Susan Eckert Lynch Professorship will focus on the business of the life sciences

By Jeannie Griffith

In the midst of its centennial year, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) is also celebrating a new moment in its history. Susan E. Lynch, a longtime friend, adviser and foremost benefactor of CALS and Cornell, has become the first woman to endow a faculty chair within CALS. Her establishment of the Susan Eckert Lynch Professorship in Science and Business will advance research and teaching in the Department of Applied Economics and Management.

Lynch

"At this exciting juncture in the history of Cornell and the college, when both business and the life sciences are emerging as major priorities, this is an inspiring and important gift," remarked Susan A. Henry, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "Susan Lynch's generosity will be felt in our enhanced ability to foster leadership at the interface of business and science where entrepreneurs and emerging technologies meet."

The Susan Lynch Professorship is the first endowed position at Cornell designed to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between business and the new life sciences. Lynch suggested the professorship as a means to create synergy between two identified college priorities. "The college would benefit from having a new professorship in either of these fields," she commented. "But it will be especially valuable to have a faculty member who can bridge the two, who can show how important it is to business to have a stake in the life sciences, and how important it is to the people working in the life sciences to involve the business community with the outcomes of their research."

At Cornell, Lynch is a Presidential Councillor and a Friend of the Cornell University Council. She also serves on the advisory councils of CALS and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and formerly served on the President's Council of Cornell Women. She and her late husband, Ronald P. Lynch, a 1958 CALS graduate, endowed the college's deanship during his term as vice chairman of the university's board of trustees. Together the Lynches also funded the Ronald P. and Susan E. Lynch Professorship of Investment Management in the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management and the Lynch Fund for Athletics. The two were honored in 1994 as foremost benefactors of the university. Since her husband's death in 1996, Lynch has continued her active support of the university, creating the Susan E. Lynch Director's Discretionary Fund in support of the recent athletics campaign and making a lead gift for expansion of the Johnson Museum.

"Susan Lynch has set an inspiring example for our alumni and friends, not only by becoming one of the few women to endow a professorship at Cornell in her own right, but also by responding to the needs of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in a way that so thoughtfully reflects the spirit of the university's ever-increasing emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration," said Provost Biddy Martin. "This exceptional gift serves as a model of creative philanthropy and a wonderful demonstration of the impact that one individual, whether man or woman, can have on the advancement of the university's academic mission."

An alumna of Connecticut College, Lynch chaired a highly successful fund-raising campaign for that school in the late 1990s. She is a trustee of the Asia Society and a member of the board of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. With her son Charles R. Lynch '90, she continues to host several Cornell events instituted during her husband's lifetime, including an annual CALS luncheon in New York City and the annual Lynch-Weiss campus visit, which helps Cornell's alumni and friends renew their ties to the university and remain abreast of developments on campus.