The dramatic transformations during Gutmann’s presidency have been supercharged by two record-breaking capital campaigns, Making History and the Power of Penn, raising $9.7 billion, making possible record levels of support for graduate, professional, and undergraduate financial aid and innovative faculty research. The University’s endowment has quintupled, from $4.1 billion to $20.5 billion, making it among the fastest growing of the nation’s 10 largest university endowments. With robust finances and global renown, Penn is now significantly more affordable and accessible, more diverse and excellent, more innovative and impactful, and more engaged at home and around the world than ever before.

Gutmann credits the ardent dedication and unwavering support of the entire Penn community and her talented leadership team with these impressive achievements. Their mettle was put to the ultimate stress test with the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, Gutmann and her leadership team deftly steered an enormous urban university and health system through the greatest global health crisis in generations. Penn Medicine served at the forefront of Philadelphia’s pandemic response and Penn Professors Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó pioneered the technology that made the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines possible. Throughout, Gutmann focused the Penn community on being resourceful, resilient, and responsive to everyone’s needs—a leadership philosophy of solidarity in service of core values and an animating spirit of knowledge-based action, which is key to how truly great universities always serve individuals and societies, not just in times of pandemic and crisis.

“You see it in the dreams come true of our talented students. And you see it in the life-changing breakthroughs of our brilliant faculty,” is how Gutmann described it when she received the revered Pennsylvania Society’s highest recognition: its coveted Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement. In contemplating the untold possibilities awaiting Penn’s unsurpassed students, staff, and faculty, Gutmann captured in a single sentence this unique moment in the University’s history. “At Penn,” she declared with earned—and earnest—heartfelt confidence, “the future truly is wide open.”

Amy Gutmann was confirmed United States Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany on Feb. 8, 2022.