County Commissioner to Deliver Commencement Address

Dr. Valerie Arkoosh, Chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners will be the 2018 Commencement speaker at Harcum College. Harcum’s Commencement ceremony will be held Saturday, May 12 at 11 a.m. on the Great Lawn at Harcum’s Bryn Mawr Campus, 750 Montgomery Avenue.

Dr. Arkoosh is a parent of three, physician, health policy expert, and community leader who was appointed a Montgomery County Commissioner on January 29, 2015, and was elected to a full four year term on November 3, 2015. She currently serves as Chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners. A practicing obstetric anesthesiologist for over two decades, she served as President of the National Physician’s Alliance from 2009-2012, a non-profit multi-specialty physician organization dedicated to ensuring high quality, affordable and accessible health care for all Americans.

Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, Dr. Arkoosh has a degree in Economics from Northwestern University, and attended medical school at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine. She moved to Philadelphia in 1986 for residency training at Jefferson Medical College.

She served as Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at Drexel University College of Medicine from 1999-2004 where she successfully restored her department to fiscal solvency following the Allegheny University bankruptcy.

Concerned that families she cared for often fell through the cracks of the health care system she earned a Masters Degree in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a concentration in Health Policy, giving her the tools to increase her impact outside of the exam room.

Dr. Arkoosh lives in Springfield Township, Montgomery County, with her husband Jeff Harbison and their three teenage children.