The University of Pennsylvania has received an $8 million gift to redesign how it trains doctors at the Perelman School of Medicine, Penn officials announced Thursday.
Incorporating technology, AI, and data to create customized learning pathways for Penn medical students is an overarching goal. The effort comes at a time when increasingly easyaccess to medical information and changes in care delivery are leading medical schools nationwide to revamp their curricula.
The gift to Penn is from New York-based RTW Foundation, a philanthropy associated with the life sciences investment firmfounded by Perelman School graduate and Penn Medicine board member Rod Wong. Penn said the gift from Wong, and his wife, Marti Speranza Wong, is the largest single donation to support curriculum innovation at the medical school, which dates back to 1765.
At a news conference announcing his donation Thursday, Wong recalled his time atthe medical school right after its last major overhaul of the curriculum in 1998. One update underPenn’s “Curriculum 2000” revamp was recording and making lectures available online — a relatively innovative move at the time (YouTube wouldn’t be created for another several years).
“Technology has changed, and obviously we’re at this same inflection point because of AI and data science,” said Wong, who is managing partner and chief investment officer at RTW Investments LP.
Penn alumnus Rod Wong (center) sits with dean of Perelman School of Medicine Jonathan A. Epstein (left) after signing the gift agreement.
The vast majority of the $8 million gift will go toward hiring data scientists and engineers, supporting faculty, and building and acquiring the platforms needed to deliver the new curriculum.
Technology will be incorporated into new training techniques, such as byusing augmented or virtual reality to assist in learning anatomy, developing knowledge needed to diagnose illnesses and develop treatment plans, and mastering clinical skills such as IV placement and suturing.
For example, students can practice taking a person’s medical history or doing a physical exam on a virtual patient, while an AI agent is there to give feedback in real time.
“It’s really adaptive to the individual learner, but you do it at your own pace, on your own time,” said Lisa Bellini, executive vice dean of the medical school and a leader on the project.
The redesign will take place over the next three years as school leaders consult with stakeholders and work on building the platform.
Some of Wong’s gift will be used to create a biannual endowed lecture in business and entrepreneurship that will bring leaders in medicine and healthcare innovation to campus. The gift will also establish the Roderick Wong Entrepreneurship Pathway, which will provide mentorship, workshops, and project-based learning to students with business interests.
“We really need to incorporate the fundamentals of how best to use technology responsibly within the practice of medicine and create something incredibly enduring, because you’re not going to go through this exercise every three years,” Bellini said.
The Perelman School of Medicine is embarking on its curriculum revamp at a time when medical education is evolving at many schools.
Some medical schools have concentrated the traditional two years spent learning science into one year to give students more time to learn how to interact with patients and collaborate with other medical professionals.
A three-year medical school option is offered at institutions such as the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine to speed doctors into the clinic and reduce students’ debt loads.
Jennifer Kogan, vice dean for undergraduate medical education at the Perelman School of Medicine, is a leader in the curriculum revamp.
Faster, flexible learning
Like most medical schools, Perelman has a standard curriculum where students take foundational science courses for a stretch of time and then transition to the hospital to gain clinical experience.
This can lead to some students repeating courses that they already mastered in college.
“If you were a biochemistry major as an undergrad, do you really have to take biochemistry again?” said Jennifer Kogan, vice dean of undergraduate medical education and a leader on the redesign project. “How could you better use that time to achieve whatever your career goals are?”
Leaders at Penn want to give students the flexibility to adjust their timelines based on their skill sets and goals.
Instead of setting a fixed time for how long a class or rotation will take, a student who masters a skill more quickly should be able to move on and devote their time to other interests, such as research or entrepreneurship.
Many students at Penn pursue dual degrees or research fellowships that end up adding a fifth year of medical school. Penn leaders hope adding flexibility to the curriculum could enable students to instead finish in four years or “maybe even three,” Kogan said. (The possibility of a three-year path is not yet guaranteed but will be explored.)
“It will be better set up to support students like me who have had to use significant federal loans to finance their way through medical school and might have benefited from the condensed training timeline,” said Alex Nisbet, a fourth-year medical student at Perelman who spoke at the signing event.
An attendee holds a pennant flag representing the Perelman School of Medicine.
The school will leverage data and AI to assess how individual students are progressing in what they’re calling a “precision education model.”
Though parts of the program will be piloted over the next three years, the first class to see the full implementation of the curriculum will be in the fall of 2029.
The U.S. Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into the Great Valley School District in Chester County for a policy allowing transgender girls to participate in girls’ sports teams.
The probe — one of 18 investigations announced last week into transgender sports policies in K-12 districts and colleges nationally — comes after President Donald Trump threatened last year to strip federal funding from schools that recognize transgender students.
“Time and again, the Trump Administration has made its position clear: violations of women’s rights, dignity, and fairness are unacceptable,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement. “We will leave no stone unturned in these investigations to uphold women’s right to equal access in education programs — a fight that started over half a century ago and is far from finished.”
District officials said at a school board meeting Tuesday that they’re cooperating with the investigation and working with lawyers to prepare a response.
Numerous Philadelphia-area school districts have policies allowing transgender students to play on sports teams aligned with their gender identities, including Philadelphia. But Great Valley appears to be the first on the administration’s radar.
Great Valley was one of the first Pennsylvania school districts to pass a policy supporting the rights of transgender students in 2016 — seeking to provide those students “equal opportunity to achieve their maximum potential,” including by participating in sports “in a manner that is consistent with their consistently asserted gender identity.”
It was unclear whether any transgender girls currently play sports at Great Valley. A district spokesperson provided a statement Wednesday saying the district was “committed to serving all students in our community with dignity and respect” but declined to comment further.
After declaring the country would “recognize two sexes, male and female,” Trump issued an executive order in February seeking to end the participation of transgender women in women’s sports.
The president invoked Title IX, the landmark civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in programs that receive federal funding.
But how that law applies to transgender students and their rights has been hotly debated. The U.S. Supreme Court last week heard two cases challenging laws in West Virginia and Idaho requiring that participation on sports teams for girls be based on “biological sex.”
In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, the Human Relations Act specifies that discrimination based on gender identity is a form of prohibited sex-based discrimination.
Courts have also protected the rights of transgender students. In 2018, judges in the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against students in the Boyertown Area School District who said their privacy rights were violated by sharing bathrooms with transgender students.
Last year, a U.S. District Court judge in Philadelphia rejected a lawsuit from a Quakertown student who said her equal protection rights were violated by having to race against a transgender female student in the Colonial School District.
