLEY ANN JACKSON
Ms. Jackson is president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A physicist with a specialty in theoretical condensed matter physics, she became in 1995 the first woman and the first African-American to serve as chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Jackson worked as a theoretical physicist at the former AT&T Bell Laboratories and as a professor at Rutgers University. She currently is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Jackson earned both an S.B. in physics and a Ph.D. in theoretical elementary particle physics from MIT. She is the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate from MIT in any field and is one of the first two African-American women to receive a doctorate in physics in the United States. In 2002 Jackson was named one of the top 50 women in science by Discover magazine.

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BARRY MAZUR
Mr. Mazur, a university professor at Harvard, is a mathematician who specializes in number theory and algebraic geometry. Mazur won the American Mathematical Society’s Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory for his work on elliptic curves and Abelian varieties, the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry for his work on the generalized Schoenflies theorem, and the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research. He received the Mathematical Association of America’s Chauvenet Prize for an outstanding expository article on a mathematical topic. Mazur is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. He earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1959. He is the author of the 2002 book Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), which analyzes the historical process by which mathematicians came to understand numbers.

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BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON
Bernice Johnson Reagon founded the Grammy Award-winning a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey In The Rock in 1973. She served as a consultant, composer, and performer for the award-winning PBS programs “Eyes on the Prize” and “We Shall Overcome” and helped develop the Peabody Award-winning radio series “Wade in the Water: African-American Sacred Music Traditions.” Reagon’s publications on African-American music and songs of the civil rights movement include If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition and We’ll Understand It Better By and By: African American Pioneering Gospel Composers. She earned a B.A. in history from Spelman College and a doctorate in U.S. history from Howard University. Reagon has been a professor of history at American University and a curator at the Smithsonian Institution. Her numerous honors include an Isadora Duncan award for the score to the ballet Rock and a Presidential Medal.

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RICHARD RUSSO
Richard Russo was born and raised in upstate New York and earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. at the University of Arizona. He taught at Arizona State, Penn State-Altoona, Southern Connecticut State University, and Southern Illinois University before coming to Colby in 1991 as a professor of English and creative writing. A serious writer of fiction beginning in graduate school, Russo has published five novels (Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls) and a collection of short stories (The Whore’s Child and Other Stories). Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002. Two of his novels have been made into feature films, as was Twilight, a screenplay. He lives in Camden, Maine, with his wife, Barbara, who worked in the Music Department office while Russo served on the Colby faculty from 1991-1996. They have two daughters, Kate ’04 and Emily. Russo returned to Colby this year to teach a course in creative writing.

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