Peter Henry

Peter Henry could have had athletic glory. Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin all recruited him to catch passes on Saturday afternoons.

Instead, he chose The Morehead — despite his misgivings about the South, his mother’s advice to go to Harvard and his father’s yearning to see him play Wisconsin ball.

It wound up being a decision that changed Henry’s life. He learned to love learning. No longer would he be known as the strong athlete who also happened to be really smart.

“I was studious in high school, but The Morehead unlocked the scholar in me,” Henry says.

“When I went off to college, I decided to refocus. Gradually, I got sucked into the life of the mind.”

Consumed by academics, Henry found lifelong mentors in several UNC professors. By the time he graduated, he had won both the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships. After attending Oxford, he went on to MIT to earn his PhD in economics. Now, he is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

While he didn’t abandon his athletic prowess — playing as a reserve wide receiver at Carolina and earning a finalist spot in the campus’s slam dunk contest — Henry honed something more important as a Morehead Scholar.

“UNC really captured my imagination,’” Henry says. “I arrived at Chapel Hill as a talented student-athlete who wanted to ‘get good grades.‘ I left as a promising young scholar with an intrinsic love of learning and a desire to use that learning to make the world a better place.”