Connie Chen

When people call what she does “saving the world,” she winces.

“I don’t think I’ve saved any lives in my time here,” she says. Such humility, according to friend and fellow Harvard AIDS Coalition (HAC) member Matthew F. Basilico ’08, is characteristic of Connie E. Chen ’08—and perhaps misleading.

A snapshot of Chen’s resume reveals a person of Herculean capabilities: a Detur Book Prize winner, John Harvard Scholar, pre-med econ major interviewing for both medical schools and consulting firms (just landing a job at McKinsey & Co.) who has also spent one summer drafting a $31 million grant for malaria and AIDS intervention in Cambodia, another documenting sex workers in Kenya, and the times in between working in various organizations across campuses.

“She is a programming chair of PBHA,” says Phillips Brooks House Association President (PBHA) Angelico N. A. Razon ’08, who met Chen during the Freshman Urban Program. “That’s supporting 73, 74 programs at the same time.”

As a board member of the nationally recognized Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, Chen worked on a program that has urged universities to make use of their licensing leverage to require pharmaceutical companies to make low-cost drugs available in poor countries.

“50 percent of all therapeutic innovations come from universities today,” says Basilico, who currently heads the HAC along with Chen. He says the potential of the campaign is sweeping, adding that it has garnered support from hundreds of luminaries in science, law, and medicine.

Yet despite her accomplishments, Chen stays human.

“You wouldn’t think this intense person has so much fun,” Razon says. Chen, he describes, is the type of person who does her organic chemistry problem set “buzzed—with a deep purple Asian glow.”

In the end Razon agrees Chen has more resemblance to Mother Theresa than a fun tsarina.

“I make fun of her sometimes for having this terrible allergic reaction to peanuts,” Razon says. One time, he recalls, she was working for PBHA’s Summer Urban Program, and one program hadn’t received the lunch they expected.

“They asked her ‘can you please make 60 peanut butter jelly sandwiches?’ Everyone else was tied up then, and so she sat in the back of the van and made 60 sandwiches. Later she would break out all over the place and have to get the antihistamine shot or whatever. It didn’t matter,” Razon says.

“That was a very Connie moment right there.”