Great Valley “takes its obligations under Title IX and all federal civil rights laws seriously,” the district’s school board president, Rachel Gallegos, said at a board meeting Tuesday. “We also take our responsibility to comply with the legal rulings from federal courts in this jurisdiction and to provide the protections afforded our students by Pennsylvania statutes just as seriously.”
Much of the Trump administration’s focus on transgender issues to date has been at the collegiate level. The NCAA last year announced it would ban transgender women from competing, and the University of Pennsylvania struck a deal with the administration over the past participation of transgender athlete Lia Thomas on its women’s swim team.
The Great Valley investigation appears to have been triggered by a former school board president, Bruce Chambers, who filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights last March, objecting to the policy.
Chambers, who served on the board from 2009 to 2012, said Wednesday that OCR notified him last week that his complaint was under investigation, the same day it made its public announcement.
The district’s policy “discriminates against girls, because the trans people can use whatever bathroom they want, use whatever locker room they want … join any team they want, or activity,” Chambers said. He said he “gave the board three chances” before filing the OCR complaint.
If the board rescinds the policy, “that will solve the whole thing,” Chambers said.
Kristina Moon, senior attorney with the Education Law Center, a Philadelphia-based group that advocates for transgender students, said the Trump administration appears to be trying “to intimidate school districts” into complying with its policy goals.
Moon pointed to a recent OCR investigation into gender neutral bathrooms that was criticized by Denver Public Schools, which said the office didn’t independently verify claims and “issued conclusions using an approach that departs from established investigative practice.”
“If they actually cared about protecting girls … they would not have dismantled the Department of Education and Office for Civil Rights,” Moon said.
In a letter this week to the Great Valley board, the LGBT Equality Alliance of Chester County said there was “no clear federal law or Supreme Court ruling that makes inclusive policies for transgender students unlawful.”
“Great Valley’s current policy reflects a reasonable, lawful approach that protects students from discrimination, aligns with local and state civil rights standards, and has been reviewed with legal counsel,” the alliance said in the letter. “Supporting students’ dignity and safety is not political. It is consistent with our legal obligations and the district’s duty of care to all students.”
Two residents who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting also urged the board to maintain the policy.
“I understand there is a need for all students and not just a minority to feel safe, but I feel assured the board can and will handle all concerns from parents and students with great care,” Christi Largent said. “I look forward to seeing the board stand up for all the students.”
The University of Pennsylvania in a legal filing Tuesday pushed back against a federal commission’s demand that in effect would require it to turn over lists of Jewish faculty, staff, and students, calling the request “unconstitutional,” “disconcerting,” and “unnecessary.”
The filing comes in response to a lawsuit filed against the university in November by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, asserting that Penn failed to comply with its subpoena. The commission is seeking employees’ names, home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses to further an investigation it began in 2023 over the school’s treatment of Jewish faculty and other employees regarding antisemitism complaints that emerged following Hamas’ attack on Israel.
In its quest to find people potentially affected, the commission demanded a list of employees in Penn’s Jewish Studies Program, a list of all clubs, groups, organizations, and recreation groups related to the Jewish religion — including points of contact and a roster of members — and names of employees who lodged antisemitism complaints. It also sought names of participants in confidential listening sessions held by the school’s task force on antisemitism.
The request has spurred a backlash from some student and faculty groups, including Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, arguing that the names and personal information should not be turned over to the government.
Penn has refused to provide the information, and the school doubled down on that position in Tuesday’s legal filing.
“The EEOC insists that Penn produce this information without the consent — and indeed, over the objections — of the employees impacted while entirely disregarding the frightening and well-documented history of governmental entities that undertook efforts to identify and assemble information regarding persons of Jewish ancestry,” the university wrote in its filing. “The government’s demand implicates Penn’s substantial interest in protecting its employees’ privacy, safety, and First Amendment rights.”
Also on Tuesday, the Penn Faculty Alliance to Combat Antisemitism, a group of more than 150 primarily Jewish professors, filed a brief in support of the university’s decision not to comply with the commission’s demand.
“While the Alliance supports the EEOC’s efforts to combat antisemitism at Penn, its members are gravely concerned that the scope of the EEOC subpoena … invokes the troubling historical persecution of Jews and threatens the personal security of the Alliance’s members,” the group wrote in the brief.
The alliance includes members who have had concerns about antisemitism at Penn, including faculty who were harassed online after attending a trip to Israel following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the country, said Claire Finkelstein, a professor at Penn Carey Law School, member of the alliance, and faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law.
Among its members are faculty “who have been really on the side of remediating antisemitism, do not believe that concerns about antisemitism are pretextual, do not think that it is a sham issue, and think there are real … issues to address at universities in general.”
Finkelstein said the alliance has not taken a position on whether the EEOC’s investigation is warranted or needed.
But the group is adamantly opposed to the subpoena and believes it could discourage membership in Jewish groups at Penn. In its brief, the group notes “the dark historical legacy associated with government lists of Jews,” including how Nazis “frequently demanded that others identify the Jews among them.”
Penn said in its filing that it had complied with the subpoena except for the list of names and contacts, noting it had provided over 900 pages of materials to the commission. The school noted that it even offered to send notices to all employees about the EEOC’s request to hear about antisemitism concerns with the commission’s contact information.
The university also asserted that the commission’s demand “is a particularly unjustified use of enforcement authority given the weakness of the underlying charge.”
The commission, the university argued, has not identified a “single allegedly unlawful employment practice or incident involving employees.”
“The charge does not refer to any employee complaint the agency has received, any allegation made by or concerning employees, or any specific workplace incident(s) contemplated by the EEOC, nor does it even identify any employment practice(s) the EEOC alleges to be unlawful or potentially harmful to Jewish employees,” Penn said in its response.
The original complaint was launched by EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas, now chair of the body, on Dec. 8, 2023, two months after Hamas’ attack on Israel that led to unrest on college campuses, including Penn’s, and charges of antisemitism. It was also just three days after Penn’s then-president, Liz Magill, had testified before a Republican-led congressional committee on the school’s handling of antisemitism complaints; the testimony drew a bipartisan backlash and led to Magill’s resignation days later.
Lucas, whom President Donald Trump appointed chair last year, also brought similar antisemitism charges against Columbia University that resulted in the school paying $21 million for “a class settlement fund.”
