Winthrop geology professor Irene Boland dies at 74

Winthrop University geology professor Irene Boland, a passionate educator who earned her doctorate in her mid-50s after falling in love with geology, died Sunday. She was 74.

Boland, a Rock Hill native, attended kindergarten through third grade at Winthrop Training School, and later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at then-Winthrop College. She had been teaching geology for about 20 years at Winthrop.

Funeral arrangements will be announced by Greene Funeral Home.

“She was one of the most impressive people I have known in my lifetime,” said Pat Owens, chair of the chemistry, physics and geology department.

“She was just so passionate and enthusiastic about what she did, and so intense,” Owens said. “She loved what she did so much. The students and the work she was doing at Winthrop, it was all about that. She was totally selfless.”

Her daughter, Rebecca Boland, who lives in Rock Hill, was inspired by her mother’s enthusiasm.

“Any of her students who wanted to learn more, she always made time for them,” she said. “She would give her students her personal cell number, they could call her and email her at any time. That’s how devoted she was.”

Boland said her mother was an avid outdoor enthusiast who enjoyed singing in the choir at the Episcopal Church of our Saviour in Rock Hill, where she met her husband, the late Charles “Al” Boland.

Owens said Irene Boland discovered a passion for geology during the mid-1980s, when she was teaching part time at Winthrop. She was given a text on plate tectonics. He said that led her to earn a Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of South Carolina.

She was a member of the Winthrop classes of 1963 and 1969. She earned bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and biology, with a minor in secondary education, followed by a master’s degree in teaching chemistry.

Boland received many honors for her work.

Winthrop gave Boland the James Pinckney Kinard and Lee Wicker Kinard Award for Excellence in Teaching at the December 2012 Commencement ceremony.

She was a recipient of the Phi Kappa Phi Excellence in Teaching Award in 2000. Boland served on the Board of Directors of the Carolinas Geological Society and was its president in 2005.

In 2014, Boland established a new Winthrop endowment to assist geology and physics faculty members in attracting and retaining high-caliber students interested in conducting summer research projects.

Called the Charles A. Boland ’08 and Irene Brunson Boland ’63 Student Research Assistantship Endowment, it provides financial support to students who commit to summer research in chemistry, physics and geology. The endowment was named in honor of Boland’s late husband, who earned his B.S. in environmental sciences at Winthrop in 2008.

The university named room 209 of Sims Science Building – where Boland taught historical geology every fall semester for the last 20 years – in her honor in 2014.

The National Park Service published the Digital Geologic Map for Cowpens National Battlefield a few years ago; about 90 percent of the map was completed by Boland, which took years.

This story was originally published January 7, 2016 at 7:36 PM with the headline "Winthrop geology professor Irene Boland dies at 74."