Trustees

Witmer Chairs Board; Blumenstein Appointed

An attorney with long ties to the University has been elected as the new chairman of the Board of Trustees and a highly regarded cognitive scientist who recently served as interim president of Brown University has joined the board as a trustee.

Witmer

Longtime Trustee G. Robert Witmer Jr. ’59, a partner in the firm of Nixon Peabody LLP in Rochester, became chairman last May. He succeeds Robert Goergen ’60, chairman of Blyth Inc., who will continue to serve as a member of the board.

Also in May, Sheila Blumstein ’65, the Albert D. Mead Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown, joined the board as a trustee.

A trustee since 1979, Witmer was president of the Eastman Dental Center Board of Directors and continues to serve on the Eastman Dental Center Foundation Board of Directors.

Blumsteim

From 1977 to 1978, he chaired the Trustees’ Council of the College, and he has chaired the University Alumni Council.

After earning his bachelor of arts degree with honors from Rochester and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Witmer earned his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1962.

At Rochester, he was cocaptain of the varsity basketball team, earning induction as a charter member of the University’s Athletics Hall of Fame.

Witmer is a member of a considerable “University family.” His father, G. Robert Witmer Sr., a former justice in the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court, was a 1926 graduate of the University; a daughter, a son, two brothers, a sister-in-law, and two nephews are University graduates as well.

Blumstein, who also earned Phi Beta Kappa honors while an undergraduate studying linguistics at Rochester, has held several administrative positions at the Rhode Island Ivy League institution, including chairwoman of the department of linguistics, chairwoman of the department of cognitive and linguistic sciences, dean of the college, and interim provost.

A former Guggenheim fellow and an elected fellow of the American Philosophical Society, Blumstein served as acting president of Brown from February 2000 to July 2001.