Carolyn Kent Rovee-Collier

Carolyn Kent Rovee-Collier,of Delaware Township, New Jersey, died early in the morning of October 2,following a prolonged struggle with breast cancer. She passed away peacefully in her home, attended by loved ones.

Carolyn was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 7, 1942. She grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where her father, George C. Kent, Jr., was a professor at Louisiana State University. Her mother, Lila Kent, played a crucially supportive role – financially through her deft work as a seamstress, always through her loving presence as a mother and homemaker.

Attending the University Laboratory School through the twelfth grade, Carolyn excelled in academics and (despite a childhood bout with polio) athletics. She served as class president at her high school and was a member of the National Honor Society. An exceptional tennis player, she won the Gulf States Tournament when it was held in Baton Rouge during her teenage years. For her achievements later in life she was inducted into the U-High “Hall of Distinction” in 2001.

Carolyn was an undergraduate at Louisiana State University from 1959 to 1962, majoring in Psychology and graduating in just three years with a B.A. cum laude and College Honors. She minored in English and carried through her life fond memories of poetry classes led by famous poets and professors such as Lewis Simpson.

At Louisiana State, Carolyn met David Thomas Rovee, a graduate student who worked in her father’s lab. They married and, when she was admitted to Brown University’s Graduate School, moved northward together to Providence, Rhode Island. “I didn’t even know where Rhode Island was,” she later recalled; “I had to look it up on a map to find it.” Carolyn took an Sc.M. from Brown in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1966.

These years saw the birth of her first child, Benjamin. It was while typing her thesis and simultaneously tending to her baby that Carolyn became intimately aware of the power of the infant mind – a discovery that would set her toward a trailblazing career as scholar of infant memory development. She observed that when the mobile above Benjamin’s crib was moving, he was happy and entertained (allowing her to get some writing done), but that when it was still, he fussed. By gently attaching a ribbon between her son’s ankle and the stand holding his mobile, she enabled Benjamin to soothe himself by merely kicking. Soon, though, she noticed that her son would start to kick before the ribbon was attached to his ankle – that is to say, he remembered having set his mobile into motion. Thus was born a then-radical idea, which is now routinely taught in introductory psychology courses: that pre-verbal infants can learn things and remember them. This idea was so unthinkable at the time that Carolyn found it hard to find a journal that would publish her findings. But in the succeeding decades she gradually changed the way people conceived of the infant brain and its capacities.

Carolyn took her first teaching post at Trenton (NJ) State College in 1965. While there she gave birth to her second son, Christopher. Soon after, she gained promotion to Associate Professor, but she resigned in protest after her department made a politically motivated decision to change a failing grade, given to a mostly absentee student by an adjunct professor, to an A.

In 1970, Carolyn was offered an Assistant Professorship by Rutgers University. She would spend the rest of her groundbreaking career there, attaining the highest rank possible for a faculty member. She published hundreds of journal articles, co-authoring most of these with her graduate and undergraduate students. She co-wrote an important book on learning and memory, edited a prestigious academic journal, and oversaw two influential book series.

Carolyn was a leader within her profession. She served as President of the International Society for Infant Studies, the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology, and the Eastern Psychological Association, and received numerous awards for her work. Brown once designated her as one of its ten most influential female graduates. Her oral history was placed in the National Archives of the Society for Research in Child Development. And in 2003 she was presented the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the most coveted award in experimental psychology, whose recipients include five Nobel Prize winners.

But her greatest professional achievement, she always claimed, was her mentorship of the hundreds of devoted students who were a part of the Rutgers Early Learning Project, which she established in 1974. Consisting of undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers, “Baby Lab” team-members tirelessly schlepped all over New Jersey, making between two and three thousand in-home visits per year to observe babies’ memories at work. Carolyn’s students consistently received national recognition for this research, and for the dissertations and published articles based on it.

She oversaw and nurtured the beginnings of innumerable careers, and her former students rave about her profound impact on their professional and personal lives. “She will always be the person most responsible for who I am today,” says one of her earliest undergraduate students at Rutgers; “Her enthusiasm for psychology was infectious. Her support and encouragement guided me along my career path. But, most of all, she was a dear friend.”

