Memorial Service Planned for Hamilton Professor John Rybash

Hamilton College will hold a memorial service for John Rybash, professor of psychology, on Monday, Sept. 27, at 4:30 p.m. in the Chapel. He died of cancer in June at the age of 51.

The service is open to the community. The Freyja String Quartet will play and speakers will include Doug Weldon, George Gesheider and Jon Vaughn from Hamilton's Psychology department, as well as voices from MVCC, Syracuse University and friends and colleagues who knew and worked with Professor Rybash.

Rybash joined the Hamilton faculty in 1990, having already established himself as an expert in cognitive aging, especially the processes of human memory. In addition to co-authoring the text Adult Development and Aging, currently in its fourth edition, Rybash published nearly four dozen journal articles and chapters and spoke at more than 50 conferences around the world. In 1995 he was elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and in 1998 he was awarded a $100,000 grant from the National Institute of Aging to study aging and memory.

A native of Auburn, he earned an associate's degree from Auburn Community College, his bachelor's and master's degrees from SUNY College at Oswego and his Ph.D. from Syracuse University.