(Posted May 7, 2012)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Five Juniata College faculty members who retired at the end of the 2011-2012 academic year were honored recently at the faculty retirement dinner in April. The retirees are: Michael Boyle, William J. von Liebig Chair in Biomedical Sciences; James Donaldson, professor emeritus of accounting, business and economics; Ruth Reed, professor emerita of chemistry; Robert Reilly, professor emeritus of social work; and David Reingold, professor emeritus of chemistry.

Michael Boyle, a Huntingdon resident, came to Juniata in 2002 from the Medical College of Ohio, where he was professor of microbiology and immunology. As von Liebig chair at Juniata, Boyle teaches and oversees undergraduate research projects. He received the 2010 Beachley Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Currently his own research focuses on two areas: using immunotechnology to adapt antibodies as the basis for diagnostics and other tests; and the study of pathogen interactions between Group A streptococcus and the human immune system.

He also has worked tirelessly to continue Juniata's high reputation as a leading institution for undergraduate research. For example, he organized in 2004 a conference on undergraduate research attended by students and professors from more than 25 institutions. He collaborated with several Juniata professors to create GCAT-SEEK, a consortium of smaller, liberal arts colleges to share the costs of genomic research projects submitted to genomic instrumentation facilities at Penn State.

Boyle, a native of Belfast, Northern Ireland, started his career as a visiting fellow and visiting scientist at the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute from 1974 to 1980. His research focused on using specific antibodies and complement to kill tumor cells. This information helped provide the basis for identifying and purging cancer cells from bone marrow to be used in bone marrow transplantation.

Boyle continued his academic career in 1981 as an associate professor of immunology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, Fla. He was promoted to full professor in 1985. He then joined the faculty of the Medical College of Ohio (MCO) in 1988 to direct their immunology program. He served as director of the college's pathogenesis and immunology program within the newly created MCO Cancer Center.

His education began in Europe, earning a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from the University of Glasgow, in Glasgow, Scotland in 1971. He earned a doctorate in 1974 from the Chester Beatty Research Institute, Belmont, Sutton in Surrey, England.

Boyle has been continuously grant-funded from extramural sources for over 30 years and currently is supported by a number of awards from the National Institutes of Health. He has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, Merck/AAAS Undergraduate Science Research Program and the American Heart Association.

He is author or co-author of more than 180 peer-reviewed publications and serves on the editorial boards of a number of scientific journals. Boyle is a past president of the Allegheny Branch of the American Society for Microbiology. He is a current or past member of a variety of professional organizations, including the Foundation for the Advancement of Education in the Sciences, the American Association of Immunologists, the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society of Microbiologists, the Lancefield Society and Sigma Xi, the international honor society of scientific and engineering research.

Jim Donaldson, a 1967 Juniata graduate, worked as a methods engineer and economic analyst for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company while also earning a master's degree in economics in 1972 from the University of Akron. Questor Corporation hired him in 1972 as the manager of planning for the home products division and later promoted him to director of product planning and research for the automotive division in Toledo.

He returned to Juniata in 1979 to teach courses in business strategy, marketing and management, and continued his formal education, earning an M.B.A. from Syracuse University in 1982.

In recent years he conceived and implemented the business department's curriculum in entrepreneurship, featuring the Hands-on Entrepreneurial Leadership Lab, New Venture Creation, New Venture Start-up and a senior capstone experience. He has worked closely with the director of the Juniata Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. In 2003, he was invited to participate in "The Experiential Classroom," an extensive clinic sponsored by the Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management.

His expertise in analysis and statistics also served him well as he spent time from 1994 to 1997 as Juniata's director of institutional planning and research. He was promoted to associate professor in 1984 and to full professor in 1987. His international experience includes conducting workshops at Humberside University in Hull, England, on using the case study method for teaching management.

He received the 1998 Beachley Award for Distinguished Academic Service.

His work at Juniata has always gone beyond the classroom to collaborate with businesses within the local community. He was coordinator of the continuing education Certificate in Management program and played a major role in the college's Business Outreach Center. For example, he helped write the 1988 Huntingdon County Economic Development Plan and contributed to the 1993 Lake Raystown Master Plan for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He has served for years on the marketing and membership committee of the Huntingdon County Business and Industry.

He wrote several cases for business classes, as well as articles and monographs on industrial reorganization, consumer behavior theory as it relates to choosing a college, international expansion strategies, venture capital, and Internet business models. His most recent publication was in collaboration with his wife, Karen Rosell, professor of art history, titled "Educating Entrepreneurs: Lessons from the Fine Arts." The paper was presented at the Northeast Association of Business, Economics and Technology.

During his Juniata career, he taught in the Global Business Strategy program in Penn State's Department of Energy, Environmental and Mineral Economics and in Saint Francis University's M.B.A. program, specializing in courses in business strategy and entrepreneurship.

Donaldson also has served as a business consultant in management training, strategic planning and marketing assistance to several area businesses, including a major full-service commercial bank, a foundry, a manufacturer, retail store chains, a regional service merchandiser, and not-for-profit agencies.

Ruth Reed, a Huntingdon resident, joined the Juniata faculty in 1976. She earned a magna cum laude bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1968 from Winthrop College, in Rock Hill, S.C. and earned a Fulbright grant for study at the University at Göttingen, Germany, before pursuing a doctoral degree in biochemistry in 1974 at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in Blacksburg, Va.

She received the 1993 Beachley Distinguished Professor Award for outstanding teaching. She served as chair of the chemistry department from 1982 to 1985. She was promoted to associate professor in 1986 and was promoted to full professor in 1988.

