In 2004, Dr. Amy Gutmann became the 8th President of the University of Pennsylvania. Gutmann is also the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn with secondary faculty appointments in Philosophy, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Graduate School of Education. She has published widely on the value of education and deliberation in democracy, on the importance of access to higher education and health care, on "the good, the bad and the ugly" of identity politics, and on the essential role of ethics-especially professional and political ethics-in public affairs.

She continues to be an active scholar as Penn's President, most recently lecturing on "What Makes a University Education Worthwhile?" and publishing her sixteenth book, The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It (with Dennis Thompson) in May 2012.

Appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama, Gutmann chairs the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She also serves on the National Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, and on the Boards of the National Constitution Center, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Vanguard Group. Gutmann has won the Harvard University Centennial Medal (2003), the Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award (2009), and was named by Newsweek one of the "150 Women Who Shake the World" (2011). She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and is W.E.B. DuBois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She served as President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. Gutmann is a founding member of the Global Colloquium of the University Presidents, which advises the Secretary General of the U.N. on a range of issues, including the social responsibility of universities.

Prior to her appointment as Penn's President, Gutmann served as Provost at Princeton University, where she also was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics. She was the founding Director of the University Center for Human Values, an eminent multi-disciplinary center that supports teaching, scholarship and public discussion of ethics and human values. She served as Princeton's Dean of the Faculty from 1995-97 and as Academic Advisor to the President from 1997-98. In 2000, she was awarded the President's Distinguished Teaching Award by Princeton University.

Gutmann graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College. She earned her master's degree in Political Science from the London School of Economics and her doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University.