{"id":3091,"date":"2019-04-25T11:53:19","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T15:53:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aviationheritagearea.org\/?p=3051"},"modified":"2019-04-25T11:53:19","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T15:53:19","slug":"amanda-wright-lane-to-receive-honorary-degree-from-wright-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/amanda-wright-lane-to-receive-honorary-degree-from-wright-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Amanda Wright Lane to receive honorary degree from Wright State"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: Amanda Wright Lane is a volunteer trustee for the National Aviation Heritage Alliance<\/a>.
\nReprinted with permission by Wright State University.<\/a>
\nBy\u00a0Bob Mihalek<\/a> |\u00a0Published\u00a0April 24, 2019
\nAmanda Wright Lane, great grandniece of Wilbur and Orville Wright, will receive an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Wright State University\u00a0at spring commencement.
\nThe university\u2019s graduation ceremony begins at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 4, in the Wright State Nutter Center. The spring class of 2019 includes 2,082 graduates.
\nAmanda Wright Lane is the fourth member of the Wright family to receive an honorary degree from Wright State. Her great aunt and uncle, Ivonette Wright Miller and Horace Wright, received honorary degrees in 1981, and her father, Wilkinson Wright, was honored in 1999.
\n\u201cI consider it a high, high honor,\u201d she said. \u201cI was so proud the day my dad received his degree, his passion for this university was so evident. And I believe I caught that passion too!\u201d
\nShe said the honorary degree is wonderful recognition of the volunteer work she has done at the university \u201cjust as my father and great aunt and uncle did before me.\u201d
\n\u201cI am not sure how to define what it is that I do \u2014 connect people with a love of aviation, share a legacy that really belongs to all of us and take Dayton\u2019s message of innovation around the world,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it certainly is terrific to know Wright State values something I love to do.\u201d
\nWright Lane is an enthusiastic supporter of Wright State, saying she has a deep appreciation for the university\u2019s mission of reaching out to a student population that can be overlooked.
\n\u201cOne of the things I\u2019ve always admired about the university is its interest in meeting students where they are \u2014 an acceptance of students who come from different backgrounds, who have different abilities academically and physically and who also may be in different stages in their lives when they begin their education,\u201d she said. \u201cMy great granduncles certainly were different in their thinking, and early on they struggled to find acceptance of themselves and their ideas.\u201d
\nAs co-chair, Wright Lane played an instrumental role in the success of Rise. Shine. The Campaign for Wright State University, which raised more than $167.7 million. She is currently co-chair of\u00a0Discover Your Story: The Campaign for the Wright State University Archives Center<\/a>. The $6.5 million fundraising campaign will move the Special Collections and Archives<\/a> to a new home.
\nSpecial Collections and Archives is home to the largest repository of Wright family materials in the world, featuring more than 4,000 original photographs, documents, publications, medals and awards. For 30 years, Wright Lane has been a frequent visitor to Special Collections and Archives, bringing guests from around the world to campus to see her family\u2019s personal papers, diaries, photos and memorabilia.
\nLike so many others, Wright Lane knew from history books that the Wright brothers were the first to fly. However, after many visits to the archives she discovered the men behind the history \u2014 they were sons, businessmen, uncles and, of course, brothers.
\n\u201cThe scientific process they developed that led to the invention of the airplane and human flight was brilliant. They achieved what was thought to be impossible,\u201d Wright Lane said. \u201cBut understanding who these two young Midwestern men were and the environment they came from is by far the most interesting part of their story to me.\u201d
\nOnce the Wright State Archives Center opens, Wright Lane said she envisions it becoming a hub of many activities for the university and a place that attracts not only researchers but also community groups, educators and children.
\n\u201cIt should be a dynamic meeting space for Wright State that is not only a comfortable place for students to explore or do some studying, but a place the public will enjoy as well,\u201d she said.
\nWright Lane regularly consults with aviation experts and scholars studying the Wright brothers\u2019 history, including Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough<\/a>, who conducted research in\u00a0Special Collections and Archives\u00a0for his book\u00a0 The Wright Brothers<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 She also works with community leaders in both Ohio and North Carolina to raise awareness for the two national parks dedicated to telling the story of her great granduncles.
\nWright Lane is a trustee of the Wright Brothers Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports the preservation of aviation history related to the lives of the Wright brothers. Since its inception in 1990, the Wright Brothers Family Foundation has donated approximately $1.5 million to aviation-related organizations in the United States and abroad.
\nShe also serves on the boards of the National Aviation Heritage Alliance<\/a>, Wright Image Group<\/a>, Wright B Flyer, Inc., and the First Flight Foundation<\/a> in North Carolina, as well as on the Ohio Aerospace and Aviation Council<\/a>. She was appointed by President Obama to the advisory council<\/a> of the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum<\/a>.
\nWright Lane has received the Public Service Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Aviation Trail\u2019s Trailblazer Award and the lvonette Wright Miller Award for volunteerism from the National Aviation Heritage Alliance. She has also been recognized by the Kittyhawk Chapter of the Air Force Association and was named a Woman of Influence by the YWCA Dayton and one of Dayton\u2019s Top Ten Women.
\nShe served on the Le Mans Sarthe Centennial Committee celebrating the first powered flight in Europe, achieved by Wilbur Wright in 1908. She also represented her family at Wright brothers\u2019 events in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Brazil. She has served as a Wright family spokesperson<\/a> many times at the Paris and Farnborough International Air Shows, beginning in 2003.
\n\u201cI\u2019m extremely proud to be able to share the Wrights\u2019 legacy with people from around the nation and around the world, but also to share Dayton\u2019s legacy \u2014 because I\u2019m not sure that the Wrights could have done what they did if they hadn\u2019t grown up in Dayton, Ohio,\u201d she said.
\nWright Lane graduated with a bachelor\u2019s degree from Miami University and as a volunteer founded three children\u2019s educational and social programs for her community\u2019s schools in Cincinnati. She and her husband, Don, have two children, Brenden, a graduate of Stanford University who lives with his wife, Erin, in San Francisco, and Meredith, a doctoral graduate from The Ohio State University who lives with her spouse, Pablo, and their two children, Rehn and Grey, in Columbus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: Amanda Wright Lane is a volunteer trustee for the National Aviation Heritage Alliance. Reprinted with permission by Wright State University. By\u00a0Bob Mihalek |\u00a0Published\u00a0April 24, 2019 Amanda Wright Lane, great grandniece of Wilbur and Orville Wright, will receive an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Wright State University\u00a0at spring commencement. The university\u2019s graduation ceremony begins […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3052,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39,412,119,14,11,198,766],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3091"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visitnaha.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}