Beginnings

When I was barely a teenager, my grandmother gave me a birthday gift that still astonishes me. It was amazing to me then because I couldn’t believe that I would be on the same continent, in the same city, and on the same acre of land as my musical idols. I’m boggled even now, because I realize that my stoic, sometimes stern, and mostly ancient grandmother somehow knew exactly what to buy a teenage girl in the summer of 1965. She bought me a pair of tickets to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

So, on a steamy August night, my Beatles-loving friend, Pam, and I were shepherded onto a mobbed subway by Pam’s father, who seemed as overwhelmed as we were.  At Shea Stadium, he took us to our section gate and reluctantly sent us on our way, alone, except for the 55,000 or so other giddy teenagers who were there that night.

That event still resonates with me, all these years later. It wasn’t just seeing  John, Paul, George, and Ringo alive, in front of us, rather than on the Ed Sullivan Show or on our favorite album cover. (Though, I admit, the Fab Four were roughly the size of ants as we watched the center-field stage from our stadium seats.) It also was about being in the hubbub of New York City that night, taking the Flushing No. 7 car to Shea Stadium in a literal crush of humanity, and beginning to feel the glimmers of just how exciting life might become.

Since that August night in 1965, I’ve seen and heard and experienced many other artful wonders that have opened up an ever-larger world to me, among them the vibrant, startling paintings of Vincent Van Gogh;  Judith Jamison flowing across a stage in the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater’s Cry, River; the exquisite marble sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the joys of Henry Moore’s primitive stone shapes; Jamaica Kincaid reading her lyrical prose; the spare elegance of Japanese ikebana; the luminous voice of countertenor Bejun Mehta in Handel’s opera Julius Caesar. Art opens the door to new perceptions, new possibilities.

I’m especially fond of this issue of Pitt Magazine, because several of the features are about the transforming power of art. Better yet, this issue shows the broader connections between transformational experiences, University life, and the lasting influence of higher education. After all, on a grand scale, the University exposes us to life’s possibilities and encourages us to see more, to understand more, to seek more.

Driving home from the office this week, I noticed a bumper sticker on the station wagon ahead of me.  It read: The truly educated never graduate. In this season of graduations, it’s helpful to remember that we mark the end of University life with a ceremony called Commencement—the beginning of something new.

That’s the promise of art, of education, of life. There’s always something ahead of us to be discovered. Astonishing.

Cindy Gill
Editor in Chief

Phenomenal

A very fine university magazine.
I read it all the time. The Winter 2009 issue had a good article on “Phenomenal Women.” I can’t wait for the next Pitt Magazine issue with “Phenomenal Men.”

Frank Molesky
Arts and Sciences ’67
Marietta, Ga.

Phenomenal, Too

I recently finished reading the Winter 2009 issue of Pitt Magazine and was particularly interested in your piece on “Phenomenal Women.” Since its founding in 1939, the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Nursing has graduated legions of highly successful women scholars and clinicians. In addition, Pitt’s PhD program in Nursing was one of the first in the nation and prepared many for successful academic careers. I hope that as we celebrate women at Pitt, we celebrate these outstanding women as well.

Margaret Grey
Nursing ’70
Dean and Annie Goodrich Professor
Yale University School of Nursing
New Haven, Conn.

Also
Phenomenal

Congratulations to your great article on “Phenomenal Women.” I’d like to add the name of Dr. Hilda Kreger to that list. Dr. Kreger taught with distinction in the Graduate School of Public Health in the 1960s-70s. She was a practicing physician and hospital administrator prior to that. Her last place to serve in the capacity of administrator was as CEO of Pittsburgh’s Magee-Womens Hospital. She was an inspiration to all of us who were under her instruction. She embodied the spirit of Pitt—an outstanding woman, physician, administrator, and professor.

Michael C. Waters
Graduate School of Public Health ’67
Dallas, Texas

And Again!

Congratulations on the most recent Pitt Magazine. I thought the piece on “Phenomenal Women” was outstanding: Two of them part of the National Academy—Wow!—and all the rest really impressive, too. Great article, good concept, nicely done.

Keith Brown
Emeritus Faculty, Anthropology
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pa.

Remembering
That Smile

Being a science major at Pitt in the mid-80’s, I was ever on the lookout for an interesting elective to round out my intense core classes. Ghosts, Masks, and Actors fit the bill perfectly. The class explored the various Japanese theater types (Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku) as well as later Japanese cinema masterpieces (e.g., Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress). The instructor was a slight Japanese woman in her 30s who was quick to smile and laugh. She informed us early in the semester that all of her tests would be open book. Test content would come almost exclusively from class notes. That being said, she strongly encouraged attendance so that when test time rolled around we wouldn’t find ourselves “in a pickle” (as she was so fond of saying).  She was truly a delight. Years later, I remember few of my professors and even fewer by name.  Keiko McDonald is the exception. She always smiled, made me laugh, and took me away from science and back to Feudal Japan a couple of times a month. She is surely missed by all those closest to her.

Brent Jones
Arts and Sciences ’89
Glenmoore, Pa.

Mining Life

I enjoy receiving the magazine. Thank you for publishing the lovely article, “Mining for Energy,” and the story behind the rebirth of mining engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering. I was overwhelmed with pride earlier this year, when the Department of Civil Engineering awarded me recognition as a Distinguished Alumnus. Seeing the article later in the same week made the experience especially gratifying. Pitt and mining have both been extremely important in my career and my life. It’s rare to read positive stories about coal mining these days, and I and my company, CONSOL Energy, work hard to get out the word about all of the great benefits the industry
provides.

James J. McCaffrey
Engineering ’78, Business ’87G
Washington, Pa.

Pitt restored Oakland’s historic University Club, and this spring opened the site as a membership club. As an on-campus gathering place for faculty and staff, the club includes dining areas, conference space, a library, a fitness center, and other amenities. The facility also is open to the community for wedding receptions, banquets, conferences, and other social events.

Pitt’s recycling program diverted nearly 40 percent of the institution’s waste materials from being sent to landfills last year. The University was recognized for these and other related efforts with a 2009 Enviro-Star Award from the Allegheny County Health Department for ongoing commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainability. More than a dozen businesses and institutions received the award, but Pitt was the only one to receive a three-star rating, the highest distinction.

Wearing blue rubber gloves, the high school freshman gingerly handles a petri dish full of agar, a gelatinous substance that’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet for bacteria. He’s standing in a bright lab. He places the dish in a nearby incubator; overnight, the bacteria should munch and multiply into millions of feasting colonies.

Ben Nolan is one of about 20 students in the lab who are studying microscopic life and gaining new science skills for the future. The students are in the University of Pittsburgh’s mobile 70-foot tractor-trailer, a lab on wheels that travels to middle and high schools in Western Pennsylvania.

At about 8 feet wide, the lab is stuffed with 26 work stations and screens that magnify microscope findings. The equipment gives students a chance to conduct college-level hands-on research and open their minds to science careers.

Fourteen-year-old Nolan, from Bethel Park High School, will spend his science class in the lab using micropipettes to experiment with a nonharmful form of salmonella bacteria. He is investigating natural selection and examining how amoebas eat other bacteria.

His science teacher, Barbara Eisel, is thrilled. Some of her students are so excited by the lab, they are volunteering for extra science time. Thrilled, too, is Alison Slinskey Legg, director of Outreach Programs for Pitt’s Department of Biological Sciences. Her offices develop lab programs and monitor the mobile lab. She is observing students’ experiences during the lab’s first days at Bethel Park, hopeful that the lab will expand Pitt’s biological sciences outreach beyond the 4,000 Allegheny County students participating each year. “Our outreach program is operating at full capacity, and demand was beginning to exceed our capabilities,” says Slinskey Legg. “We were limited by what we could physically bring to a school, and the mobile lab removes that limitation.”

The science lab traveled a long, winding road to Pitt. It took several years of advocacy by the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative, the Pittsburgh-based Lyceum Group, and Slinskey Legg, along with science and education groups, to make the mobile lab a reality. Last year, purchase of the lab and operational support were made possible with help from Steven Reis, Pitt associate vice chancellor for clinical research, health sciences; and director of the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. The institute also plans to use the mobile lab to conduct segments of research studies “on the road,” increasing the experimental protocols available in rural areas and creating opportunities to educate adults about the benefits of clinical trials.

Funding from the National Center for Research Resources—part of the National Institutes of Health—and from Pitt investments keeps the lab rolling into diverse communities and neighborhoods, where teachers welcome the new equipment and opportunity to connect with professional scientists.

Now, thanks to this lab on wheels, students like Nolan—who wants to be a marine biologist—can get a closer look at what it takes to succeed in science.

Four business students sit nervously in a conference room at the Pittsburgh headquarters of telecom giant Ericsson, where they are being addressed by a group of senior managers. The Pitt MBA students are handed a challenge that would test even the most seasoned corporate executives. In just three months, they must analyze the market for a new product that could transform the way people communicate—and figure out how Ericsson can position itself as the leader of this coming revolution.

The managers explain that the product, known as quadplay, refers to using the same networks to provide television, home and mobile phone services, and broadband Internet. These megabundles would offer consumers unprecedented digital freedom, they say. The Pitt students nod intently and take notes, trying to understand what quadplay is and why customers would want it.

“We walked into that first meeting not knowing what it was, and I’m not sure our client did either,” student Tom Higgins recalls later. Through subsequent meetings and phone calls and e-mails, the Pitt students and Ericsson business executives clarified how the new product would connect household digital devices. Customers could, for example,  use their cell phones to record programs on their TVs or continue watching a favorite sitcom when they leave their homes.

Higgins and his teammates—Craig Romanek, Tien-I Shen, and Gurpreet Ubhi—collaborated with Ericsson last fall through a Pitt project course in which MBA students worked in consulting teams to advise local companies and governmental organizations on real-world problems. For their project, they carried out a national survey to study the consumer market for quadplay. They interviewed top executives at leading communications companies to dissect the customer base, growth patterns, and financials. They also used advanced strategic planning methods to develop a program Ericsson could follow to implement quadplay.

Their extensive research and hard work earned them the top prize among 70 students participating in the Katz School’s McKinsey Cup Playoffs last year. Launched in 2006, the competition is sponsored by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company to reward students for excellence in business consulting. “The McKinsey Cup competition is part of a broader effort at the Katz School to give our students an increasing amount of experience-based learning so they have the tools to understand the business process,” says Bud Smith Jr., clinical professor of strategy, environment, and organization, who leads the project course.

In honor of the victory, the four students’ names were inscribed on the winners’ trophy. But more importantly, they learned firsthand how a business operates and what’s happening in today’s warp-speed world of communications technology.

“Everyone will start hearing about quadplay in three to five years,” Higgins predicts. Keep your ears open.

Music scores, audio recordings, letters, and other materials that relate to American music are currently housed in multiple archives around the globe. Pitt’s Center for American Music is leading an effort to link all of these materials in one electronic database. This spring, specialists in music and information technology are convening at Pitt to brainstorm ways to create a new, comprehensive reference tool for the study of American music and history. The project is being supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which has predicted that the resulting digital music tool “will serve as a model for libraries across the nation.”

Intelligence and law enforcement agents often use Palantir Government, a software program that helps them to monitor the activities of suspected terrorist groups and to fight cyberterrorism. Pitt students will soon be using the software, too. This year, the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs implemented the technology to train students enrolled in the school’s security and intelligence studies program. Pitt is the first U.S. university to incorporate the software into its curriculum.

In 1829, a young Black man was admitted to the Western University of Pennsylvania, later renamed the University of Pittsburgh. But in that era, Black students were rare. So, then-Chancellor Robert Bruce—who bowed to student opposition to a Black student in the classroom—devised a plan that allowed the young man to sit on a chair just outside the classroom door.  From there, the student could hear the lessons and gain instruction.

That young man, whose name is unknown, was the first of many at the University who endured hardships that eventually paved the way for other Black students to attend Pitt. His story is part of a new documentary, Blue, Gold & Black: From Doorway to Distinction, screened at a world premiere in February. The event was the University’s 2009 K. Leroy Irvis Black History Month Program, commemorating February as Black History Month.

The film, which includes perspectives from Pitt alumni, faculty, and staff of the University, tells the story of the 180-year experience of Black men and women at Pitt. Through their persistence and intelligence, they broke down barriers and took their rightful places in the classrooms, on the playing fields, and in Pitt history.

Millions of Americans live with diabetes. The disease is linked to insufficient insulin, which is needed to fuel cellular energy. Insulin, a hormone, enables glucose to enter cells and produce energy. In people with diabetes, this process isn’t working. Diabetes debilitates the body and increases the risk for heart attack and stroke. Over time, many diabetics suffer from eye problems and kidney disease, and others lose limbs from nerve damage.

Imagine if these problems could all go away.

University of Pittsburgh researchers have made a discovery that moves scientists closer to that goal. The team—led by Andrew F. Stewart, a professor of medicine, and Nathalie Fiaschi-Taesch, an assistant professor of medicine—has been able to induce replication of human insulin-producing cells, known as beta cells.

The Pitt group discovered that insulin-producing human beta cells contain considerable amounts of the protein cdk-6, which modifies the function of other proteins and molecules. The team found that it could replicate and multiply beta cells by boosting production of the protein through manipulation of the cdk-6 gene. Further, the team was able to stimulate creation of additional human beta cells by boosting production of cyclin D1, a molecule that’s vital in a cell’s cycle of life.

When the team’s engineered human beta cells were transplanted into the kidney of a diabetic mouse, the cells continued to replicate, and blood sugar levels stabilized and normalized. When the engineered cells were removed, the mouse again developed diabetes.

These findings give new hope to all who are afflicted with diabetes. “This work provides proof-of-principle that the production of human beta cells can be stimulated and that the newly generated cells function effectively both in the lab and in a living animal,” says Stewart, who also is chief of the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism in Pitt’s School of Medicine.

Forty years ago, a young student found his calling in the “acid pit” of a Pittsburgh steel mill. It was dirty, dangerous, and noisy, where the steel plates were cleaned with acid. Workers were exposed to high-voltage electric lines, and temperatures often rose to 120 degrees. Salt pills and a gallon of water were daily necessities. The acid fumes were so toxic they burned holes in the student’s work clothes.

The mill is gone, but the student, Hide Yamatani, now remembers it wasn’t only the mill’s physical conditions that were troubling. He also was bothered “by a work culture that reflected inflexibility, racism, and gender bias.” Black and female workers, he says, were frequently denied access to the higher-paying, career-building skilled trades in the mill.

These experiences forged Yamatani’s commitment to social justice, influenced his decision to enroll in Pitt’s School of Social Work, and still inform his approach to research.

Today, Yamatani (SOC WK ’71G, ’76G, KGSB ’91) is a Pitt professor of social work and the associate dean for research at the school. Last year, he and several Pitt colleagues released surprising research results based on an evaluation of prisoner rehabilitation at the Allegheny County Jail.

Each day, 40 inmates on average are released from the jail. Within a year, many are back, locked up again in the high-rise facility along the Monongahela River near downtown Pittsburgh. The high expectations inmates often have upon their release can be quickly dashed by the realities of outside life. Once they’ve lost a job or past relationships sour, many inmates spiral downward.

“They’re back in the game, dealing drugs, scrapping for money, hustling and stealing,” says Ramon Rustin, the jail’s warden and a corrections officer for nearly 30 years. “Soon they’ll do something to get caught.”

The pattern isn’t new, according to officials like Rustin, whose observations are borne out in U.S. arrest and conviction figures. In recent years, 44 percent of inmates have been rearrested within the first 12 months following release; nearly 60 percent have been reconvicted within three years, says Yamatani.

A decade ago, county jail officials began tackling in earnest the problem of this relapse into crime. Working with corrections officials and others in human services, the health department, and community groups, they established the Allegheny County Jail Collaborative to help inmates successfully transition to outside life.

In 2004, Yamatani and fellow researchers from the Center on Race and Social Problems, which is housed in Pitt’s School of Social Work, were selected by the collaborative to evaluate the programs that had been designed to reduce a relapse into crime, or recidivism, for inmates at the county jail. The programs centered on drug and alcohol rehabilitation, computer courses, parenting skills, anger management, spirituality, and preparation for passing high school equivalency exams for inmates. Then, upon release from jail, the inmates were referred to some 60 community groups to find housing, jobs, and schooling. But, over the years, no one knew whether the approach was successful.

“All of my information came from inmates who were released and then came back,” Rustin said. “I never heard about the success stories.” There wasn’t evidence that could be used to persuade private foundations or policymakers to back the programs.

When Yamatani and his Pitt colleagues entered the picture, their research produced some surprises. One finding, in particular, grabbed headlines: Male inmates who received collaborative services ranging from job training to drug counseling were less likely to be back in jail within a year. The Pitt researchers found that the recidivism rate—or rate of relapse into crime—was about 50 percent lower for these inmates compared with another group of inmates who hadn’t been exposed to such programs.

By examining past studies and conducting in-depth interviews with

300 former inmates, Yamatani and his team showed that inmates who had come through the system since the start of the Allegheny County Jail Collaborative had a recidivism rate of 16.5 percent—compared to 33.1 percent for those who served time and were released before the jail collaborative existed.

Another surprise: Researchers discovered there was no “statistically significant difference” in recidivism rates between Blacks and Whites among ex-offenders who were released from the jail since the rehabilitation programs were implemented. This contrasted with earlier studies from around the country that found racial disparities in recidivism rates.

Other highlights of the research showed that the collaborative’s efforts saved the county more than $5 million and led to a better housing situation for former inmates. The research findings demonstrate that efforts to help the incarcerated can result in significant positive returns for the larger society, says Larry Davis, the School of Social Work’s dean and Donald M. Henderson Professor. He also directs the school’s Center on Race and Social Problems.

As part of their effort, Yamatani and colleagues also implemented an innovative research approach, using applied collaborative research during their three-year evaluation study. Instead of relying solely on ideas selected by traditional academic researchers, Yamatani and the Pitt group sought input from the community. Last year, Yamatani was honored by the grassroots nonprofit Community Empowerment Association for his commitment to racial justice. It’s important, he says, to understand the role community leaders have in creating positive outcomes. “Community input at the start can help to ensure the ‘right’ questions are asked, leading to meaningful, applicable solutions.”

The final report continues to guide the Allegheny County Jail Collaborative, and the study was selected by the National Institute of Corrections, U.S. Department of Justice, for national access at www.nicic.org/Library/022993.

There have been intangible benefits, too. “It was my first experience with a big school,” Rustin says about working with Yamatani and others at Pitt. “When you are in the [jail], you feel cut off, but when you meet people from an academic setting, it motivates you to look at your own field. It motivates you to do more.”

It’s a characteristic that Rustin shares with Yamatani, who looked around the steel mill where he worked long ago and decided he’d find a way to be an agent for change.

Driving down the highway on a warm autumn day, the third-grade teacher spots something odd. In the sunlight shining off passing cars, a little black line, like a crooked spiral, hovers in the air. She dismisses it, goes to her job, returns home, carries on with her life. But when it happens again, the line takes a little bit of her vision as it departs.

Sarah “Sally” Hobart Alexander was 24 years old when this happened to her in California in 1967. She saw many doctors, but the little lines kept coming back, first in her right eye, then in both. Her vision continued to deteriorate. Eventually, she learned that her eyes were hemorrhaging, and the blood was scarring her retinas. She had to leave her life in California to seek training skills in Pittsburgh, where she lost the remainder of her vision, and where her hearing started to fail, as well.

Pittsburgh also was where Alexander learned braille and other skills to tackle these challenges. In 1973, she earned a graduate degree in social work from Pitt. Then, over the course of a decade, she got married, had two children, became a full-time author of award-winning children’s books, and began teaching as a university adjunct professor.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Alexander’s latest book, coauthored with her husband, Robert, tells the story of another woman who overcame great odds to achieve success: She Touched the World: Laura Bridgman, Deaf-Blind Pioneer (Clarion Books). Bridgman, born in 1829, is considered the first deaf-blind child in America to acquire an English-language education. The book portrays her birth to an emotionally cold family; her toddler-age encounter with scarlet fever, which left her both deaf and blind; the inspiring story of her intellect and education; her fame as a role model; and her accomplishments as an educator. She Touched the World, which also will be available in braille and in recorded and digital formats within the year, shows that Bridgman was a pioneer years before the more famous Helen Keller, who was born in 1880.

Alexander (SOC WK ’73G) is moved by Bridgman’s ability to progress despite others’ ignorance and prejudice. “She was a little bit different. So what?” Alexander says. “If people had better information, they would understand why someone who is blind doesn’t look you directly in the eyes, why they might not have as many facial expressions or use as many gestures. Disability is different, not less than.”

The Pitt graduate has written six books dealing with blindness. She seeks to teach children about disabilities because, she says, so many everyday decisions are based on a gut reaction of “is that person like me?”

