Second presidential candidate to visit, address students

Kaelia Neal and Elizabeth Stoeger

A chemistry professor from Westminster College in Salt Lake City, who has also served as its dean of arts and sciences, is the final presidential candidate to visit Linfield.

Lisa N. Gentile will visit both the McMinnville and Portland campuses on Thursday and Friday.

There will be an open forum at 11:30 a.m. Thursday in Riley 201 and a forum with students at 4:15 p.m. on Thursday in the Austin Reading Room in the library.

Gentile’s Thursday schedule will also consist of forums with faculty and staff as well as tours of the McMinnville campus.

After another campus tour Friday, Gentile will visit the Portland campus for a forum with students at 12 p.m. in Peterson Hall 203.

Gentile earned her bachelor’s degree at Colgate University in New York and her doctorate degree in biochemistry at Brown University. She completed her postdoctoral research in biophysics at the University of British Columbia.

Gentile has been a professor of chemistry at Westminster College in Salt Lake City since July 2013. She has been a provost since March 2013 and was the dean of arts and sciences from July 2013 to March 2015.

Her achievements at Westminster include designing and implementing a new liberal education core and developing a plan for diversity, equity and inclusion.

She is in the process of expanding the school’s music building by 25,000 square feet while focusing on fundraising for the college.

Westminster is a 32-acre private college in Salt Lake City. There are 2,127 undergraduates and 565 graduates with a total enrollment of 2,692. There are 154 faculty to provide a nine to one student to faculty ratio. It has been recognized on The Princeton Review’s best colleges list for more than a decade, according to the college’s website.

Before Westminster, Gentile was professor of chemistry from 2006 to 2013 at the University of Richmond.

She has published over 30 articles in different publications, including the Journal of College Science Teaching and Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Either Gentile or Miles K. Davis, dean of business at Shenandoah University, are expected to succeed President Thomas Hellie after he retires June 30. The Linfield Presidential Search Committee hopes to name the new president by the end of 2017.