Carolyn had a sharp, often inappropriate, sense of humor. For someone with such a diminutive frame, her voice was unusually forceful, trained by years of lecturing to 500-student classrooms. She disliked pretension: she stripped away the insides of her 250-year-old farmhouse to expose to view its original, rough innards. She could be prickly, as her father had been, but this aspect of her personality was inextricable from her warmth and her alert, disarming intelligence. She demanded the most from those she loved, and with her students as with her children, this meant pushing them to reach their full potential.

Carolyn was an energetic and loving mother. She hosted birthday pool-parties, took her sons to Great Adventure amusement park, and attended their cello recitals, gymnastics meets, and Little League baseball games. She even ran the refreshment stand at the Delaware Township ball-fields. For the eight years that Benjamin and Christopher were in high school, she drove them almost nightly to gymnastics practices nearly an hour away. While her sons practiced, she frequently transformed the dank, fluorescent-lit gym-lobbies with their tin folding chairs into mobile office-spaces where she and her students could work on articles together.

In 1977 Carolyn married George H. Collier, also a Professor at Rutgers, becoming stepmother to three more sons, Chip, Jon, and James. She and George spent the rest of her life together on their beloved farm on Pine Hill Road, which they shared with chickens, sheep, horses, goats, ducks, even a cockatiel and a pet skunk. In 1992 Carolyn and George became the owners of a dearly loved golden retriever named Hannah, who kept them company and ghost-wrote the family’s annual holiday letter for the next sixteen years.

And then there were cats, so many one cannot count – though at one point in the early 1980s, there were twenty-seven. When she worked at home, Carolyn’s papers were invariably kept warm by one. Some of her favorites were Julius and Moses (named after Philadelphia basketball stars), Ozzie and Harriet (named after the television figures), Eponine and Cosette (named after characters in Les Misérables), Mikey and Jackson (named after the 1988 democratic candidates for president), and her first and probably favorite of all, Foggy – a rotund, deep-gray, enigmatic female whom Carolyn dramatically referred to as “The Fog.”

In 1987, Carolyn was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Her health dwindled gradually across the next two decades. Yet even as her motor skills diminished, her determination to contribute at the highest level to her profession never wavered. She could often be found typing away into the early hours of morning, one finger at a time, wrapping up an article or commenting on a student’s thesis, racing the clock against her debilitation.

Throughout these decades of decline, Carolyn took comfort (or, as was more often the case, pain) in watching the Philadelphia Phillies and Philadelphia Eagles play on television. Confined mostly to her bed in her final years, she kept her radio continually tuned to a local sports-talk station and occasionally even phoned in to comment on Andy Reid’s play-calling or the Phillies’ bullpen.

Starting in 2008, Carolyn received loving care from Beth Harper and Tara Krommelbein. Together they made it possible for Carolyn to remain in her cherished farmhouse despite dire health problems. Beth and Tara even drove her to Rutgers and wheeled her to the classrooms in which she continued to teach until 2013.

Carolyn was committed to her local community and its environment. She was a member of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation and served on the board of a local historical preservation group. She donated the acreage outside her kitchen window to the Green Acres Farm Preservation program, ensuring that it would remain forever green.

Surviving Carolyn are her husband, George Henry Collier; two sons, George Benjamin Rovee, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his wife Kersten; and Christopher Rovee, of Palo Alto, California, and his companion Giovanna Ceserani; and three stepsons, George Collier, Jr., of Califon, New Jersey, and his wife Aylin; Jon Collier, of Tampa, Florida; and James Collier, of Delaware Township, New Jersey. She also is survived by two grandsons, Julian Rovee and Zachary Rovee, and one step-granddaughter, Emilia Moore.

Memorial contributions may be made to the University Laboratory School Foundation (www.ulsfoundation-lsu.org), which has established a "Carolyn Kent Rovee-Collier '59 Memorial Scholarship" for young women interested in pursuing advanced studies in the human sciences.

The flag in front of the Old Queen’s Building at Rutgers will be lowered to half-staff in Carolyn’s honor, on October 21 and 22.

In keeping with Carolyn’s wishes, there will be a memorial gathering at her farmhouse; details will be announced at a later date. Her ashes will also be sprinkled in the green field which she so loved to look at.

Funeral arrangements are under the direction of the Holcombe-Fisher Funeral Home, 147 Main Street, Flemington, NJ.

Please visit www.holcombefisher.com for further information, or to send condolences.