Professor Emeritus Robert A. Plane was born in Evansville, Indiana in 1927. He received his AB in 1948 from Evansville College and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago in 1949 and 1951. In 1951 Professor Plane accepted a position at Oak Ridge National Laboratories where he stayed for a year and then accepted a position as instructor at Cornell. In 1954 he was promoted to assistant professor, in 1958 associate professor, in 1961 full professor, and in 1990 was made Professor Emeritus. During his time at Cornell, Professor Plane served as Chair of the Chemistry Department from 1967-69, Acting Provost of the University in 1969, and Provost in 1970. In 1974, Plane accepted the position of president at Clarkson University. In 1985 he retired from Clarkson then returned to Cornell in 1986 to assume the leadership of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva. He established Plane's Cayuga Winery and became a part-time winemaker. In 1990 he retired again but in the following year, he accepted the position as 16th President of Wells College, staying there until 1995.
Professor Plane co-authored ?Chemistry,? a text that was the most widely used college chemistry book in the world. He was also an NIH Special Fellow at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm, a visiting fellow at Oxford, a visiting fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, and from 1986 ? 1990 he was director of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station.
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