Professor Harold C. Connolly Jr.

Professor Harold C. Connolly Jr. is founding chair and professor within the Department of Geology in the School of Earth and Environment at Rowan University. He also holds the titles of Mission Sample Scientist (MSS) and Co-Investigator for NASA’s New Frontiers 3 asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx. As the MSS, he is responsible for coordinating and conducting a global team of scientists who test hypotheses designed to constrain the origin and evolution of asteroid Bennu through analyses of the sample delivered to Earth by the spacecraft on September 24, 2023.

Professor Connolly is a classically trained geologist who specializes in the petrology and petrography of meteorites and asteroid samples, also applying geochemical techniques to understand the formation of these oldest rocks in our collections. His research focuses on communicating across disciplines, including astrophysical modeling, to produce comprehensive views of the earliest stage of the Solar System’s origin. Professor Connolly is a Co-Investigator on JAXA’s Hayabusa2 space mission as part of the team that investigated sample from asteroid Ryugu delivered by that spacecraft to Earth on December 5, 2022. Professor Connolly has been a visiting professor Hokkaido University and the University of Tokyo, both in Japan. He is a fellow of the international Meteoritical Society, is co-founder of the mineral Krotite, and has an asteroid named after him, 6761 haroldconnolly.

Photo Credit - Roger Hewins

Professor William D. Carrigan

William D. Carrigan is Professor of History at Rowan University. A native Texan, he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. In 1999, he earned his PhD in American history from Emory University and joined the faculty in the Department of History at Rowan.  A former chair of the Department, he is currently the Graduate Program Coordinator, the History Department Alumni Liaison, and the editor of Project 100.

At Rowan, Professor Carrigan has taught over 100 courses and thousands of students on such topics as the Civil War and Reconstruction, the American West, and the History of New Jersey. In 2013, he won a University-wide competition vote hosted by the Student Government Association at Rowan University and subsequently delivered his hypothetical "last lecture." In 2014, the Organization of American Historians named him a Distinguished Lecturer in American History.  In 2020, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences named him that year’s winner of the Excellence in Teaching Award.  In 2022, he won a Rowan University award for Excellence in Online Teaching.  In 2023, he was nominated for the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award.

He is the author or editor of numerous scholarly articles and four books, including The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916 (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004), winner of the Richard Wentworth Prize.  Professor Carrigan's research has been cited widely in the news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, and the Houston Chronicle.  In addition to his extensive research studying the lynching of Mexicans in the United States, Dr. Carrigan has written five essays on different elements of US historiography since 2014.