Hall, Mills wrap up decades helping shape Wingate science departments

By Chuck Gordon

Dr. James Hall says he knew from "day one" that he was going to be a scientist. The chemistry kit he got in fourth grade solidified his choice, and a couple of years later a guest speaker at school helped him see a clear vision of his future.

"He was saying that if you go into industry, then you have to work on a project that your boss tells you to work on, whether you like it or not," Hall recalls. "If you go to teach at the university level, then you can pick your own research. I said, 'OK, I'm going to teach, and then I'm going to own my own little chemical company.' That was seventh grade."

This week, Hall wraps up a 44-year career at Wingate, retiring at the age of 76 to continue running his little chemical company, printing lab books for the department, and maybe traveling a little more.

Dr. James Hall

Hall is one of two mainstays of the science faculty who is retiring. Dr. Ed Mills, a biology professor, is also bringing an end to his career, after 37 years teaching students how to identify nearby birds, catalogue local wildlife and find their own path in biology.

Hall and Mills teach different scientific disciplines, but they have a lot in common: Both started offshoot majors that have become popular (chemistry business for Hall; environmental biology for Mills), and both have seen several of their former students return to teach in their departments.

Hall actually started the chemistry major too, having been lured to Wingate by his old friend Dr. Michael Gibson in 1982 after five years at Union College. Hall put a distinctive spin on the curriculum that remains today, making a hazardous-materials course mandatory for chemistry majors.

His demonstrations remain popular, and students take the visuals with them as reminders when they go into industry.

"You know, most chemistry professors, if they do these things, they'll take a little chunk of sodium about the size of half a pea and drop it in water," Hall says. "The sodium reacts, gives off hydrogen, it sparks and you get a little poof.

"I drop chunks this big in a bucket of water," he says, miming the holding of a chunk of rock with both hands.

Other days he'll have students use tongs to drop a chunk of potassium in a five-gallon bucket of water while running past it. A few seconds after they drop it in, a fountain of liquid explodes 10 feet in the air.

Another Hall innovation that remains unique to Wingate is a commercial chemistry course, in which students learn to scale up chemical reactions for use in business. "I tell the students that those are the kinds of things that are unique to us," he says. "Those are things you put on your resume."

Hall uses his small-quantity chemical business, Wingate Advanced Materials, as a second lab, of sorts. "I can take them over there and we can make 10 kilograms of this cobalt compound," he says. "We're weighing out kilograms of materials instead of just grams on the little balances."

Hall also has his commercial chemistry students come up with their own household cleaning solution, and the one that tests the best is scaled up into large batches, which the class then "sells" (read: donates) to the University's housekeeping crew.

The thing he'll miss the most, he says, is interacting with students. He's taken countless student researchers to the Southeast Region Meeting of the American Chemical Society (SERMACS), where the Wingate chemistry department has become well known for churning out high-quality grad-school candidates.

A few of those (Todd Griffin, Stacey Hutchison, Daniel Free) have returned to Wingate to teach in a chemistry department that has ballooned from two faculty members in the 1980s to a dozen today.

Hall has such a heart for teaching and for his students that he has become perhaps the most prolific person ever at setting up scholarships for Wingate students, having established 10 now, in memory or honor of several people who have been important to him over the years: his wife, Shayne, who died in 2007; and former or current Wingate faculty members Gibson, Ron and Polly Bostic, David Rowe, Greg Bell, Pat Plant and Don Merrill; in addition to one in his own name and one each in honor of Shirley and John Wasson, an old colleague from whom Hall purchased his chemistry business.

After 44 years, including 34 as department chair, the 76-year-old Hall says it's a good time to call it a day. After all, the 12-year-old Hall's dreams pretty much came to fruition.

"We're set up now basically where I had dreamed we would be," he says.

Ed Mills

Mills came to Wingate in 1989 fresh off of earning his Ph.D. from the University of Alabama. He grew up in rural Polk County, N.C., collecting insects and tending to his bull, Buck, and other animals. Environmental biology was a natural fit.

So was teaching, and Wingate University (College at the time), not even three hours from his parents' house near Tryon, N.C., proved to be a comfortable fit for him.

"It was teaching, which was what I wanted to do," he says, "rather than have my advancement based on how many research articles I publish or how much money I bring in in grants."

Dr. Ed Mills

Still, Mills enjoyed research and liked giving his students some research experience. He became known for his ornithology class, which became so popular that he had to stop the class's field trips to the Outer Banks because all the students could no longer fit in the van.

On those trips, he and his class would see tundra swans and other geese and ducks that aren't native to the Piedmont of North Carolina, and he relished spotting his favorite bird, the snow goose, a shy creature that might have among its flock one or two blue geese. "They have a color morph that's blue, and so they kind of stand out with all the white geese," he says. "They actually call that one the blue goose, but it's still the same species. We'd always try and pick it out."

Mills chose to work with blue breasted quail because they're small and can be raised from eggs, thus avoiding the need for wild-animal permits. They have 30 different vocalizations, and Mills can see those vocalizations represented visually via software.

"Birds are smart enough to have interesting behaviors, and most everything they do has a purpose, or it's wasted energy, right?" he says. "So I'm trying to figure out, Why did you just do that?"

One particular experiment he's proud of involved running white noise in the lab to see whether the quail would modulate their chirping.

"It turns out that they actually get louder in decibels to be heard over the noise, because a lot of their calls are in the same frequency as the low-frequency noise that most people make," he says, "and then they actually changed the pitch or frequency of their call too."

Students have taken the experiments they've run with the quail and presented at conferences and then gone on to graduate programs. Mills lists former students studying endangered bats in Missouri, dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, and alligators and crocodiles in South America.

Others have returned to teach at Wingate, including Nicole Barrios, Mark Rollins and Dr. Erika Niland, who is moving from the biology department to administration, becoming the vice president for academic systems on June 1.

Another lasting impact Mills has made during his tenure is the establishment of the environmental biology major in 2000. While attending a conference in Boston focused on setting up an environmental science major, Mills realized Wingate didn't have the faculty or infrastructure to do that but could manage environmental biology.

"It started out a little slow, of course, because it was new," he says, "but it's picked up and it's been, I think, good for the University over the years."

With so many of Wingate's hundreds of biology majors planning to head into the medical field, environmental biology provides a good alternative path. Mills and his students spend a lot of time around the University conducting experiments and cataloging the flora and fauna of the area.

"I think the biology majors realize now that they don't have to go to medical school," he says, "that they can get a biology degree and still do field work or whatever."

He'll miss that field work with students, but he'll be taking his binoculars with him into retirement.

May 4, 2026