Obituary of Conrade C. Hinds

Professor Conrade C. Hinds served as a faculty member at Sinclair Community College from 1976 until his retirement in 1998. Dr. Hinds exemplified a spirit of dedication to excellence by serving consistently as a leader and innovator. Not only did he work hard and effectively to implement new and more effective teaching techniques in his own classroom, but he also worked to assure the dissemination of those techniques throughout the College and beyond. During the period from 1979 to 1990, Dr. Hinds was the clear leader of Physics at Sinclair, serving first as Acting Chair of the Physical Science Department, and then as Physics coordinator. One of his achievements was the implementation of major changes in the Technical Physics program. Dr. Hinds also served as the driving force behind the establishment of the Physics Resource Lab and a variety of other academic centers that have now become an important part of Sinclair’s transformation to new ways of teaching.

Dr. Hinds’ national activities included service from 1990 through 1993 as a member of the National American Association of Physics Teachers’ Committee on Minorities in Physics Education. He participated in several national conferences and workshops on minorities in science and engineering, and he was very active in disseminating and implementing ideas from these national benchmarks at Sinclair. Dr. Hinds was also an active leader in the National Science Foundation funded Project Discovery, which brought several groups of secondary science and math teachers to the Sinclair campus for six weeks of summer workshops.

Throughout his time at Sinclair, Dr. Hinds was actively involved in a variety of programs to recruit and retain minority student, including formal collaborations with the Dayton Public Schools, the Engineer’s Club, and others. Dr. Hinds provided Sinclair with advanced notice about the National Science Foundation/ Advanced Technological Education call for proposals, initiated an interdivisional collaboration under Neil Herbkersman to prepare a proposal that brought a $5,000,000 project to Sinclair.

Dr. Conrade C. Hinds was born in the Panama Canal Zone. He studied at Fisk University under Dr. Nelson Fuson and received a masters in Physics and was awarded an Ed.D from Ball State University in 1971. Dr. Hinds also previously taught physics at Wilberforce and Central State Universities and served as Chairman of the Physics Department at Southern University from 1963 to 1967. In 1966, he worked at the NASA Research Center in Huntsville, Alabama on the Saturn 5 rocket development project.