Cynthia RockwellDr. Jeffrey Burns ’80, chief of critical care at Boston Children’s Hospital and associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, is program director of OPENPediatrics, the newly created and first cloud-based global education technology platform designed to improve the exchange of medical knowledge on critically ill children around the world. OPENPediatrics was created by IBM and Boston Children's Hospital. “Nothing breaks down walls and brings people together like caring for a critically ill child," said Burns in an IBM press release, noting that with the corporation’s “technology and services arsenal” and the hospital’s expertise in pediatric critical care, the…
Joshua Horwitz ’91, a student at Wilkes University’s graduate creative writing program was awarded the 2013 Beverly Blakeslee Hiscox ’58 Scholarship. The scholarship was established by Hiscox's children to honor their mother's service to Wilkes University as a trustee from 1986-2003, and first preference is given to a non-traditional student with family responsibilities. Horwitz is pursuing his master of arts in creative nonfiction, studying memoir under his mentor Beverly Donofrio ’78, author of Riding In Cars With Boys (1992) and, most recently, Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace (2013). Horwitz’s work-in-progress, titled Once Upon a Mania, explores a…
Richard Locke ’81 was named director of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. On leave from the MIT Political Science Department, he was previously deputy dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management. Locke’s current research focuses on improving the safety and environmental conditions for workers in global supply chains. The author of four books, he most recently published The Promise and Limits of Private Power (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In a recent Q&A for the Brown Magazine, he spoke on his hopes and expectations that the Watson Institute will build on Brown’s strong foundation as well as strengthen its…
Sasha Chanoff ’94, founder and executive director of RefugePoint, hosted an inaugural event on June 19 in advance of World Refugee Day in Cambridge, Mass., near the organization’s headquarters. Featured was the work of photojournalist Amy Toensing, a regular contributor to National Geographic, whose latest project, In the Shadows: Urban Refugee Children, documented the lives of urban refugee children in Africa, one of the populations RefugePoint works to protect. RefugePoint, an action-oriented organization, is focused on locating people whose lives are caught in an untenable zone—unable to go home, yet unable to find themselves a new, safe place to live—and helping…
Charisse Lillie ’74, vice president of Community Investment of Comcast Corporation, delivered the 2013 keynote commencement address at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania. The school, the oldest of the historically black colleges and universities in America, was founded in 1837 as the Institute for Colored Youth. Lillie, who holds a J.D. from Temple University and an LLM degree from Yale Law School, received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Cheyney. Cheyney University President Michelle Howard-Vital welcomed Lillie, saying that her “many accomplishments will inspire our new graduates to aim high as they approach their future.” Lillie urged the new Cheyney graduates…
Katherine 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.…
In his role as 2013 Distinguished Teaching Fellow, Andy Szegedy-Maszak, professor of classical studies and the Jane A. Seney Professor of Greek, brought a slice of Wesleyan to members of the Wesleyan community—alumni, parents, admitted students—living in select cities on the West Coast. The Distinguished Teaching Fellowship—of which Szegedy-Maszak is the first recipient—offers the professor the opportunity to teach a course outside of his/her usual departmental offerings. Szegedy-Maszak is teaching a course through the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life on photography and its effect on social movements. It was this topic he explored in his WESeminar on the Road,…
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…
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…
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.…
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…