Reginald White ’80, senior director of human resources for the Research Division, is the newest member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees and will serve a four-year term as the employee-elected trustee.

White topped a field of five candidates in online balloting, receiving 767 of the 1,322 votes cast in the final round of vote tabulation.

“I am humbled and grateful for the support,” White said. “It’s exciting to have the opportunity to serve the community in this manner and to use my experience to make a difference. Being elected to the board allows me to continue to learn about the university, and to contribute to the important decisions that will be made over the next four years.”

White, who graduated with a degree in psychology, has served on several Cornell boards, including the Human Ecology Alumni Association Board (president); Cornell Council; and Cornell Mosaic, which seeks to increase the number of diverse alumni engaged with the university. He served on the Presidential Task Force on Campus Climate, and led efforts to identify actions in response to the 2016 Employee Engagement Survey.

White is a member of the graduate chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s first Black fraternity, which was founded at Cornell.

The employee-elected trustee was determined using the Hare (or instant runoff) System, in which voters rank their choices in order of preference; if no candidate receives a majority of the voters (50% plus 1), the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Ballots cast for the eliminated candidate are redistributed to the remaining candidates, based on voters’ second choices, until one candidate wins with a majority of the vote.

Earlier this year, Abigail Cohn, professor of linguistics and director of the Southeast Asia Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, was elected by the faculty to serve as trustee for a four-year term. Cohn’s research interests include the Austronesian languages of Indonesia, with a particular focus on their phonetics, phonology and morphology.

And in the spring, Beth Anderson ’80 and Doug Mitarotonda ’02, M.Eng. ’03; M.A. ’07, Ph.D. ’09, were voted in as the newest alumni-elected trustees.