Fidelity Executive to Deliver Thomas More Lecture on Faith, Work and Civic Life at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Sheila Cavanaugh ’81, senior vice president for internal communications at Fidelity Investments, will give the annual Thomas More Lecture on Faith, Work and Civic Life on Feb. 8 at 7:30 p.m. in Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Cavanaugh leads a team of people dedicated to keeping Fidelity’s 37,000 employees knowledgeable, informed, and educated. She worked as a global strategies consultant with Coopers & Lybrand, and spent more than a decade as a banker in New York, Japan, Switzerland and the former Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, she took a sabbatical year from banking to teach English with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at a Vietnamese Refugee Camp in Southeast Asia. She returned to pursue a graduate degree in business at Yale, and spent two years at Harvard Business School publishing research for use in graduate programs. From there, she became a Soros Foundation fellow and moved to the Baltic States to start one of the first credit training programs after the fall of communism.

An economics major, Sheila worked her way through school in factories in Worcester, and suffered a stroke at the beginning of her career. Sheila and her husband, whom she met in Indonesia, are the parents of three young children from South Korea. She volunteers at the International Institute of Boston, a refugee resettlement agency.

The Thomas More Lecture honors a graduate of Holy Cross who exemplifies the College’s dedication to the integration of faith and learning. It is sponsored by the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.