In She Touched the World, Alexander shows that all of us share common bonds, and some—like Laura Bridgman—exceed all expectations.

They come lugging folding chairs and coolers, pennants and baseball cards, some with grandchildren in tow. Like a dispersed family returning to an ancient homeland, they all head toward the same spot—a grassy patch of campus lawn that once served as an outfield. Some would say it’s holy ground. It’s a Monday afternoon, and men playing hooky from work lean against trees or sit on concrete ledges. They loosen their collars and try to look inconspicuous.

After a couple hundred folks squeeze onto a plot no larger than a modest backyard, a gray-haired man wearing a fanny pack and a Pirates baseball cap presses “Play” on an iPod wired to a speaker. Then, the legend begins anew.

The crowd listens to a 48-year-old radio broadcast. The recording sounds muffled and scratchy—the timbre of a bygone era—as radio announcers call

the plays of the 1960 World Series. It’s Game 7, the Pittsburgh Pirates vs. the New York Yankees.

For more than 20 years, Pirates fans have gathered on Pitt’s campus every Oct. 13, the anniversary of the series’ final game, which crowned the winner of the 1960 World Series. The tradition began quietly in 1985 when the late Saul Finkelstein brought a cassette player and his lunch to the brick outfield wall on the south end of campus, the only part of Forbes Field that still stands. (The stadium, which hosted Game 7, was razed in 1971 to make room for Pitt’s Posvar and Mervis halls.) Finkelstein listened to a cassette tape of the game. The next year he invited some buddies, who told their friends. Soon, strangers linked only by Pirates mania were meeting at the wall every year and calling themselves the Game 7 Gang.

For the 2008 anniversary, staff in Pitt’s Katz Graduate School of Business—housed in Mervis Hall, next to the old wall—served hotdogs and gave away balloons. Nick Demao (A&S ’63, KGSB ’67), who attended Game 7 when he was a Pitt sophomore, wandered through the crowd carrying an original base and telling its history: His father stole it in the revelry at the end of Game 7.

When the radio recording reaches the bottom of the ninth, the crowd pushes closer to the single speaker broadcasting the game. The Pirates and Yankees are tied. If the Pirates score, they’ll take the series and the championship trophy. Gang member and Pitt alum Herb Soltman (CBA ’56), who has served as the event’s coordinator and master of ceremonies for the past three years, pauses the iPod.

“Remember, this was 1960,” he announces. “So if we happen to win, there are no high-fives, because they didn’t exist back then.” The gang chuckles, someone lets out a high-pitched whistle. Soltman presses play again.

Pirate Bill Mazeroski is up to bat. There’s the pitch. Then the swing. Crack. The ball sails over the players, soaring toward the left field wall where, nearly 50 years later, a crowd gazes upward and looks for the magic ball in the sky, remembering the gals they swung, the hands they shook, and who they were in 1960 when that ball plunked on the other side of the wall. Home run.

Students hustle in from the cold, searching for seats close to the televisions. They squeeze around tables, pile on couches, lean on pool tables, and sit on the floor at Nordy’s Place, a newly renovated lounge in the William Pitt Union, affectionately named by students in tribute to Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg.

Voices rise above the sound of the televisions. Students munch on chicken wings, pretzels, and chips. Anticipation builds. Soon, history will be made.

“Look at how many people are there,” says a guy standing near one of the flat-screen TVs, as he views a sea of people gathering in Washington, D.C. All around him, everyone at Nordy’s Place is part of the experience, too. The first African American U.S. president is about to be sworn into office.

One of the students who arrived early has a prime spot near a flat-screen by the juice bar. Brittany Moreland, a Pitt sophomore majoring in economics, voted for the first time in the November 2008 election. She came to Nordy’s Place wanting to be surrounded by others also excited to see history in the making.

As the presidential oath begins, students in the lounge fall silent. Moreland stares at the screen, watching intently. In grade school, she fantasized about becoming the first female, Black president. Seeing Obama, she thinks of her 9-year-old cousin, her 5-year-old brother, and herself. Now, she knows it’s true—any of their aspirations are possible.

When President Barack Obama shakes the hand of Chief Justice John Roberts after officially being sworn in, the lounge erupts into applause. Moreland smiles, others wipe away tears. The youthful citizens in Nordy’s Place join millions of others across the nation—watching, with expectation, as a new chapter in history opens at the White House.

In a university lab, college students prepare to teach a group of middle-schoolers how robot construction works. But before the collegians can even begin their presentation, their young students pick up electronic parts and deftly assemble some simple robots. The youngsters have an edge: They’ve been using Lego Mindstorms—programmable devices that teach robot design—for months.

It’s unusual for middle schoolers to have access to robot software and tools, but the principal of their school, Regina Holley (EDUC ’80G, ’88G), makes sure that her students have the same opportunities, or better, than most. Principal Holley leads the elementary and intermediate campuses of Pittsburgh Lincoln, a K-8 school with sites in Pittsburgh’s Lincoln-Larimer and Lemington neighborhoods. She has helped her students to consistently outperform their peers, including those at wealthier schools with more resources.

Driven by her conviction that seeking opportunities leads to more opportunities, Holley works with her staff to apply for grants that support technologies like Lego Mindstorms and activities like history field trips to Harlem, Philadelphia, and Canada. The trip to the university robot lab was part of a visit to Hampton University in Virginia to encourage students to think about college early in their educational careers.

Holley, president of the Pittsburgh Administrators Association and former president of the Greater Pittsburgh Alliance of Black School Educators, has won praise from colleagues regionally and nationally. Her school also has a high teacher-retention rate, and she is known for her enthusiastic, positive leadership of students and teachers alike. Last year, Holley was the first recipient of the PreK-12 Educator Award from the University of Pittsburgh School of Education, given as part of its Distinguished Alumni Awards program.

1954 Nicholas Kayafas CBA ’54, KGSB ’60 has written Welcome to the Poverty Class (RoseDog Books) about the growing problem of unemployment and underemployment.

1958 Bernard J. Berg ENGR ’58 wrote an article in the Allentown, Pa., Morning Call encouraging new graduates to relax as they embark on their postcollege lives.

1961 Edward W. Harbay A&S ’61 is proud of his family of Panthers. His three daughters have followed his example and earned their degrees from Pitt, too. They are: Katherine M. Harbay Rarrick DEN ’01, Julie A. Harbay SIS ’05G, and Marla J. Harbay DEN ’07.

1962 Rosemarie Rizzo Parse NURS ’62G, EDUC ’69G received the 2008 New York Times Nurse Educator Award. She is a visiting scholar and consultant in the New York University College of Nursing and a former dean of the nursing school at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She’s founder and editor of Nursing Science Quarterly as well as the author of nine books, two of which have been selected for the “best picks” list of nursing theory texts by the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing.

1968 Barbara Radin Fox A&S ’68, EDUC ’69G is an adjunct professor of social work at the University of South Carolina. She also runs a private social work practice through the Body & Soul Therapy boutique in Charleston.

1972 Kenneth R. Balkey ENGR ’72, ENGR ’80G received a Melvin R. Green Codes and Standards Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for his leadership in promoting the society’s industry codes and standards. He is a consulting engineer with Westinghouse Electric Company in Monroeville, Pa. Richard Utley A&S ’72 retired in December from his position as deputy auditor general for the state of Pennsylvania.

1973 Michael D. McDowell LAW ’73, a Pittsburgh attorney and arbitrator, was appointed to the Employment Disputes Panel of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution. He will mediate employment and business debates. Jeffrey I. Pasek A&S ’73 edited the 2009 edition of the Pennsylvania Human Resources Manual published by the American Chamber of Commerce Resources and the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry. An attorney with the Cozen O’Connor law firm in Philadelphia, he focuses his practice on employment-related litigation.

1974 Mark Laskow LAW ’74 is CEO and managing director of Greycourt & Co., a financial firm in Pittsburgh. Eric Rieseberg GSPH ’74G received the District of Columbia Hospital Association Presidential Award of Excellence. He is president of Specialty Hospitals of America as well as chair and president of United Medical Center, both in Washington, D.C. Sandra Pflueger Thomas A&S ’74 is president of the Ace Lock security company in Pittsburgh.

1975 Al Condeluci SOC WK ’75G, EDUC ’84G edited the Spring 2009 issue of the Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation. He is CEO of United Cerebral Palsy of Pittsburgh.

1976 J.D. Stahl A&S ’76G received the 2008 William E. Wine Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Virginia Tech Alumni Association. He’s an English professor at Virginia Tech and established the university’s children’s literature program.

1977 Thomas A. Tangretti GSPIA ’77, a former legislator in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives, was recognized by REACH (Road to Educational Achievement through Choice Foundation) for his work to support charter schools and school choice.

1978 Carolyn Kent Hall A&S ’78 is the managing editor of AARP.org. She resides in Rockville, Md. George J. Omiros A&S ’78 was named national senior vice president of field development for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in White Plains, N.Y.

1979 Joseph H. Bucci CGS ’79, an attorney with Pittsburgh’s Houston Harbaugh law firm, joined the board of the Spina Bifida Association of Western Pennsylvania. He’s also an opinion editor with the Pittsburgh Legal Journal.

1980 Aliyu Wamakko EDUC ’80, governor of Nigeria’s Sokoto State, was named Man of the Year by a coalition of the Igbo Traders Forum, Woman Liberation Movement, and Society for Better Education.

1985 Frank Brown A&S ’85G was named one of the “Nifty Fifty” leading scientists in San Diego by the San Diego Science Festival. He’s a pioneer in cheminformatics, an emerging science that applies computer technology to chemistry. He’s a chief science officer and senior vice president with Accelrys, a company that develops software to manage scientific data.

1990 Matthew McMullen A&S ’90, EDUC ’96G, LAW ’04 was named program director with the Office of Education Abroad at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.  Lisa Scherfel Catanzarite A&S ’90 published her first children’s book, What the World Is Like to Bea Moore: The Treasure (Trafford), about a seashell-collecting girl who learns from a wise fisherman about the importance of being grateful.

1991 Kimberly M. Hopbell Metzger A&S ’91 was appointed senior associate director of development with Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Md. She also serves on the board of the Maryland chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

1992 Derrick Darby A&S ’92G, A&S ’96G, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas, received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to support a research study titled “Philosophy and the Racial Achievement Gap.”  Mike Metlay A&S ’92G is associate editor of Recording Magazine, a monthly magazine for professional and home-recording musicians and engineers. He’s an electronic music artist who records with his band, mindSpiral. He also hosts a weekly Internet radio show about electronic music on www.stillstream.com.

1993 Rodney K. Odom KGSB ’93 resided at Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner, S.C., for the month of February to prepare for entrance into the monastery. Suzanne Traub-Metlay A&S ’93G is the operations director for Secure World Foundation, a foundation that promotes space security. She says that the foundation briefs members of Congress on “space traffic management for satellites” and “what to do about potentially hazardous asteroids.” The foundation also has permanent observer status with the United Nations’ Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Stephanie H. Bacin Winegrad A&S ’93 joined the Cozen O’Connor law firm in West Conshohocken, Pa., as an associate. She focuses her practice on family law.

1994 Eric C. Shiner A&S ’94 was appointed the first Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

1995 Elizabeth S. Campbell A&S ’95, LAW ’99 is “of counsel” at Pepper Hamilton law firm in Philadelphia. She’s part of the firm’s Commercial Litigation Practice Group and the White Collar and Corporate Investigations Practice Group. Rebecca Kukla A&S ’95G and Mark Lance A&S ’87G, ’88G coauthored ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ (Harvard University Press), a philosophy text that examines how ordinary, nondeclarative phrases in everyday conversation can be useful for philosophical analysis. Kukla is professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida, and Lance is professor of philosophy and professor of justice and peace at Georgetown Univ.  in Washington, D.C.

1996 Thomas Cormac McCarthy A&S ’96 was elected director of the Houston Harbaugh law firm in Pittsburgh. Scot Withers LAW ’96 was named a partner with Lamb McErlane law firm in West Chester, Pa. He also serves as a deputy legal counsel to the Appellate Court Procedural Rules Committee of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

1998 Cheryl Lynn Cheatle Cummings ENGR ’98 and her husband, Scott Cummings, announce the November 2008 birth of their daughter, Corina Lynn Cummings. They also have a 3-year-old son, Evan.

2000 Travis Smith LAW ’00 was named a Rising Star in Pennsylvania by Super Lawyers and Law & Politics magazines. He’s an attorney with Burns, White & Hickton law firm in Pittsburgh. Michael Gill LAW ’00 was named to the Chester County Mental Health/Mental Retardation Advisory Board. He’s an associate attorney with Buckley, Brion, McGuire, Morris & Sommer law firm in West Chester, Pa.

2001 Eddie Edwards Jr. LAW ’01 was named a Rising Star in Pennsylvania by the publishers of Super Lawyers and Law & Politics magazines. He’s an attorney with Burns, White & Hickton law firm in Pittsburgh. Leona Marie Kozuch Morales UPJ ’01 is a communications specialist with the parking and transit services department of Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz. She promotes alternative transportation options because it’s “quite a challenge to have 55,000-plus students with only 19,000 parking spaces.”

2002 Stephanie C. Luff A&S ’02, joined Pittsburgh’s Thomas, Thomas & Hafer law firm, where she focuses her legal practice on the defense of workers’ compensation claims. Katherine Weeks A&S ’02 was named an associate with the Litigation Group of Burns, White & Hickton law firm in Pittsburgh. She focuses her legal practice on health care and professional liability cases.

2004 Michael Brodzinski CGS ’04 is a specialty products account executive with Zurich North America, an international insurance company. He’s based in Green Tree, Pa. In December 2007, he earned his MBA from Regis University in Denver; in October 2008 he married Jessica Spray. Omar A. Jalloun EDUC ’04G was inducted into the Golden Key International Honour Society, a collegiate honor society that recognizes top-performing college and university students around the world. He’s a doctoral student in Pitt’s School of Education.

2005 Gwendolyn O. Armstrong A&S ’05 is volunteering in Burkina Faso with the Peace Corps to train entrepreneurs in business and marketing skills.

2007 Jessica Anne Schaberl ENGR ’07 is a student at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine in Lewisburg, W.Va.

In Memoriam

Nicholas F. Cerminaro CBA ’49, a sergeant in the Army Air Corps during WWII, died in September 2008 at age 85. He was employed as a metal buyer for more than 40 years, working at Allegheny Ludlum, Steelmet/ELG Metals, and Keywell, all metal manufacturers in Western Pennsylvania. When he retired from Keywell, he was vice president of buying and selling specialty scrap metal.

Montgomery M. Culver A&S ’49, A&S ’50G, a retired Pitt professor of English, died in February 2009 at age 80. He began his Pitt career in 1953 as a fiction-writing instructor, eventually becoming the director of the writing program. His short stories were published in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and The Saturday Evening Post, among other publications. In addition, he served as editor of the Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

Justin Joseph Falgione KGSB ’96 died in October 2008 at age 43. He was a procurement consultant with the Pittsburgh office of Ariba, a company that specializes in helping other businesses to manage spending. During his business career, he was also employed by PNC Bank and UPMC in Pittsburgh.

Ovais Ghaznavi A&S ’63G, an adjunct professor of mathematics at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, died in October 2008. A native of Pakistan, he had a successful teaching career in the United States, where he also taught at Kalamazoo College in Michigan and Widener University in Wilmington, Del.

Paul Florent Gibson ENGR ’40 died in August 2008 at age 89. Beginning his engineering career as a missile and aircraft designer during WWII, he later cofounded Spar Engineering and Development Corp. and served as an engineer with RCA. He also was an active volunteer with the Meals on Wheels program.

Harry McLean A&S ’55G died in December 2008 at age 83. He had a successful career in Washington, D.C., working for the Redevelopment Land Agency and later with the Consumer Credit Counseling Service. He also served in the Army during WWII and was an active member of the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church.

Eric Mendlow SOC WK ’07G died in October 2008 at age 33. He was a social worker with Ursuline Senior Services in Pittsburgh and a pianist who entertained at nursing homes and assisted living centers throughout the Pittsburgh area. As a gerontology student at Pitt, he helped to create the Student Interest Group on Aging and also served with the Journal of Neurophysiology.

James Thomas Mitchell ENGR ’55G, a former engineering instructor at Pitt, died in August 2008 at age 84. He served as an engineer for 41 years with Westinghouse Electric Corp. near Pittsburgh, where he designed parts for aircraft engines, resulting in five patents. After his retirement, he was a consultant with Sundstrand Aerospace and a substitute teacher for school districts in Ohio.

Vaughan Peters MED ’55, a doctor who resided in Brookline, Pa., died in September 2008. He was a supporter of the Friends of Music group at Mt. Lebanon United Methodist Church.

Clyde W. Powell III A&S ’52 died in August 2008 at age 78. He served as a Navy officer and was a member of the Orange Beach United Methodist Church in Alabama.

Betty Ann Allison Squires SOC WK ’46G died in June 2008 at age 86. During her career as a social worker and teacher, she worked for the Red Cross and the Girl Scouts of the USA and taught fifth and sixth grades at the Plainfield Public Schools in New Jersey.  In her retirement, she volunteered with the Literacy Volunteers of America.

John G. Roberts Sr. ENGR ’51, a retired steel executive and manager, died in November 2008. He worked as an engineer and manager at several plants of Bethlehem Steel Corp. and eventually as president and CEO of CSC Industries. He also volunteered with the International Executive Services Corp. to advise managers at steel plants in Poland. He was the father of four children, and his son John G. Roberts Jr. is chief justice of the United States.

The focus of the Building Our Future Together fundraising campaign is to continue Pitt’s progress and momentum in providing superior education and pursuing groundbreaking research. More than ever, the aim of the capital campaign is to help the University attract high-achieving students and faculty to its campus, retain and support outstanding faculty, and provide a nurturing learning environment that inspires discovery in all of the University’s many disciplines.

In the accompanying article in this section, you will read about the powerful research collaborations made possible by The Hartwell Foundation. In addition to the fellowships described in the story, The Hartwell Foundation also supports Pitt’s research excellence with the Biomedical Research Award. This award has been given to one Pitt faculty member in each of the last three years. Gary Silverman, Antoinette Darville, and David Hackem have all been the recip-ients of this generous funding. We are grateful to The Hartwell Foundation and feel fortunate to be a recipient of such generous philanthropy.

Since 1997, 145,678 donors—including The Hartwell Foundation—have made an investment in the University of Pittsburgh. During this time of national economic hardship, we are grateful to all those who continue to make contributions to the various needs of our institution. We appreciate your enduring support for a better future for all of us through the best investment possible—education and research. For more information, please visit our new Web site at www.giveto.pitt.edu.

Hail to Pitt!

Al

In April, Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg provided a University update to more than 350 alumni who are Pitt employees.

1. School of Law Director of Development Jui Joshi (LAW ’89) appreciates the occasion.

2. Chancellor Nordenberg enjoys sharing some surprising facts about the group’s alma mater.

3. Pitt Alumni Association’s own Web designer Peg Figore (left) and Associate Director for External Affairs Alyson Kavalukas (A&S ’04) are present and accounted for.

4. Associate Vice Chancellor Denny Desantis (SIS ’87G) and School of Medicine Associate Dean Chenits Pettigrew (EDUC ’76) find time to chat.

The alumni trip to Tanzania amazed its participants.

5. Barbara Aronson-Cook wonders at lions and zebras and giraffes while husband, Bernard Cook, gets them in focus.

6. Jim Bockenek (A&S ’66, KATZ ’68) is ready to shoot from the jeep.

7. Ginny Nicklas (KATZ ’51) indicates her approval of the day’s game drive.

Restless and curious as a child can be, Dennis Ranalli was the kind of youngster who liked to tinker. Sitting in a waiting room wasn’t exactly his strong suit.

Fortunately, he found a sympathetic mentor in his dentist, Hollis Zwicker, who had a laboratory in the building that housed his office in the working-class Pittsburgh suburb of Millvale. Zwicker gave his young and restless patient permission to poke around in the laboratory, a virtual treasure trove of Bunsen burners and wax molds.

“He was a real big guy—tall, lanky, had really big hands,” recalls Ranalli. “You thought, ‘Wow, how did he get those hands inside somebody’s mouth?’ This was before fluoride; that’s probably why I went to the dentist so often.”

The lab technicians befriended the boy and gave him simple projects to do; Zwicker gave him old instruments to take home. By the time he was a sophomore in high school, Ranalli knew how to make a mold of someone’s teeth, and he was sure he wanted to be a dentist.

For a local boy, schooled in the lore of Pitt athletics and surrounded by neighbors who were Pitt alumni, the teenager’s first choice for college was a foregone conclusion. When he got the letter of acceptance in his senior year in high school, he knew exactly where he’d go to begin pursuing his dream—the University of Pittsburgh.

