Mike SembosIn November 2013, the White House nominated Stefan Selig ’84 as under secretary of international trade for the United States Department of Commerce. Since 2009, he’s served as executive vice chairman of global corporate and investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The Obama administration rarely appoints Wall Street bankers, especially from Bank of America, so this is an exceptional case. If confirmed by the senate, Selig will head the International Trade Administration, working toward the expansion of American industry, job creation and the promotion of exports. Selig earned his BA from Wesleyan and an MBA from Harvard Business…
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The artwork of Assistant Professor of Art Sasha Rudensky ’01 has been featured in a multi-page spread in the January 2014 issue of Rangefinder, a monthly magazine for the professional wedding and portrait photographer. The story is called “Culture of Brightness,” and it explores Rudensky’s “Brightness” photo series, in which she documents the lives of everyday Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. The collection was four years in the making. Rudensky herself was born in Moscow in 1979, and in the article she explains that in Russian-Ukrainian culture, the concept of “bright” is a synonym for “being beautiful, unforgettable — something that…
Hankus Netsky, who received a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan in 2004, has been chosen by the editorial staff of The Forward — a well-respected weekly newspaper covering the Jewish world — as one of the 50 American Jews who have had the greatest impact on the world in 2013, alongside the likes of Harvey Fierstein, Mandy Patinkin and Janet Yellen. Netsky is the chair of the contemporary improvisation department at the New England Conservatory of Music. He has mentored countless young Jewish musicians, many of whom attended NEC primarily to study with him, and has guided jazz and classical…
Maggie McLean Suniewick ’97, who served as vice president of programming for Comcast Cable, has been named senior vice president of Strategic Integration, linking NBCUniversal and Comcast. It is now her task to find creative, technological and strategic opportunities between Comcast, the nation’s largest video, high-speed Internet and phone provider, and NBCUniversal’s portfolio, which includes broadcast networks (17 cable networks and more than 50 digital properties), a motion picture company, television production operations, a television stations group and theme parks. Suniewick — an economics major at Wesleyan who went on to obtain an MBA from Columbia — will lead the charge on NBCUniversal’s…
Taft Armandroff ’82 has been appointed as director of the University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas. He’ll be moving to the Lone Star State in June 2014 to claim his new position. Armandroff’s specialties include dwarf spheroidal galaxies, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, and globular clusters. He will soon be leaving his current position as director of the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Prior to Keck, he worked for 19 years at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Ariz., having earned his BA in astronomy with honors…
Spelman College President Beverly Daniel Tatum ’75 was presented with a national academic leadership award from the Carnegie Corp. of New York in December 2013. She was the first recipient from a historically black college and the first ever in the state of Georgia. Tatum was selected because of her work supporting female students pursuing science, technology, engineering and math at the university. More African-American women earned doctorates at Spelman in those fields between 1997 and 2006 than at Georgia Tech, Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill combined. Tatum was a psychology major at Wesleyan who went…
Since September 2013, Paul Chill ’78 has been presiding as the associate dean for clinical and experimental education at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He first joined the UConn faculty in 1988 and is known for his advocacy on behalf of parents and families. Chill teaches legal ethics, legal interviewing, counseling and negotiation, torts and criminal law and has supervised clinical programs relating to child protection, civil rights, disability, mental health law and mediation. Between his time as a government major at Wesleyan and the present, he has worked with dangerous juvenile offenders, graduated from UConn Law (in…
Laurenellen McCann ’09 is the executive producer of the hour-long, weekly podcast/radio show The Good Fight with Ben Wikler, a program that covers grassroots activism and politics with a humorous edge. Its listener base includes fans of NPR and The Colbert Report. She was formerly the national policy manager at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that calls for heavier government accountability. Time magazine editors and a panel of millennials recognized Larenellen’s achievements by including her on their list of “30 People Under 30 Changing the World.” Follow Larenellen on Twitter @elle_mccann to keep up with her daily activities.