HOLLAND, MI (WHTC-AM/FM) — On paper, she may have been Dr. Jennifer Hampton, but almost everyone called the chair of Hope College’s physics department Jenny. Her death in a traffic crash Sunday, March 14, 2021, set those who knew her reeling.
“This loss brings deep sorrow for all of us who knew and loved Jenny as a colleague, friend and teacher,” said Hope College President Matthew A. Scogin in a message sent to the campus community Monday morning. “As kind and encouraging as she was brilliant, Jenny was a bright light at Hope.”
Since arriving at Hope College in 2007 to teach everything from introductory classes to upper-level lectures and labs, Jenny Hampton made literal sparks fly in the classroom — intersectional science intersecting with entertainment.
She was the faculty contact for the materials characterization lab, which includes the college’s scanning electron microscope and atomic force microscope. Dr. Hampton, however, didn’t live in those labs.
She tutored for KidsHope. She played clarinet and participated in Hope College’s annual, lauded Christmas Vespers. She filled her social media accounts with family, friends, food, and adventures every image infused with enthusiasm.
She loved travel: China, Chicago, New Orleans, Missouri, and elsewhere, as her public social media images and posts showcased her deep faith, fascination with the natural world, and her love of others.
More to the point, she was beloved by them.
Hope’s senior philanthropy advisor, Mark DeWitt, tweeted that she was, “a bright light to Hope students and faculty colleagues. Her research was innovative and addressed present needs.”
The Rev. Trygve Johnson told those attending Monday’s virtual morning chapel words were inadequate.
“When the news moves from head to heart, you just don’t know what to say,” he said, adding, “I don’t anyway, I wish I did. I wish I did, to have the words that could fix it. And we can’t. Which is why I take great comfort in these words of the Apostle Paul in Romans when he reminds us of the God that we worship.”
He went on to ask the Spirit to intercede, to comfort her family, friends, students, colleagues, her fellow congregants at Faith CRC and for Hope College.
“Everyone that really knew her loved her,” said Gerald D. Griffin, Ph.D., Hope’s interim Provost for the Departments of Biology and Psychology, recalling how welcoming she was when he arrived on campus in 2015. “We are all grieving really hard, really hard, right now.” (Listen to the full podcast.)
Griffin called Jenny Hampton, “a brilliant star, and star that cast light on others, so that others could see that great potential within themselves. A star that connected people, that mentored others, that really cared deeply about the world and the people of the world. I’m so blessed to know her, definitely. We all are.”
She saw people as God’s creation, and as Griffin said, “loved connecting people and supporting others’ development. She did more than just give facts and skills. She helped students become more intellectually agile.”
She showed them how to navigate “deep problems that required multiple fields to collide together,” guided by ethics, he said.
While doing so, she maintained such a joyful spirit, Griffin said, people naturally smiled when she was speaking, even in virtual situations.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Michigan, upending education, Jenny Hampton remained ever-present in emphasizing how faculty communicated with students and shepherded their development.
“Her research lab of undergrad students felt like a family,” Griffin said. She mentored her students so they were operating at grad-school levels, pouring her energy into the work, not just working with students, but learning with and from them, while teaching.
“That speaks to her desire to be very interdisciplinary and work with students from different fields … as someone who dedicated their life to learning, you look to everyone for education and edification, he added. Not only faculty and staff, but also to the students we’re charged with developing into researchers.”
Dr. Jennifer Hampton’s research interests were, according to Hope College’s statement, “highly multidisciplinary, drawing from chemistry and materials engineering as well as physics, and her areas of expertise included electrochemistry, nanoscale science, scanning probe microscopy, and batteries and fuel cells.”
In addition to earning multiple research and equipment grants from the National Science Foundation she had several articles published in professional journals. She had made a seminar presentation about her research during the college’s Winter Happening event in 2012.
Hope officials noted her collaborative research with students “focused on understanding and controlling the fabrication of inorganic thin films and nanostructures for energy related applications. Through the years, students she mentored in research were co-authors on published research articles and received external awards and honors including a Goldwater Scholarship, a first-place research presentation award during the Annual Meeting and National Student Conference of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and being chosen to present research during the American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting, the largest physics meeting in the world.”
With her Faith Christian Reformed Church family in Holland, she was a familiar member of the worship team and served on the missions team as well as a pastoral deacon.
A 1995 graduate of Oberlin College, where she majored in physics, Jennifer Hampton earned a master’s of philosophy in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1996; a master’s degree in physics from Cornell University in 1999; and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 2002. She had also been a post-doctoral fellow in a research laboratory at Penn State.
The Wooster, OH, native is survived by her parents, who live in Grand Rapids, two sisters, and an extended family. Funeral arrangements are pending.
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