Ranalli graduated from Pitt in 1968, studying biology and chemistry. He won a scholarship from a state senator to attend dental school in Philadelphia, and he did a residency at a cleft palate clinic before returning to Pittsburgh and paying a visit to his old friend and mentor, Hollis Zwicker. The boy who had once tinkered in Zwicker’s on-site laboratory had returned to join the practice.

Over the years, a handful of other dentists followed the same route, learning a love of the profession from Zwicker—and, later, Ranalli.

“It was a mini-feeder school” for Pitt dentists, says Ranalli, adding that Zwicker had 14 people working in his office, including his own lab technicians and insurance employees.

“He was a visionary in that way,” says Ranalli. “He had a lot of professional courage—he did everything himself.”

It was Zwicker who also got Ranalli interested in academia. The senior dentist taught part-time in the Pitt clinic and brought Ranalli in as a faculty member to work on Wednesdays, when the dental practice was closed. The school’s dean, intrigued by Ranalli’s cleft palate background, asked him to work in the cleft palate center.

Later, Ranalli earned a master’s degree in dental science from Pitt and accepted a full-time faculty position. Since then, he has risen steadily through the ranks to become senior associate dean in the School of Dental Medicine.

He says that when Dean Thomas Braun offered him the associate deanship, Ranalli answered, “That’s great, but I don’t know what that means,” to which Braun jokingly replied, “It means you get to do anything I don’t want to do.”

In reality, Ranalli spends much of his time mentoring students in the dental school. He also serves as an advisory board member for the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship Program, and he is the team dentist for Pitt’s football, wrestling, and women’s basketball teams.

“For a while, a lot of the athletes were into the bling, the tongue piercings, and the grills,” he says. “It peaked, though. I don’t see as much of it anymore … You kind of get used to it. They keep me young.”

Ranalli’s three children all attended Pitt, and he and his wife have traveled extensively through Pitt’s alumni travel and continuing education programs. Some work-related trips have taken him to Paris, London, and various sites abroad; but others, such as a February trip to the Special Olympics World Winter Games, only took him as far away as Idaho. To Ranalli, each represents a unique chance to touch someone’s life.

“My range of responsibilties means that I’m involved in a lot of diverse activities,” says Ranalli. “I have many opportunities to influence people in a positive manner. That has been my life, in a way.”

In the footsteps of his mentor, Ranalli has  honed a talent for helping others to succeed. Surely, Hollis Zwicker is clapping those big hands.

Staying in touch is so important. We are working with Harris Connect—the company that has provided our online services since 2000—to compile a Universitywide print directory of all alumni. It will be our first since 2001. You’ll want to make sure your information is up to date. If Harris Connect has not contacted you yet to verify your information, it will soon.

Alumni find all sorts of ways to stay in touch and keep the Pitt spirit strong. Melanie and Anil Mehta, featured on page 51, gather with other Pitt alumni in Florida whenever they can, and they also traveled to El Paso in December to join us at the Sun Bowl. Dennis Ranalli, in our School of Dental Medicine, has enduring ties with Pitt, as you’ll read about here. He, too, enjoys traveling the world with other Pitt alumni. Trips with the association offer a great way to get to know others and learn about far-flung places. The February trip to Tanzania was no exception. To see photos, turn the page and also go to www.alumni.pitt.edu and follow the links to About Us and Photo Galleries.

Another way to stay in touch is to attend a Pitt Club game watch.  Lots of clubs and representatives hosted game watches during the NCAA Tournament. Here’s to both the men’s and the women’s teams for their great performances this year. Check our Web site for a club or rep near you. If you don’t find one, consider becoming a rep yourself. Call Alyson Kavalukas at 1-800-ALU-PITT to learn more.

One of the best ways to stay in touch is to join the Pitt Alumni Association.  You can do that on our Web site, as well. Association members get discounts and extra benefits. It’s a great time to join us.

Hail to Pitt!

Jeff Gleim
Executive Director, Pitt Alumni Association
Associate Vice Chancellor for Alumni Relations

As she waited for her cell cultures to grow, the Pitt biology student decided to kill time by cleaning out a file cabinet. Impressionable and ambitious, Melanie de Souza was spending her summer as an unpaid research assistant at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, gaining experience that she hoped would move her closer toward her goal of one day attending medical school. As she cleaned, someone walked past and noticed her. She remembered him as Anil Mehta, the guy who campaigned outside the Towers courtyard for election as Pitt’s Homecoming King.

“Hi, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Melanie,” she answered.

“I’m going to call you Mel-Mel now,” Mehta announced. And from that point on, the two were inseparable.

Married in 2003, de Souza (A&S ’99, MED ’03) and Mehta (A&S ’96) have settled on Florida’s Gulf Coast. But they missed their Oakland ties so much that they made a pact with a group of friends to meet at least once a year in Pittsburgh for a home football game. Known to one another as the South Oakland Refugees, the friends have remained faithful to their cause. They even traveled to the 2008 Sun Bowl together to watch Pitt play Oregon State on New Year’s Eve.

That ability to rally fellow classmates with enthusiasm was part of what helped Mehta become Pitt’s Homecoming King in 1995. He even managed to do it without his future wife’s vote. “I forgot,” she explains, laughing.

It also prompted the alumni association to approach them to form the Tampa Bay Pitt Club, a new chapter meant to reach out to nearby Florida alumni who want to reconnect with the University.

“Our number-one goal is to get the ball rolling and have alumni see that we’re planning activities,” says Mehta, who works in sales for an occupational health care management company.

So far, the group has set up a Web site and gotten fellow alumni together for the Backyard Brawl football game between Pitt and West Virginia, for the last game of the men’s regular basketball season, and for the Sweet 16. Eventually, they hope to work toward social events such as a wine tasting or kayaking trip. Friends at other Pitt Club chapters are offering advice to the fledgling group, as is the Pitt Alumni Association.

Fellow Pitt graduates who live in Tampa Bay would have a hard time missing Mehta, according to his wife, who now practices internal medicine. “Anil wears Pitt merchandise wherever he goes,” she says. In Florida, where Gators and University of South Florida logos are commonplace, the Pitt flag outside their house stands out, as does the Pitt license plate on their car.

Mehta and de Souza draw inspiration from the Pitt Club activities they remember from Washington, D.C., where de Souza completed her residency in 2006. The Tampa Bay alumni club hopes to start a Pitt scholarship fund similar to the one launched by the South Oakland Refugees, which is now more than a decade old. The new venture will begin with a tour—led by a fellow Pitt alumnus—of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers training facility.

“Our group of friends, and Mel and I, have a strong loyalty and love for Pitt and the contributions the University has made to the world,” says Mehta. “It’s just a fantastic school, and we take a lot of pride in that.”

The Tanzanian trip was beyond expectations. We were within 10 feet of a feeding bull elephant, saw lions mate, and witnessed thousands of zebras and wildebeests in their perennial migration through the seemingly endless plains of the Serengeti. Photos of our safari are among the photo galleries on our Web site at www.alumni.pitt.edu.
As always, we traveled with the best company, Pitt alumni.

Contact information:
Pitt Alumni Association
140 Alumni Hall
4227 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
412-624-8229
www.alumni.pitt.edu

Glasco

On a Saturday morning, regulars in the Kuntu Writers Workshop gather in a bright room along Forbes Avenue on the University of Pittsburgh campus. Eight writers—young, old, Black, White—pull their chairs into a circle. One is wearing a dashiki. Another sports an afro.

One fair-skinned man in a dark goatee and floppy cap sits with his shirt buttoned to the collar. He fumbles with his rolled up legal pad. Usually, he offers writing—poems and prose—that touch on culture, race, and the human heart. When he reads, he lifts a pipe from his mouth and speaks almost in a whisper. Softly, he assesses the work of others, sometimes stammering, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings.

The man is August Wilson, at age 31, on the path to becoming one of the nation’s greatest playwrights. For awhile, he was part of this writers’ circle every other Saturday, where the group bantered about history, politics, life, and the struggle for equality. The writers critiqued each other’s work, revised their pieces, and some even submitted scripts to Pitt’s Kuntu Repertory Theatre.

Wilson, in the Hill District on Bedford Avenue near the house that was his boyhood home.

It turns out that Wilson—a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who died in 2005 at the age of 60—has a 30-year legacy that’s woven into Pitt as intricately as roses to a trellis. Today, the playwright’s accomplishments make for flourishing study here. Several Pitt professors are among the national vanguard of scholars who are exploring and teaching about Wilson’s world and his works.

It is a warm Wednesday evening, and an orange sun is setting. A lanky professor with a gentle yet sonorous voice holds class on a Centre Avenue corner in the Hill District, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. For a moment, he stops talking and waits for the noisy bus belching black smoke to pass. Pitt history professor Laurence Glasco does not want the dozens of students, some of them taking notes, to miss a word.

He’s giving his students a walking tour of the neighborhood. The group moves together along the avenue, then stops in front of the century-old St. Benedict the Moor Church. Atop the church is a giant open-armed statue of St. Benedict, the patron saint of Blacks in North America. Playwright August Wilson once worshipped in this building, says Glasco to the group.

The professor knows that he stands in the shadow of one saint while revering another: Wilson has taken his place at the top of the pantheon of revered, creative figures who passed through the Hill neighborhood across the years, among them  Lena Horne, Billy Strayhorn, George Benson, Billy Eckstine, and Earl “Fatha” Hines.

Wilson was born in the Hill District in 1945, when the community bounced with Black life. He grew up on its cobbled streets, where friends remember him as a wandering, mischievous young man. His nickname was “Freckles,” because his light skin was dotted with them. He always had a pen and paper and was always scribbling, scribbling, scribbling.

Not far from the church, reminders of Wilson’s life still haunt the Hill: his age-battered birth home; the jitney stations he frequented; and the block where a young Freddy August Kittel shut himself up in a boarding house, blues music wailing on his 78 rpm phonograph, and typed permutations of his name, eventually merging his middle name with his mother Daisy Wilson’s maiden name, to be reborn as August Wilson.

“C’mon, let’s move on,” says Glasco as the group turns a corner and rambles up Crawford Street, crawling deeper into Wilson’s world.

Various biographies of the playwright recount a similar story:  Wilson began reading at the age of 4. As a youngster, he often visited the local library, and he remained an enthusiastic reader throughout his life. During his teenage years, his family moved off the Hill to a mostly White working-class neighborhood, where Wilson experienced recurring racism, especially in high school. Frustrated, he dropped out of school and began his own course of self-study at Oakland’s Carnegie Library.  At the age of 20, he bought his first typewriter and continued to earn money through a string of low-wage jobs.  On his own time, he would often sit in local restaurants, writing, writing, writing.

Eleven years later, in 1976, he cofounded the Kuntu Writers Workshop with his friend, Rob Penny—a Pitt professor who later became chair of the Department of Africana Studies. The University-related writer’s forum blossomed as part of the nation’s Black arts movement, fostering work that fed Black pride. Years earlier, Wilson and Penny had founded Black Horizon Theatre on the Hill, a Black activist theater company that flourished during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Wilson’s presence at the Kuntu Writers Workshop is one of the earliest recollections in which friends can place him on Pitt’s campus. In 1976, two events boosted Wilson’s writerly ambitions: A colleague, Pitt professor Vernell Lillie, directed one of  Wilson’s early plays, The Homecoming, for Kuntu Theatre, and Wilson later guest directed In New England Winter, a Kuntu show performed in the University’s black box theater. People involved at the time remember him as a meticulous, sensitive director who showed up for rehearsals in a crumpled jacket and tie. Over several years, both the Kuntu workshop and theater kept Wilson connected to Pitt.

The budding playwright left Pittsburgh in 1978 to visit a theater friend in St. Paul, Minn. Wilson stayed in St. Paul, got a job as a scriptwriter at a science museum, and began focusing on writing for theater. Somehow, being away from the hub of Pittsburgh Hill life gave him artistic clarity. One account says that he wrote his play Jitney in 10 days, mostly while sitting in a fish-and- chips restaurant.

His work began to attract attention and grant money, ultimately gaining notice from Lloyd Richards, who was the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and dean of the Yale School of Drama. In April 1984, Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was staged at Yale; in October, the play opened on Broadway and then won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Before Wilson’s death from liver cancer in 2005, he would win many more awards for his work, including a Tony Award for Fences in 1987 and two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama—one for Fences in 1987 and one for The Piano Lesson in 1990.

Around 4:15 p.m., the students start to show up. Their hands are cupped around coffee mugs, their cell phones pasted to their ears.  In their jeans and sweatshirts, baseball caps and ponytails, they take their seats and wait for their professor in Room 230 of the Cathedral of Learning. Soon, Chris Rawson enters in his tweedy jacket.

He’s in a swirl. Before class ends, he must review an exam, preview the next lecture, and take students through a discussion of Aunt Esther, an ancestral figure that Wilson uses to explore the continuity of Black culture.

Welcome to August Wilson as English literature.

Rawson, a faculty member in Pitt’s English department since 1968, also is the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s longtime theater critic. He has taught the August Wilson class since 2006. It grew from conversations he had with the playwright over the years. Wilson, who once taught a theater class at Dartmouth and who received an honorary doctorate from Pitt in 1992, liked the idea and told Rawson, “Great. I’ll come to your class. It will be fun.”

He died before he could get there.

The University of Pittsburgh, though, had already found its way into Wilson’s work. In Jitney, set in 1977, a character nicknamed Booster is a bright African American kid who wins a scholarship to Pitt in the mid-1950s only to lose it when an interracial romance turns tragic. Booster’s story is one among many in Wilson’s 10-play cycle that chronicles every decade of the Black experience in 20th-century America. Nine of the plays take place in Pittsburgh’s Hill neighborhood, where Wilson pays homage to the rhythm of the lives of garbage men, blues musicians, domestics, and mystics. As the soul of a people’s history flowed from his pen, Wilson made the ordinary extraordinary.

On many occasions, dating back to 1984, Rawson sat in the dark—as a drama critic—and witnessed the poignant theater of August Wilson. In the last years of the playwright’s life, Rawson’s relationship with him budded into friendship. They chatted at Broadway openings, and Wilson sent the critic photos of his new baby daughter, autographed books, and cigars.

For Rawson, teaching the August Wilson class has been a privilege and an emotional experience. At times, the teacher has been the student. After all, Rawson—who also heads the national theater critics association—has lived in Pittsburgh for four decades. For 30 of those years, he avoided the Hill District, believing it to be desolate. It was his interest in Wilson’s dramas and his growing relationship with the playwright that first took Rawson to the Hill.

What he found there, he wrote in the playwright’s 2005 obituary, was “August Wilson Country—the archetypal northern urban Black neighborhood, a construct of frustration, nostalgia, anger, and dream.” It was a world of imagination, wrote Rawson, “to rank with such other transformational fictional worlds as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Hardy’s Wessex, or Friel’s Donegal.”

So, as a bright sun pours through the curtains in Room 230, it is Rawson who works hard to help his students understand that Wilson has created theatrical literature—and it’s not just something to read, but it’s something to be put on its feet.

To that end, he has taken his classes to local theater performances and on trips to Washington, D.C., for marathon viewings of Wilson productions, often staying behind to chat with actors before driving home late in the night.

Together with Pitt’s Glasco, Rawson is writing a book about “August Wilson’s Pittsburgh.” The publication will have 10 chapters, each focused on one of the decades in which the plays are based. It also will include a biography of Wilson and hundreds of photos.

The book, says Rawson with a smile, will be written so that everyone, even those most like the characters who populate the plays—the waitresses, drivers, and everyday people—can access the historical cycle.

The lady in red enters Pitt’s Posvar Hall, Room 4165. She does not so much walk in as she pirouettes, light on her feet and grand. Her black hair is pulled into an upswept bun, a crown. “Hello students,” she grins as she plugs in her Dell computer.

Through the Department of Africana Studies, Kimberly Ellis, an American Studies scholar, is teaching a course created by the late Rob Penny called August Wilson Dramas. How apropos for the glam, theatrical “Dr. Goddess,” an alter ego that Ellis—who also is an actress—uses to combine a bold spirit with an ardor for the arts and activism. Funny, intelligent, passionate, she is always onstage.

Her computer revved up, she’s ready to discuss one of her favorite subjects: August Wilson.  Her class, a stew of ages, generations, ethnicities, and political thought, resembles an August Wilson audience. This early evening, they are all more actors than spectators as Ellis assigns readings from King Hedley II and Seven Guitars, the two plays being discussed. “And, action,” she commands the students, who take turns chewing on the rich language that Wilson puts in their mouths.

For Ellis, all of Wilson’s words are gems. She mines the plays for lessons in history, faith, sexuality, community, fatherhood, and culture. The students laugh, and debate, and laugh some more.

“I love this class,” says Ellis. “So many things going on at once, but I want my students to walk out understanding August Wilson’s life, works, and legacy. He gave everyone—young people, African Americans, women, human beings—a toolbox for survival. His plays are a survival manual.”

Just look at his history, she reminds the students: Wilson dropped out of school and wasn’t supposed to have a future. “He had to prove life was worth something. He did make something of his life,” says Ellis, pausing a moment and peering into the eyes of her students. “He knew more than anybody what it meant to be looked down on.”

But, she adds, he became a “big man”—a line he uses in his plays. “I think he wanted young people to know you can’t let others define who you are,” she says. “You can create the life you want. You have to find your song and sing it.”

Honoring all that Wilson accomplished is bittersweet for the actress and academic. First, she never has enough time in her class to discuss it all. Second, Ellis is the niece of August Wilson, and any discussion of her uncle brings back the ghosts of their loving connection.

A native of the Hill District, Ellis practically grew up at the playwright’s knee. Her mother’s old home, despite always being hammered by repairs and upgrades, was a refuge for her uncle. When “Uncle Freddy” visited, it was storytelling time. They would engage in a sing-songy call-and-response (one of her favorites was, “What you gonna do when your troubles get like mine?”) and spend the night sharing tales.

To distance herself professionally and to not cry every time she lectures on her uncle, she refers to him by the formal “Wilson.” But that does not stop her memories. Even in his 20s, she recalls, “Uncle Freddy dressed like an old man. He was very practical, and shopped at Goodwill until he died.” She tried to get him to listen to hip-hop, to go to the movies, but he stayed in his own world. All he listened to was the blues.

Yet, Wilson’s art extends far beyond that simple world. Ellis has introduced the playwright’s work to plenty of students, including David Tyson, a Pitt senior majoring in Italian studies. In her class, he found a freewheeling forum where history, urban development, race, and economics intersected. He also took the Hill District tour.  Tyson, who wears a braided ponytail and favors T-shirts, has embraced Wilson as one of his most revered authors. “Everything I’ve learned,” he says, “I’ve learned from August Wilson.”

Ellis thinks her uncle would be euphoric to know his influence lives on. A man deeply moved by artistry—blues music, the poems of Amiri Baraka, the writing of Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, and the paintings of Romare Bearden (the playwright’s “four Bs”)—Wilson would love the idea that his own art continues to inspire others’ lives at the University of Pittsburgh and far beyond.

The Pitt men’s basketball team made its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament in spring 1974. Fans of the game certainly remember All-American star forward Billy Knight, who carried the top-10 team to a 25-4 finish under legendary coach Charles “Buzz” Ridl. If history were a fair referee, they would also remember the feats of John Sikora, who became the team’s manager the next season.

Like all good team managers, Sikora compiled statistics for the coaching staff, assisted with practice drills, cared for the team’s equipment, and dished out water and words of support to the hardworking Panthers squad. But as a talented basketball player himself, Sikora never envisioned watching the action on court from the sidelines—especially not from a wheelchair.

It only takes a moment for dreams to change. For Sikora, that moment came two weeks before high school graduation, when he saw the oncoming headlights of the drunk driver who left him paralyzed from the waist down.

A year later, in 1972, he arrived at Pitt. “I was still learning how to do basic things like dress myself and take a shower,” Sikora says. “But I went to college with the attitude that I was going to conquer my physical disability. You can either give up on life or realize there’s still a lot of life left to live.”

That same courage, iron will, and self-determination served Sikora well during the three years he spent managing the Pitt basketball team, beginning in fall 1974. He applied for the job with encouragement from student-athletes on campus who knew about his lifelong passion for sports and working knowledge of the game.

Kirk Bruce (EDUC ’76)—who played for Ridl’s record-breaking team and is now Pitt’s associate athletic director—says Sikora was an inspiration during their long, grueling season. “It was hard to look at John and not be motivated to do your best no matter how tired you were, because we knew he would have loved to be playing,” Bruce says.

