The board of directors at Bank of America Corp. recently elected Walter Massey as chairman, separating the roles of chairman and chief executive. Former Chairman Kenneth Lewis previously held both roles. He will remain as CEO.
Massey, who received his master’s and doctorate in physics from Washington University in 1966, is the former president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he received his bachelor’s in physics and mathematics in 1958. He was president of the school from August 1995 to June 2007.
He had been a BofA director since 1998 and is a member of the board’s audit committee.
Massey was a director of BankAmerica Corp. from 1993 to 1998. Massey and also is a director at McDonald’s Corp. and a former director of Delta Air Lines Inc., Motorola Inc. and BP plc.
Before joining Morehouse, he was a director of the National Science Foundation, a governmental agency that supports research and education in mathematics, science and engineering. Massey also is a former vice president of research and professor of physics at the University of Chicago. And he has been a director of the Argonne National Laboratory, dean of the college and professor of physics at Brown University and assistant professor of physics at the University of Illinois.
He is a fellow and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow and past vice president of the American Physical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Massey was born in Hattiesburg, Miss. He and his wife, Shirley Anne, have two sons and three grandchildren.