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…
Cynthia RockwellJennifer 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.…
Gabe Rosenberg '16Andrew McCulloch ’76, president of Kaiser Permanente’s Northwest region, was one of a team of 11 “Health Care Heroes” honored as Statesman of the Year by the Oregon Business Association in 2012. Instead of one “Statesman,” the association decided to recognize pre-eminent contributors to health reform. Kaiser Permanente is an integrated health care delivery organization combining a nonprofit insurance plan with its own hospitals and clinics. With over 37 hospitals, 17,000 doctors, and a state-of-the-art electronic medical record system, the organization has achieved highly coordinated and personalized patient care while focusing on keeping people healthy and preventing illness. As president…
The 36th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held in Brooklyn, N.Y. March 8–10 proved to be a great place for Wesleyan alumni to shine. Out of nearly 600 contestants from all over the country, Jesse Lansner ’96 came in 57th; Olin Documents Librarian Ehrhard Konerding MALS ’82 came in 62nd—both in the top 15 percent. “This is my fifth time at this competition,” said Konerding, adding, “my first year, when Jesse and I were rookies, we got second and I got third in that category.” Konerding noted that the puzzlers tend to know each other, traveling around in the same circuit…
David LowBetty Goes Vegan (Grand Central Publishing) by Annie and Dan Shannon ‘01 is one of the first comprehensive, everyday cookbooks for creating meals for today's vegan family. This must-have guide features more than 500 recipes inspired by The Betty Crocker Cookbook, as well as hundreds of original, never-before-seen recipes that may also entice meat eaters. In preparation for the book, the authors attempted to cook all the Betty Crocker recipes vegan-style. The book offers insight into why Betty Crocker has been an icon in American cooking for so long—and why she still represents a certain style of the modern super-woman…
Olivia DrakeSinger-songwriter Tess Amodeo-Vickery '07 debuts her first music video "When I Think about You" on YouTube. The video was filmed in Rome, Italy with director Federico Iris Osmo Tinelli. [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3RVJ2GnKo&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
Jodi Daynard ’79 recently published her first novel, The Midwife’s Revolt (Opossum Press), a work of historical fiction set during the founding days of America. The novel centers on midwife Lizzie Boylston from her grieving days of widowhood after Bunker Hill, to her deepening friendship with Abigail Adams, and finally to her dangerous work as a spy for the Cause. Daynard takes the reader into the real lives of colonial women patriots and explores human connections in a violent time. According to Publishers Weekly, the book is “a charming, unexpected, and decidedly different take on the Revolutionary War.” Daynard also is…
Respected tax scholar Leonard Burman ’75 is the co-writer (with Joel Slemrod) of Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), a clear, concise explanation of how the U.S. tax system works, how it affects people and businesses, and how it might be improved. This highly accessible book, organized in a question-and-answer format, describes the intricacies of the modern tax system in an easy-to-grasp manner. The book starts with the basic definitions of taxes and then examines more complicated and controversial issues. They address such questions as: How much more tax could the IRS collect with better…
Jeanine Basinger, the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, is the author of I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies, published by Knopf in January 2013. This extensively researched and illustrated book examines “the marriage movie;” what it is (or isn’t) and what it has to tell us about the movies—and ourselves. As long as there have been feature movies there have been marriage movies, and yet Hollywood has always been cautious about how to label them—perhaps because, unlike any other genre of film, the marriage movie resonates directly with the experience of almost every adult…
Norman Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, translated Comtesse Anna de Noailles' A Life of Poems, Poems of a Life. The poetry collection was published by Black Widow Press in 2012. A poet whose reputation has lasted beyond the popularity of her actual works, de Noailles was respected and beloved by France's literary and lay population alike, counting among her admirers such figures as Proust, Cocteau, Colette and many others. Seemingly unconcerned with the tenets of this or that poetic school, she tuned the traditional elements of French prosody to her personal lyrical use, refusing however to be straitjacketed…
A paper co-authored by Rich Olson, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, and Sophia Levan '12 was published in The Journal of Molecular Biology, March 2013. The article is titled, "Vibrio cholerae Cytolysin Recognizes the Heptasaccharide Core of Complex N-Glycans with Nanomolar Affinity." The human intestinal pathogen Vibrio cholerae secretes a pore-forming toxin, V.cholerae cytolysin (VCC), which contains two domains that are structurally similar to known carbohydrate-binding proteins. Olson and Levan used a combination of structural and functional approaches to characterize the carbohydrate-binding activity of the VCC toxin. At Wesleyan, Levan was the recipient of the Butterfield Prize, the Graham Prize…