The 2018–19 academic year marks the retirement of three Trinity College faculty members, listed below.
DENISE N. RAU
Senior Lecturer and Laboratory Coordinator in Chemistry
Denise Rau retired as the organic lab coordinator and instructor for general and organic chemistry lab. Her career focus always was on teaching. She earned a B.S. in chemistry and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and went on to teach as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford. Rau then obtained high school certification through a State of Connecticut eight-week summer program at a time when the state was undertaking two initiatives: attracting professionals into high school teaching and the use of inquiry-based methods to teach science. She taught at Farmington High School, which was a leader in the movement toward inquiry-based science teaching. Development of skills as an inquiry-based teacher and adaptation of chemistry curriculum to this student-centered method created an ideal opportunity for a return to college teaching in 2008 with Trinity’s Chemistry Department.
CRAIG W. SCHNEIDER
Charles A. Dana Professor of Biology
Craig Schneider earned a B.A. in biology from Gettysburg College and a Ph.D. in botany from Duke University. Schneider, a Trinity faculty member since 1975, has worked on the seaweed flora of Bermuda for the last 30 years using scuba, surface-supplied air, and submersibles on his annual collecting trips. He most recently has been using molecular-assisted alpha taxonomy to discover a wide array of new species and genera in the island flora. Schneider authored two books and published nearly 100 papers while on the faculty at Trinity, many of these with his undergraduate research students. In 1995, he won the Charles A. Dana Research Professor Award followed by the Thomas Church Brownell Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1996. In 2016, he was awarded the Trustee Award for Faculty Excellence. Schneider is retiring from teaching but plans to continue his phylogenetic research in retirement.
RIEKO WAGONER
Principal Lecturer in Language and Culture Studies and International Studies
Rieko Wagoner earned a B.A. in English from Sophia University in Tokyo and an M.A. in East Asian Studies and an M.L.I.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her training focused on Japanese language teaching and pedagogy. She then taught at Wesleyan University, as well as at summer programs at UW-Madison, Middlebury College, and Harvard University. In 1987, she came to Trinity, where she started the Japanese program, taught all four levels of Japanese instruction as well as a first-year seminar, twice hosted at Trinity the Annual Conference of the Japanese Language Teachers’ Association of New England, ran the Technos Japan Tour program, and established Trinity’s exchange program with Rikkyo University in Tokyo. Following her first translation publication, The Stories Clothes Tell (Rowman & Littlefield), Wagoner plans to stay busy with her translation projects, as well as with volunteer work and weaving, after retirement. She would welcome her former students keeping her posted with their life stories.