College President Alice Gast *84 Smashed Glass Ceilings

Alice Gast *84 was the first female president of Lehigh University and both the first female and first foreign president of Imperial College London. She was the first person to have led universities in both the Unites States and the United Kingdom. Along with an investor partner, Gast was the first to launch an entrepreneurship competition for women at a university in the U.K.

And Gast was the first to discover, back in her Princeton days, when she lived at Hunter’s Glen with her husband, Brad Askins, that their escape-artist cat responded to the theme song of the TV show M*A*S*H*. If you ever saw a group of people scouring the adjoining golf course whistling that familiar tune, it was because of Gast.

“She put a lot of energy into everything she did,” says Askins, who had inadvertently made a habit of whistling the theme song whenever he fed Stumpy dinner, usually after he and Gast finished watching M*A*S*H* reruns.

Born in Houston, Texas, Gast largely grew up in California, where she developed a lifelong love of the outdoors. In 1980, she graduated with her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering as valedictorian from USC, where she and Askins met. They came to Princeton so Gast could pursue her Ph.D. in chemical engineering. Aside from tracking down their runaway cat, at Princeton, Gast and Askins liked to play tennis and have dinner with her classmates. They were married in the University Chapel.

Gast spent a year in France as a postdoc and then 16 years as a professor at Stanford, during which time she co-authored a textbook on colloid and surface phenomena and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Gast then moved to the administrative side of higher education. She spent five years as vice president for research, associate provost, and chair of chemical engineering at MIT before taking the helm of Lehigh in 2006. While there, she was named a global science envoy by the U.S. Department of State.

In 2014, she became president of Imperial College London, and she and Askins moved to the U.K.

“We had this expression — we’re happy wherever we go,” says Askins.

At Imperial, one of Gast’s most enduring legacies is WE Innovate, a six-month competitive program for female entrepreneurs that she co-launched with Alexsis de Raadt St. James.

“I don’t think 500 women would’ve gone through the program, and I don’t think over 80 companies would’ve been created, had she not stepped up and said, ‘You know what? I want to put my name, my time, my energy, and this university behind [WE Innovate]. So, for that, I’m just eternally grateful,” says de Raadt St. James.

Gast stepped down from Imperial in 2022, after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but she didn’t stop working; she and de Raadt St. James were writing an article weeks before her death.

According to Askins, Gast was proudest of both “her academic children — her Ph.D. students” and their two children, David and Rebecca.

Despite her intense career, she was an extremely supportive mother. Rebecca says Gast came to nearly all her cross country and track meets while she was growing up, yet somehow Gast also made time to attend “almost every sport you can imagine” at the universities where she worked.

“How amazing is that, that the president of your university shows up to your cross country meet when like nobody comes to cross country?” Rebecca asks.

As president of Lehigh, Gast once said, “There is really nothing more important to our future and to our success than our children.”

Julie Bonette is PAW’s writer/assistant editor.