EEOC complaints typically come from those who allege they were aggrieved. Lucas, according to its complaint, made the charge in Penn’s case because of the “probable reluctance of Jewish faculty and staff to complain of harassing environment due to fear of hostility and potential violence directed against them.“
The commission’s investigation followed Lucas’ complaint to the commission’s Philadelphia office that alleged Penn was subjecting Jewish faculty, staff, and other employees, including students, “to an unlawful hostile work environment based on national origin, religion, and/or race.”
The allegation, the complaint said, is based on news reports, public statements made by the university and its leadership, letters from university donors, board members, alumni, and others. It also cited complaints filed against Penn and testimony before a congressional committee.
In its brief, the faculty alliance also asserted that the commission could have used other voluntary and informal methods to obtain contact information for Penn faculty and staff, such as setting up a website where people could report concerns.
Finkelstein, the Penn law professor, said she understands that the commission generally guarantees anonymity to witnesses or complainants, but leaks can occur.
“When state force extracts sensitive, personal details, those details could (and often do) become public, turning group members into targets for their enemies,” the group states in its filing.
Penn has done a lot to address antisemitism concerns, said Brian Englander, president of the alliance and a professor of clinical radiology who has been at Penn for 22 years.
In its brief, the alliance listed antisemitic incidents that occurred on Penn’s campus in 2023, including a swastika left on a Penn building and messages that Penn called antisemitic that were light-projected onto several Penn buildings.
“Penn is a very different place than what we were experiencing in the fall of 2023,” he said.
Finkelstein agreed.
“Penn is not Columbia or Harvard or UCLA,” she said. “The problems that have appeared on those campuses have been much more extreme than what happened on Penn’s campus.”
“I also think there may be a limit to what university leadership can do in the face of widespread antisemitism that has really affected university campuses all over the country.”
But there is always room for improvement, she said.
“To the extent that there is an atmosphere that has made Jewish students and faculty feel unwelcome, or not heard, or vilified, that is something the university has to continue to address and I believe they will continue to address it,” she said.
Finkelstein was among about 40 faculty who took a four-day, personal trip to Israel in January 2024 and said hey felt attacked for supporting academics there and trying to learn more about the Oct. 7 attacks. An Instagram account by Penn Students Against the Occupation was critical of the trip and accused faculty of “scholasticide.” The EEOC referred to that incident in its complaint.
“My dean got hundreds of letters,” she said, protesting faculty going on the trip.
Englander said there probably are members of the alliance who would be interested in talking to the commission.
“But they would want to do it voluntarily,” he said.
The alliance, he said, is “straddling this middle line” in that it supports Penn’s refusal to turn over the names, but also recognizes “that antisemitism is a massive problem in the United States right now.”
“So having government support, whatever the motivation for that, is meaningful,” he said.
Daniel Segal, 79, of Philadelphia, cofounder and shareholder of the Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller law firm, adjunct law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, former cochair of the Philadelphia Soviet Jewry Council, onetime board president at the Juvenile Law Center, mentor, and “mischievous mensch,” died Thursday, Jan. 8, of stomach cancer at his home.
Born and reared in Washington, Mr. Segal moved to Philadelphia in 1976 to teach at what is now Penn Carey Law School. He went into private law practice in 1979, became cochair of a litigation department in 1993, and joined with colleagues in 1994 to establish Hangley Aronchick Segal & Pudlin.
For more than 40 years, until his recent retirement, Mr. Segal handled all kinds of cases for all kinds of clients, including The Inquirer. He was an expert in juvenile law, defamation, the First Amendment, professional ethics, education, civil rights, and other legal issues.
He was president of the board at the Juvenile Law Center and worked pro bono for years, beginning in 2009, to help represent more than 2,400 juvenile victims and win millions of dollars in settlements in what is known as the Luzerne County “kids-for-cash” case. In that case, two judges were convicted of taking kickbacks for illegally sending juveniles to two private for-profit detention facilities.
“This is one of the worst judicial scandals in history,” Mr. Segal told The Inquirer in 2009. “The people you’re stepping on are the true, true little guys.”
Mr. Segal was honored in 2010 by the Philadelphia Bar Foundation.
Among his other notable cases are a 1985 workplace racial discrimination dispute, a 1990 libel case against The Inquirer, and a 2000 trial about the city taxing outdoor advertisers. “Dan Segal was a living testament to professional excellence,” said Mark Aronchick, his law partner and longtime friend.
Law partner and friend John Summers said: “He was a great teacher and mentor.” Marsha Levick, cofounder of the Juvenile Law Center, said: “He was a brilliant, steady partner who made us smarter and kept us laughing.”
Mr. Segal clerked for Chief Judge David Bazelon in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1974 and for Supreme Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1975. He was active with the Philadelphia Bar Association, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, and the Penn Law School American Inn of Court.
He wrote articles for legal journals and letters to the editor of The Inquirer and Daily News. He spoke at panels and conferences, earned honors from legal organizations and trade publications, and was named the Thomas A. O’Boyle adjunct professor of law at Penn in 1992.
This story and photo features Mr. Segal (left) and appeared in The Inquirer in 1984.
The son of a rabbi, Mr. Segal was cochair of the Soviet Jewry Council in the 1980s, and he organized rallies and marches for social justice and human rights. He traveled to Israel often and to the old Soviet Union several times to secretly support Jews not permitted by government officials to immigrate to Israel.
“We are persuaded that the Soviet Jews are pawns in the Soviet-American relationship,” he told The Inquirer in 1985.
He served as president of the board of directors at what is now Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy and held leadership roles with the Jewish Community Relations Council, the New Israel Fund, Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, and other organizations.
Colleagues at the New Israel Fund praised his “characteristic kindness” and “gentle and sparkling humor” in an online tribute. They said: “He was everyone’s favorite board member.”
Mr. Segal and his wife, Sheila, married in 1968.
Mr. Segal enjoyed pranks and funny jokes, even at work, and neighbors called him Silly Dan. His son Josh said: “His warmth, humor, and humility meant that he could connect with just about anyone.” A friend said he was a “mischievous mensch.”
He earned his law degree in 1973 and was executive editor of the Law Review at Harvard University Law School. He earned a bachelor’s degree in politics and economics at Yale University in 1968 and a master’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics in 1969.
He taught elementary school for a year in Washington and spent another year in Europe before moving to Philadelphia. “He taught us just how important it is to stand up for what is right,” his son Eli said, “and to do so not only with conviction but with humility and kindness, and without a thought of getting personal credit.”
