Joseph P. Keithley is the former chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer of Keithley Instruments, Inc., a Cleveland-based provider of advanced electrical instrumentation for the electronics industry. Upon graduation from Cornell University (B.S., 1971; M.S., Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, 1972), Keithley joined Eaton Corporation where he worked as a manufacturing engineer and later as a market research analyst in the Truck Component Group. In 1976, he received an M.B.A. with distinction from the University of Michigan and that same year joined Keithley Instruments, holding various positions in manufacturing, sales, marketing and division management. In 2010, the company was acquired by Danaher Corporation.

Keithley is a member of the board of trustees of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and the visiting committee of the Case School of Engineering. He also serves on the advisory council of Cornell University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He and his wife, Nancy, have endowed the Keithley Fund for Artistic Collaboration to support the Cleveland Orchestra’s collaborations with other major institutions in northeast Ohio, and particularly with the Cleveland Museum of Art. The gift will provide short-term funding for annual artistic collaboration, and provide a portion of endowment funding for the Cleveland Orchestra’s long-term goal of fully endowing artistic collaboration. In 2013, the couple funded the Nancy and Joseph Keithley Institute for Art History, a collaborative doctoral program between CWRU and the Cleveland Museum of Art.