ALUMNI “WALL OF HONOR” The West Liberty University Alumni Board of Directors instituted a project in 1990 to demonstrate to current students, visitors, and friends that the college has some very successful graduates. This project, known as the “Alumni Wall of Honor,” is a dramatic way to honor some of the college’s most distinguished alumni and display pride in the accomplishments of its graduates. The concept was suggested by then Associate Professor of Physics Robert W. Schramm, who is a 1958 graduate of the college and a 2002 Alumni Wall of Honor inductee. The Alumni Wall of Honor is housed in the south end of the Union known as the Alumni Lounge.
Ben A. Hitt
Inducted 2005Ben A. Hitt majored in biology and chemistry at WLSC and earned a bachelor of science degree in 1966. After graduation, he enrolled in the Department of Biochemistry at the West Virginia University School of Medicine and earned a doctor of philosophy degree in biochemistry in 1970. After doing post-doctoral work in the Stanford University Medical School Department of Dermatology, he joined Stanford’s Department of Anesthesiology. During his eight-year tenure, he described the metabolism of several volatile halogenated anesthetics, both in terms of the pathways and the reaction dynamics. He filled positions in the Veterans Administration and the University of Cincinnati Medical School, and in 1984 he left academia to pursue an interest in commercialization of artificial intelligence. Since that time, Hitt has founded several corporations directed towards the development and application of advanced information extraction algorithms to large scale databases. Hitt invented and was granted U.S. Patents on three novel pattern recognition algorithms and a patent on the application of pattern discovery to biological and medical data. He is currently the chief science officer of Correlogic Systems, Inc. and is working to introduce to market serum tests for several cancers.