Sikora’s experience with the Pitt team made him realize that he didn’t have to give up his hoop dreams, despite his spinal cord injury. He could, in fact, play.  He went back to the hardwood as part of four medal-winning USA national wheelchair basketball teams, and he helped to form the Pittsburgh Steelwheelers team. Most recently, he served as assistant coach of the USA Women’s National Wheelchair Basketball Team, which won gold last year in the Paralympic Games in Beijing.

Sikora (A&S ’76) also is making it possible for other people with physical challenges to lead active, healthy lives through the HOPE Network. The nonprofit organization—founded 12 years ago by Sikora—offers sports and

recreation opportunities ranging from cycling to golf, tennis, and basketball for adults and children who are

physically challenged. The network also runs trauma awareness and prevention workshops that teach students

about the power of making good decisions to avoid serious injuries.

Thanks to the HOPE Network, thousands of people with disabilities don’t have to search hard to find new ways

to fulfill their dreams. Sikora blazed that path for them. Their work now is to keep moving ahead.

Efe Oghoghome in a sculpture park outside the O’Reilly Theater in Pittsburgh’s Cultural District

Efe Oghoghome is taking the night off.

It’s a cold Friday evening in late February, and with midterm exams fast approaching, the University of Pittsburgh freshman faces a long weekend of studying ahead. As a premed bioengineering major, Oghoghome spends most of her time using the tools of math and physics to understand the intricacies of how the human body works. Usually, she’s punching the keys of a calculator and writing lab notes. Tonight, however, she picks up a needle and thread.

Sitting at a metal table in the basement studio of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood, she expertly stitches together two swatches of canvas, each the size of a paperback book. One piece is black, the other is the color of burlap.

Oghoghome is an avid seamstress who reconstructs store-bought clothes to better suit her fashion sense, so sewing a basic pillow is a simple, familiar task. But the questions it will lead her to explore about herself and her world are possibly more complicated than anything in her science textbooks.

An image of a half-full glass of water is screen-printed in ink on both sides of her pillowcase. Or is the glass half-empty? Does she see things as black-and-white or in shades of gray? What is her vision of utopia and dystopia? After finishing her pillow, Oghoghome debates these issues with several classmates over a burrito dinner in the trendy Warhol Café. They next embark on a guided walk through the museum’s “THE END” exhibition, which features the work of contemporary artists who have opted to examine the dark side of humanity and look at the power of art in troubled times.

At the center of one pitch-black gallery stands a vintage fire-call box in a large installation called “PULL,” created by digital artist Jane Philbrick. Oghoghome rushes to pull the lever, triggering a barrage of blinding strobe lights and deafening sirens—an artistic wake-up call to action.

“I’ve always wanted to pull a fire alarm,” she says with an impish grin, while other students cover their ears and ponder the meaning.

Within the span of a few hours, Oghoghome experiences an intellectually challenging studio arts project, the artful act of pulling a fire alarm, and an expert-led tour through one of Pittsburgh’s hottest cultural attractions—all at no cost to her or the 40 other students who are part of this museum excursion. She also enjoys a catered meal with newfound friends.

The event was coordinated by PITT ARTS, which connects the University’s students with Pittsburgh’s vibrant cultural life. Through the innovative program, almost 5,000 undergraduates participate each year in more than 100 “socio-educational” arts encounters like the recent Warhol outing. These well-choreographed events provide students with a hands-on arts experience, a live demonstration, or a behind-the-scenes look at a production and its stars—not to mention free meals, tickets, and transportation.

Any Pitt student can sign up for a variety of events and excursions through the program’s Web site (www.pittarts.pitt.edu). Last fall, for example, one group of students attended a Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performance by renowned violinist Joshua Bell and then had the opportunity to converse with the Grammy-winning artist during a dessert reception. Another group toured the tropical forest exhibit at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, tasted red curry, and learned how to make traditional Thai flower garlands.

Both graduate and undergraduate students take advantage of free admission to the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, the Mattress Factory, and many other city cultural sites. Thousands of PITT ARTS participants—including faculty and staff—purchase deeply discounted tickets to the opera, symphony, ballet, theater, and more through the program’s Cheap Seats ticketing service.

PITT ARTS also brings culture to campus during its Artful Wednesdays events, which offer free lunchtime concerts, improv comedy sessions, and other performances at the William Pitt Union each Wednesday in the fall.

“This is a formal, systematized program unlike anything available at other schools,” says PITT ARTS director Annabelle Clippinger, an award-winning poet who teaches composition as an adjunct professor in Pitt’s English department. “The University is firmly committed to supporting PITT ARTS at the highest levels, and that is what really sets us apart.” One of the most enthusiastic supporters is Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg.

PITT ARTS—established more than a decade ago by Provost James Maher—gets at the very essence of Pitt’s academic core value of educating the whole student by providing learning opportunities in and outside the classroom, according to Robert F. Pack, vice provost for academic planning and resource management, who helped to launch the first-of-its-kind program.

It is also a realization of the University’s informal motto: The city is our campus. “We wanted to engage our students in the life of the city, to get them out and about so they could truly experience Pittsburgh and their urban setting,” Pack says. At the same time, he recalls, the University was searching for strategies to recruit all-star students and seeking new ways to retain students already enrolled at Pitt—and keep their talent in the region after graduation.

So, the notion of PITT ARTS was born.

An able negotiator and lifelong arts aficionado, Pack spent the summer of 1997 meeting with the city’s leading cultural institutions. Partners such as the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Pittsburgh Opera, and the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild quickly came onboard. Pack discussed program approaches with Maher, who also had a keen interest in helping arts programs on campus attract student audiences.

Of course, there was the economic payoff, too: Last year alone, PITT ARTS contributed almost $270,000 in direct spending to arts nonprofits in Pittsburgh. More importantly, though, these organizations viewed the program as a way to address the long-term problem of how to attract young audiences.

Since the early 1980s, audiences for classical music, jazz, opera, theater, and the visual arts have declined nationwide as a percentage of the population. The percentage of these audiences ages 30 and younger has dropped even more precipitously, according to a RAND Survey of Public Participation in the Arts based on data collected by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The “graying” trend is further magnified in Allegheny County—home to the second-oldest population in the United States—where a recent study revealed that 45 percent of arts audiences are 55 and older.

“The challenge for all of us in the arts is to figure out how to reach more young people,” says Rose Piccioni, director of educational partnerships and audience development for MCG Jazz, Pittsburgh’s premier jazz performance space.

With grant funding from the Heinz Endowments, Clippinger has used PITT ARTS as a research laboratory to better understand the barriers to arts participation in young adults—and discover ways to overcome them.

College students bring with them considerable intellectual capital from their classrooms, making them uniquely suited to think critically about the arts and embrace new and challenging art forms, Clippinger says. Yet they also lead busy, hectic lives where studying, work, and extracurricular commitments keep them from doing everything they would like to do.

In her role as director of PITT ARTS, Clippinger conducts a range of research, including how to attract diverse audiences to the arts and how to develop enduring audiences. She found, for instance, that students are often unaware of arts events, or they are too intimidated to attend because they don’t know when to clap or what to wear. Ticket costs can be prohibitive, and public transportation in a large urban center like Pittsburgh can be daunting.

But the main obstacle keeping young adults from participating in the arts is inadequate K-12 arts education in America’s public schools, says Laura Zakaras, a senior communications analyst at the RAND Corp., an international nonprofit think tank that works to improve policies and decisionmaking through research. She is the coauthor of “Cultivating Demand for the Arts,” a report exploring policy options for declining public interest in the arts.

Cuts in education funding as well as federal requirements that emphasize reading and math test scores leave little space for arts instruction, Zakaras says. However, several studies indicate that children who are provided with little or no experience or study of the arts are less likely to become arts participants later in life: You don’t seek out what you don’t understand or appreciate.

“We are losing opportunities to draw young people into the arts and get them hooked early on,” Zakaras says. “And since arts learning in childhood is so strongly correlated with adult participation, once we lose them, it becomes less likely that we will recapture them.”

The stakes are high.

If demand for the arts keeps dropping, some arts organizations will be forced to close their doors, in turn shrinking the highly profitable cultural sector. Nationally, the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity each year, supporting 5.7 million full-time jobs, according to Americans for the Arts, a national arts advocacy group.

Then there are impacts that are harder to quantify. “The arts get us thinking deeply, make us laugh, cause us to question the world as it is, help us to build a diverse community, celebrate international awareness, beautify our world and nurture our spirits,” says Clippinger, warning that if the number of arts appreciators continues to dwindle, so too will these humanizing effects.

Pitt senior Sophia Cooper recalls attending a performance of Apollo, Balanchine’s oldest surviving ballet, by the Joffrey Ballet Company through PITT ARTS during her sophomore year.

“Our seats were in the front row of the balcony, and I remember crying,” says Cooper, an art history major and former dancer from Williamsport, Pa. “Apollo is just a beautiful ballet, and it was one of the most moving things I’ve ever experienced.”

Unless more is done to improve access for all students to arts education, experiences like these will only be available to a privileged few, Zakaras says, “and we will never manage to really democratize the arts to make them accessible to people from all walks of life.”

Clearly, PITT ARTS is doing vital work. “The program is fabulous because it is helping students play catch-up where their earlier formal education might have failed them,” says Susan Blackman, director of arts programs for the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, which represents dozens of cultural institutions across the region.

And by encouraging students to become audience members who are engaged and knowledgeable, the University is helping to create future generations of single ticket buyers, subscribers, and ideally arts patrons, Blackman says.

Asked in a survey if they would continue to support the arts after graduation, 87.3 percent of this year’s PITT ARTS participants said “Yes,” 11.4 percent answered “Maybe,” and just 1.2 percent said “No.” The program serves as a national model for how to foster lifelong habits of arts participation among students through experiential learning.

Take the example of Pitt sophomore Liam Sweeney, who has attended more than a dozen PITT ARTS excursions since discovering the program at an event fair his freshman year. “They would take us out to a nice dinner and pay for us to see a show, and as soon as I started going, I kind of fell in love with it,” says Sweeney.

Through PITT ARTS, the longtime jazz and blues fan has developed a new interest in flamenco music and classical theater that he plans to pursue after he leaves college. “The program is exposing me to more things that I normally wouldn’t be exposed to,” Sweeney says. “Now I will have a greater catalog to pull from after I graduate and have to do things on my own.”

Connections like these are being made at the University all the time. In helping to revitalize Pittsburgh’s cultural community, PITT ARTS also is making it possible for students like Efe Oghoghome to reconfirm their own vitality.

“Everything about that night was perfect,” Oghoghome says, recalling her arts encounter at the Warhol Museum. “And the fact that they brought me out there and gave me a taste of what is possible made it easier for me to want to explore the arts by myself.”

But her plans to spend more time at the museum over spring break were frustrated by the need to put in extra hours of studying to keep up in her challenging engineering courses.

While she toiled through her vacation, Oghoghome kept returning to the evening at the Warhol in her mind. The experience provided her with the escape she needed to put her academic difficulties in perspective. And by studying art that confronted death and disaster—and exploring these themes through her sewing—she realized that perhaps things weren’t so bad after all.

“I’m an optimist, but I’ve been getting pessimistic lately,” Oghoghome says. “That experience reminded me that there’s always a bright side to everything and that I could still get through the semester.”

Afterward, she decided to take apart her handcrafted pillow and re-sew the canvas patches on a hoodie sweatshirt to wear as a reminder of her experience at the Warhol Museum.

Lives transformed through art. What could be more powerful?

The sun would rise and so would the petite young cook. She’d slip on her crisp beige uniform, custom-made with pockets and buttons down the front. Then she’d tiptoe quietly from her quarters and walk down a short hill into the small, airy kitchen at Fallingwater.

A mythic home tucked in the emerald woods of Fayette County, Fallingwater was built by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s for department store mogul Edgar J. Kaufmann and his family. Famously, the house sits over a forest stream; a small waterfall babbles beneath the living room.

Elsie Henderson, the young chef, was the family’s last cook, serving primarily as the weekend baker beginning in 1947. She is the sole survivor among those who lived and worked at the home before it was entrusted to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy by Edgar J. Kaufmann Jr. in 1963.

Today, at almost 96, Henderson is taking classes at Pitt, studying French to better inform her mastery of cooking. With the help of author Suzanne Martinson, a retired food editor, Henderson also is telling some insightful tales in The Fallingwater Cookbook: Elsie Henderson’s Recipes & Memories (University of Pittsburgh Press). Martinson befriended Henderson more than a decade ago, and they grew close sharing meals like Henderson’s Cornish hens and corn sticks. Martinson said the book is the story of a woman, the Kaufmanns, and a beautiful house.

The Kaufmanns were a spirited family. They filled Fallingwater with art, books, and celebrities. Henderson recalls cooking for renowned guests like violinist Isaac Stern. Architect Wright, a friend of the Kaufmanns, flirted with her. She describes the day she began her job. When she arrived on a summer afternoon, the Kaufmanns were frolicking with friends in the falls. To her surprise, says Henderson, they were all nude. This incident and others give a glimpse, often with humor, into the interior life of Fallingwater, including the food enjoyed by those who lived and visited there.

Henderson was born on Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington in 1913 in a small home on a street that, she says, always seemed muddy. The youngest of 13 children, she left high school after the 11th grade to help support her family. She began working in the accounts department of Kaufmann’s Service Center but left to pursue her interest in cooking. With minimal culinary training but lots of her mom’s homespun know-how, she found a way to please the palates of the rich and famous.

During her long career, she has cooked soup for the father of Sen. John Heinz,  resurrected leftovers for the Kennedys, and prepared meals for the Mellons and Shrivers. But her longest and most memorable job was at Fallingwater. There, she danced with Kaufmann Sr., picked herbs from his wife’s garden, and was driven to the estate by a chauffeur who wore Brooks Brothers suits. Now, she’s giving everybody a taste of the magic that was Fallingwater.

Ashley

In San Diego, federal agents monitor a motor home that’s sitting, stationary, in a parking lot. They suspect illegal activity. Eventually, a teenage boy exits the motor home. The agents approach him, and he admits that he just bartered to receive marijuana, a violation of U.S. law. The agents tell the teen to return and knock on the door. When a man inside answers, one of the agents enters the motor home—without permission or a search warrant—and finds marijuana, plastic bags, and a scale for weighing drugs. Then the agents take the motor home to a nearby police station, where it’s searched for a second time, and more marijuana is found.  The man, Charles Carney, is charged with possession and sale of marijuana.

Nearly three decades later, Pitt law student Corrine Saylor reads the tale of Carney’s misdeeds on a computer screen in the Barco Law Building’s computer lab. The crime story does not have a simple end, but that only makes Saylor’s task more interesting.  She’s using a new method of digital study, developed at Pitt, to examine the legal system’s twists and turns.

Saylor is examining the Supreme Court case of California vs. Carney to inform her understanding of the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which protects citizens against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Usually, cases for marijuana peddling are decided quickly by local judges and aren’t heard in higher courts—but Carney’s case raised interesting legal questions because of the motor home, which isn’t a typical residence. His case was debated in multiple California courts and ultimately argued in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984.

On screen, Saylor reads a transcript of the Supreme Court oral debate when Carney’s case was argued. She ponders some of the same questions that the justices considered: Is a motor home a vehicle or a residence? If it’s a residence, were the federal agents wrong to search it without a warrant? Was Carney’s privacy illegally invaded? Then she clicks on virtual buttons in a software program to map out an argument diagram showing how the justices evaluated those questions in considering their decision.

Saylor is learning from, and testing, a pilot computer program developed by the University of Pittsburgh’s Kevin D. Ashley and colleagues. He’s an expert at using computers to model how lawyers, judges, and other legal professionals ponder and interpret laws. A professor of both law and intelligent systems, as well as a senior scientist in the University’s Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), Ashley conducts hybrid research that involves the fields of law, learning, and artificial intelligence.

For more than 20 years, Ashley has been working in artificial intelligence—the branch of computer science that simulates intelligent behavior—to get computers to understand what goes on in the American judicial system. With his interest in law, he’s in a unique position to help the computer science world achieve a seemingly far-off goal: To get a computer to understand human common sense. “The law is kind of midway between math and science,” he says. “When confronted with less-structured common sense, artificial intelligence doesn’t have a clue as to how to proceed, but in the law, there’s a fair amount of structure. The appealing idea is to try to take advantage of that structure. Then, artificial intelligence has a fairly good idea of how to proceed and represent information and model inferences.”

This year, Ashley traveled to conferences nationwide and abroad to report on the unusual computer software program developed by the research team that he leads—a project that’s funded by the National Science Foundation.The experimental software, called Legal Argument Graph Observer (LARGO), helps users analyze decision-making in the oral arguments of Supreme Court cases like California vs. Carney. It has the potential not only to improve legal studies, but also to bring computers closer to understanding the less-obvious patterns in human common sense.

Some days, Ashley can be found leading a Socratic discussion with students in the law school; other days, he’s in his LRDC research office with a red pen and a stack of LARGO documents.One afternoon in his research office, he explains that the U.S. Supreme Court is one of the most unusual judicial bodies in the world, and its inner workings can be a challenge to understand. That’s one reason he developed the LARGO software program—to help law students follow and interpret complex Supreme Court debates. While talking, he gently reclines in a swivel chair near a window overlooking Oakland’s urban hillside. He’s polite and genial, the sort of professor inclined toward neckties and round glasses, and he keeps himself in shape by swimming. On his desk are printouts of diagrams that various students have drawn using LARGO. He’s marked scores on them in red pen.

Ashley says a characteristic feature of the Supreme Court is that justices pose hypothetical questions to the attorneys who are arguing cases. As the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court is the ultimate authority on interpreting the U.S. Constitution and other laws. It must consider how its decisions affect the Constitution and the future decisions of judges across the nation. To properly evaluate cases for their future impact, the justices must ask hypothetical questions.

This method of hypothetical reasoning helps the justices test the effectiveness of their interpretations, as well as understand how their decisions could set precedents for lower-court judges. It also helps them build arguments in support of their final decisions. In California vs. Carney, for example, the justices pondered the residency status of a motor home parked at a campground instead of a parking lot, or the residency status of houseboats and truck trailers, to gauge how their decision would affect future legal cases that might deal with privacy issues at “ambiguous” residences.

Ashley notes that it can be difficult for law students, and even legal professionals, to understand the purpose of hypothetical questions or the structures of the arguments that are built through a series of hypothetical questions.

“Law professors are famous for not doing a lot of explaining about what is happening in an argument,” Ashley says. “If a student makes a weak argument, the professor will illustrate the problem to the student by taking advantage of the weakness and coming back with a strong response.” However, he says, students can benefit from close analysis of arguments, through activities like drawing maps of arguments’ structures. “It’s helpful to go ‘meta’ from time to time to explain examples so that students can reflect on what’s happening.” And his LARGO program helps users do just that—by applying the analytic power of computers to decipher the hypothetical reasoning used in Supreme Court cases.

When Saylor used LARGO in the Barco computer lab, she scrolled through the written transcript of the California vs. Carney debate on the left side of her screen and highlighted important words in the text. Then, on the right side of her screen, she clicked little boxes and wrote summaries of the rules that the lawyers had posed, like: “IF a vehicle has wheels AND is capable of moving, THEN a search without a warrant is permitted.” After that, she drew lines to connect the boxes to the hypothetical ideas that the justices posited. One such hypothetical considered whether a motor home hooked up to water and electricity at a campground could be searched without a warrant. Sometimes, Saylor got stuck. When she didn’t know what to do next, she clicked an “Advice” button. The program provided hints and suggestions for improving her argument diagram, based on the coding that Ashley had developed for the software to understand the arguments.

Yet, deciphering hypothetical reasoning isn’t only a challenge for students. It’s a challenge for computers, too. In a 21st-century digital world, computers seem to be all-knowing, and it’s easy to forget that people have created the artificial intelligence programs that enable a personal computer to beat a chess master.

For his PhD dissertation in the late 1980s, Ashley wrote a computer program called HYPO that simulated both sides of a legal argument. It incorporated some hypothetical reasoning, though not nearly as advanced as today’s LARGO. Still, it was innovative work, and his dissertation was ultimately published as Modeling Legal Arguments: Reasoning with Cases and Hypotheticals (MIT Press). But Ashley hasn’t always mixed the fields of computer science and law.

“When I went to college in the ’70s, to be interested in computer science meant that you had to write your programs on IBM punch cards, deliver a whole pile of them to the computer center, and then come back in the morning to discover you’d left a comma out someplace,” he says, tossing his hands up. “It was a very frustrating activity. So, I wanted NO part of computers,” he says, with amusement.

As an undergraduate, Ashley studied philosophy at Princeton and then earned a Harvard law degree. Afterward, he worked as a litigator at a high-profile New York law firm, where he was well paid but uninspired—there wasn’t enough time to analyze intelligently the cases shoved across his desk. So he considered various career options and, because “computer law was a hot topic at the time,” he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts to earn a master’s degree in computer science. Once he discovered that he could model legal arguments with artificial intelligence—and didn’t have to deal with punch cards—he decided to pursue a doctoral degree.

