Bill Welch is in his fifteenth year as mayor of State College, the largest borough in Pennsylvania with nearly 40,000 residents, two-thirds of whom are Penn State students.

A 1964 graduate of Penn State in English, Welch spent 21 years at the Centre Daily Times in State College. A former president of the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors Association, he was executive editor and general manager of the CDT when he left to become editor of The American Philatelist magazine in 1985. He retired in 2001.

Welch, 66, was honored as Penn State's Renaissance Man of the Year in 2002. He is a longtime member of the Community Diversity Group and a former member of the Centre County Advisory Council to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.