Reed, Ringer join Cornell College Board of Trustees
The Cornell College Board of Trustees has announced the election of a new and a returning member to the Board, Harper Reed ’01 and Jerry Ringer ’59.
Reed is new to the Board. He earned a degree in computer science from Cornell in 2001. His first job out of college was as an engineer for World Book Publishing. From 2005 to 2009, he was the Chief Technology Officer of a clothing company called Threadless, where he helped pioneer the online business model of crowd-sourcing. Reed went on to serve as Chief Technology Officer for Obama for America from April 2011 through the November 2012 election. Reed was also the CEO of a mobile payment platform called Modest, which was purchased by PayPal in 2015. He is now head of commerce for Braintree, another PayPal acquisition. He was identified by the Chicago Tribune as “Someone to watch in 2014” calling Reed and his Modest partner “Chicago’s best-pedigreed software developers”. In 2014 Harper was given the Young Alumni Achievement Award from Cornell College. Harper currently resides in Chicago with his wife Hiromi Nakazawa ’01 where he, in his own words, “builds paradigm-shifting technology and leads others to do the same.”
Ringer is returning to the Board. He graduated from Cornell in 1959 with a degree in biology and went on to earn an M.D. in Ophthalmology from the University of Iowa in 1963. He had a successful career as an ophthalmologist in Bloomington, Illinois before retiring in 2003. He has taken trips to Africa to perform eye treatments and surgery. Ringer was one of the first ophthalmologists in downstate Illinois to perform outpatient surgery. Cornell has been a part of his life since his childhood. He grew up in Mount Vernon and his father is a Cornell alumnus. Ringer has a strong history of giving and involvement at Cornell. He previously served on the Alumni Association Board of Directors, on Cornell’s 2010 Presidential Search committee, and is one of the longest serving members of Cornell’s Board of Trustees—including as Board Chair from 1999 to 2002. He is married to Carole Ringer, and the couple has three adult children—Douglas, Kirsten, and Andrew.
The Cornell College Board of Trustees is the governing body of the college. The Board elects the president and formulates policies governing the operation of the College that are necessary to carry out the college’s mission—its educational programs, its financial affairs, the physical plant, and the quality of student life.