“Artificial intelligence was coming into its own when I was in graduate school,” he says. “You could conceivably build a program that could work not just on one example of an argument, but on a bunch of other examples, too. You would look to see what kinds of examples it would start to break down on, and that’s where you would try to improve, invent, and make new things. Artificial intelligence just fit my philosophical interests.”

California vs. Carney was argued in the Supreme Court while Ashley was in graduate school, and he added the case to his PhD dissertation on HYPO, unaware that it would become a featured example in his future research.

Since joining Pitt’s faculty in 1989, Ashley has written and evaluated several tutoring programs that are designed to help users understand different aspects of law. Typically, such programs have been developed to help philosophy students or others in liberal arts studies to understand the art of argument, but few of these programs focus on legal studies—and Ashley’s programs are more interactive than most. Many, for instance, don’t provide the “advice” feedback that students like Saylor receive when they get stuck. In recognition of his groundbreaking work, Ashley received the Pitt Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award in the Senior Scholar Category in 2000. That same year, he also served as president of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Ashley’s most recent project, LARGO, has been creating a buzz. The maps on his desk are just a few of hundreds drawn by Pitt law students, including Saylor, who is now working with Ashley as a research assistant. “The program helped me to realize that the law could be approached by breaking things down into smaller problems,” she says.

In addition to collecting anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of LARGO as a teaching tool, Ashley also is analyzing its impact through various quantitative methods. He has, for instance, been comparing scores on the students’ diagrams (marked in his red pen) to the students’ scores on the LSAT, a standardized test that all law-school applicants must take. Some of his evidence shows that LARGO is very helpful as a learning tool for students with lower LSAT scores. Lately, he also has been busy giving conference talks in the United States and abroad. In his presentations, he uses the California vs. Carney case to explain how LARGO works.

In the future, Ashley expects to build a grading system so LARGO can evaluate the student mapping diagrams by itself. He also hopes to include aural recordings of the Supreme Court debates. Because court transcripts in LARGO don’t note, for example, the amount of time that passes between a justice’s hypothetical question and the response from a lawyer, Ashley says it’s easy to gloss over that detail. Yet, when you hear a recording of an awkward six-second pause hanging in the nation’s highest courtroom, you realize how difficult those hypothetical questions are. “You can just imagine the lawyer considering the alternatives and deciding which is the lesser evil in the response,” he says.

In the California vs. Carney case, the Supreme Court decided that a mobile home can be searched without a warrant. The federal agents followed proper procedures. Anyone who has used Ashley’s LARGO program knows why.

Dudgeon

Maul

Cole

Growing up in rural Ohio, the teenager tackled a daily list of chores. He fed pigs, shoveled cow manure, toted buckets of water—all kinds of tough farm work. But whenever he found a spare moment, he liked to sit under his favorite maple tree. There, by a pond, he read and dreamed, aspiring to become everything from an astronaut to a surgeon.

Eventually, fate led the teen, Drew Dudgeon, to a future career.

A beloved cousin developed a deadly blood disease. To see his “bigger and stronger” 23-year-old relative wither away taught Dudgeon that no one is invincible. At the time, no proven treatments were available, and a cure was not possible for Dudgeon’s cousin, who died within a year of the diagnosis.

But it was an era when experimental medicines were starting to show glimmers of promise. So the teenager’s aspirations turned to science, and he decided to become a researcher, hoping to make discoveries that might save lives.

While Dudgeon was cultivating an interest in science, another youngster, Timothy Maul, was growing up elsewhere in Ohio. He, too, developed an affinity for science, influenced by his father, a hospital lab manager. Like Dudgeon, he initially wanted to be a surgeon, but science-fair projects in middle school and later exposure to bioengineering shifted his focus to scientific research.

Both young men pursued science careers in college and, in time, both earned doctoral degrees—Dudgeon from Johns Hopkins University and Maul from the University of Pittsburgh. In 2007, their paths converged at a campus awards dinner.

Each was selected to receive a two-year Hartwell Biomedical Research Fellowship, with $50,000 a year in support. The prestigious national fellowships fund postdoctoral training for budding scientists early in their research careers. The funds are directed to a few, select, qualifying U.S. research institutions—including the University of Pittsburgh—which then determine a handful of candidates and ultimately choose a single fellow for the Hartwell distinction.

Maul—a research associate in the Department of Bioengineering in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering and in the Department of Surgery in the School of Medicine—received the fellowship in 2006. He was at the ceremony the following year to watch Dudgeon—a researcher in the School of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology & Chemical Biology—pick up a 2007 fellowship.

Their association strengthened over the next summer when Maul began searching Pitt’s campus for a Biacore, a delicate state-of the-art instrument used to detect the dance between biological and drug molecules. He found it, thanks to Dudgeon, and now both share a special rapport as they work to complete their Hartwell-funded research projects.

The foundation’s mission is to support innovative biomedical research that potentially benefits children. The fellowship support is aimed at early-stage research projects that haven’t yet qualified for funding from more traditional sources.

The Hartwell Foundation chose Pitt as one of its select institutions because of shared values related to children’s health, says Fred Dombrose, president of the Memphis-based organization. The foundation also took into account Pitt’s first-rate medical school and its established Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Swanson School. It also looked at Pitt’s commitment of technical support for investigators, as well as support for translational approaches that promote rapid clinical application of research results, including technology transfer. “The quality and scope of ongoing research to benefit kids was outstanding,” says Dombrose, who adds, “Pitt ranked high in each category.”

Dudgeon’s research focuses on anticancer therapies. He’s exploring the microworld of proteins and molecules, searching for drugs that trigger the body’s natural “cell-suicide” mechanism as a way to kill cancer cells. Data from the American Cancer Society indicate that, from 1975 to 2004, cancer death rates among children ages 14 and younger decreased, but the incidence rates increased.

Maul, a research associate, is developing new artificial heart technology to help babies and children live longer while waiting for a donor-heart transplant. His research is taking place in several areas—the Swanson School’s bioengineering department, the School of Medicine’s surgery department, and the Pitt-UPMC McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Early in his studies, Maul says he realized that he “could probably do more good for people by developing new medical technologies rather than as a single medical practitioner.”

However, he remains passionate about pediatric medicine and wants to build a career connected to the field. Even as a scientist with a PhD in bioengineering, Maul is drawn toward clinical research through his work at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, where he monitors neonatal and pediatric patients on lifesaving devices.

He and Dudgeon have been working together on a project that involves creating synthetic “microbubbles” to improve blood circulation. Dudgeon runs models to analyze their results, and then the two discuss the outcomes and plan the next experiment. Their collaboration, aided by a lot of e-mail discussion, is typical of the interdisciplinary research that thrives across campus.

The fellows are supported by prominent Pitt faculty who serve as mentors. Dudgeon’s is John S. Lazo, Allegheny Foundation Professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Chemical Biology. Maul gets guidance from Harvey S. Borovetz, professor and chair in the Department of Bioengineering and director of the University’s Clinical Bioengineering Program, and William R. Wagner, deputy director of the McGowan Institute, and a professor of surgery, bioengineering, and chemical engineering.

In February 2009, the two postdoctoral fellows were joined by Pitt’s third and newest Hartwell Fellow, Marcie Cole, who is a biochemist in the School of Medicine. A West Virginia native, Cole has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry and a doctoral degree in nutritional sciences and toxicology, all from the University of Kentucky. She is investigating the mechanisms by which inflammation in the body induces chronic metabolic disorders such as diabetes and, perhaps, obesity. Part of her work involves developing new therapies to treat the conditions, with guidance from her mentor, Bruce A. Freeman, professor and chair in the Department of Pharmacology & Chemical Biology.  Cole says she is honored by the fellowship and is interested in collaborating with Dudgeon and Maul.

All three young researchers are tackling important issues. Diabetes is one of the top 10 causes of death among Americans, with heart disease and cancer ranking first and second, respectively. The Hartwell Fellowship distinguishes the three Pitt fellows as among the most promising young scientists at one of the nation’s top biomedical research institutions.

“Science is all about working with others. No one can do it alone,” says Dudgeon. “This kind of science is focused on getting something beneficial out the door, helping people to get better.”

U.S. Steel Dean of Engineering Gerald Holder

It’s the heart of Mali’s dry season.

Four undergraduate students bounce around inside a battered VW van with seven other travelers. In 115-degree heat, the driver follows a barely visible “road,” crossing a segment of Africa’s flat Sahel region. One of the van’s doors won’t stay shut, so the rider next to it has the job of holding the door closed on the long, dusty journey. After a hot, gut-tumbling eight hours traveling from the capital of Bamako over an arid plain, the van finally reaches its destination, a remote village in central Mali.

Most of the villagers here in Makili are subsistence farmers, trying to grow rice and millet, eking out a living in one of the world’s poorest nations. The bare, scrubby landscape is dotted with mud-brick, thatch, and corrugated tin houses. The dry season lasts six or seven months, a time when the shallow wells begin to disappear without any guarantee of replenishment. Drinking, washing, cooking, crop irrigation—life itself—all depend on a steady supply of water, something that is especially fragile in this part of the world.

The just-arrived University of Pittsburgh students have traveled thousands of miles to see whether they can help. Using their Pitt-acquired engineering skills, they will partner with the Makilians to boost the village’s year-round water and food supplies. The students—engineering majors Emma Baillargeon, Mike Bozek, and Victoria Kennedy, along with physics major Jeff Fein—are part of the Pittsburgh chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that matches students with professionals to construct infrastructure in developing countries. The students are accompanied by three mentors who are Pittsburgh-area civil engineers.

A few years ago, the residents of Makili learned that a neighboring village had begun to develop a sustainable fish farm. Brilliant idea! The Makilians dug their own pond, but the water continued to dry up from evaporation and ground absorption. So they turned to a local Peace Corps worker, who contacted EWB headquarters to find skilled volunteers who might be able to help. Before long, the Pitt team arrived, ready to survey land, assess the site, and design a sustainable pond.

It turns out that building a fish farm in Mali requires virtually the same skills and approaches demanded by the broader field of engineering today. These include the need for multiple partnerships, new or unlikely collaborations, global communications, cultural sensitivity, access to the right tools, and planning that accounts for resources, energy use, costs, sustainability, and security.

For several years, Pitt’s John A. Swanson School of Engineer-ing has been re-envisioning its programs, classrooms, and curricula to better equip its students to grapple with the world’s toughest problems.

The future of engineering is not sitting in an office alone, says Harvey Borovetz, distinguished professor and chair of Pitt’s bioengineering department in the Swanson School. “Your laptop is your office,” he says. “You can collaborate with coworkers on any continent or in any city. Everything is changing as the world becomes more tightly connected.”

The Swanson School has revamped its curriculum in many areas to prepare students to lead engineering innovation over the next decades. The current curriculum offers more opportunities for students to work in teams and participate in cross-disciplinary research, mirroring the world they will work in when they graduate. New state-of-the-art classrooms, part of the innovative Albert G. Holzman Learning Center, are designed to encourage interactive, collaborative learning with multiple, interconnected computers on a shared desktop. The school also has embarked on a $100 million “transformation plan” that will further renovate Benedum Hall in preparation for a new era of problem solving.

One major goal is to make sure that students are prepared to compete in an international environment, says Gerald D. Holder, the Swanson School’s U.S. Steel Dean of Engineering. Last year, 35 percent of graduating engineering students had worked or studied abroad in countries as diverse as Brazil, Germany, Vietnam, India, and Mali. That global experience is becoming essential in the education of engineers, especially those eager to solve truly daunting problems.

The National Academy of Engineer-ing recently assembled a diverse group of experts to identify “the grand challenges in engineering” for this century. Their report (www.engineeringchallenges.org) notes, “Foremost among those challenges are those that must be met to ensure the future itself.”

The report’s priorities range from developing economical solar power,  securing cyberspace, and engineering better medicines to creating energy from fusion, restoring urban infrastructures, ensuring access to clean water, and preventing nuclear terror.

The complex nature of these challenges requires the brainpower of multidisciplinary teams, working together in locations scattered across the globe. The solutions will result from novel approaches, new tools, and creative people—in other words, the world needs engineering innovation and plenty of it.

Pitt’s bioengineers, for instance, are working closely with both materials engineers and with physicians from the School of Medicine and the medical center to create advanced devices and techniques. Borovetz—who also is the Robert L. Hardesty Professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Surgery—and others are designing and building mechanical devices to aid faulty or failing organs. Additional teams are creating new biomaterials, including a form of bioscaffolding to support the growth of new tissue and even, possibly, replacement organs.

To support and broaden these kinds of innovations, the Swanson School has created new programs and certificates in areas like bioengineering, electrical power and energy, construction management, and green construction. There is a keen and growing awareness of the need to make new things possible with less environmental impact and lower resource use.

“Until recently, it wasn’t part of an engineer’s ken to consider sustainability,” says Dean Holder. “Now, engineers must consider the entire life cycle of their design: What resources and materials will be used, the manufacture and use of that structure or device, and what happens to it when its useful life is over.”

New initiatives are training Pitt students in this area, including a green entrepreneurship course on sustainable products and clean technology design.  “Growing interest in green engineering and bioengineering reflects a trend among students to want to be part of something that benefits society,” says Dean Holder.

The Swanson School’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation is dedicated to conducting research and developing approaches and products that will have a positive, enduring impact on the environment and quality of life. Here, students are working on projects to convert traditional buildings to green technology, to develop sustainable water resources, and to design environmentally friendly power sources.

Other areas where students are devoting their attention are in the electric power and energy fields because of increasing national and global energy needs and the growing specter of climate change. Areas of focus at the Swanson School’s Center for Energy include renewable energy resources, energy efficiency and reliability, advanced materials for energy applications, and power system technology development.

“It’s going to take responsible integration of existing and new technologies to tap new forms of energy resources, become sound environmental stewards, and comply with coming legislation and policies that will require less CO2 emissions,” says Gregory Reed, a professor in electrical and computer engineering who also directs the Swanson School’s Power & Energy Initiative.

Another focus is on modernizing the half-century-old U.S. electrical grid, which was not engineered to handle the current population or its energy needs. A 1950s household did not contain a microwave, two computers, video games, three TVs, cell phones, a dishwasher, multiple air conditioners, or a multitude of other electronic gadgets. Projections show that U.S. energy needs will continue to skyrocket for at least the next half-century.

According to Reed, the aging grid needs to transport ever-greater amounts of energy from inland generators to population centers that are often perched on faraway coastlines. It’s a problem that could make blackouts more common, if not properly developed. Another obstacle is that the current system is not tooled for renewables. Pitt researchers in the Power & Energy Initiative are looking at how to engineer a “smart” grid able to better manage power systems and store energy from “episodic” sources that are productive only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

“We need to strategically integrate all forms of energy resources to establish a balance of economics, reliability, and sustainability,” says Reed. “This includes everything from renewables to clean coal  to nuclear. We also need better ways to store, deliver, and use energy.”

Amidst this great need for innovation, a crisis is brewing in the U.S. energy industry, says Don Shields, codirector of the Swanson Institute for Technical Excellence. Over the past decades, the industry reduced recruiting and research, and it now faces a huge retirement wave. The average age of technology and engineering workers is about 55 years old, and nearly half of that workforce will be eligible for retirement in the next 10 years.

To meet this need, the Swanson School developed certificate programs in electric power, mining, and nuclear engineering. “We need to fill the pipeline with new engineers,” says Shields. “But this also means that these students will face big responsibilities very early in their careers—and we’re trying to make sure they’re ready for it.”

Changing world demographics are creating challenges for engineers. By 2150, two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities, and much of that population will be clustered along coastlines. Already, 25 megacities across the globe are home to at least 10 million inhabitants, straining the infrastructure.

Crumbling bridges, highways, sewage treatment plants, and other deteriorating public works pose an impending crisis, says Shields. More housing, more cars, and more people are straining systems that were built in the 1950s. Though they have been minimally maintained, most were never updated.

The challenge is how to make these structures safe—and how to make them smarter. Shields notes that there are fewer sensors and computing capabilities in a multimillion dollar bridge than there are in his car. Students in a new Pitt transportation engineering master’s program are learning how to design, maintain, and manage the highway system using novel paradigms, with new pavement materials and embedded sensors that monitor traffic flow and sense where maintenance is needed.

Today’s engineers working in the new global landscape must be equipped with skills that fall far outside traditional technical parameters. Students must embrace globalization and diversity. They must be able to manage change—along with a project’s cost. They must be able to work with policy makers, to employ leadership skills, and to communicate well with everyone involved.

Pitt is addressing these issues in myriad ways, including broadened requirements that include more humanities, social sciences and business courses, and a co-op requirement that gives students work experience. “We are working to educate the next generation and prepare them in a way that is modern and relevant, and we are doing it with strong industry collaboration,” says Reed.

On some fronts, this generation’s engineers are already leading the way. They are hungry to make a difference. In response to growing student involvement in programs like Engineers Without Borders (EWB) and Engineers for a Sustainable World, Pitt will launch a new certificate program next year in Engineering for Humanity, requiring involvement in a service project.

For several years now, Swanson School students have embraced the concept of engineering for humanity.  Emma Baillargeon, one of the Pitt students who traveled to Makili last summer, joined EWB in spring 2007 and became the chapter’s president in 2008. From the start, she has been part of the Pittsburgh effort to help the village create a durable fish-farming pond.

When the students returned from  Mali last summer, they used their site assessment data to draft a pond design that would sustain year-round use. Afterward, with input from Makili residents, the students discovered that the initial pond design wouldn’t work—the downpours during the rainy season would likely flood the pond and, possibly, the village. Now—a year after the reconnaisance trip and consultations with Mali’s Ministry of Fish, Rotary International, REFOR (an organization that has built other fish farms), a local Peace Corps representative, and others—Pitt’s EWB members are refining the pond design to account for the region’s extreme seasons. Baillargeon is returning to Makili this spring to help gather data on the local watershed, ground slope, and rainfall. In addition to adjusting the pond’s design, chapter members will evaluate the need for a reservoir to regulate the pond’s depth.

A bioengineering major, Baillargeon also worked on health assessments and quality-of-life surveys related to the pond’s impact on the village. The full scope of the fish-farm project includes educating the local population about rainwater harvesting techniques, aquaculture practices and maintenance, and financial management of resources.

Baillargeon, who completed her Pitt bioengineering degree this spring, says that her trips to Mali were among her most valuable college experiences. “I got into engineering because I wanted to help other people,” she says. But the reality is even more moving than she’d imagined. “You meet a community, you see their needs, and you can’t let them down. It’s not an option.”

Just Enough Anxiety: The Hidden Driver of Business Success
For the busy executive, the right amount of uneasiness could be the key to business triumphs. Using clinical psychology, his background as a CEO, and his experience advising corporate leaders, Robert H. Rosen (A&S ’80G,’82G) reveals his know-how in Just Enough Anxiety (Penguin Group). The book provides insights from various CEOs and gives methods to gauge anxiety levels. Bottom line: Rosen offers strategies to better understand the “upside” of anxiety and use it in the workplace to maximize success.

The Baltimore Plot
As President-elect Lincoln’s train rolled to his inauguration, there were rumors of a possible assassination attempt in Baltimore. These suspicions were never fully investigated, until now. Acting as a legal detective, author Michael J. Kline (LAW ’85) explores vintage letters and documents, revealing the treachery that could have changed history. Robert Cochran, Emmy-winning executive director of the TV series 24, optioned film rights to The Baltimore Plot: The First Conspiracy to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln (Westholme Publishing).

Voices of My Comrades
Avoiding gunfire as he runs for safety, the young sailor watches as his ship explodes from bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. Now, Ensign Wesley P. Craig’s firsthand account—and that of 240 other veterans, including several Pitt alumni—can be read in Voices of My Comrades: America’s Reserve Officers Remember World War II (Fordham University Press). Editor Carol Adele Consavage Kelly (A&S ’53) offers a 1941-45 chronological compilation of stories originally told in The Officer magazine. She pulls from diaries, journals, and memoirs to offer these profiles in courage.

Prospect Hill
Inspired by her great aunt’s stories, author Kimberly Seigh (SOC WK ’87G, UPJ ’98) reveals life in 20th-century Johnstown, Pa., through the fictional Crystal Edelweiss. The story follows the Edelweiss family after the 1889 Johnstown flood as it struggles to stay together and as Crystal transforms herself into an independent 1920s woman. Intended to teach children history while also appealing to adults, Prospect Hill (Publisher Page) offers a glimpse into early Western Pennsylvania life.

Author Ervin Dyer (right) with August Wilson in 1997. Two years later, after another interview, the playwright signed the photograph,“The struggle continues,” a popular 1960s salutation used to encourage others in the long march for racial justice.

