Two new members have been elected to the Hope College Board of Trustees.
Newly elected to serve four-year terms on the board are Karl Droppers of Holland and Dr. Brent Krueger of Holland.
The board has also re-elected Daniel Gordon of Grand Rapids, Douglas C. Ruch of Holland; Beth A. Snyder of Dallas, Texas; and the Rev. Jill Ver Steeg of Johnston, Iowa, to four-year terms.
Trustees concluding service on the board are Dr. Kenneth Elzinga of Charlottesville, Virginia; Theodore S. Etheridge III of West Olive; Dean L. Overman of Washington, D.C.; and Dr. Joanne L. Stewart of Holland.
Mary V. Bauman of Grand Rapids is continuing to serve as chairperson, the Rev. Dr. William R. Boersma is continuing to serve as vice-chairperson and Dr. David W. Lowry of Holland is continuing to serve as secretary.
Droppers is president of MVP Sports Clubs, a sports and recreation development and operations company. MVP Sports Clubs operates 10 facilities in Central Florida and West Michigan, and with more than one million square feet of facilities, 40,000 members and 1,250 employees is a leader in both markets for membership athletic facilities and recreation options.
He has been with the MVP organization since 1996. He was previously general manager and owner of the Lakeshore Athletic Club in Holland.
He and his family relocated to Holland earlier this summer from Maitland, Florida, where his community involvement included serving as an elder for Northland Church; the board chair for Central Florida FCA; a board member for Time Ministries, an international mission organization; and a board member for Central Florida Boys and Girls Clubs.
Droppers graduated from Hope in 1982 with majors in physical education and business. He was a third-generation student, the son of Jean and Neil Droppers of the Classes of 1951 and 1952, and the grandson of Anthony Droppers of the Class of 1915. He completed a master’s degree in education at Michigan State University in 1986.
He and his wife, Lori, who is a 1983 Hope graduate, have four children, three of whom are alumni and one of whom is a student: Neil, a 2010 graduate; Jack, a 2012 graduate; Nina, a 2014 graduate; and Mara, who is entering her sophomore year.
Krueger is a professor of chemistry at Hope, where he has taught since 2001. He also serves as director of the college’s Computational Science and Modeling Laboratory, and in 2013 he was named a Schaap Research Fellow at Hope, an appointment that provides unrestricted funds in support of the faculty member’s research. From 2004 to 2008 he was a Towsley Research Scholar at Hope.
Krueger’s laboratory seeks to understand how biological systems engineer proteins and nucleic acids to achieve their function, using tools including pulsed lasers, single-molecule spectroscopic methods, and computational methods to model the behavior of the molecules and their interactions. He has mentored more than 50 students in collaborative research at the college, and has also received more than $1.4 million in external funding while at Hope. In addition to co-authoring publications concerning his research, he is developing, with his students, materials for “ChemWiki,” an online chemistry textbook initiated at the University of California, Davis.
He graduated from Truman State University with majors in chemistry and physics in 1993, and completed his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Chicago in 1999. Prior to coming to Hope, he was a research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
Krueger and his wife, Renee, have two children at home.