"Unusual Combinations"—Christine Scott Nelson '73

By Kathy Roos

As chair of the Allegheny College board of trustees, Christine Scott Nelson '73 knows something about unusual combinations.

She cites "getting to know the faculty and administration—and the unusual combinations that they represent"—as one of the best parts of her work for Allegheny.

"Where else would you find a motorcycling chemist as president?" she asks. "A rock star CFO? An Irish dancing geologist?" She also points to examples of unusual combinations among her colleagues on the board, including several medical doctors trained in classical music and an investment advisor who is an award-winning horticulturalist.

Nelson majored in Spanish and minored in political science. "When I came to Allegheny I vaguely had the notion that I wanted to be in the Foreign Service," she says. "However, what I was going to do in terms of a career was not uppermost in my mind. My parents had always said that a college education should prepare one to live a life, not to make a living. And, true to that, most of what I did and learned at Allegheny was preparing me for life experiences."

But a liberal arts education also prepared Nelson for a career path that she could never have foreseen but that she has found immensely rewarding.

Graduate work in foreign languages at Boston University was followed by a teaching stint at both BU and at Northeastern University. A second part-time job at MIT, assisting a professor of probability and statistics, turned out to be the key to a career.

"He encouraged me to attend MIT's Sloan School of Management, where I studied international finance," Nelson says. "Between my two years at Sloan, I got a summer job with a consulting firm working on a forensic economics' project in Puerto Rico—because I knew Spanish, not because I knew anything about economics. I fell in love with the field of forensic economics and have been working in that area ever since."

Forensic economics doesn't yet have a CSI-type television show devoted to its investigative techniques and procedures, but it's a burgeoning field. Forensic economists apply economic theories and methods to help determine monetary damages in complex commercial litigation.

Nelson's own cases have covered a number of industries, including energy, consumer products, and high technology manufacturing.

In 1989 Nelson's interest and increasing expertise in forensic economics led her to found, with two other partners, Cornerstone Research. Although the firm now employs 400 people in six offices in Boston, Los Angeles, Menlo Park, New York City, San Francisco, and D.C., Nelson notes that some of Cornerstone's top staffers have come from close to home. "Some of my best employees," she says, "have been Allegheny grads who started with us as interns between their junior and senior years."

That takes care of making a living. But what about living a life? "The way Allegheny combined a focus on academics with a focus on service shaped my life," Nelson says. "While I'm very proud of the firm that we have created, the most rewarding parts of my life have been raising two wonderful sons and being able to continue doing community service."

In addition to her work as an Allegheny trustee, Nelson serves on the board of the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry, which, among other programs, provides after-school programs for children in Boston's inner city. She is also active in her church's partnership program with a church in Transylvania, where, she notes, Unitarianism was born.

But serving as chair of the Allegheny board, which she joined in 1999, keeps her connected on almost a daily basis with the school where academics and service provided a springboard for both a career and a life—a springboard that she wants to preserve and enhance for other students who may have only vague notions about what they want to do when they graduate from college.