Daniel Segal was born July 4, 1946. He started dating Sheila Feinstein in ninth grade, and they married after college in 1968. They had sons Josh and Eli, and lived in Center City and Lower Merion before moving to Fairmount in 2018.
Mr. Segal’s sons said: “Our dad showed us that relationships are the heart of a life well-lived by nurturing lifelong friendships.”
Mr. Segal loved chocolate and ice cream. He recovered from a traumatic brain injury 20 years ago, and he and his wife traveled to Iceland, Peru, Vietnam, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere.
He doted on his family and friends, and he and his wife rented vacation places every summer to bring his sons and their families together. “Neither of us were surprised that our dad always made our kids feel so loved,” his son Eli said. “Because that was just how he made us feel.”
I’m Jewish, and like most other Jews I know, I often wonder who else is. When I meet someone at a party, or see a new face on TV, I think: yes or no? It’s a game, and it’s all in good fun.
But when the government does it, it isn’t. It’s a dagger at our hearts.
That’s why so many people at the University of Pennsylvania — where I teach — are up in arms about the Trump administration’s effort to compel the university to identify Jewish students and employees. It’s part of an investigation of antisemitism on campus by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which issued a subpoena demanding the names and contact information of members of Jewish-related student groups, staffers at the school’s Jewish studies program, and anyone who had filed an antisemitism complaint.
Fortunately, Penn said no. The EEOC sued the university back in November for refusing to comply with the subpoena. And last week, several groups at Penn filed their own motion in the case. “Compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history,” they wrote.
Indeed, it does. Going back to the Middle Ages, state officials have tried to establish who is Jewish. And it never ends well.
In 1215, Pope Innocent III decreed that Jews must wear markers at all times that made them distinguishable from Christians. Two years later, in England, King Henry III ordered male Jews to wear a badge on the front of their outer garments.
In England, the badge was shaped like the tablets upon which Moses — according to the Old Testament — received the Ten Commandments. In France, it was a circle of red or yellow felt. Hungarian Jews had to wear red capes. And in German-speaking parts of Europe, Jews were required wear a cone-shaped Judenhut, or “Jew’s Hat.”
The goal of these rules wasn’t simply to identify Jews; it was to segregate, humiliate, and persecute them. Jews wearing badges were mocked by children and attacked by bandits. Badge laws also led to extortion: To receive exemptions from the laws, Jews had to pay large sums to the state.
In the so-called Jewish Emancipation era of the 18th and 19th centuries, when Jews finally received citizenship in the nations where they lived, badge laws disappeared. But they returned with a vengeance in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Nazis required Jews in Germany and the territories it conquered to wear yellow stars.
That helped facilitate their deportation and murder in concentration camps, where a new set of markers developed. Jews who were also political prisoners wore a red triangle, superimposed on a yellow one; gay Jews were identified by the pink triangle, which was later adopted by LGBTQ+ activists as a symbol of pride.
And Jewish camp prisoners often received tattooed numbers on their arms. Again, that was a way to degrade Jews as well as to identify them.
“My number is A-10572. That is what I was, they did not call us by our names,” recalled Holocaust survivor Lilly Ebert, whose TikTok video about the Auschwitz death camp went viral in 2021. “We were no longer humans. We were only a number, and we were treated like numbers.”
Since then, every state effort to count or list Jews has reflected disdain for them. Convinced that Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics were altering employment statistics to undermine him, President Richard Nixon ordered aides to find out how many BLS workers were Jewish. “The government is full of Jews,” Nixon fulminated in a taped 1971 White House conversation. “Most Jews are disloyal … You can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”
An aide scrutinized the BLS employees’ names — never a perfect way to figure who is Jewish — and concluded that 13 of 35 fit the “demographic criterion that was discussed,” as he delicately reported. Less than two months later, two Jewish senior officials were removed from their posts and demoted to less visible positions in the agency. That was “the last recorded act of official antisemitism by the United States government,” as political commentator Tim Noah wrote.
Forcing Penn to cough up a list of Jews would be the next one. It doesn’t matter that it comes as part of a Trump administration investigation of antisemitism. Frankly, I doubt a president who welcomed Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes to his home for dinner — and who still refuses to criticize him — cares very much about the safety of Jews on campus.
But even if he does, that’s no reason to count them. When the government does that, it isn’t fun anymore. It’s game over.
When State Sen. Sharif Tahir Street converted to Islam 30 years ago, he already had a Muslim name.
His father, John F. Street, who would go on to become Philadelphia’s mayor, gave his son a Muslim name when he was born in 1974 despite raising him in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, an evangelical Christian sect in which members of the Street family hold leadership roles to this day.
As the senator tells it, his father initially considered adopting the name Sharif himself — not because he was considering converting to Islam but because he wanted to embrace the movement of Black Americans reclaiming pre-slavery identities.
Instead, the elder Street, who had already built a reputation as a rabble-rousing activist, kept his name and dubbed his son Sharif, which in Arabic means noble or exalted one.
The story would be surprising if it weren’t from the idiosyncratic Street family, which has played a unique outsider-turned-insider role in Philly politics for decades. The late State Sen. Milton Street was the senator’s uncle, and Common Pleas Court Judge Sierra Thomas Street is his ex-wife.
This year, with Sharif Street a frontrunner in the crowded Democratic primary to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans, the family could make more history: If elected, Sharif Street would become the first Muslim member of Congress from Pennsylvania.
A Street win would mark another milestone in political representation for Philadelphia’s large Muslim community, an influential constituency that already includes numerous elected officials and power players.
But in characteristic Street fashion, that potential comes with a twist. Street has relatively moderate views on the conflict in Gaza and would likely stand out from Muslim colleagues in Congress like U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D. Mich.), progressives who regularly denounce Israeli aggression.
To be sure, Sharif Street, 51,is highly critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war in Gaza. But he is also quick to defend Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, favors the two-state solution, and counts many prominent Philadelphia-area Jews among his friends and political supporters.
“Guess what? Benjamin Netanyahu is not the only leader of a major country in the world that’s committed war crimes, because Donald Trump has done the same thing,” Street said last week at a Muslim League of Voters event. ”But none of us would talk about getting rid of the United States of America as a country.”
For Muslim voters who view the Middle East crisis as a top political concern, this year’s 3rd Congressional District race sets up a choice between one of their own and a candidate whose politics may more closely align with their views on Gaza: State Rep. Chris Rabb, a progressive who has been endorsed to succeed Evans by the national Muslims United PAC.
