2005: Fall Three New Trustees Join Amherst College Board

Richard S. LeFrak ’67, Hope Eighmy Pascucci ’90 and Paula Rauch ’77 have joined the Amherst College board of trustees. Their appointments began July 1, 2005, and will continue until 2011.

Richard S. LeFrak leads the LeFrak Organization, a diversified, privately held New York firm active in major residential and commercial real estate development, oil and gas exploration and financial investments. He joined the organization, one of the nation’s largest owners of apartment and office properties, in 1968, and was appointed president in 1975. He was elected chairman of the organization’s board in 2003.

Active on the boards of the Lower Manhattan Development Council, the American Museum of Natural History, the Sequa Corporation and the Real Estate Board of New York, LeFrak is also active on the JP Morgan regional advisory board and the executive committee of the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation. He also is a member of the LeFrak Foundation.

LeFrak holds a J.D. from Columbia University. He received an honorary doctorate from Amherst in 1998. LeFrak and his wife, Karen, have two sons, Harrison and James, both of whom are managing directors of the LeFrak Organization.

Hope Eighmy Pascucci ’90 was elected to the board by her fellow alumni in voting in May. Pascucci is managing director at the London office of Deutsche Bank, where she is the global head of new issue syndicate, global head of debt capital markets and head of European issuer coverage. Before joining Deutsche Bank in 2000, Pascucci worked for Merrill Lynch for 10 years, first in New York and then in London.

Since joining Deutsche Bank, Pascucci has served as the company’s Global Markets Executive Sponsor for Amherst, Williams, Princeton and Oxford. A member of the Global Markets Executive Committee and the Global Banking Executive Committee, she was named by Euro-week magazine as one of the world’s top 40 bankers under the age of 40.

Pascucci is a mentor, senior member and speaker in Women in European Business, and the Family Network selected her as a Family Network Champion. A sponsor of Take Your Child to Work Day, she also has been an active fundraiser for the Thomas’s Preparatory School charities.

Pascucci travels frequently to the U.S. for business and personal reasons. She and her husband, Michael P. Pascucci, have two children: Luke, age 8, and Annie, age 6.

Paula Rauch ’77, a child psychiatrist and chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Child Psychiatry Consultation Service, began her career at MGH in 1982 as a psychiatry resident. Four years later, she began her child psychiatry consultation work with pediatric patients, and in 1987, she became the psychiatrist in the hospital’s Cystic Fibrosis Clinic. A year later, she was named associate chief of the hospital’s Child Psychiatry Consultation Service; she has been chief since 1998. In addition, she is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, consultant at a local preschool, and an adviser for Arthur, a popular PBS children’s cartoon. She has worked on initiatives to address underage drinking, helped develop anti-tobacco curricula for middle school children, and recently served on the assistant surgeon general’s committee for child mental health resiliency in the aftermath of September 11. At MGH, she founded PACT (Parenting at a Challenging Time), a unique parent guidance program that provides individual and group parenting support by expert child psychiatrists and psychologists for cancer patients, their spouses and children.

In 2003, Rauch received the Schwartz Center’s annual Compassionate Caregiver Award, which honors a Massachusetts caregiver who displays extraordinary compassion in caring for patients.

Rauch received an M.D. degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1981. She is married to Aubrey Dickman; they have three children: Daniel (Amherst 2000), Ben (Amherst ’08) and Laura.

The Board of Trustees of Amherst College consists of the president of the college, ex officio, and 20 other members: 14 term trustees, elected by the board, and six alumni trustees elected by alumni of the college.