Cornell College Board elects Trustees
At its 2022-23 meetings the Cornell College Board of Trustees elected Board members and named its chair-elect.
Richard Williams ’63 was elected as a Life Trustee.
Makayla Kelleher ’23 and Gretchen Liebenow Buchmeyer ’88 were elected as Trustees. and Steven DeAngeles ’84 was reelected as a Trustee. All terms are for three years.
The Board also chose Jan Thomas ’80 as chair-elect.
Richard Williams ’63, Life Trustee
Richard Williams ’63 was elected Life Trustee in recognition of his distinguished service to the college. He majored in history at Cornell, received his juris doctor from Georgetown University Law School and is a semi-retired attorney with Hlustik, Huizenga, Williams & Vander Woude, Ltd., which he co-founded in Chicago, Illinois.
Williams served on the Board of Trustees for 24 years. He also served Cornell on a Presidential Search Committee, the founding of the National Council of Advisors, and was a founding member of the Cornell College Club of Chicago.
He and his wife, Marlene Williams, created the Richard and Marlene Williams Special Activities Endowment Fund at Cornell to bring enthusiasm and greater insight to campus via performances the students want to see and hear.
The college honored him in 2013 with the Distinguished Achievement Award.
Jan Thomas ’80, Chair-Elect
Jan Thomas ’80 will soon be retiring from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where she is the senior advisor for community relations. She grew up in Mount Vernon, Iowa, and graduated from Cornell College with a major in sociology. She received her master of arts degree in social services administration from the University of Chicago in 1982 and worked for several years in women’s health and as a public health educator. She received her doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1995 and began teaching at Kenyon College in 2000.
In 2011–12 and 2015–16, Thomas had the opportunity to teach on the Block Plan as a visiting professor at Colorado College. She joined the Cornell Board of Trustees in 2015. She is married to Gary Doernhoefer. Their son, Eric, graduated from Cornell in 2013. Thomas is also the daughter of the late Rev. Richard Thomas, former Cornell chaplain and history professor emeritus.
In 2013 Thomas and her siblings endowed the Richard H. Thomas History Scholar Award for Off-Campus Research.
Gretchen Liebenow Buchmeyer ’88, Trustee
Gretchen Liebenow Buchmeyer ’88 graduated from Cornell College with a degree in politics and economics and business. After a few years of working in Des Moines, she and Andrew Buchmeyer ’86 left their jobs to become full-time students and earned their M.B.A.s from the University of Iowa.
Gretchen then began her career in human resources with Shell, taking them to Houston, Washington State, London, Canada, New Orleans, and the Netherlands. Their two young adult children were born in Houston, where the couple resides today.
Gretchen retired from Shell in 2021 as a vice president and is now involved in her “next chapter” with Andrew, including work in support of social justice causes.
Steven DeAngeles ’84, Trustee
Steven DeAngeles ’84, M.D., is the founding medical director of The Center for Transformational Medicine, Naples (Florida) Community Hospital. He majored in biology at Cornell, received his medical degree from Southern Illinois University in Springfield, and completed his residency in internal medicine at Northwestern University, after which he served as chief resident for a year and then held a major teaching position at Northwestern as associate firm chief. He won numerous teaching awards including the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
Along with his teaching responsibilities, DeAngeles was in private practice at Northwestern for 26 years. He now consults for various healthcare institutions. He is the founder of Innovative Technology Advisers and co-founder of Concierge Home Integrative Care. He holds five U.S. patents, four of which are in renewable energy.
His Cornell family connections included his wife Sallie Marotta DeAngeles ’86, father Robert DeAngeles ’58, brother Dave ’85, and sister-in-law Shawn Kruger ’87. He and his wife have three daughters and six grandchildren. They reside in Riverwoods, Illinois, and Naples, Florida.