“F— AIPAC,” Rabb said at a recent forum, referring to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, which has spent large sums and wielded aggressive tactics to unseat lawmakers it views as antagonistic to Israel. “They are destroying candidates’ lives because they don’t like that we’re standing up to them, that we are actively and consistently acknowledging that there is a genocide in Gaza.”
Rabb, who is not religious and said he respects all faiths, is hoping that Muslim voters will embrace his stance on the issues.
“Making history is not the same as being on the right side of history,” Rabb said in a statement.
‘Embrace all of the texts’
Street said his Adventist upbringing immersed him in an Old Testament-rooted Christianity that led to a growing curiosity about all the Abrahamic faiths. As he got older and read more, he realized that he didn’t view Judaism, Christianity, and Islam “as separately as other people do.”
“I do believe that the Abrahamic religions were all correct. In no way were they all supposed to be separate religions,” he said. “Islam allowed me to embrace all of the texts, which I had already decided to do.”
Before converting, Street said he was embraced by the Muslim community in Atlanta when he was a student at Morehouse College. He officially converted after returning to Philly to earn his law degree at the University of Pennsylvania.
Street’s Shahada, the creed Muslims take when joining the faith, was administered by Imam Shamsud-din Ali, his father’s friend. (Years later, Ali was one the elder Street’s associates being targeted by federal investigators when an FBI listening device was discovered in the mayor’s office in 2003. The episode created a firestorm around John Street’s ultimately successful reelection campaign that year, and Ali was later convicted on fraud and racketeering charges.)
For many Muslim converts, the religion’s dietary strictures, such as abstaining from pork and eating Halal food, take some getting used to, Sharif Street said. That wasn’t a problem for him.
“Islam has a lot of rules — unless you were Seventh-day Adventist,” he said, referring to the denomination discouraging followers from eating pork, shellfish, and numerous other foods.
Street said his faith has guided him as an individual and public servant.
“Islam, for me, focuses on my personal responsibility,” he said, and “the idea that man’s relationship with God is and always was.”
His views on the unity of the Abrahamic religions also guide his perspective on the Middle East, he said.
“I recognize that there won’t be peace for the state of Israel without peace for the Palestinian people, but there won’t be peace for the Palestinian people unless there’s peace for the state of Israel at some point,” he said.
Sharif Street participates in Friday prayer at Masjidullah mosque recently.
Like elected officials of other religions, Street’s politics do not perfectly align with the teachers of Muslim leaders.
On a recent Friday, Street attended Jumu’ah, the weekly afternoon prayer service, at Masjidullah in Northwest Philadelphia. A sign at the entrance reminded Muslims that abortion and homosexuality are against Islam’s teachings.
“Almost every one of Philadelphia’s Muslim political leaders … are all pro-civil rights, including LGBTQ [rights] and pro-choice,” he said. The sign, he said, represented “some members of the faith leadership who are reminding us … that is not the stance of the official religious community.”
For Street, that type of dissidence hits close to home.
His father, he said, became Baptist after being “kicked out” of the Seventh-day Adventist Church for officiating a same-sex marriage in 2007 between Micah Mahjoubian, a staffer for Sharif Street, and his husband, Ryan Bunch.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in North Philadelphia did not respond to a request for comment.
’One of the most Muslim urban spaces’
Ryan Boyer, who heads the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council and is Muslim, likes to say he’s proud that members of his faith are so integrated into local politics that their religious identities are often overlooked.
“We’re a part of the fabric,” said Boyer, whose politically powerful coalition of unions has endorsed Street. ”To me, it’s not that big of a deal. We’re here.”
For Boyer, that means Muslim candidates like Street are judged based on their merits, not their identities.
“He’s Muslim,” Boyer said of Street. “Well, is he smart? Does he present the requisite skills and abilities to do the job? … The answer is yes.”
Other Muslim leaders in the city include: Sheriff Rochelle Bilal; City Councilmembers Curtis Jones Jr. and Nina Ahmad; former Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson; and City Commissioner Omar Sabir, who is Boyer’s brother.
Philly has also sent several Muslim lawmakers to Harrisburg, including current State Reps. Keith Harris, Jason Dawkins, and Tarik Khan.
Although the community is less well-known nationally than those in Michigan or Minnesota, Philadelphia has one of the nation’s oldest and largest Muslim populations, with about 250,000 faithful in a city of 1.6 million, according to Ahmet Tekelioglu, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Philadelphia branch.
By some estimates, Philly’s Muslim community has the highest percentage of U.S.-born followers of any major American city, thanks to the conversion of thousands of Black Philadelphians in recent decades. While many came to the faith through the Nation of Islam movement, a vast majority of Black Muslims in Philadelphia now practice mainstream Sunni Islam, Tekelioglu said.
Add in thriving immigrant communities from West Africa and the Middle East, and Philadelphia is “one of the most Muslim urban spaces” in the country, he said.
“Within a few minutes of walking in the city, you come across a visibly Muslim individual,” said Tekelioglu, whose nonprofit group does not make political endorsements. “Halal cheesesteak, ‘the Philly beard,’ and such — these also have overlap with the Muslim community and [the city’s] popular culture.”
The Middle East and the 3rd Congressional District
As a lawmaker, Street has been instrumental in forcing the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association to allow Muslim girls competing in sports to wear hijabs and in leading the School District of Philadelphia to recognize Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr as official holidays.
That record is part of why he bristles at the Muslims United PAC’s endorsement of Rabb.
“We cannot allow other people to hijack our community and hijack our issue because it’s Black people, it’s Muslims dying in Philadelphia right now, and some of these candidates don’t have anything to say about that,” Street said at the Muslim League of Voters event. “Some of them even got some fugazi Muslim organizations to endorse them.”
State Sen. Sharif Street appearing at a forum hosted by the 9th Ward Democratic Committee in December.
At another recent forum, the 3rd District Democratic candidates were asked whether they support legislation stopping U.S. weapons shipments to Israel after more than two years of conflict that has seen an estimated 70,000 Palestinians die in Gaza.
Street, who traveled to Israel and Palestine in 2017, said the one-minute response time wasn’t enough to unpack the complicated issues, and none of the other candidates gave straightforward answers — except Rabb, who said he supported the proposal.
“There are no two sides in this when we see the devastation,” Rabb said.
In an interview, Street said his comparatively moderate views on the crisis and his relationships with Jewish supporters will allow him to “play a really constructive role” in Congress.
