Cynthia RockwellKatherine Krug ’04, COO and co-founder of tech startup Everest, was recently featured by Forbes contributor Leslie Bradshaw as part of a running series on the rise of female chief operating officers. A psychology major as an undergraduate, Krug left the corporate world to become a tech entrepreneur, first founding a startup dedicated to changing the way nonprofits raise funds, before moving on to co-found Everest. Krug looks back on her decision to dive into entrepreneurship as one of the most personally fulfilling she’s ever made. “I now leave work everyday with more energy than when I arrived,” says Krug.…
Gabe Rosenberg '16A litigation associate at Squire Sanders, Dan Matzkin ’06 beat out several hundred other applicants for a clerkship with Judge Adalberto Jordan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Matzkin also has been blind since birth with a condition called Leber congenital amaurosis. It didn’t hold him back, however, from earning an undergraduate degree with honors, double-majoring in Wesleyan’s College of Letters and Classics or graduating from law school at the University of Michigan. While Jordan had reservations about how someone with such a disability could manage the challenges of legal practice, which include reading hundreds of…
David LowSebastian Junger ’84 has directed a new documentary, Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, which premiered on HBO this month. The film covers Hertherington’s career as a war photographer, from his earliest days covering the civil war in Liberia to his final days in Misrata. He was killed in 2011 at age 40 in the siege of Misrata during Libya's civil war. Junger pays tribute to Hetherington's video and still photography and how he engaged himself on a personal level with his subjects. Junger and Hetherington were co-directors of the acclaimed…
Best-selling author Mary Roach 81 has just published her latest gift to readers, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W. W. Norton), in which she takes a memorable tour inside and outside of the body. Her fascinating book on the process of eating brings readers upclose with the bodily equipment that turns food into the nutrients and sustenance that keeps us ticking. On her quest for knowledge of the digestive tract, Roach meets with professors and technicians, murderers, mad scientists, Eskimos, exorcists, rabbis and other unique characters. She is fearless in asking taboo and embarrassing questions with relish and humor.…
Lily Baggott '15Plate subduction, magmatism, and mantle plumes are the focus of a recent study by Christopher Kincaid ’83, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. A highly contested topic, the three proposed causes of volcanism in the northwestern United States led Kincaid and his team aboard the RV Endeavor to publish an article in the scientific journal Nature. “I always tell people that I got on this track to being an oceanographer because of my time at Wes,” Kincaid said. “I can trace it back to taking small geology classes alongside master’s level grad students. It made a huge…
Jack DiSciacca '07 is first author on a paper that appeared in the April issue of Physical Review Letters, a premier journal for physics. Now a Ph.D candidate at Harvard, DiSciacca earned his undergraduate degree with high honors; Foss Professor of Physics Tom Morgan was his advisor. The published paper, “One Particle Measurement of the Anti-Proton Magnetic Moment,” details DiSciacca’s research on the antiproton, which is an antimatter particle. Morgan explains, “DiSciacca spent the last six months at CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research], at the same accelerator facility where physicists recently discovered the Higgs boson to measure the…
Mark Saba ’81 recently released Painting A Disappearing Canvas (Grayson Books), a collection of poems spanning 30 years. Centering on his Polish and Italian roots in Pittsburgh, the poems focus on the subject of family life and universal themes of what it means to be alive. Paolo Valesio, professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, writes in the book’s foreword that Saba is a “writer who meditates on the entanglement of his roots and who sounds as if he is tenderly worried that his children not be too bound up with this entanglement while at the same time he is…
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Invited to participate in a local TEDx Talk, Vivian Chau Best ’03 spoke on her “Give It Fresh Today” —or G.I.F.T.—program, in which people at farmers markets will buy a little extra to donate it to homeless shelters. She said she was traveling in Chicago when she first saw a donation table at a local farmers market and was determined to bring the concept back to Hawaii, where she now lives. She notes that people normally give canned food to a shelter, but the table in Chicago challenged her to think about “what it would feel like to eat something…
Sasha Chanoff ’94 and the organization he founded, RefugePoint, were featured prominently on several national media outlets recently, including a special on 60 Minutes on Sunday, March 31. RefugePoint works throughout Africa identifying refugees in life-threatening situations and relocating them to safety. The CBS news show, 60 Minutes, aired a two-part 20-minute special March 31, on the resettlement of the Sudanese Lost Boys and what has happened over the past decade since they've arrived in the United States. Chanoff was instrumental in facilitating this story and was featured in the segment, which included footage of his original contact with these…
Kate Carlisle“Being called a salesperson is not a perjorative term,” said Stephen McCarthy ’75. McCarthy, senior vice president of KCG Capital Advisors and co-founder of Wesleyan Alumni in Philanthropy and Public Service, led 10 students in a “Social Entrepreneurship Boot Camp” March 28 at the Patricelli Center. The session on “business plan essentials” covered what it takes to sell an idea, get funding and launch a project. McCarthy stressed the importance of knowing your audience when pitching ideas, leveraging funding to attract new investors, lining up advisors and measuring success. He also sampled and critiqued proposals he is currently reviewing for…
Jennifer Sorenson ’01 is one of only three women from the Natural Resources Defense Council’s San Francisco office to be recognized as a "rising star." In an NRDC press release, the women were lauded as “represent[ing] the next generation of the Bay Area’s environmental movement, seeking innovative new solutions to the world’s greatest environmental and health challenges.” Sorenson was one of 12 lawyers to receive a Distinguished Environmental Advocates Award at the American Bar Association's Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources (SEER) at their annual spring conference in March. Sorenson serves as chief litigator in a case challenging the U.S.…