How a Seton Hall professor and a student have stuck together for 25 years.
When chemistry professor Dan Huchital saw Erin (Sharp) Williams’ application for admission to Seton Hall in 1998, there wasn’t a doubt in his mind she should be offered a scholarship. The awards committee agreed, and he called to tell her the good news: a four-year full ride including tuition, room and board, some cash for books and a summer research internship.
Williams, still in her senior year of St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, knew she wanted to leave Florida and experience another part of the country, and the close, family-like feeling she felt when she visited Seton Hall lingered.
“I hung up the phone. I screamed, went downstairs to my parents, and told them the news,” she says.
Chemistry was a small program at Seton Hall then, but even though Williams’ class had only 10 students, she never had Huchital as a professor. He became her de facto adviser, though, helping her prepare for a solid career. And she couldn’t have had a more worthy role model.
Huchital majored in chemistry at City College, then moved cross-country to Stanford for graduate studies, where he received his doctorate in April 1965. He worked with Henry Taube, a renowned scientist who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1983. When it was time to apply for a tenured position, there were only three available for an inorganic chemist like Huchital, and since he and his wife had family in New Jersey and New York, they chose Seton Hall.
Huchital taught at Seton Hall for 35 years, from 1966 to 2001.
In the middle of Williams’ studies at Seton Hall, Huchital was due for a sabbatical, and he chose to spend it at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Although he taught for two more semesters at Seton Hall after that, he announced his retirement in 2001.
When FAU learned that Huchital was back in the state, it wasn’t long before they asked if he would be interested in a full-time position, giving him another opportunity to teach. “I was 62,” he says. “I said, I’ll do it for two years, maybe three. Get to 65 and then retire. It turned out to
be 22 years.”
As it happened, he was settling into Williams’ neck of the woods. “Any time I would come back to Florida, he was right up the road,” she says. “I would tell everybody, I’ve got to go see Dr. Huchital.”
Then in the summer of 2022, Huchital, 82, decided the next semester would be his last. “I love teaching. I love to be in the classroom, but all the extra administrative stuff just got to be too much.”
FAU opened his position — and Huchital told them he knew the right person for the job: Erin Williams.
After graduating from Seton Hall in 2002, Williams earned a doctorate at Ohio State University, then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, located on the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she worked closely with a graduate student. “After that interaction, I said, wow, I think I am short-changing myself on my love of teaching.”
When Williams got a second life-changing call from Huchital in 2022, she was teaching at her old high school in Fort Lauderdale, where her love of chemistry had begun.
“Dan called me and said he had great news. He was going to retire. I said, we already did that
at Seton Hall. Is this one for real? He said, it’s for real … and you should think about applying
for the job.”
In June, Williams started her second year as an instructor at FAU, the result of a special friendship forged through Seton Hall connections. Both she and Huchital are thankful for everything Seton Hall has given them; they are loyal material supporters of the community, paying it forward so that other students and faculty can forge the same kinds of bonds that have kept them together for 25 years.
Ruth Zamoyta is Seton Hall’s director of advancement and campaign communications.
