Alumnus named chairman of RIT Board of Trustees

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Brian Hall

Brian H. Hall of Colorado Springs, Colo., is the new chairman of the Board of Trustees of Rochester Institute of Technology.

Hall, who received an MBA from RIT in 1978, retired in 2007 as vice chairman of The Thomson Corp. (Thomson Reuters), a global information company. He joined Thomson in 1995 as president and CEO of Thomson Legal Publishing, where he led the acquisition of West Publishing, which formed the foundation of the Thomson Legal & Regulatory group. Prior to Thomson, he was an executive vice president of McGraw-Hill and president of Shepard’s, a division of McGraw-Hill. Hall also worked for Rochester-based Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, which later was acquired by Thomson.

Hall currently serves on the board of directors of IHS, a leading global source of information and analytics headquartered in Englewood, Colo.; The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo; and the Intergeneration Foundation. He previously has served on numerous for-profit and nonprofit boards. He became a member of RIT’s Board of Trustees in 2000 and is the fifth alumnus to serve as chairman.

“RIT has become a premier university with an international reputation. This is the result of the quality of our students, administration, faculty, staff and trustees and, of course, RIT’s high academic standards,” says Hall, who will serve a three-year term as chairman. “I’m very honored to be asked to play a leadership role in the continued development of my alma mater.”

Hall grew up in Irondequoit, N.Y., and is a graduate of Eastridge High School. He received his bachelor’s degree from Defiance College (Ohio). His wife, Linda, is from Webster, N.Y., and her father, Charles Thompson, is an RIT graduate. They have two married sons and two grandsons.

Hall succeeds Donald N. Boyce ’67 (business administration) of Lake Forest, Ill., as chairman of the RIT Board of Trustees. Boyce is the retired chairman of IDEX Corp., a diversified manufacturing firm known for developing the “Jaws of Life” rescue equipment.