Lehi People
Lehi High alum, Harvard Administrator addresses USU graduates
When William “Willy” Lensch graduated from Lehi High School in 1985, he was unsure of his future. He said in his recent address to the graduates of Utah State University, “Attending college was an improbable outcome for me as a young person. I grew up on a little farm just north of Lehi, Utah. We dry-farmed barley, had a few cows at any given time, chickens and lots of pigs. My father never made it all the way through school.”
Lensch continued, “Growing up, we didn’t exactly sit around the dinner table talking about college, but I was awarded the Lehi Free Press scholarship provided by owner and publisher Russell and Phebe Innes. Their son Weston presented the scholarship. It was the gift of my own future.”
Lensch went on to earn his B.S. in Biology at USU and his PhD in the Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics at Oregon Health Sciences University, where he studied pediatric bone marrow failure, the onset of myeloid leukemia, and rare diseases of the blood. He did postdoctoral work at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and as a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Career-Development Fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital.
His experience and expertise led him to Harvard University as Strategic Advisor to the Dean of Harvard Medical School. He served the Harvard community as Chief of Staff to the Dean of Biology. His credentials and awards are numerous and varied. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles, reviews, book chapters and policy recommendations, and presented over 200 lectures, medical grand rounds, interviews and panel discussions. Today, he is Associate Provost for Research at Harvard.
Arla Cook, Lehi resident, was in attendance at USU to see her daughter, Olivia, graduate and was thrilled at the references Lensch made about Lehi and the impact his association with the people in our community made in his life. Cook said, “He was so gracious, grounded and grateful. He said the Lehi Free Press scholarship made college possible for him.”
In his address, Lensch said he experienced long stretches of hardship, missteps, failures and days with little to eat. He even withdrew from college twice.
“I became the first person in my family to earn a college diploma,” he said. “My father died of blood cancer while I was in high school, and that became my academic passion.”
He commented to the graduates about the uncertainty of the world today. “None of us were prepared to go out into the world, but the future does not wait on the present to be ready. It just comes anyway. I can’t tell you exactly what path you’ll take from here or what you will accomplish, but you will do good things. As you sit here today, you have not yet even begun to glow. Your light will shine in ways you do not know.”
