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Six talented and distinguished ���챬�� faculty members have retired. They have empowered generations of students to follow their curiosity and to attempt and accomplish great things.

The retiring faculty members are: Kennedy-Schelkunoff Professor of Astronomy M. Darby Dyar; Ida and Marion Van Natta Professor of Biological Sciences Rachel Fink; Elizabeth Page Greenawalt Professor of Chemistry Maria Alexandra Gomez; Julia and Sarah Ann Adams Professor of Mathematics Margaret Robinson; and Professor of Geology Alan Werner. Additionally, Professor Emeritus of Russian Peter J. Scotto retired in 2024.

“These individuals have shown remarkable talent, dedication and passion,” said Provost and Dean of Faculty Lisa Sullivan. “Their contributions have shaped our students and the College as a whole. We will miss them, even as we look forward to seeing what they do next.”

M. Darby Dyar’s primary research goal is to understand how hydrogen and oxygen are distributed throughout our solar system, particularly in terrestrial bodies, such as Earth, the Moon, Mars and the parent bodies of meteorites. During her career at Mount Holyoke, Dyar authored over 260 papers for scientific journals and was awarded more than $10 million in grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In 2016, Dyar received the G.K. Gilbert Award from the Planetary Geology Division of the Geological Society of America for outstanding contributions toward solving fundamental problems in planetary geology. In 2018, she received the Eugene Shoemaker Distinguished Scientist Medal from NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute for significant contributions to the field of lunar science. At a recent retirement party dubbed DarbyFest, current and former students and coworkers sang Dyar’s praises. Hers will be a working retirement — she is the deputy principal investigator for NASA’s VERITAS mission to Venus.

Rachel Fink's research centers on cytoskeletal dynamics in living fish embryos. She developed research video footage for teaching and published two compilations of movies: “A Dozen Eggs: Time-Lapse Microscopy of Normal Development” (Society for Developmental Biology and Sinauer Associates) and “CELLebration” (the American Society for Cell Biology and Sinauer Associates). She said, “As an embryo develops from a fertilized egg, cells are constantly dividing, migrating, differentiating and rearranging. Time-lapse video microscopy reveals these movements and allows analysis of the cellular mechanisms driving these transformations.”

In the classroom, she taught highly interactive courses, using a range of tools, including colorful chalk, research videos and student presentations, to engage students with the material. She took students to Washington, D.C., to attend the President’s Council on Bioethics, and she ran a Science Buddy program at the local elementary school, where MHC students worked with second-, third- and fourth-grade students.

In 2023, Maria Alexandra Gomez was among a group of investigators who received an NSF Major Research Instrumentation Grant, which provided computing resources for the Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational Chemistry (MERCURY). MERCURY sponsored the first national conference devoted to undergraduate computational chemistry. In 2017, Gomez was the principal investigator on a three-year grant from the NSF to use graph theory to probe oxygen vacancy and proton conduction in perovskite oxides. In 2015, she was awarded the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship by her Mount Holyoke faculty peers, in part, for her work on reducing petroleum dependency by improving conduction in fuel cells to maximize their efficiency.

Gomez also taught General Chemistry, Chemical Thermodynamics, Atomic and Molecular Structure, From Lilliput to Brobdingnag: Bridging the Scales Between Science and Engineering, and Using Data Science to Find Hidden Chemical Rules, as well as an elective on using spectroscopy to analyze paintings.

Number theorist Margaret Robinson is a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She was chosen for this prestigious fellowship for her support and empowerment of several generations of women in mathematics, for her mentoring within the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference and the Carleton Summer Math Program, and for seeing the spark in each individual under her guidance and supporting them in the fulfillment of rewarding careers in mathematics. She has been the principal investigator and co-principal investigator on several NSF, National Security Agency and Mathematical Association of America grants. Some of these grants funded Mount Holyoke’s Summer Mathematics Institute, one of the oldest NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates sites in the country.

When colleagues started organizing a retirement celebration, Robinson requested an event where attendees could learn about each other’s work. Friends, current and former coworkers, and students past and present agreed that Robinson is the type of mentor and leader who always lifts up others in the community and makes connections.

Alan Werner, a groundwater geologist and a specialist in glacial geology, environmental geology and climate change, is the former chair of the College’s environmental studies program and the Department of Geology and Geography. His courses focused on the geology of Earth’s surface. Werner's research focuses on past environmental change, and he studies records of climate change to document the nature and timing of climate events in various locations in the Arctic.

Werner’s dedication to his students didn’t stop at the Gates. Drawing on connections with alums he’s mentored over the years, Werner helped students find meaningful internships that connect classroom learning with real-world experience. For example, Bridget Hall ’24 spent a summer in Canada collecting ice cores with glaciologist Peter Neff, who is married to climate scientist Heidi Roop ’07.

Professor Emeritus of Russian Peter J. Scotto retired in 2024. A distinguished scholar and longtime faculty member at Mount Holyoke, he codeveloped the innovative course Nomads, Steppes, and Cities: An Introduction to the Peoples and Cultures of Russia and Eurasia, one of the few undergraduate offerings focused on the cultural and geopolitical diversity of post-Soviet Eurasia. Scotto’s research, supported by MHC faculty grants, has taken him to archives in St. Petersburg and beyond, resulting in work on figures such as Osip Senkovsky and literary memory in Russia. He also represented the College internationally, granting interviews on Nevsky Prospekt radio and participating in events honoring .