Helen Elizabeth Garrett, commonly known as Elizabeth Garrett or Beth Garrett (June 30, 1963 – March 6, 2016), was an American professor of law and academic administrator. On July 1, 2015, she became the 13th president of Cornell University—the first woman to serve as president of the university. She died from colon cancer on March 6, 2016, the first Cornell president to die while in office. Early life and education Garrett was born in Oklahoma City on June 30, 1963 to Robert and Jane Garrett. According to her mother, Garrett began to read very early and thereafter was never seen without a book in her hand. At age 3, according to Jane, young Garrett announced she would be a lawyer—Garrett, more modestly, claimed she was 5. Her father, Robert, had earned a law degree, though he worked as president of a savings and loan. An uncle and grandfather were also lawyers. Jane's great-grandfather was the first to open a school in the Choctaw Reservation town of Lehigh, Oklahoma. Her parents taught her and her sister Laura that when they finished a task, they should start on something else. One of Garrett's hobbies was cross-stitching. In her USC office, Garrett covered her walls in cross-stitched state mottos and landscapes of Jerusalem, Chicago, and the Netherlands. She would send cross-stitched works to her family and friends. Her college friend, Mike Bresson said he remembered traveling through Italy with Garrett and a group of others, and while everyone else slept, she cross-stitched, never to waste a moment. During her tenure at the University of Chicago Law School, Garrett started dating Israeli legal philosopher, Andrei Marmor, and they got married soon after. Matthew Spitzer, dean of USC Gould School of Law at the time, coincidentally attempted to recruit both Garrett and Marmor independently to come to USC before they met. Soon after they decided to get married, Garrett and Marmor accepted USC's offers. She and her husband enjoyed traveling together, and most recently visited Cambodia, Vietnam, and Italy before her death in 2016. Education Garrett earned her Bachelor of Arts in history with special distinction from the University of Oklahoma in 1985. In a 2004 interview, David Levy, Garrett's favorite history professor at the University of Oklahoma, said that Garrett would finish the weekly quiz ahead of the other students and, in the same motion, turn over the paper and reach for next week's