“We need more people who can talk to both the Jewish and Muslim communities,” he said. “We need people who can have a nuanced conversation and do it with some real credibility.”
Tekelioglu said he has observed Muslim voters moving away from “identity politics” and toward “accountability-based political stance.” That evolution has accelerated during Israel’s war in Gaza following the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, he said.
“Oct. 7 and everything that’s going on has made everything a bit more clear,” he said. “This doesn’t make it such that the Palestine issue is the main dealbreaker, but overall I see a trend of moving away from the identity politics.”
The real question, he said, is, “Are they going to represent our interests?”
At Penn Medicine’s clinic where adults receive genetic counseling and testing, about 9% of patients are Black.
By contrast, one in four patients at the cardiology and endocrinology clinics located in the same facility in West Philadelphia are Black, while nearly 40% of cityresidents are. Those from low-income neighborhoods are also less likely to be seen at the genetics clinic, yet more likely to have positive results when tested, a recent Penn study found.
These findings line up with what Theodore Drivas, a clinical geneticist and the study’s senior author, had long suspected about the impact of racial disparities based on his own experience seeing patients at Penn’s clinic.
The study, published this month in the American Journal of Human Genetics, found that Black patients were also less likely to be represented at adult genetics clinics at Mass General Brigham, a Harvard-affiliated health system in Massachusetts.
There’s no biological reason why rates of testing should differ, Drivas said. The overall rate of genetic disease should be similar regardless of race, even though certain diseases are more prevalent in some populations.
“Genetic disease doesn’t favor one group or another,” he said.
That means if one group isn’t getting tested as much, they’re probably missing out on key diagnoses.
Racial disparities are an ongoing concern in medicine and have been attributed to a wide range of causes, including socioeconomic factors, unequal access to care, implicit bias, and medical mistrust due to historic injustices.
In a study published last August, Drivas’ team found that the chances of a genetic condition being caught varied widely by race. Among patients admitted to intensive care units across the Penn health system, 63% of white patients knew about their genetic condition, compared to only 22.7% of Black patients.
To address these disparities, Drivas is calling for changes to how the medical field approaches genetic testing, such as by integrating testing into standard protocols and improving national guidelines.
“It’s not just a Penn problem or a Harvard problem. It’s a genetics problem in general,” Drivas said.
Diving into the disparities
Drivas’ team analyzed data from 14,669 patients who showed up at adult genetics clinics at Penn and Mass General Brigham between 2016 and 2021. The findings are limited to the two major academic centers on the East Coast, which tend to see sicker patients compared to community medical centers.
Black patients were 58% less likely to be seen at Penn’s genetics clinic than would be expected based on the overall University of Pennsylvania Health System patient population.
At Mass General Brigham, Black patients were 55% less likely than would be expected based on that system’s population.
Some literature has suggested that Black patients and others from minority groupsare less likely to agree to genetic testing because of an inherent distrust in the medical system due to historic injustices. “But we don’t see that in our data,” Drivas said.
Once evaluated at Penn’s clinic, Black patients were 35% more likely to have testing ordered than white individuals.
His team also found disparities affecting lower-income individuals. Each $10,000 increase in the median household income of a person’s neighborhood was associated with a 2% to 5% higher likelihood of evaluation at a genetics clinic.
Meanwhile, patients from neighborhoods with lower median socioeconomic status were more likely to get positive results from testing than those from wealthier neighborhoods.
“We’re relatively over-testing the people from higher socioeconomic brackets and under-testing the people from lower socioeconomic brackets,” Drivas said.
The solution is not to stop testing the wealthier people, he clarified, but to improve access to testing for others.
Undoing disparities
People who want to get a genetic diagnosis often have to go to major medical centers.
The University of Pennsylvania health system comprises sevenhospitals across Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Its Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, adjacent to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia, is the only one that has an adult genetics clinic.
Drivas has many patients who drive two or three hours to be seen for genetic testing.
The current wait time at his clinic is around three or four months, which he said is “pretty good” compared to others.
He thinks part of the solution to reducing disparities requires expanding the size and diversity of the genetics workforce so more patients can be seen.
Geneticists also need to better educate doctors in other fields about when to refer patients, he said. Creating better guidelines would help.
Notably, Black patients in the study were more likely to be evaluated than white individuals for genetic risk factors of cancer — an area where there are clear clinical practice guidelines recommending genetic testing.
They need to come up with similar guidelines for other conditions, such ascardiovascular and kidney diseases, he said.
Another idea he had was to make genetic testing more integrated into standard care in the hospital.
His earlier study found a surprising number of adults in ICUs at Penn had undiagnosed genetic conditions. Such testing is now widely available and often costs as little as a few hundred dollars.
“It costs money, but I think there are cost savings and life-saving interventions that can come from it,” Drivas said.
A year ago, leaders of Family Practice & Counseling Network feared their health clinic, which has served low-income Philadelphians for more than 30 years, wouldn’t survive past June.
The clinic was part of Resources for Human Development, a Philadelphia human services agency that a fast-growing Reading nonprofit called Inperium Inc. had acquired in late 2024.
As a federally qualified health clinic since 1992, the clinic had received an annual federal grant, higher Medicaid rates, and other benefits.
But federal rules prohibited the clinic from continuing to retain that status and those benefits under a parent company. That meant Family Practice & Counseling Network had two options: close or spin out into a new entity that would reapply to be a federally qualified clinic.
“We had to figure it out,” the organization’s CEO Emily Nichols said in a recent interview.
At the time, the organization’s three main locations had 15,000 patients. They are “very underserved, low-income people that deserve good healthcare,” she said.
Thanks to $9.5 million in financial and operational support from the University of Pennsylvania Health System, a new legal entity took over the clinics in July. They now operate under the tweaked name, Family Practice & Counseling Services Network, and without the federalstatus.
“Penn allowed us to survive,” Nichols said.
Still in a precarious position
The nonprofit, with its name now abbreviated as FPCSN, remains in a precarious position.
Because of the corporate change, the $4.2 million annual grant that Family Practice had been receiving through RHD had to be opened up for other applicants under federal law. FPCSN applied but won’t find out until March the result of the competition.
Natalie Levkovich, CEO of the Health Federation of Philadelphia, a nonprofit that supports community health centers in Southeastern Pennsylvania, expressed confidence that the clinic will regain the funding, which helps cover the cost of caring for people who don’t have insurance.