Reed was a postdoctoral National Institutes of Health fellow at Johns Hopkins University before coming to Juniata in 1976.

Reed has been one of the driving forces on the Juniata campus to emphasize international education. She helped to start the college's foreign exchange program from 1982 to 1984 and in 1980 she was the first Juniata professor to exchange with a partner university, the Catholic University in Lille, France. She exchanged with a Lille chemist, the Rev. Gerard Lepoutre, for one semester with support from the Fulbright program and the French government.

In 2001, she was interim director of the BCA Study Abroad site at the Cochin University of Science and Technology in Kerala, India. In 2010, she spent spring semester at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico to establish exchange opportunities for Juniata science students in a Spanish-language setting.

From 1985 to 1986, she was a visiting professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Her research interests include biochemistry and enzyme analysis. In addition, she has supervised the research projects of over 100 undergraduates. Reed has also taught in the general education program, including first-year writing courses and helped develop Heart of India, a cultural analysis course taught from 1990 to 1998.

She has received grants from the Research Corporation, the National Science Foundation, and the Whitaker Foundation and served as program director for a $900,000 Howard Hughes Medical Foundation grant.
Reed has been a member of the American Chemical Society, having served as secretary and president of the central Pennsylvania section.

Robert Reilly, a Brady Township resident, joined the Juniata faculty in 1974 after working as a graduate intern and assistant program director at the Lackawanna County Prison in Scranton, Pa. He earned a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1971 from Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa. He went on to earn a master's degree in social work in 1974 from Marywood University in Scranton, Pa.

Reilly was named the Charles A. Dana Professor of Social Work in 2004. He received the Beachley Distinguished Professor Award in 1991.
He is a licensed social worker and the field coordinator of the social work program. He came to the college as an instructor and was promoted to assistant professor in 1976. He was promoted to associate professor in 1981 and was appointed full professor in 1987.

He also has been active in the Huntingdon community for 30 years, serving two terms on the Huntingdon Area School Board and as a founding member of Huntingdon House. He also has served on the boards of Huntingdon County Children's Services, Head Start, and the Tri-County Community Action Agency. He received the Huntingdon House Service Award in 1987 and received the Head Start Outstanding Volunteer Service Award in 1986. In 2004 he received an award from the V-Day organization for his work with nonviolence toward women and families. Currently he is on the board of Habitat for Humanity.

His teaching interests center on social work practice, social policy criminology, and American families. Several years ago, he helped conceive and team-teach, with sociologist Cynthia Merriwether-DeVries, a new course in oral history which helped document the stories of Juniata's African-American alumni.

Reilly has been very active at Juniata as well. He has been a faculty representative for the board of trustees and faculty and institutional committees. He also served on the Personnel Evaluation Committee, the college's Strategic Planning Committee, the Enrollment Management Committee and the Committee for Diversity and Inclusion.

He has over his career served as faculty adviser for many Juniata student clubs, including Habitat for Humanity, The Juniatian student newspaper, Juniata Outreach, the Equestrian Club, Women's Rugby and Phi Alpha, the social work honor society.

He is a member of the National Association of Social Workers, the Academy of Certified Social Workers and the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors.

David Reingold came to Juniata in 1988 after earning a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1971 and going on to earn a doctoral degree in chemistry in 1976 from the University of Oregon. He pursued a postdoctoral research project at the University of Alberta in Canada from 1977 to 1978.

He started his academic career at Haverford College, in Haverford, Pa., as an assistant professor of chemistry from 1978 to 1979. He moved to Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vt., as an assistant professor, working there from 1979 to 1986. He worked as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago from 1983 to 1984, and as visiting associate professor of chemistry at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., from 1986 to 1988. He was hired as an associate professor in 1988 and was promoted to full professor in 1992.

He was awarded the 2001 Beachley Award for Distinguished Academic Service and received Juniata's Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1992. Juniata named him the H. George Foster Chair in Chemistry in 2005. He served as chair of chemistry division of the Council on Undergraduate Research in 1995 and was named the first "Volunteer of the Year" by the Council on Undergraduate Research in 2001.

He was responsible for bringing in research grants totaling more than $1,250,000 from agencies such as the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Research Corporation and the Petroleum Research Fund. Reingold was named was named a Dreyfuss Scholar from 1994 to 1996.

Reingold and other Juniata colleagues in the 1990s pushed to change traditional chemistry curriculum by teaching organic chemistry to freshmen. In 1999, Reingold received a grant from the National Science Foundation to write a textbook for freshmen, "Organic Chemistry: An Introduction, Emphasizing Biological Connections," which was published in 2001. He also wrote "Preparation for Organic Chemistry" in 2008.

Reingold's research interests include synthetic organic chemistry and molecules of theoretical interest and synthesis of non-natural products. He wrote, often with undergraduate students as co-authors, numerous articles in such publications as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Tetrahedron Letters, Synthetic Communications, and the Journal of Chemical Education.

He is an active member of the American Chemical Society and the Council of Undergraduate Research, a proposal reviewer for the National Science Foundation and the Petroleum Research Fund, and an article reviewer for the Journal of Organic Chemistry and The Chemical Educator, an online journal.
Late in his career, he began to submit op-ed columns to newspapers and media outlets. His opinion pieces have appeared in the Providence (R.I.) Journal, the Harrisburg Patriot-News, the Altoona Mirror and the Huntingdon Daily News.

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.