Dr. Barbara Hillery is OW’s new acting associate provost. In this new role, Dr. Hillery is responsible for helping establish academic priorities for the school. Although she is still figuring out the in’s and out’s of her new job, Dr. Hillery is excited to see what this new chapter has in store.
“I like to be constantly learning new things, and I don’t want everyday to be the same as the one before it,” she said. “I like jobs where everyday is something different, everyday provides something that requires that you learn …. once I get a handle on [the new position], there’s all kinds of things that I’m going to have to be learning in order to do the job. I’m very excited about that.”
Before her recent promotion, she held the title of dean of arts and sciences. “I was basically responsible for all of the faculty and students in the school of arts and sciences,” she said. “I was responsible for helping faculty to be the best faculty that they could be, helping them do the research they needed to do… I was responsible for helping students get through their degrees in a timely fashion… and I was occasionally responsible for telling students no they can’t do what they want to do.”
Before she worked for Old Westbury, Dr. Hillery went through some extensive schooling herself. At the University of Virginia, she was a biology major and landed a job in a lab after graduating.
“While I was working, I started taking classes at a nearby school, so they offered me the chance to get a doctorate, and I got my doctorate in chemistry at American University,” she said.
Dr. Hillery has also worked in labs before coming to OW, and a lab she remembers fondly was the food lab.
“We were a lab that helped the food industry when they had problems that required chemical analysis,” she said. An example of the analysis she did was tasting when ice cream didn’t taste right, which is called an “off flavor.” The lab personnel then could eat the ice cream, which Dr. Hillery enjoyed very much.
After working at the food lab, Dr. Hillery did post graduate work in Indiana when she saw an ad for SUNY Old Westbury. After she applied, she became an assistant professor for analytical chemistry in 1997.
Dr. Hillery has also conducted research and done fieldwork, One of her favorite things to do is travel, which she was able to do while she did fieldwork.
“I’ve been very fortunate to be in a couple of projects that were national and even international…” she said.
One her most memorable research projects was working with the International Atmospheric Deposition Network in which the United States and Canadian governments worked together to look into the pollutants which had found their way into the Great Lakes.
When she came to SUNY OW, she was part of a project that took herself and Professor Emerita Dr. Judith Lloyd to Mexico to analyze pollution from volcanoes.
“I got to spend two or three weeks in Mexico, hanging out in a field, watching analytical equipment and eating Mexican food,” she said. “It was great.”
One country that she would like to go back to Iceland, but this time in the winter rather than the summer to experience their almost all day darkness instead of all day sunlight.
Dr. Hillery has a quote that she likes to live by which is “never do something the easy way if a hard way can be found.”
