Hope College Board of Trustees announces new board chair, three new members

Hope College — The Hope College Board of Trustees has appointed a new board chair and three new board members.

Stephen Boerigter of Los Alamos, New Mexico, who has been on the board since 2017 and was previously board secretary, has been selected as the next chair. He replaces Karl Droppers, whose term on the board expired.

Sandra Gaddy of Grand Rapids will succeed Boerigter as board secretary. Matthew Wixson of Ann Arbor will continue to serve as vice chair.

Other members of the board’s executive committee include Victoria Brunn of Santa Monica, California, Thomas Gordon of Chicago and Andrew Ohm of Seattle. They are the chairs of the Protecting the Mission, Sustaining the Mission and Living the Mission committees, respectively.

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Boerigter recently retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he served in a variety of roles for more than 29 years. He holds degrees in geological engineering from the University of Arizona and in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hope’s Boerigter Center for Calling and Career is named for his parents George and Sibilla.

The new board members are Lisa Meengs Joldersma of Washington, D.C., Jeanne Petit of Holland and Jon Soderstrom of Madison, Connecticut. They replace Droppers, Virginia Beard of Holland and Mark Van Genderen of Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

Meengs Joldersma is senior vice president for public policy and research at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America in the nation’s capital. She is a 1995 Hope graduate, majoring in political science and English.

Petit is a professor of history at Hope and has been a member of the college’s faculty since 2000. She serves on Hope’s Women’s and Gender Studies Council and previously chaired the college’s history department.

Soderstrom recently retired from Yale University after 25 years as managing director of Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research. The department helps commercialize the inventions of Yale’s faculty by partnering with investors and corporations. He graduated from Hope in 1976 with a degree in psychology.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Hope College Board of Trustees gets new chair, three new members