Once in a lifetime, as a reporter, if you’re lucky, you get a moment that shines brighter than any other. My moment came 12 summers ago when I hopped into a Chevy Lumina with three other people and drove all night to Chicago.

A filmmaker, his young apprentice, a reporting intern, and myself—a journalist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at the time—had an appointment with playwright August Wilson. We met at Chicago’s charming Whitehall Hotel. At about 3 p.m., Wilson knocked at the door. He entered, wearing a natty cap and faint smile. He seemed hesitant, answering questions with measured pauses. I was star-struck.

About 40 minutes later, the conversation grew more intimate. Wilson began reflecting on life in the Hill District. Suddenly, all strangeness melted away as he chatted warmly about family and friends. He chatted about blues music, too, and how it helped him find his literary soul. I chatted about disco.

For three hours—180 minutes—great stories and characters tumbled from his memories. The playwright seemed ready to share a thousand tales. Then, in my stumbling naiveté, I shut the interview down, telling him I was due somewhere else. We all had to leave. It was our mistake to think three hours would be enough time. Now I realize that he could have talked for several more hours, and I would have been that much the better for it. In parting, I shook his hand and posed for a photograph before going somewhere that has now faded from my mind.

I met August Wilson at least twice more, but his time was more hurried than before. No matter how long we talked, no matter how generous his spirit, I was forever haunted by the moment I let slip away, with so many stories left untold.

Amy Niceswanger

A native of South Park, Pa., she grew up rooting for Pitt. She also spent a lot of time dancing, starting lessons at age 3. Those steps led her to the Pitt Dance Team and eventually to her position with the University of Pittsburgh’s athletics department. Today, one of her primary tasks is coordinating fundraising efforts for student-athlete scholarships. She still follows all Panthers athletics, including the dance team. “There is a dance movement that the team does that is still called ‘Amy,’” she says proudly. “It’s a lot of hip-shaking and smiling. They don’t do it too often, but I’ve seen it.”

My first residence on campus … was on the sixth floor of Holland Hall. We had a corner room, so we had six windows. We’d yell down at the boys. It was fun. To this day, my roommate and I are very good friends.

I still have … my pom-poms, or my “gold shakers,” from the Pitt Dance Team. By the end of the school year, my roommate and I called our pom-poms “The Rat,” because they shed throughout the season. By March, there was hardly any gold to “shake.” They are tucked away in my little memory chest, only to be taken out when my friends from the dance team come back to town (or for this PittChat page!).

I didn’t have a computer at school, so … I would be in the computer lab in Hillman Library. I remember pressing “print” and not knowing on what floor the pieces of paper would come out, or how long it would take.

My favorite spot in Oakland is … Oakland Avenue, where I had an apartment for three years. I love the businesses there. My favorite eating spots were one block away.

The song that always reminds me of Pitt … is “Dancing Queen” by Abba.

My first meal in Oakland was … pizza at the “O” at 2 a.m.

Most people think my job … is the greatest job in America because I get to attend every sporting event and have a behind-the-scenes relationship with the department. But I usually don’t get to sit down to watch the games until after halftime.

Today’s students … are very impressive. The quality of students coming into the University makes me feel like all of us are going to be in good hands in the future.

I wish I’d kept … my tickets from each of this year’s Pitt basketball games, because this is a season to remember.

Photograph from The Owl yearbook, 1971

As his final semester drew to a close, this University of Pittsburgh senior developed the
ability to write term papers in his sleep—even during midday naps.

Congratulations to our 2009 graduates!

Now, follow your dreams
Write to us at:
pittmag@pitt.edu
or
Pitt Magazine
400 Craig Hall
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Chairman, Board of Trustees, University of Pittsburgh
Retired Chief Justice of Pennsylvania

The following is an excerpt from Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg’s eulogy, delivered at a memorial service celebrating The Honorable Ralph J. Cappy’s life. The service was held on campus at Heinz Memorial Chapel on May 5, 2009. Justice Cappy died on May 1 in his Green Tree home.

The University of Pittsburgh was Ralph Cappy’s university. He arrived here, as a college freshman, in the fall of 1961. After earning two degrees, he was prepared to move into the real world and craft his distinguished career—a career that was centered in Pittsburgh and included his service as Pennsylvania’s Chief Justice, a pinnacle of the legal profession.

But in a very real sense, Ralph never left this campus. Pitt was in his heart; he believed in its mission; and he supported the University in a broad range of ways and over the course of many years. He would be very pleased that so many of you have come to his academic home—not only to honor his life of high achievement, but to reflect, more personally, on the parts of that special life that he shared with you.

In the ways that he regularly expressed himself, Ralph Cappy almost seemed more proud of the place from which he had come than he was of the lofty destinations to which he traveled. He was the “kid from Brookline” who became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania—not only the highest court in this Commonwealth, but the oldest appellate court in our nation.

It was interesting to hear Ralph talk about one of the early legs of that journey—his trip from Brookline to Pitt, a distance that was short in miles but not in certain other ways.  Ralph arrived ready to “take on the world,” with his priorities apparently aligned to place social success first, with academics to follow.

His freshman first impressions were not encouraging. Ralph judged his new college classmates to be more stylish and sophisticated than he was.  Undaunted, he pursued that social agenda with levels of effectiveness that later would characterize his approach to important professional undertakings.  One of his undergraduate friends later reported to me, admiringly, that Ralph fit more of a social life into any single Pitt weekend than he had been able to muster in all four of his own undergraduate years combined.

That, of course, is the way that Ralph was. He had a personal appeal that drew people to him. And he had an enviable combination of qualities that held those people close, as friends and as allies, and that contributed to his many successes. Those qualities included an active and agile mind, a principled commitment to worthy causes, the courage of his convictions, good judgment, common sense—and, most important of all, a caring heart.

Ralph was one of the kindest, most considerate and genuinely empathetic individuals I have known. He built his career by doing good work extraordinarily well in each and every job he held—public defender, trial court judge, Supreme Court justice, and, most recently, private practitioner. And the list of honors that he was accorded—not because of the positions he held but because of what he did from those positions—reflects the breadth and impact of his accomplishments.

Among the honors presented by his professional peers, Ralph was recognized by the National Center for State Courts for work of national significance in the field of judicial administration; he was one of only nine persons ever to receive the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s Bar Medal; he received the highest honors bestowed by the Philadelphia and Allegheny County Bar Associations; and he received the Susan B. Anthony Award from the Women’s Bar Association of Western Pennsylvania for his efforts to promote equality in the legal profession.

The range of other groups honoring him included the Pennsylvania State Police, the Fraternal Order of Police, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and, of course, the Sons of Italy. Here at Pitt, he was recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus of the School of Law, as a University Distinguished Alumni Fellow, and as a Pitt Legacy Laureate. And the “people of Pitt” always will be indebted to him for his leadership in our drive through this period of historic progress.

As each of us attempts to deal with the deep sense of loss triggered by Ralph’s sudden and untimely death, we may find some comfort in the tragically prophetic words attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “In the end, it is not the years in your life that count. It is the life in your years.” No one fit more life into his years than Ralph Cappy.

Adams-Campbell

Perlmutter

Pitt alumnus Lucile L. Adams-Campbell and Pitt professor David H. Perlmutter were each elected to the Institute of Medicine, an elite membership organization and national advisory body on matters of health and science policy. Adams-Campbell (GSPH ’83) is a Georgetown University professor of oncology and the associate director for minority health and health disparities research at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Georgetown University’s medical center. Her work focuses on the prevention of cancer in populations at risk for the disease and includes examinations of diet and exercise as tools in the battle against cancer and other serious diseases. Perlmutter is the Vira I. Heinz Professor and chair of the Department of Pediatrics in Pitt’s School of Medicine. He has dedicated more than 20 years of research to studying alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency, the most common genetic liver disease of childhood. He’s also the scientific director and physician-in-chief at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC.

Starzl

At 83 years old, medical pioneer Thomas E. Starzl is still conducting research on organ transplantation in his homey office on Fifth Avenue. Lately, he’s been studying the relationship between donor and recipient cells to develop new therapies that will help patients’ immune systems to tolerate new organs. The first surgeon to perform a liver transplant, Starzl is Distinguished Service Professor of Surgery in Pitt’s School of Medicine and director emeritus of the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute at UPMC. In recognition of his continued work, he received a 2009 Physician of the Year Award for Lifetime Achievement from Castle Connolly Medical Ltd., a national health care research and information
company.

Luna

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary federal agency that supports medical research across the country. This spring, Pitt’s Beatriz Luna was appointed to the agency’s Advisory Committee to the Director, a select group of scientists and physicians who help to oversee NIH policy and planning. Luna (A&S ’96G) is on the psychiatry faculty in Pitt’s School of Medicine and on the psychology faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences. She also is affiliated with the University’s Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Her research focuses on adolescent psychology.
adolescent psychology.

MacCord

Anthropologists who unearth human remains have long considered that disease and malnutrition retard the skeletal growth of children. But is that really true? Pitt senior Katherine M. MacCord, an anthropology major, conducted independent research at three natural history museums on three separate continents to find out. Her results were surprising: Disease and malnutrition don’t significantly retard growth. In recognition of her enterprising research and other academic accomplishments, she was named a national Gates Cambridge Scholar this year. The scholarship, which is highly competitive, is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and will enable MacCord to pursue graduate work at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

The affectionately named Oakland Zoo—one of the planet’s best groups of basketball fans—went wild this season, along with Pitt fans everywhere. The Panthers scored a record 31 wins-5 losses (15-3 Big East) and achieved a consensus Number One national ranking for the first time in school history.  The team also earned Pitt’s first-ever Number One seed entering the NCAA Tournament. Despite a heartbreaking loss that kept the team out of the Final Four playoffs, the Panthers set or tied school records for victories (31) and league wins (15), and finished the year with a PERFECT 19-0 home record. To top it off, Coach Jamie Dixon won the most prestigious national award for coaches in college basketball: He was named the 2009 Naismith Men’s College Basketball Coach of the Year by the Atlanta Tipoff Club, selected by a group of leading basketball journalists, coaches, and administrators from around the country.

Wetherill (left) and Palmer

Two Pitt engineering students slice plywood into pieces, spreading sawdust around a South Oakland basement. They’ve adapted a pool table into a workbench, and their power tools are connected to a slew of extension cords that twist near a washing machine. A radio blares, almost inaudible because of the whirring power tools, as seniors Stephen Palmer and Patrick Wetherill construct the initial framework for what they hope will lead them to success in their efforts to “go green.”

In the basement, Palmer, an industrial engineering major, and Wetherill, a mechanical engineering major, are building a model of their invention, a “Solar Assisted Window Fan.” The device is similar to typical window fans but uses less energy and can both heat and cool a room. It uses heat from the sun to warm room air, and it has a sensor for automatic on-or-off control.

The two students are creating the new fan as part of Pitt’s first annual Energy-Efficient Building Technologies Challenge, launched by the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, part of the Swanson School of Engineering. The contest prompts students from Western Pennsylvania universities to invent devices that conserve energy use in buildings. One of the requirements for the challenge is to make an affordable invention that, in one year, recoups the cost of the device through
energy-cost savings.

The Solar Assisted Window Fan invented by Palmer and Wetherill became a finalist and won second prize in the challenge, which included other noteworthy projects to generate wind power, create hydroelectricity with rainwater, eliminate power drain from idle devices like cell phone chargers, and much more.

Jero

Japan’s latest pop sensation, Jero, was named the Best New Artist at the 50th Annual Japan Record Awards this year. Jero, also known as Pitt alumnus Jerome White Jr. (SIS ’03), sings traditional enka songs—one of Japan’s oldest forms of music— while entertaining crowds with his hip-hop gear and dance moves. Check out Pitt Magazine’s profile of him in the Fall 2008 issue.

Robinson

Classroom 3800 in Posvar Hall has been officially dedicated the Robinson Room in honor of the late Roscoe Robinson Jr. (GSPIA ’65), a Pitt alumnus and the first four-star African American general in the U.S. Army.  The classroom showcases photographs and memorabilia from Robinson’s successful military career, including service in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, at the U.S. Army Garrison in Okinawa, Japan, and as a U.S. representative to NATO’s Military Command in Brussels, Belgium.

At a spacious, restored Victorian mansion in Pittsburgh’s Friendship area, neighbors and business people gather around a dining-room table to discuss a nearby piece of land. For years, the lot was the site of a dingy tire shop, but recently the property was sold. The people at the table are there to encourage the land’s new proprietor to improve the space, and they’re willing to help.

The mansion’s owner, Will Davies (EDUC ’04, EDUC ’05G), is a member and past board delegate of the Friendship Preservation Group, an assortment of residents who are revitalizing historic homes, parks, and streetscapes in the neighborhood, located roughly two miles from Pitt. It’s an affordable and popular living place for students and others at the University. The preservation group, which includes a host of Pitt professors and alumni, is part of a nationwide trend to eschew suburbs and revive urban centers.

Davies bought his fixer-upper mansion on South Negley Avenue the same year he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in applied developmental psychology and became the third generation in his family to earn a Pitt degree. Since then, he has turned the house into a livable achievement that also preserves history.

Back at the dining table, the group decides that planting trees would spruce up the nearby property, newly leased by a rental-car business. They pledge to help make that happen.

These days, whenever Davies passes the newly planted trees, he’s glad to be part of a movement that’s creating new life in age-old places.

In a modest brick building in lower Manhattan, not far from City Hall, two health care specialists confer about their joint project and biggest job challenge ever. Laura Rosas (CGS ’95, GSPH ’04, LAW ’04), a health care lawyer, and Nicholas Soulakis, an epidemiologist and doctoral student in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, are both senior managers with New York City’s Primary Care Information Project. That means they’re part of a massive effort to convert the city’s tons of paper medical records into electronic records, making patients’ medical information quickly available to health care providers via computers.

A $60 million initiative of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the project is helping private doctors and public health departments coordinate care through the nearly instantaneous exchange of data, from sending wireless prescriptions to pharmacies to alerting physicians when their patients fall behind on treatment programs. At the moment, Rosas and Soulakis are focusing on getting electronic health records software in doctors’ offices across New York City. So far, more than 3,000 physicians have enrolled.

Rosas and Soulakis were recruited separately to the project—she to ensure that patients’ confidentiality rights are protected; he to create an electronic surveillance program and, later, to develop ways to transmit epidemiological data to the city’s health department and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Initially, they were unaware of their common Pitt pedigree, but now their meetings are sprinkled with talk about Squirrel Hill coffee shops or Pitt sports. Because of its size and success, the New York City project has become a national model. Rosas and Soulakis are among those leading the way to better health care through new technology.

Sewald

Some 25 years ago in a Pitt literature class, Jeffrey Sewald read a novel that was set in a South American rainforest. The book, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, made him see the world anew and motivated him to read more novels written by the author, Peter Matthiessen. For more than 50 years, the author’s fiction and nonfiction—which focus on mankind’s relationship with nature—have been inspiring readers like Sewald to think about the world and to advocate for the environment, wildlife, and social justice. After graduating from Pitt, Sewald (A&S ’84) became a writer and filmmaker and eventually crossed paths with Matthiessen. This year, he released a documentary about the author, Peter Matthiessen: No Boundaries, which premiered nationally on PBS in April. “Although Peter is not a scientist by background, his writing and innate spirituality have brought the issues of nature versus technology, human oppression, and the destruction of wildlife and natural habitats to the forefront of conservationist thinking,” says Sewald, who produced, wrote, and directed the film.

Hendrix

Viruses that infect bacteria are thought to be the most numerous organisms on earth. These microscopic viruses, called bacteriophages, have been the subjects of study for Roger Hendrix, a Pitt professor of biological sciences, for more than 30 years. Not only has he published significant research documenting how bacteriophages act like “spaceships” when transferring harmful DNA between cells, but he also has written numerous articles synthesizing ideas and research in the field at large. This year, Hendrix—cofounder and director of the Pittsburgh Bacteriophage Institute at Pitt—received the 2009 Award for Scientific Reviewing from the prestigious National Academy of Sciences for a decade of excellence in scientific reviewing of research on the world’s most populous organisms.

Pitt’s full-time MBA program was ranked the first in the nation for the “best value for the money.” It also was ranked eighth in the world in the same category by London’s Financial Times.

Crowds gathered everywhere from Times Square to Los Angeles to Point State Park in recent years to sing “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” for a documentary celebrating the city and people of Pittsburgh. Produced by Pitt faculty member and Hollywood screenwriter Carl Kurlander, My Tale of Two Cities premiered this past fall in honor of Pittsburgh’s 250th anniversary. Kurlander, a visiting distinguished senior lecturer, began the project after Doug Kress, a clinical associate professor of dermatology at Pitt, encouraged Kurlander to create an upbeat movie about how Pittsburgh is reinventing itself in the poststeel age. More than two dozen Pitt students interned with the film crew, and Pitt alumni across the country joined in the sing-alongs of the theme song from the Pittsburgh-based Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood television show.

Keeping doctors apprised of advancements in the rapidly changing medical field is a challenging responsibility. During the past decade, pediatrician Catherine D. DeAngelis (MED ’69)—a Pitt alumnus and trustee—has excelled at the task as editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the most widely circulated medical journal in the world. She’s the first female chief in the publication’s 125-year history. This fall, Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell named her a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania for her international contributions to medicine.

Buyer beware. Given today’s chaotic financial environment, the results of a study by Pitt researcher J. Jeffrey Inman and colleagues provide cautionary information for investors in the future. The study, “Saving for Retirement: The Effects of Fund Assortment Size and Investor Knowledge on Asset Allocation Strategies,” published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs, shows that less-knowledgeable investors doubled the portion of dollars they allocated to risky stocks, versus safer bonds or cash, when faced with an increased number of investment options in 401(k) plans. Inman is Albert Wesley Frey Professor of Marketing and a professor of business administration at Pitt.

But you know this story about the galoshes
Is really About Your Life, so, like a diver climbing over
the side of a boat and down
Into the ocean, you climb, sentence
By sentence, into this story on the page

Pitt English professor Lynn Emanuel wrote these words in “Like God,” a poem about being a writer. This year, she will continue to climb into the oceans of her poems as the 2009 Elliston Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati, a prestigious position that has been awarded to one accomplished poet each year for more than 50 years. Past Elliston Poets include Robert Frost, Louise Gluck, John Ashbery, and Robert Lowell. In addition to writing, Emanuel—author of four poetry collections—will teach an intensive poetry course and give poetry readings and public lectures. She has been a poetry editor for the Pushcart Prize anthology, a member of the National Endowment for the Arts’ literature panel, and a judge for the National Book Awards. She also is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

Pitt hosted its largest-ever career fair in the Petersen Events Center last fall. To jump-start their careers, nearly 3,000 students met with some 237 employers from all 50 states.

During the 2008 Democratic National Convention, several Pitt people sat among thousands in the night darkness of the Rockies, not far from Denver. On a 20-foot screen framed by soaring sandstone boulders, a short documentary about civil rights activists played. The Pitt viewers had already seen the video—they helped to produce it for the evening’s film competition.

On screen, the elongated image of activist Amelia Boynton-Robinson appeared. She was poised in her living room, wearing turquoise earrings and a purple blouse.

“People are beginning to realize that the color of the skin makes no difference whatsoever,” she said, her voice booming around the amphitheatre. “Because we are one race, and that’s the human race.”

While the video played, Pitt junior Peter Kusnic recalled filming Boynton-Robinson in her living room during a trip to the South. He listened to her talk about how police sprayed tear gas on her at the 1965 Bloody Sunday march, and he was awed that, at age 97, she was still advocating for equality as vice chair of The Schiller Institute, an international human rights organization.

Kusnic, an English major, met Boynton-Robinson through a summer film course on the U.S. civil rights movement taught by Pitt adjunct professor Jen Saffron and supported by an Amizade service-learning program. For an oral history film project, he and students Gary Wingfield Jr., Andrea Zimmer, Erin Lanzendorfer, Elaina O’Brien, Keith DeVries, and Nick Moreland (from American University) traveled to Alabama and Georgia to interview advocates and church leaders who witnessed the historical bus boycotts and marches in the 1950s and ’60s. Monica Cwynar (SOC WK ’07) was the course facilitator, helping students deal with emotions evoked by the intense material.

The students edited 25 hours of raw film into a five-minute video called Democracy: A Steady, Loving Confrontation. Then they entered the video in the national Cinemocracy Film Festival competition, “How Do You Define Democracy?,” sponsored by the Denver Film Society and the Democratic National Convention host committee.

That night, during the convention, the video was shown as one of the festival’s top 10 films, selected from a pool of 112 entries. When the video ended, there was silence. Then the crowd erupted into fervent applause. Kusnic and his classmates clapped along, wowed by the reaction. The film won the top prize in the national competition.