“FPCSN is a well-run, well-regarded, well-supported health center that has an established, high-functioning practice in multiple locations,” Levkovich said. The clinic received letters of support from all the other federal clinics in the area, she said.
A mural in a conference room at Family Practice & Counseling Services Network’s headquarters in Nicetown shows a timeline of the agency’s history since its founding in 1992.
In return, federally qualified clinics have to accept all patients, including people without insurance. The insurance mix of FPCSN’s patient population is about 60% Medicaid, 20% uninsured, 10% Medicare, and 10% commercial, Nichols said.
Also, half of a federal clinic’s board members have to be patients at the clinic. FPCSN has three main locations, in Southwest Philadelphia, on the western edge of North Philadelphia, and in the West Poplar neighborhood. Its revenue in fiscal 2025 was $31 million.
During the past year, 55 FPCSN staff members have left, leaving 140 employees still at the organization, including 16 nurse practitioners who provide the primary care. The departures may have contributed to a decline in the number of patients seen to 13,500 last year, compared to 15,000 the year before, Nichols said.
Why Penn helped FPCSN
Federally qualified health centers form the core safety net in Philadelphia and across the nation, said Richard Wender, who chairs Family Medicine and Community Health at Penn, which had a longstanding relationship with RHD’s clinics.
Under contract, Penn family practice physicians were providing prenatal care to 400 pregnant patients at the clinics that would have closed abruptly at the end of June if Penn hadn’t provided support. “We wanted them to be able to continue to take care of the patients that they were taking care of,” Wender said.
The money from Penn helped pay startup costs for the new entity and bridged the period until FPCSN was able to secure new contracts with insurance companies.
Penn also didn’t want the clinic’s patients showing up in its already busy emergency departments for basic care. “That adversely affects their health because it’s not a good place to get preventive care,” he said.
But it was important to Penn that there was a pathway back to federal clinic status. “We feel as optimistic as we can,” Wender said.
Wender and Nichols credited Kevin Mahoney, CEO of Penn’s health system, with the preservation of FPCSN’s services for low-income Philadelphians by throwing his full support behind the effort.
“You have to have a CEO, a leader in your health system, who understands that this is the responsibility of large academic health centers,” Wender said.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro questioned whether he was being unfairly scrutinized asthe only Jewish person being considered as a finalistto be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate — and briefly entertained his own run for the presidency — according to a copy of his upcoming book obtained by The Inquirer.
Shapiro, a popular Democratic governor long rumored to have future presidential ambitions, even briefly entertained a run shortly after then-President Joe Biden unexpectedly dropped out of the race in July 2024, according to his book. The Abington Township resident is now seen as a top contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination as he seeks reelection in Pennsylvania this year.
But before Shapiro ended up in the veepstakes for Harris’ running mate, he wrote in his book that there was a moment right after Biden dropped out of the race where he considered whether he should run for president.
“Well, now what?” Shapiro wrote. “Maybe there would be a process the party would engage in to replace him? Did I want to be part of that?”
He called his wife, Lori, who at the time was out of the country with their two younger kids. “I don’t think we are ready to do this,” Shapiro recalled his wife saying from a Walmart in Vancouver. “It’s not the right time for our family. And it’s not on our terms.”
After that call, Shapiro wrote that he quickly decided he didn’t want to run and would back Harris, as Biden also endorsed her for the top of the ticket.
Once the field cleared for Harris, Shapiro recalled seeing his face on TV as her potential running mate, before he was asked by her campaign manager to be formally vetted.
In the days that followed,Shapiro contended with increasing national scrutiny as he emerged as a front-runner. Some pro-Palestinian protesters began calling Shapiro “Genocide Josh” online, he wrote. And top Democrats questioned whether a Jewish running mate would deter voters from supporting Harris, as Shapiro had been outspoken against some pro-Palestinian campus protests that year.
What was unknown: Whether those same questions — and some even more extreme — were circulating within Harris’ camp, Shapiro wrote in his most detailed retelling of his experience vying for the vice presidency to date.
Gov. Josh Shapiro at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris at Wissahickon High School in Ambler on July 29, 2024.
Just before he went to meet with Harris at the vice president’s residence in the summer of 2024, Shapiro received a call from Dana Remus, former White House counsel for Biden who was coleading the vetting process for Harris.
“Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?” Remus asked, according to Shapiro’s memoir.
“Had I been a double agent for Israel? Was she kidding?” Shapiro wrote in his 257-page book. “I told her how offensive the question was.”
According to the memoir, Remus then asked if Shapiro had ever communicated with an undercover Israeli agent, which he shot back: “If they were undercover… how the hell would I know?”
“Remus was just doing her job. I get it. But the fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about some of the people around the VP,” Shapiro wrote.
In high school, Shapiro completed a program in Israel that included service projects on a farm, and at a fishery in a kibbutz, as well as at an Israeli army base, which he once described in his college student newspaper as “a past volunteer in the Israeli army.”
Harris’ office could not be reached for comment Sunday evening. Remus also could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday.
Shapiro, more broadly, recalled getting the feeling from Harris’ vetting team that she should pick Shapiro — a popular Democratic governor in a critical swing state — but that they had reservations about whether Shapiro’s views would mesh with Harris’.
In one vetting session with U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D., Nev.), former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, former associate Attorney General Tony West, and former senior Biden adviser Cedric Richmond, Shapiro wrote that he had been questioned “a lot” about Israel, including why he had been outspoken against the protests at Penn.
“I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running — or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way,” he wrote. (Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who is Jewish, was also vetted to be Harris’ running mate. Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, is also Jewish.)
In his book, Shapiro recalled the whirlwind two weeks as an awe-inspiring window into an opportunity — but ultimately it was one he knew he didn’t want.
When Shapiro finally sat down with Harris in the dining room at the Naval Observatory, he said it became clear that she had a different vision for the vice presidency than what he wanted. He would work primarily with her staff and couldn’t say whether he would have access to her. In her own experience as vice president, she saw the job as mostly to make sure that you aren’t making any problems for the president, he wrote.
Shapiro noted his own relationship with his No. 2, Lt. Gov. Austin Davis. The role in itself has few powers, but Shapiro views Davis as a governing partner and is one of few people who can walk into his office unannounced at any time, he wrote. He wanted the same relationship with Harris, he said, noting that he knew he would not be the decision-maker.
“If we had door A and door B as options, and she was for door A and I was for door B, I just wanted to makes sure that I could make the case for door B,” Shapiro wrote.
