JENNIFER PRAH

Jennifer Prah preferred the backcourt. That's the only thing baseline about her. 

She reached a national ranking of No. 6 in Girls 16 singles by dissecting opponents, not overpowering them. She thrived on clay. Her game wasn't powerful. It was strategic. The slow surface played right into her ability to out-think and out-maneuver. Like she did when she reached the finals of the 1983 USTA Girls 18 Clay Court Championships. 

She earned a spot on the USTA Junior Federation Cup Team and a scholarship to the University of California-Berkeley. There, she won the prestigious Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman Scholarship. She was a quarterfinalist in the 1986 NCAA Singles Championship and an All-American. 

She was an overachiever in the classroom, too. She earned her master's degrees at Oxford, Tufts, and Yale, and her PhD at Harvard, where she was also an assistant tennis coach. A Guggenheim Fellow, her work has been cited by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. 

As the Amartya Sen Professor of Health Equity, Economics, and Policy at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice, Dr. Prah is focused on reducing global and national health inequities, especially among women and children. 

"Craft, hard work, diligence, rigor, precision, skill, and grounding are necessary to be effective as an athlete, and those are also really helpful to being an academic," she says. 

(2024)