Pitt is among the top 10 U.S. university recipients of federal science and engineering research and development funds, according to the National Science Foundation’s annual survey based on figures for fiscal year 2006. The survey was released this past fall. Successful Pitt proposals accounted for nearly $427 million of the $25.4 billion awarded.

A hundred women sip drinks and sample the buffet while Panther game clips play overhead on a giant screen in Pitt’s Duratz Athletic Complex on the South Side. Tonight, the complex has been transformed into home turf for female football fans. Pitt alum Rodie Fruzynski (EDUC ’69), a pixie-cut, blonde baby boomer, is in hog heaven with her 20-something daughter, Krystyna Fruzynski.

“Krystyna and I have always gone to Pitt games and tailgate parties with my husband and son—ever since she was little,” Fruzynski says. “She knows so much about sports.”

Her daughter laughs and chimes in: “Yeah, sometimes it intimidates guys.” The duo is enjoying Pitt’s third-annual Football University for Women, indulging in some Panther fun with other gals.

Soon, Jan Wannstedt, the evening’s host, walks to the front of the room to kick off—so to speak—the program. She is the wife of the Panthers’ head coach, Dave Wannstedt (EDUC ’74, ’76G).

“How many of you have ever wanted to play football?” she asks, and a bunch of hands shoot up. No wonder so many women haven’t quite “tackled” it, Wannstedt explains. “Football is the one sport we never really get to play.”

In recent years, college and NFL teams have worked harder to cater to their female fan bases, from selling pink jerseys to hosting female training camps. Wannstedt caught on to the national trend early: She has been organizing events similar to tonight’s football clinic/girls’ night out since 1989, when her husband was the Dallas Cowboys’ defensive coordinator.

Now, she launches into a lay-woman’s Football 101 session, explaining everything from what goes on inside a huddle (“They’re saying, ‘I like your shoes!’” she jokes) to what an audible is. “An audible is the football version of a woman’s prerogative,” she says of the term for a quarterback changing plays just before the ball is snapped. Pitt’s coaching staff and an NCAA referee also explain rules and surprises of the game.

Afterward, the women tour the facility, peppering trainers and players with questions along the way. In the locker room, Fruzynski tries on a football helmet, and her daughter poses for a photo with Panther middle linebacker Scott McKillop.

“I’m a fifth-year senior,” says McKillop, who already has earned a Pitt bachelor’s degree in business and is pursuing another bachelor’s degree in administration of justice. “I was red-shirted one year. Does anyone know what that means?”

Krystyna does—it’s when a student athlete continues practicing with the team but benches at games for a year (students are eligible for the lineup for four years, max).

Then the women hit the indoor practice field, where McKillop and other players coach them through plays. Krystyna kicks off her heels and sprints across the home turf of her favorite NCAA team. It’s a rare moment for a fan, regardless of gender. In the football world of X’s and O’s, the XX’s are the victors tonight.

The Florence Influence

I’m originally from Brownsville, Pa., and recently sent the Pitt Magazine Web site address to a person in Michigan who is doing research on the Lancaster-Florence families. He was delighted with the article (“The Great Debater,” Summer 2008). My mother and aunt collected clippings from the Brownsville newspapers for a number of years, and they have pictures of Charles Florence when he graduated from high school, plus his father’s obituary. Congratulations on the article. It was very well done.

Hannah Millward Fisher
Associate Librarian
Arizona Health Sciences Library
University of Arizona
Tucson, Ariz.

Great Debater Too

I have been meaning to write and say how impressed I was with the article on Charles Florence titled “The Great Debater” by Ervin Dyer. It was a well-researched and well-written article. In fact, I plan on sending a copy of the article to the historian for Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Antonio F. Holland
Professor of History
Lincoln University
Jefferson City, Mo.

Gas in the Gulf

I am writing regarding Sharon Guynup’s interesting article, which featured Kenneth Jordan’s research involving gas hydrates (“Super Models,” Fall 2008). As a geologist drilling wells in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico, I was delighted to see an article to which I could truly relate. Gas hydrates underlie much of the deep-water Gulf, and they are, indeed, a resource waiting to be tapped when technology catches up.

Michael Price
Arts & Sciences ’68, ’70G
Houston, Texas

Welsh Ways

I enjoyed the blurb about a new Welsh Nationality Room (Front Page, Fall 2008 issue) and quickly located the Web site for Pitt’s famous rooms and sent it to England to a friend of mine who is married to a woman from Wales. He wrote back to describe the Welsh tradition of Eisteddfod [a competitive festival of the arts in literature, music, and performance, which dates to the 12th century]. It is the custom to present the winners in certain categories of the arts with elaborately carved chairs.

Alice P. Snyder
Nursing ’59
State College, Pa.

Good News

Pitt Magazine is one of the best university magazines—and I receive a few from other universities. It’s thoroughly enjoyable and informative.

Linda Simon Scott
Arts & Sciences ’69
Miami, Fla.

Over There

I enjoy reading Pitt Magazine. It is good to learn about the activities and successes of alumni and alumnae. I would also appreciate reading more about the men and women serving our country in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world. They put their lives on the line daily because our nation asks them to do it. More stories about them would be a joy to see.

Henry Wojciechowski
General Studies ’73
Cowansville, Pa.

Proving It

I was so impressed with the cover picture and the cover story and photos in the fall Pitt Magazine. “Proving Ground,” by Cara J. Hayden, was a most informative and well-written article. The story made me very proud to be a Pitt grad and hear what our graduates are doing to promote peace in our world today.

Nancy Marts
Nursing ‘52
Greenville, Pa.

Pitt-Notre Dame Redux

After watching the phenomenal Pitt-Notre Dame football game on Saturday, Nov. 1, 2008, I found some items I had set aside on my desk, including a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about Pitt students celebrating the 1958 Pitt win over Notre Dame. During my senior year in 1958-59, I was part of that celebration. The win, by the way, was by three points—the same as with the 2008 Pitt victory.

Andrew R. Becker
Engineering ’59
Eldersburg, Md.

Innovation is a daily pursuit at the University. This year, faculty filed 100 patent applications. The Office of Technology Management also helped to launch three companies that are producing medical tools invented at Pitt.

Sunlight passes through the varicolored lancet windows of Pitt’s Heinz Memorial Chapel despite the bitter wind outside, and it saturates the chapel with blue. An organist practices, and the music swells from the chancel into the nave, upward toward the arches. Seventy years after the chapel’s dedication on Nov. 20, 1938, its innate tranquility and subtle majesty remain its defining features. “It comes together as a jewel box of color,” says longtime chapel director Patricia Gibbons. “The windows twinkle on sunny days and gloomy days—they have a luminosity of their own.”

At health clinics in rural India, student Supriya Kumar spent her summer listening to ideas and suggestions from employees of an Indian government health care program. A student in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, she analyzed the collective responses and then made recommendations on ways to improve the system. Her research trip was partially supported by Pitt’s new Student Global Travel Grants program, which covers international travel expenses for graduate students researching global health disparities. This year, 22 students from many schools across the University of Pittsburgh used the funds to travel to more than a dozen countries and pursue research.

Whether or not you were able to join us at the Sun Bowl on Dec. 31 in El Paso, you can see lots more photos of the action at www.alumni.pitt.edu. Follow the About Us link and click on Photo Galleries. And be sure to sign up on our site for online services if you haven’t done so already. You can find out what your classmates are up to and stay connected to Pitt wherever you happen to be.

Contact information:
Pitt Alumni Association
140 Alumni Hall
4227 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
412-624-8229
www.alumni.pitt.edu

Bazzoui (aka Ann McCauley)

A few winters ago, an aspiring novelist walked into the quiet of a friend’s log cabin in rural Pennsylvania. She spied an oil portrait on the wall and was spellbound by the image. In the painting, a handsome, elderly woman stared out from the canvas with a bare hint of emotion.

The visitor asked her friend about the portrait and discovered that the elderly woman had become a mystery of sorts among the locals. People in town said she had lived alone in the cabin for 12 years before she passed away. They knew she had been a good friend to a local father. They knew she had come from “somewhere out West” before settling in the forests of McKean County. That’s all they knew; the woman had seemed to leave an earlier past behind her.

The visitor, Cheryl Bazzoui, sensed this true story had all the intrigue of a good book, and she used her imagination to spin these secrets into her second novel, Runaway Grandma (Madison Ave. Publishers), written under the pen name Ann McCauley.

Bazzoui (UPB ’83, ’90) studied nursing and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. While working as a nurse and a mom, Bazzoui also made time to write. In fact, she has been writing since girlhood. She recalls: “After reading one of my stories, my father said, ‘I’ll be damned if you’re not a writer,’ and I believed from that day forward that I was born to be a writer.” Her stories flow from the heart of a woman who is the oldest of seven children and who grew up writing dramatic stories about her siblings and penning letters to the editor.

Published in 2007, Runaway Grandma has inspired discussions in book clubs and community groups. Bazzoui—who also earned a geriatrics certificate at Pitt—has worked with many elderly patients, making her familiar with the challenges of aging. It was not tough for her to imagine that a spunky older woman might decide to take off and look for a better way of life.

That’s what her character, 70-year-old Olivia Hampton, does. A retired teacher and a longtime widow, Olivia has a too-busy daughter with two self-absorbed children and a businessman son who wants to manage Olivia’s finances. She decides she can have a better life without this unappreciative family. Olivia becomes “Dorothy Meyers” and takes on a new life in a small Western Pennsylvania town called Harmonyville. This is a quiet town, but some exciting events take place—including criminal activity and the mysterious contamination of the water supply—which bring in the media and FBI.

Bazzoui’s first novel, Mother Love, was published in 2003 and received a national Readers’ Choice Award in 2005. She has recently finished a third novel, and a fourth is in progress. Even now, during quiet times when she’s settled into writing, her imagination roams free, much as it did on a winter day at a cabin in the woods.

During their lab period, four Pitt engineering students hop off the 84A bus near an overlook with a panoramic view of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny River, nearby hills, and span of bridges. Chatting, the freshmen walk along a stretch of sidewalk to their starting point. Then they pull out notepads, pencils, and a distance wheel and get to work.

Student Kristin Gottron pushes the distance wheel—a device that measures how far she travels—while she strolls down a block of Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Her teammates walk behind her, recording the distance and snapping digital pictures. The team is mapping a walking trail that will connect the neighborhood’s planned and existing green spaces. Their work is part of a collaboration between the community’s Hill House Association and Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering.

When Gottron reaches a difficult patch without a sidewalk, she pushes the wheel through weeds and grass. Then she backtracks and rolls it over the terrain again, repeating the process until she gets an accurate measurement. Her teammates take notes about the condition of the overgrown path. The elderly or people with disabilities might use the route, and they’ll need to know what they’ll be up against. Plus, the budding engineers will later review their notes and discuss alternative routes they could develop.

The team is enrolled in Engineering Applications for Society, a course taught by Laura Lund, an adjunct professor and director of service learning for Pitt’s Freshman Engineering Program. She pairs groups of motivated freshmen with local nonprofit organizations that need engineering help. Not only does her course benefit nonprofits, it gives students a rare chance to practice real-world engineering at the start of their college careers. Since the course’s inception three years ago, students have conducted geomorphic-mapping and soil-sampling studies of Schenley Park, figured out the safest and most efficient ways to load patients with artificial-heart equipment onto hospital elevators, and calculated how a Pittsburgh bike trail could be lengthened despite urban obstacles, among other projects.

As Gottron and her teammates developed the Hill District trail throughout the semester, they trekked through weeds, mud, and even snow. Another group also canvassed the streets to create special walking routes throughout the neighborhood—two easy, four moderate, and two strenuous. Since then, the Hill House Association has been using maps from both groups to encourage residents to exercise, connect businesses with consumers, and highlight cultural, historic, and scenic attractions, such as the home of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright August Wilson.

On the afternoon Gottron pushed through the weeds, she and her fellow students took a short break to overlook the city from a Hill District perch. While the quartet conversed about roommate issues and dining-hall food, they also gazed across the city and were glad that their work might soon lead others to discover new views, too.

Daylight streams onto the shapes of several unfinished statues in a room of the William Pitt Union. The tarpaulin-covered floor is scattered with paint cans, brushes, and torn pages from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Dante’s The Divine Comedy. In one corner, a group of loud-talking, politically minded students has gathered around one of the statues—a panther that’s squatting on its hind legs with one paw in the air.

Junior Ian Lauer pulls a package of mint-flavored dental floss from his bag and tosses it to a friend, Pitt senior Erin Schaefer. She wraps a length of floss around her fingers and stretches it from the panther’s nose to its tail, dividing the statue in half—the right side for Republicans and the left for Democrats. It’s October—a few months before the nation’s political parties will unite under a new presidential administration—and members of Pitt’s College Democrats and College Republicans are already working together. Through the Paint-the-Panther program, a new tradition at Pitt initiated by the Student Government Board, they’re encouraging young people to get involved in politics, as well as showing some campus pride.

Without any handy adhesive, the floss slides out of place on the six-foot statue, so someone finds masking tape and runs it along the panther’s back. “Quick everyone, grab a can of paint and start shaking,” says Schaefer, a political science major and the political steering chair of the College Democrats. When a student picks up a can of blue paint, Lauer shouts: “I want to name it Joe Biden Blue!” Soon, the students are painting the panther with Joe Biden Blue and Lipstick Red to showcase, with humor, the vice presidential candidates. Lauer—majoring in anthropology, political science, and sociology—is particularly enthusiastic and jokes about the campaign while pulling his brush along the statue.

The Democrats outnumber the Republicans, so Schaefer dips her brush into the can of Lipstick Red and paints the panther’s right side along with junior Patrick Graham, president of the College Republicans and a double major in actuarial mathematics and economics. “This is party unity right here and a show of American nationalism,” she boasts. After several hours of painting, the students take a break and admire the panther that is not only half-red and half-blue but now covered with stars, stripes, donkeys, elephants, and “Vote ’08.”

On the other side of the room, students from ONE—an antipoverty advocacy group—are painting a multicolored map of Africa on another panther statue. Nearby, a third panther statue is clothed in a suit, monocle, and necktie, created from the torn pages of the favorite books of the University Honors College reading groups.

All of the custom-decorated panther statues were unveiled during Homecoming week and are now guarding the hallways of the William Pitt Union until next fall, when other student clubs will decorate the mascots with new designs that represent their passions.

Ten children scramble around a mock restaurant as they plan a pretend lunch for more than 100 employees at Universal Electric in Lawrence, Pa. They prepare a menu, predict how much food they’ll need down to the last hot dog, and set tables. In the thick of the action, Cindy Iannarelli (KGSB ’83, ’92)—a consultant who helps family businesses to thrive—observes the kids as they use problem-solving and teamwork skills.

Around the country and internationally, Iannarelli hosts dozens of workshops that teach kids and adults about entrepreneurship. Twenty-five years ago, she established the Bernelli Foundation to continue the sort of entrepreneurial development work she had done as a training coordinator at Pitt’s Small Business Development Center when she was a graduate student. Through her foundation, she not only leads mock-restaurant workshops for kids, but also frequently leads seminars for small-business owners and business students at the Bernelli Education Centre in Trentino, Italy. She takes attendees on tours of her own family’s nearby business, a resort on the Riva Del Garda in Italy, where she connects the entrepreneurs to other families who have operated businesses for decades in the Italian mountains, fostering a cross-cultural exchange of business ideas. She also teaches courses online through Bernelli University, her foundation’s most recent endeavor.

After the pretend lunch is “served” at Universal Electric, Iannarelli and the youngsters talk about the successes and failures of their operation—how they wasted time on this, spent too much money on that.  She gives them tips on ways to succeed. After all, she knows how.

Cheers thunder through the spring air. Baton in hand, the runner catches sight of the finish line and forges ahead, speeding toward the tape in the mile relay at the Intercollegiate American Championship.

“It was a very close race,” recalls Dick Doyle (ENGR ’58), who anchored Pitt’s 1957 relay team. “We finished second, by a step. But we set a University record that stood for 17 years.”

After earning a Pitt engineering degree, Doyle began a career in the automotive industry, working several research and management jobs. Eventually, he settled in Troy, Mich. Along the way, he developed a talent for marketing, and by 1980 he was vice president of sales at ITT Automotive.

In the late ’80s, Doyle spearheaded an effort to buy two struggling manufacturing companies and combined them to form Thompson International. Under his leadership, the new company became the largest supplier of wheel trim in the industry and saved 600 jobs.

Doyle also put his leadership skills to work for his community, serving as mayor of Troy, Mich., from 1974 to 1992. He led the city through a period of tremendous growth, from a population of 35,000 to 90,000.

As a Pitt athletic scholarship recipient, Doyle says he was “blessed.” Though first-place victory at the collegiate championship wasn’t in the cards for him in 1957, he’s grateful for the winning qualities that Pitt track gave him—an education, a sense of teamwork, and game-day preparedness for his future, right from the starting line.

During the Vietnam War, the Army paratrooper fought alongside fellow soldiers in pitch-black river mud and snake-filled swamps. For dinner, he forced down canned beef, canned bread, and the very unpopular combo of ham and lima beans. He was a soldier in the 101st Airborne Division and part of DET 3—a top-secret intelligence organization that identified enemy units. The group was so successful, he says, that the enemy army offered $10,000 to any civilian who captured a DET 3 member.

Luckily, the paratrooper, Chuck Donabedian (CGS ’72), returned home safely after his military tour. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Pitt and prospered as a stockbroker and consultant. In 1996 he became CEO of Winston Advisors, an Ohio-based investment management firm, which he still leads today.

In 2005, Donabedian heard that a contemporary 101st Airborne Division was being deployed to Iraq. Eager to help, he founded the DET 3 Foundation to support the troops. One of Donabedian’s first actions was to ship care packages with comfort foods like potato chips and cookies to improve those not-so-tasty military rations. Then he got more creative. With funds raised through the foundation’s Web site (www.det3.us), he and other volunteers coordinated the delivery of various goods: GPS devices that work far better than those old French maps in Vietnam; basketball hoops for troops to relieve stress in a fun way; soccer balls for soldiers to set up soccer leagues with Iraqi youths; satellite Internet systems so the troops can easily e-mail their families; and other supplies, too.

This year, the foundation received a letter from Commander Thomas H. Melton: Your frequent care packages combined with other generous gifts helped us endure austere conditions and greatly improved soldier morale, he wrote. Donabedian felt proud, but mostly he hoped that the troops would return home safely.

Pat Gallagher

Ever wonder how computers know what time it is? Many of them request the time of day from the nation’s Internet Time Service, which gets about 30,000 hits per second, all day long. Operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the time service is one of many ways that the institute helps to support technologies that people use in their daily lives. This fall, Pitt alumnus and physicist Pat Gallagher (A&S ’87G, ’91G) was appointed deputy director of the institute. He’s now overseeing nearly 2,900 scientists, engineers, and other staff as they conduct research and develop standard performance measures for technologies like cell phones, smoke detectors, and cholesterol tests.

Bert W. O’Malley

In the early 1970s, scientists began speculating about a kind of molecule that helps hormones regulate which genes in the body are turned on or off. Yet only in the past decade did technology evolve to allow researchers to identify the mysterious molecules. Now known as coactivators, these elusive molecules might underlie a wide range of complex disorders such as diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease—as well as help control memory, learning, reproductive functions, and other key physiological processes. Turns out, they’re vital to human life.

At the forefront of this new research frontier is University of Pittsburgh graduate Bert W. O’Malley (A&S ’59, MED ’63), the longtime chair of molecular and cellular biology at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, where he has conducted extensive research on coactivators. He was recently honored for his pioneering work on hormone action with the National Medal of Science—the highest U.S. award for a scientist—presented by then President George W. Bush. “It was an unexpected and humbling experience,” he says about the White House ceremony.

O’Malley first grew interested in studying hormones while taking an elective laboratory course as a medical student at Pitt. Today, he is widely recognized as the father of molecular endocrinology, the field that studies how hormones function at the molecular level. He describes coactivators as “little molecules with big goals.” More than 300 coactivators have been identified so far, half of which already have been linked to human disease.

After a decade spent identifying these regulatory molecules and figuring out how they work, O’Malley has as his goal the translation of this fundamental science into the development of powerful new medical therapies.

Greenberger

A team of Pitt scientists is developing a drug that could heal people who’ve been affected by too much radiation. This past fall, the team received a $2.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to conduct clinical trials of the drug, named JP4-039. “Currently, no drugs on the market counteract the effects of radiation exposure,” says Joel Greenberger, the lead researcher and professor and chair in the Department of Radiation Oncology in the Pitt School of Medicine. So far, JP4-039 has shown that it enhances cell recovery in mice and human tissue if it’s delivered within 24 hours after radiation exposure.

Miller (center) visits one of the schools that received Pitt book donations.

