In 2020, Dr. Rusay became Professor Emeritus after retiring from DVC with a highly accomplished, expansive 30 year career.
LAFAYETTE, CA, November 08, 2023 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Ronald J. Rusay, PhD, has been included in Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Over five decades, Dr. Rusay established a notable international career in the chemical industry and in higher education. He is married for more than 50 years, has a son and daughter, and four teenage granddaughters. He graduated from the University of Hampshire with a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry in 1967 and a Master of Science in organic chemistry in 1969. He subsequently entered active duty in the US Army as an ordnance officer and in 1970-1971 served in Vietnam as a platoon leader and executive officer. On returning from service, he began a career in teaching at Bridgton Academy in Maine, where he taught chemistry and coached football and tennis.
Advancing his career in teaching and research, Dr. Rusay began a PhD program in 1973 at Oregon State University with the support of an American Chemical Society fellowship. In 1976, he completed his graduate studies and research in organic chemistry and oceanography, and accepted an offer to join Stauffer Chemical Company's Research Center in Richmond, California as an organic synthesis researcher. His Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry with a minor in Oceanography degree was awarded in 1977.
At Richmond, his research led to a number of significant patents of biologically active molecules of agricultural and pharmaceutical importance, and in 1980, he transferred to Stauffer Chemical Company's Pacific Basin Division in San Francisco where he held progressively more responsible international management positions. During this time, he furthered his education through a series of external executive management courses, which included courses with the Wharton School, UC Berkeley, Stanford University and the London School of Business. In 1987, after a series of Stauffer Chemical Company mergers and acquisitions in which he advanced to senior management, he joined Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Dr. Rusay and his family then relocated to England, where he assisted in the integration of ICI's recently acquired Stauffer intellectual and commercial agrochemical properties throughout the Pacific Rim and Indian subcontinent.
Subsequently, ICI corporately reorganized its agrochemical and pharmaceutical businesses into a new entity, Zeneca, and then agrochemicals into Syngenta with Sandoz. He and his family decided to return to their home in California, where he rejoined academia. And, in 1990, as a tenure track professor, he taught his first college chemistry courses at Diablo Valley College (DVC), a leading California Community College in Pleasant Hill, CA with a diverse enrollment of more than 20,000 students, and he also taught graduate business and management courses as an adjunct professor.
In 2020, Dr. Rusay became Professor Emeritus after retiring from DVC with a highly accomplished, expansive 30 year career in higher education. His tenure is characterized by a distinguished list of accomplishments, which include various leadership positions, appointments, ventures, grants and awards.
He has taught all of the lower division college chemistry courses, which encompass the complete scope of STEM topics. He has been professionally active as an author, editor, content developer, publisher, and principal or co-principal investigator in many educational research projects, which began with UC Berkeley's Modular Chem Consortium (MC2) in 1995, and continuing on with the on-line, free Open Educational Resource (OER) ChemWiki Project, which he helped co-develop in 2008, currently serving more than 4 million viewers per month in its current iteration as the chemistry component of the LibreTexts.org libraries. Dr. Rusay is a passionate advocate for STEM education, science literacy, and innovative teaching methods and curricula, which engage and inspire students beginning with elementary and middle school ages. His accomplishments and contributions have been acknowledged by the California Academic Senate with its Multi-sensory Teaching Award.
He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and presented at many conferences in North America, Europe, and Asia. Over a period of more than a decade, he has been a Science Education Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Visiting Professor in Japan and Russia, a Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and at the University of California, Berkeley. He also served as chair of the DVC chemistry department.
Dr. Rusay has volunteered at Habitat for Humanity and the Contra Costa & Solano Food Bank, where he served several terms on the board of directors, and was president of the board.
In retirement, he is actively engaged with the California Community Colleges and State Universities (CSUs) as a course curriculum/syllabus reviewer in chemistry for California's 116 community colleges and 23 state universities, and he participates in educational outreach with the Contra Costa County Library's Young Learners Program and UC Berkeley's Science @ Cal Program.
Throughout his professional career, Dr. Rusay has been active as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Academy of Sciences, and as a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society.
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