Charles Hamilton Houston Internship Program Impact Award

The Charles Hamilton Houston Internship Program Impact Award will be granted each year by the Loeb Center for Career Exploration and Planning to an individual who creates valuable, high-quality professional opportunities for our students and shows exceptional dedication to student development.

The Loeb Center is honored to award Dr. Janet A. Lydecker ’06 as the 2020 recipient of the Charles Hamilton Houston Internship Program Impact Award.

Over the past few years Dr. Janet Lydecker ’06 has created valuable, high-quality professional opportunities for Amhert students at Yale School of Medicine and continues to show exceptional dedication to student development.

Dr. Janet Lydecker ’06 is a clinical psychologist specializing in eating disorders and obesity. She received a PhD from Virginia Commonwealth University in Counseling Psychology after completing her residency at the Medical University of South Carolina. Dr. Lydecker has been at the Yale School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry since 2014 and is an Assistant Professor at the Yale Program for Obesity, Weight, and Eating Research, where she is the Associate Director of Clinical-Research Training and the Director of Child Eating and Weight Initiatives. Dr. Lydecker’s research focuses on developing new treatments for teenagers with eating and weight problems, including binge eating and, more recently, weight-related bullying. 

She enjoys mentoring students who plan to pursue clinical psychology doctoral work and/or patient-centered research careers. Previous trainees have been involved in work on weight stigma, body image, disordered eating behaviors, and parent-child interactions and have presented at several international conferences and published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including the International Journal of Eating Disorders and the Journal of Adolescent Health.

It is with gratitude that we honor Charles Ashby Lewis ’64, H’03, P’93 as the inaugural recipient of this award. 

Charles Ashby Lewis ’64, H’03, P’93 is a life trustee of Amherst College, a member of the President’s Campaign Board, and a member of the Loeb Center Advisory Council. He served as chairman of a previous Amherst campaign, for which he received a Distinguished Service Award in 2001. In addition to Chuck’s longtime work with Amherst, he and his wife Penny Bender Sebring P’93 have served in multiple capacities at Grinnell College and the University of Chicago.

Chuck’s knowledge and galvanizing leadership have transformed career services at Amherst, beginning with the modernized “career community” advising model established at the Loeb Center in 2013 with seed funding from Chuck and Penny. This organizational revision has made the Loeb Center a leader in its field and serves a diverse student body across myriad areas of professional interest.

Knowing that advising alone does not drive post-graduation success for Amherst students, Chuck has also envisioned a robust infrastructure for internships at the College. In the fall of 2019 the Loeb Center launched the Charles Hamilton Houston Internship Program, thanks to another major gift from Chuck and Penny as well as support from additional donors and institutional resources.

The Houston Program offers a portfolio of meaningful, paid summer internship opportunities and comprehensive student support throughout the internship cycle, including preparatory advising, professional skill development and assistance throughout summer experiences.

Charles Ashby Lewis ’64, H’03, P’93 was a political science major and played football, lacrosse, and basketball while at Amherst. He is a life Trustee of the College, the Chairman of the Lewis-Sebring Family Foundation, and Managing General Partner of Coach House Capital. He retired from Merrill Lynch as Vice Chairman of Investment Banking after 34 years with the firm. Chuck Lewis, along with his wife Penny Bender Sebring P’93, has long directed philanthropy and thought leadership in the realm of educational equity. Their work supports many initiatives addressing urban education in Chicago, and spans several institutions of higher education, including Amherst, Grinnell College, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University.