University of Pennsylvania. Executive Vice President.

The postion of the Executive Vice President was created by the President F. Sheldon Hackney in 1983 under the title of Senior Vice President. The role of this person was to be the top administrative assistant to the President of the University. The title was changed to Executive Vice President in 1992. Helen B. O'Bannon was the first person to hold the title of Senior Vice President.

Helen B. O'Bannon was born in 1939 and was educated at Wellesley College, where she took her B.A. in economics. After receiving a master's degree from Stanford, she studied toward a Ph.D. in business at Pittsburgh. She was nominated by Governor Milton Schapp as the first woman commissioner on the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. In 1979, she was appointed by the Republican Governor Richard Thornburgh as Secretary of Public Welfare for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to head the state's largest agency.

O'Bannon joined the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1983 and held the position of the University's Senior Vice President until her death in 1988. During the five years of her tenure, she reorganized the structure of the business section of the University administration. The vice-presidential areas of finance, facilities management, and human resources were recast and redirected significantly. Also under her leadership, a $90 million bond issue for long-term capital development was launched, the Penn Plan for financing undergraduate education initiated, the federal and Commonwealth relations strengthened, and a big development project involving the construction and renovation of offices and shops in a street block on the edge of the campus realized. O'Bannon served at times as a lecturer at Bryn Mawr College and Chatham College, and instructor at the Robert Morris College in Pittsburgh. She was co-author of Money and Banking: Theory, Institutions and Policy, and was a contributor to Readings in Money and Finance and Women in Engineering--Beyond Recruitment. She was named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania in 1977, and received the American Association of University Women's 1979 award for Excellence in Government and a Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award in 1982.