Hope College has made four new appointments to its Board of Trustees.
Newly chosen to serve four-year terms on the board are Mary Bauman of Grand Rapids; Arwa Haider of Miami, Fla.; Dr. A. Paul Schaap of Grosse Pointe Park; and Carol Sytsma of Newcastle, Wash.
The college has also re-elected five trustees to four-year terms on the board: Sandra K. Church of Traverse City; Thomas H. Claus of East Grand Rapids; Brian W. Koop of Holland; the Rev. Stephen M. Norden of Powell, Ohio; and Richard L. Postma of Grand Rapids.
Retiring from the board are Ralph E. Jackson Jr. of Naples, Fla., and Donald E. Miller of Bellevue, Wash.
Joel G. Bouwens of Holland has been elected to a second four-year term as chairperson. Brian W. Koop of Holland has been elected vice-chairperson, succeeding the Rev. Peter C. Semeyn of Traverse City, who is continuing to serve on the board. Lynne Hendricks of Holland is continuing to serve as secretary.
Bauman, a 1980 Hope graduate, graduated from Thomas M. Cooley Law School in 1986 and has since been an attorney with Miller Johnson, specializing in employee benefits and executive compensation. She is on the board of trustees of the Forest Hills Educational Foundation and a member of the West Michigan Advisory Council for Inforum, a professional women's alliance. She is a past member of the boards of Arbor Circle Corporation; HHS, Health Options; and Western Theological Seminary, and of the Board of Benefit Services for the Reformed Church in America. She was on the presidential search committee at Hope that led to the appointment of Dr. James Bultman as president in 1999. She and her husband, Ken, a 1979 Hope graduate, have two sons: Ken, who is a Hope sophomore; and Kevin.
Haider, a 1991 Hope graduate, attended the college as an international student from Manama, Bahrain. Following Hope, she worked at Prince Corporation as a quality control technician for a year and then completed a master's degree in industrial engineering at Western Michigan University. She subsequently worked for Merrill Lynch International Bank in Manama as an associate financial consultant and then with Merrill Lynch Latin America in Miami as assistant vice president with the Investment Advisory Group. She is now active in her community, where she is a past vice president of the local PTO board. She and her husband, Ayman Hanna, have two children, Ramy and Dina.
Schaap, a 1967 Hope graduate, is general manager of Lumigen Inc. He completed his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Harvard University in 1970 and then joined the Wayne State University faculty. He founded Lumigen in 1987 to commercialize the dioxetanes (high-energy chemical compounds which can be triggered to generate light) developed in his research laboratory, and retired from teaching in 2000 to become the company's CEO full-time. In 2006, Lumigen was acquired by Beckman Coulter, Inc., a leading medical diagnostic company. He has remained involved with Wayne State on the Board of Visitors of the College of Science and on the Steering Committee of the Mott Center, and is also involved in his community on the Board of Directors of Detroit Merit Academy and at St. Ambrose Church. The A. Paul Schaap Science Center at Hope is named in recognition of a leadership gift he made on behalf of the project. Hope presented him with a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2006.
Sytsma, a 1961 Hope graduate, is active in her church and community as a volunteer. She is a past trustee at First Evangelical Presbyterian Church, where she has been involved in student and adult ministries leadership and event planning. She has served on the Alumni Board of Bellevue Christian High School and as an English as a Second Language (ESL) tutor to refugees through World Relief Seattle. For 18 years she was on the board of directors of the Double Arrow Resort in Seeley Lake, Mont., which she and her husband Don owned with partners. She formerly taught elementary school in both Michigan and Florida, and was on the faculty of the University of Florida School of Education. She and her husband have four grown children: Brent, Brian, Cory and Kristen, who is a 1995 Hope graduate.