Charles “Chuck” E. Phelps, a 2025 Blaisdell Alumni Award honoree, attributes his foundational approach to work and relationships to his Pomona experience.
Phelps says he learned about leadership and gained new perspectives from his Zeta Chi Sigma fraternity brothers at Pomona.
Phelps attended Pomona with his twin brother Lew Phelps ’65.
From healthcare and environmental policy researcher to testifying before congressional committees to professor and provost, Charles "Chuck" E. Phelps ’65 is among the most highly honored individuals internationally in the field of health economics. And through it all, Phelps credits his liberal arts education and perspective-changing experiences at Pomona College with building the foundation for his work and relationships.
“After walking through the Gates of Pomona for the last time as an undergraduate, Chuck followed the guidance emblazoned upon those pillars,” says twin brother and fellow alumnus Lew Phelps ’65.
Now, Phelps is being honored with the 2025 Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Award. This award, presented by the Alumni Association Board, recognizes alumni who carry the spirit of the College beyond the Gates and demonstrate exceptional achievement in their professions or community service. For Phelps, the Blaisdell Award stands above all his other accolades.
“Receiving this makes a statement about my life’s accomplishments that I never could have imagined as a student,” says Phelps. “No honor could please or humble me more.”
At Pomona, Phelps says he may have learned just as much from his coursework as from the friendships he made on campus, especially through his involvement in Zeta Chi Sigma fraternity, where he served as president during his senior year. “My fraternity brothers helped me see new perspectives that were different from mine,” says Phelps, “and I gained confidence and learned about leadership.”
His sophomore year, Phelps was prodded by hallmates into a twin-switch date. His brother was away for the weekend, says Phelps, and though Lew had taken Dale King ‘66 on a few dates, he liked her, too. Posing as his twin, he invited her to join him for a campus event. In the end, Phelps says he confessed to his mischief, Dale and Lew both forgave him, and he has been married to Dale for 57 years.
On the academic front, Phelps majored in math and enthusiastically took advantage of a range of classes across academic disciplines. While he didn’t think of himself as one of the strongest math students at Pomona, when he arrived at the University of Chicago, he found he was well prepared to tackle his graduate-level courses. After earning his MBA in hospital administration, his business professors encouraged him to enter the university’s doctoral program where he took classes from future Nobel Prize-winning economists Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Ronald Coase.
In 1971, Phelps took a position at the RAND Corporation. His Pomona math education was vital to his work there, including the development of the RAND Health Insurance Study, which remains the gold standard for understanding how health insurance affects health outcomes. He also directed RAND’s program on regulatory policies and institutions and studied energy, water and environmental regulation issues.
Phelps made a career pivot to academia at the University of Rochester (UR) in 1984 where he started teaching economics and political science. There he became the director of the Public Policy Analysis Program and later chaired what is now the Department of Public Health Sciences in UR’s School of Medicine and Dentistry. Phelps also became an in-demand expert, testifying before congressional committees on health policy and intellectual property issues on behalf of the Association of American Universities and other higher education organizations.
It wasn’t long before Phelps left behind his health economics work to serve as UR’s provost and chief academic officer, which he describes as an incredible experience. He says he accessed the full breadth of his liberal arts education during this period of his career. After 13 years as provost, he was named university professor and provost emeritus before retiring from academia in 2010.
Throughout his career, Phelps, a member of the prestigious National Academy of Medicine and author of more than 150 articles and several books, has received numerous awards. He is the only person awarded both the Victor R. Fuchs Award for Lifetime Contributions to Health Economics and the Avedis Donabedian Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). Phelps’ current research explores extending the intellectual foundations of cost-effectiveness analysis, understanding and improving the value of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in health technology assessment and using MCDA in group settings.
“The combination of being a math major, my broad liberal arts education and the friends I made at the College changed the way I went through life and how I thought about challenges and opportunities,” Phelps says. “None of this would have happened without my experiences at Pomona.”
Visit our website to read more about the 2025 Alumni Award winners.