But Harris was “crystal clear” that that wasn’t the kind of president-vice president dynamic she envisioned, he said.
In her own book released last year, 107 Days, Harris recalled the meeting differently. There, she wrote that Shapiro had “peppered” her with questions and “mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision.”His ambitions, she said, didn’t align with her view that a vice president should be a No. 2 and not a “copresident.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with Dawn Staley (left), while promoting her new book “107 Days,” at the Met on Sept. 25 in Philadelphia. The event was held in partnership with Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books.
As Shapiro tells it, the friction with Harris’ team didn’t stop there.
Shortly after meeting with Harris, Shapiro in his book recalled another unpleasant conversation with Remus, in which he wrote that she said she “could sense that I didn’t want to do this.”
According to the book, Remus said it would be hard for Shapiro to move to Washington, it would be a strain financially for his family who “didn’t have a lot of money” by D.C. standards, and that Lori would need to get a whole new wardrobe and pay people to do her hair and makeup.
It was then that he decided to leave the apartment where he had been asked to wait until Harris could come and talk to him again, he recalled.
“These comments were unkind to me. They were nasty to Lori,” Shapiro wrote. “I hold no grudge against Remus, who I know was doing the job she had to do, but I needed to leave.”
Shapiro went home, he said, and went over the day’s events with Lori at the edge of their bed.
“On one hand, I was still tugged by the prestige of it all. It’s an honor. It’s a big title. But that’s never been enough for me,” he wrote. Still, he struggled with what it would mean to withdraw, concerned about not playing his part in a high-stakes election and letting his supporters down. Ultimately, he decided that it was not his race to win or lose, he wrote.
“People were going to cast their votes for her, or they weren’t,” he added.
Vice President Kamala Harris, Democratic nominee for president, and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, address a rally to kick off their campaign at the Liacouras Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on Tuesday, August 6, 2024.
He decided that day he did not want the job, and toyed with the idea about publicly releasing a statement withdrawing himself from the running. He said he also tried to tell Harris he did not think it would be a good fit, but wasn’t able to reach her.
“I was wrung out. I just wanted to be home with my family, to take a walk with Lori, and just be,” he wrote.
Gov. Josh Shapiro takes the stage ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz at a rally in Philadelphia’s Liacouras Center on August 6, 2024.
But when it was time for him to take the stage ahead of Walz and Harris, he was long-applauded by his home city and gave a speech “from my heart” about how he took pride in his faith and his support for Walz and Harris.
Shapiro’s memoir will be released Jan. 27 and is a reflection on his decades as an elected official, including as Pennsylvania attorney general, as well as the firebombing of his home last year. He will tout the book in Philadelphia on Saturday at 3 p.m. at Parkway Central Library. He will also discuss the book at upcoming book tour stops in New York and Washington.
When Jackie Fegley, a former nun, got married 51 years ago, money was tight. So she borrowed a dress from a friend.
And when her husband looked at her nurse’s salary the first year he did her taxes, he said: “Do you know you’re borderline poverty?”
But all that changed over the ensuing decades, and on Friday, Jackie and her husband Bill Fegley Jr., who made his career in accounting, gave a $5 million gift to Neumann University. Jackie is a 1971 graduate of Neumann — then called Our Lady of Angels College.
It’s the largest single gift Neumann — a Catholic university in Aston, Delaware County — has received from an individual, and the university in recognition named its nursing college The Jacquelyn Wilson Fegley ’71 College of Nursing.
“Bill and I were both lucky to receive a good education,” said Jackie, 81, who lives in Blue Bell with her husband, a Drexel University graduate. “So we decided that’s where we’d really like to give our money.”
Chris Domes, president of Neumann University
Neumann President Chris Domes said $4.5 million will be used for undergraduate nursing scholarships for students with the most need and highest achievement, and the other $500,000 for lab equipment. The scholarships will begin to be awarded in the fall, with 22 to 25 students benefiting each year and continuing to get the funds over four years.
Nursing is the largest major at Neumann, with 368 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled. That’s about 17% of the 2,174-student body.
“If the scholarships give somebody an opportunity to change their life, it’s amazing,” said Bill, 78, who started his public accounting career with Arthur Young and then founded his own firm, Fegley & Associates, in 1975.
Domes said he hopes the gift encourages others to invest in higher education.
“It sends a signal that Neumann is a place that is financially strong and getting stronger,” he said. “It’s a real sign from Bill and Jackie that they believe in what we are doing here.”
Neumann University President Chris Domes (from left) and his wife Mary Domes, William Fegley Jr. and his wife Jacquelyn Fegley, of Blue Bell and Neumann’s Nursing Health Sciences Dean Theresa Pietsch at Neumann University in Aston, Pa. on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026.
Born in Chester, Jackie said she grew to admire the Franciscan sisters at her local parish and stayed in touch with them through high school. When she graduated from Notre Dame High School in Moylan in 1962, she joined the order.
During her decade there, she taught grade school, including one year at an orphanage where the children ranged in age from 3 to 9. She said that’s when she started to think she wanted a family.
She got her bachelor’s degree while in the order, first taking classes at St. Joseph’s University and then moving over to Our Lady of Angels when it opened. She was part of the college’s second nursing graduating class.
“I think there were 10 of us in the class,” she said, including other nuns and lay people. “It was a wonderful experience integrating everyone together.”
After leaving the convent, she worked as a nurse at Holy Redeemer Hospital in Meadowbrook and Nazareth Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia. In January 1974, she met Bill, who grew up in Tamaqua, at a dance at a local pub. In September of that year, they married.
They have five children, now ages 40 to 50, who work as accountants, a personal trainer, a doctor, and a minimart operator.
Jackie has remained in contact with the sisters through the years.
“I love the sisters,” she said. “I still consider myself a Franciscan, just not a Franciscan sister.”
Bill — whose accounting firm has since merged with Morison Cogen LLP, where he continues to serve as a partner — has served on the foundation board for the Sisters of Saint Francis and has chaired it for about four-and-a-half years. And nine months ago, he joined Neumann’s board of trustees. He also has served as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an adjunct professor at Drexel and Pennsylvania State University.
The couple has visited Neumann to see how the educational program has grown and were pleased to see its Franciscan spirit thriving.
“I was really thrilled to see that this was how it was progressing,” Jackie said.
The couple attended the naming celebration and gift announcement at Neumann on Friday.
“We’re just pleased that God put us in a position that we’re able to do this,” Bill said.
