Edna Jones - 1990
MHS 1936 Graduate
Edna Jones, Class of 1936, was nominated by her sister Charity Jones Peterson. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948 and her Master’s of Arts degree in history from Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. Her coursework was completed at the University of Washington at Seattle and Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh for her doctoral degree in psychology.
Edna is a retired vice president of Synectics Corporation, a high tech firm of which she is one of the founders and a major owner. At Synectics she directed major programs of domestic and international research and has served on the Board of Directors since 1970. Prior to her affiliation with Synectics, she served as a principal scientist and director of the Engineering Psychology Program at the American Institutes for Research in Pittsburgh, was dean of students and director of testing and counseling in the Sidney School system in Montana and held a two-year Ford Foundation Research Fellowship at the University of Washington.
She also held instructorships at Miami University and Carnegie-Mellon University and served as a member of the Board of Directors at L and C Development Corporation and Air-Sea-Land Agency, Inc.
Edna served as a captain in the U. S. Army with the Combined Chiefs of Staff and subsequently as a hospital administrator with a reserve evacuation hospital unit.
Her community service includes volunteering at the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts at McLean, Virginia, arranging and paying for secondary education for a street child in southern Africa and assisting a northern African girl in gaining her Bachelor of Arts and Master’s of Arts degrees in health service. She also served on the Board of Directors for the Allegheny County Chapter of the Pennsylvania Association for Mentally Retarded Citizens for four years and is a ten-year member of the Friends of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D. C.