When Pitt librarians heard about the earthquake in China last May, they immediately sent e-mails to Chinese colleagues to find out whether they were safe. Pitt’s University Library System (ULS) regularly collaborates with Chinese libraries through the China Gateway project, which helps Chinese and American scholars exchange research articles and ideas. Although more than 67,000 people died in the earthquake in Sichuan Province, the Pitt librarians’ colleagues there survived. However, many libraries—and the books inside—were destroyed. So ULS director Rush G. Miller and other Pitt librarians held a book drive on Pitt’s campus and then traveled to China this fall with the gifts. They donated more than 2,000 books to four school libraries that were damaged by the quake.

Not long before Election Day last fall, freshman Ladimir Geake was dressed up as a penguin, knocking on potential voters’ doors in Shadyside. He and 25 other Pitt students had donned costumes and were canvassing homes in the Pittsburgh neighborhood as part of a Halloween “Trick or Vote” campaign. College students across the nation got involved in the grassroots effort to encourage potential voters, especially young voters, to cast ballots. The event was sponsored by online sites like YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and Facebook, and it inspired strangers in cities across the country to engage in community service for a worthy cause.

Although walking around town in a penguin costume to get out the vote might not seem like a significant aspect of Geake’s life as a Pitt freshman, the canvassing event offers a perfect example of a new breed of university students—the millennial generation or NetGen students—those who are entering adulthood early in the 21st century. They’re comfortable with and connected by digital technology, partial to working in teams, idealistic, engaged in community service, racially and culturally diverse, and tolerant of differences.

Typically, millennials are plugged into iPods and PDAs. They communicate by instant messaging on cell phones and computers. They read blogs at least as often as books. They twitter and wiki and socialize online. Eighty million strong, the millennials—often defined as those born beginning in 1982—are, in many ways, different from past generations of students, and they’re changing the way that colleges and universities attract and nurture freshmen.

Kathy Humphrey, vice provost and dean of students at Pitt, rattles off a list of phrases that describe the Class of 2012: Optimistic. Accepting of others. Pushed to excel. Close to their families. Fearless. For the uninitiated, she gives a great crash course on what makes today’s freshmen tick.

“They’re extremely bright and very technologically savvy,” Humphrey says. “The researchers tell us they score higher than any other generation has scored on college-entry tests. They’re also very accepting. Issues of diversity don’t alarm them.” Humphrey observes, too, that freshmen today have both confidence and a positive outlook: “They expect to leave here with ideal jobs—they’re very optimistic.”

Geake, who is 18 years old, is far more than just a vote-trolling penguin. He’s part of a millennial class of entering freshmen. One recent afternoon, he and fellow freshman Amanda Stubing sat in the basement of the William Pitt Union, talking over a granola bar (him) and a pepperoni personal pizza and chocolate energy drink (her).

“He’s friends with everyone,” said Stubing, with a slight eye roll, but it was clear she thought it was a good thing.

They met at a bingo mixer during orientation. Geake—an energetic social work major with a lean build and short, spiky brown hair—was going from table to table collecting soda pop tabs for the Ronald McDonald House, an ongoing project of his floor mates in Sutherland Hall. (The pure, high-quality aluminum content of the tabs makes them ideal for the nonprofit’s recycling fundraising program.) Geake struck up a conversation with Stubing, a pharmacy major, and a friendship was born.

Outgoing by nature, he personifies the millennial generation’s lifestyle. His Google calendar is chock full of volunteer activities and clubs, in addition to a full academic schedule. He volunteers for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh. He’s a work-study student at the University’s Office of Disability Resources and Services, where he does everything from proctoring exams for students with disabilities to running the front desk. He’s involved with Decisions for Life, an HIV awareness group. And, he’s a volunteer with the Pittsburgh Deaf Club and a member of Pitt’s American Sign Language Club.

Geake is a hearing child of two deaf parents. He learned to sign early in life so he could communicate with his mom and dad. He also learned how to live between two worlds—the world of the hearing and the world of the deaf. His ability to readily switch hats serves him well in college, where from hour to hour the landscape changes as he goes from class to class, from his work-study job to volunteering, and from studying to socializing with friends.

Humphrey knows that motivated, involved first-year students like Geake are the norm rather than the exception. “Freshmen today are very civic-minded,” she says. “They see the world as their community.” In particular, Humphrey has been impressed with students’ commitment to civic responsibility. In October, the University sponsored the first annual Pitt Make a Difference Day, giving students a chance to work on volunteer projects throughout the city. “More than 2,000 students showed up, including a lot of freshmen,” says Humphrey. “They were willing and ready to serve.”

Geake and his floormates from the 10th floor of Sutherland Hall spent Make a Difference Day mentoring youngsters involved in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. His friend Amanda Stubing volunteered with a debris-cleaning project. Other students cleaned a Salvation Army warehouse, helped sort toys for the Operation Toy Lift project, or worked on a home rehab in Penn Hills, Pa.

Humphrey also says that millennial students are interested in actively engaging in their academic passions. In recent years, Pitt has developed learning communities that help freshmen adjust to University academics and meet people who are interested in similar fields. This fall, Pitt offered learning communities with focuses on Islamic civilization, computing in biology and medicine, and politics and the media, among others. Geake was a member of the psyche learning community, in which all students took an introduction to psychology course and a gender in composition seminar while also meeting weekly to explore theories of mind, body, identity, and sexuality. “The learning community was probably one of the first experiences that shaped my ideas on college life and academics as a whole,” says Geake. “We were able to talk a lot not only about psyche, but about the new experiences we were all sharing in the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.” Although the students met face-to-face several times a week, they also communicated with each other through course Web sites.

During the past 20 years, Pitt has seen sweeping changes in the way technology influences the daily lives of freshmen. The University’s handling of admission applications and many other processes has been transformed for today’s tech-savvy student. The millennial generation doesn’t like to wait. “If you say, ‘Come to this office and pick up a form,’ that’s just ridiculous to them,” says Humphrey of today’s students. “‘Just put it online,’ they’ll say.”

And Pitt does.

In recent years, just about anything can be put online. Even a whole dorm.

Hi. I’m Dan, the RA on 10 West. This group is designed to unite the freshmen gentlemen on Sutherland West’s 10th Floor. Check periodically for upcoming programs, and feel free to post messages, discussions, pictures, etc. … I want to make our floor community strong and make all of your first years at Pitt more than awesome.

This is part of resident assistant and junior pharmacy major Dan Yarabinec’s online pitch about his virtual floor for Pitt’s Sutherland Hall residence. This is the second year Pitt has constructed virtual residence halls on the social networking site Facebook to help incoming freshmen get to know one another before they even step foot on campus.

Most of the 45 residents on Yarabinec’s floor, including Geake, signed on prior to the start of the fall semester. There, they got to know each other by writing on the Wall (Facebook-speak for the space on a page where friends can post comments). Incoming students posted comments about everything from hobbies and interests to who was bringing what to their campus rooms or suites.

“Facebook is the social glue that holds us together,” says Geake, who explains that the site’s applications go far beyond virtual floors. He uses Facebook to find out what’s happening on campus, learn about organizations he may be interested in joining, or shout out to friends he grew up with in the Poconos. He also uses it to join virtual groups with like-minded people, such as the “Vote for Pitt to play in the Sun Bowl!” group, or the “Support our men/women in the military” group.

Even though freshman millennials are approaching university life in different ways, there are aspects of the freshman experience that haven’t changed much. The basic hopes, dreams, struggles, and triumphs of entering students are part of a long tradition of university education. Freshmen are still anxious about those first classes, still excited about making new friends, still learning how to handle independence from their families. “They’re still students who are trying to become men and women,” Humphrey says.

And although Geake may be only 18 and not long out of high school, he’s well aware of his potential and intends to use it to the fullest. He plans to earn his social work degree and work within the deaf community. And, he says, he will make his mark: “I want to do something that is notable in the world, whether it be for the deaf community or elsewhere, it’s my goal to do something big.”

Get ready. The turn of the century may have signaled the rise of the next Greatest Generation—the millennials.

Ladimir Geake

Ladimir Geake
Year: Freshman
Major: Social work
Campus Residence: Sutherland Hall
Hometown: Tobyhanna, Pa.
Work-Study Job: Assistant with Pitt’s Office of Disability Resources and Services
Activities: Pitt American Sign Language Club; Decisions for Life club, an HIV awareness group; Pitt Make a Difference Day; psyche learning community; Pittsburgh Deaf Club; and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh
Outlook: “Who has time to be sad when at ANY moment someone could take a picture of you? Gotta look good!”

Jess Collazo

Jess Collazo
Connection to Geake: High school friend and fellow Pitt student
Year: Sophomore
Major: Political science
Activities: American Red Cross volunteer, Jumpstart children’s mentor
Pitt Tidbits: “I tell people the Cathedral of Learning is reminiscent of Hogwarts [the fictional school in Harry Potter novels]. Also, my mother was really taken by Pitt when we first visited, and it’s safe to say that I cause her the most grief compared to my siblings, so I thought attending Pitt was the least I could do.”

Tricia Keefer

Tricia Keefer A&S ’06
Connection to Geake: Job on campus
Pitt degree: B.A. in interdisciplinary studies: global issues and human rights, 2006
Pitt staff position: Administrator with the Office of Disability Resources and Services
Life in the ’Burgh: “I love this city. It has so many quirks to explore. I also chose Pitt because my sister was attending, so it was easier on our parents when they wanted to visit.”
Facebook groups: “End the siege on Gaza now,” “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet.”

Larry Long

Larry Long
Connection to Geake: Decisions for Life club
Year: Freshman
Majors: Marketing and Japanese
Activities: Society for International Business; Decisions for Life club; Rainbow Alliance
Favorite Quote: “Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets. So love the people who treat you right, and forget the ones who don’t.”

Dan Yarabinec

Dan Yarabinec
Connection to Geake: Resident assistant
Year: Junior
Major: Pharmacy
Activities: Resident assistant, 10th floor, Sutherland Hall; Kappa Psi pharmaceutical fraternity; volunteer with Children’s Hospital of UPMC
Why he volunteers: “I love the sense of good it creates, and it helps me to see the world differently.”
How he keeps in touch: “I talk with my parents and siblings daily, using my cell phone and the Internet—instant messaging, e-mail, Facebook.” Damilola Aliu
Connection to Geake: High school friend and fellow Pitt student
Year: Freshman
Major: Nursing
Activities: Research assistant in Pitt professor Aletha Akers’ women’s health laboratory, FOCUS (Facilitating Opportunity and Climate for Underrepresented Students), judo
Aspirations: “I feel that the future is way ahead of me. I like to plan, but I don’t want to get so carried away that I forget I’m living in the present. Eventually, I hope to obtain my PhD in nursing education.”

Damilola Aliu

Damilola Aliu
Connection to Geake: High school friend and fellow Pitt student
Year: Freshman
Major: Nursing
Activities: Research assistant in Pitt professor Aletha Akers’ women’s health laboratory, FOCUS (Facilitating Opportunity and Climate for Underrepresented Students), judo
Aspirations: “I feel that the future is way ahead of me. I like to plan, but I don’t want to get so carried away that I forget I’m living in the present. Eventually, I hope to obtain my PhD in nursing education.”

Amanda Stubing

Amanda Stubing
Connection to Geake: Pitt pal since Freshman Orientation
Year: Freshman
Major: Pharmacy
Activities: Make a Difference Day, ballet club, treasurer of the Tower A residents’ association
Goal: “I want to make my parents proud. They have worked extremely hard to get me where I am today, and I want to show them that I didn’t take everything they did for granted.”
Facebook groups: “Honestly, I write ‘lol’ and I’m not even laughing,” “Remember when Pitt kept WVU out of the national championship?”

1949 Elizabeth Lewis ✪ SOC WK ’46G received the Mary Rosa McDonough Award, a distinguished alumni award given by Connecticut’s Saint Joseph College, for her service as a social work practitioner and teacher. She’s professor emeritus of social work at Cleveland State University in Ohio.

1950 John M. Jacecko ✪ A&S ’50, ’51G wrote a children’s book, Wedding Gifts of Diana and Prince Charles (Xlibris). He’s a retired educator who resides in Exton, Pa.

1952 David J. Armstrong ★ A&S ’52, an attorney who’s practiced law for more than 50 years, was named in The Best Lawyers in America guide. A shareholder with Pittsburgh’s Dickie, McCamey & Chilcote law firm, he specializes in civil litigation, criminal defense, antitrust law, and commercial litigation.

1959 Julius Pegues ✪ ENGR ’59, the first Black basketball player at Pitt, was inducted into the Tulsa Hall of Fame by the Tulsa Historical Society in Oklahoma for his work as a human- rights and equal-education advocate. He’s an engineering consultant with the Federal Aviation Administration.

1962 Milana Karlo Bizic ✪ EDUC ’62, ’67G received the Person of the Year Award from the Pittsburgh-based Serb National Federation for her dedication to preserving Serbian culture. She is a contributing writer to Srbobran, an American Serbian newspaper, and has been a lifelong member of the federation. She is retired after a 40-year career as an elementary school teacher and librarian.

1965 Ralph Proctor Jr. A&S ’65, ’79Greceived a lifetime achievement award from the Pittsburgh YWCA for his commitment to promoting racial justice throughout the city. He’s chair of the Ethnic and Diversity Studies program at the Community College of Allegheny County.

1968 Abraham Singer ★ A&S ’68joined the board of directors of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, Michigan Chapter, as well as the advisory board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. An attorney, he heads the litigation practice in the Detroit office of Pepper Hamilton.

1970 Harold Mowl Jr. EDUC ’70G, ’85G,superintendent of the Rochester School for the Deaf in New York state, was featured in a USA Today Veterans Day article that commemorated his son, Kevin Mowl. An Army specialist, Kevin died in February 2008, six months after he was injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Carlos Reisen ✪ A&S ’70 was named president of Ascent Advisors, a management consulting firm in West Chester, Ohio.

1972 J. Kaye Cupples ★ A&S ’72, ’73G, ’88G, EDUC ’76Gwas appointed a visiting associate professor of special education in the Education Department at Point Park University.

1973 Michael D. McDowell LAW ’73,a Pittsburgh-based attorney, arbitrator, and mediator, spoke at the Association for Conflict Resolution Conference in Austin, Texas, in September 2008. His talk was titled “Decision Making and Award Writing in Labor and Employment Arbitration: Advanced Concepts.”              Carmelle Nickens Phillips A&S ’73, SIS ’74G, was named vice president for development and communications with YWCA Greater Pittsburgh. She’s also an advocate with the Pennsylvania Black Conference on Higher Education.

1974 James E. Schoenfelder EDUC ’74Gwas recertified as a licensed professional counselor by the National Board for Certified Counselors. Through his private practice in Duncansville, Pa., he specializes in helping people to overcome suicide survivor loss and to deal with multicultural issues.  Peter J. Vuljanic A&S ’74 joined Murray Energy Corp., a coal mining company based in Pepper Pike, Ohio.

1975 Michael Botta CGS ’75, GSPIA ’05 was appointed assistant professor of criminal justice and intelligence studies at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. John C. Conti A&S ’75, who has practiced law for more than 25 years, was named in The Best Lawyers in America guide. He serves as an adjunct professor at Pitt’s School of Law and is a shareholder with Pittsburgh law firm Dickie, McCamey & Chilcote.

1976 Luke Ruppel CGS ’76 was named the interim women’s head basketball coach at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He has 14 years of experience as a head coach. He also will serve as assistant director of athletics and business manager at the college.

1977 Mark Belinky ★ LAW ’77 was elected judge of the Probate Court of Mahoning County in Ohio for a six-year term.

1978 David W. Lampl LAW ’78 was named one of the Top 50 lawyers in Pittsburgh by Law & Politics magazine. He’s a partner at the Leech Tishman Fuscaldo & Lampl law firm, where he chairs the bankruptcy and creditors’ rights practice group.

1979 Stanley Battle ★ GSPH ’79, SOC WK ’80G is chancellor of North Carolina A&T State University, which was awarded Engineering Research Center status by the National Science Foundation in September 2008, becoming the first historically Black university to earn the distinction. The new center received an $18 million grant that will be used to collaborate with Pitt and other institutions on biomedical engineering research and teaching projects. Joanne Cecchi EDUC ’79G retired from the New Kensington-Arnold School District in Pennsylvania after 32 years of service. For the past 15 years, she worked as the district’s assistant superintendent. Throughout her career, she also worked as a high school principal, assistant principal, business teacher, and student teacher.

1981 Patricia Walter Ray A&S ’81G, an attorney with the U.S. State Department, was honored with the Duquesne University Mind, Heart & Spirit Award in September 2008 for her international legal work. She has helped to rebuild Kosovo’s legal system, negotiated agreements to increase foreign investment in Kosovo, and established a copyright office in Albania, among other projects.

1982 Thomas K. Hyatt LAW ’82 was recognized for the fourth consecutive year in The Best Lawyers in America guide for his work in health law. He’s an attorney in the Washington, D.C., office of Ober|Kaler.

1985 Scott E. Haluska ✪ A&S ’85, DEN ’88 completed a certificate program in pediatric dentistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, in June 2008. He’s now a pediatric dentist at the Naval Medical Center San Diego in California.

1987 Jeffrey Pollock LAW ’87, a Pittsburgh-based attorney and mediator, was recognized as an Allegheny County “Legal Leader” for the second consecutive year by the Pittsburgh chapter of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Carl Redwood Jr. SOC WK ’87G, chair of Pittsburgh’s One Hill Community Benefits Agreement Coalition, received a community engagement award from Pittsburgh’s YWCA on behalf of the coalition for the organization’s role in improving racial equality and empowering women.

1988 James Garboden A&S ’88 was elected treasurer of the board of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. He’s a cofounder of RFC Staffing & Solutions, an information technology company in Pittsburgh.

1989 Rae Squilla Keane A&S ’89 and Paul M. Keane ENGR ’94 own Zeetlegoo’s Pet and People Store in Southport, N.C. Recently, the store was named the Best Pet Store in Brunswick County.

1990 Tammy Singleton-English ★ LAW ’90, owner of Singleton-English Law Offices, was reelected to the board of directors of the Estate Planning Counsel of Pittsburgh.

1991 Rico Gagliano A&S ’91 cocreated and cohosts “The Dinner Party Download,” a news and culture radio broadcast that airs on KPCC-FM in Los Angeles and online.

1992 N. Catherine Bazan-Arias ★ ENGR ’92, ’94G, ’99G was installed as the at-large director of the American Society of Civil Engineers. She’s an editor of the society’s Geo-Strata magazine and a senior staff engineer with DiGioia, Gray & Associates in Pittsburgh, where she specializes in geotechnical and structural engineering projects. E. Lindsey Maxwell II CGS ’92, a former Pitt football player and track athlete, is the founder and managing partner of The Intersect Law Group in Washington, D.C., where he practices labor, sports, and entertainment law. His wife, Letty E. Maxwell SOC WK ’93, EDUC ’95G, also a former Pitt track athlete, is the founder and managing partner of The Intersect Consulting Group, an education consulting firm in D.C. that specializes in international education standards and curriculum development. Terri Imbarlina Patak LAW ’92, an attorney practicing employment and labor law, holds the position “of counsel” with Pittsburgh law firm Dickie, McCamey & Chilcote.

1993 Jennifer Wiley A&S ’93G, ’96G,an associate professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, received an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship to conduct research in Germany. She is collaborating with scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich to study the psychology of how the number of people in a group can affect problem solving and learning.

1994 Eddie Ifft CGS ’94, a comedian, recorded his third live CD in November 2008 in San Francisco, Calif. Alexander Prokhorov A&S ’94G, ’02G, an associate professor of Russian at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., received an Alumni Fellowship Award from the college’s alumni association for outstanding teaching. He teaches Russian and Soviet visual culture, primarily through the study of films.

1995 Kelly Matyas Magyarics A&S ’95 was elected regional director of chapters for the Kappa Kappa Gamma fraternity, which has 134 collegiate chapters in the United States and Canada.

1996 Rachael L. Baturin A&S ’96, GSPH ’98, an attorney, was honored by the American Psychological Association Practice Organization for her success in advocating for the Senate Mental Health Parity Bill. She’s a professional affairs associate and federal advocacy coordinator for the Pennsylvania Psychological Association.

1997 Sean Aden Gill A&S ’97 and his wife, Heather Marie Gill, announce the October 2008 birth of their first child, Graci Catharine Gill.

1998 Abbie Gail Lukon Jemmott ★ CGS ’98 and Matthew Jemmott CGS ’99 announce the August 2008 birth of their son Joshua Paul in Fort Belvoir, Va. Andre S. Watson A&S ’98 competed in judo at the 2008 Paralympics Games in Beijing in September 2008. In 2007, he became the first blind athlete to win a gold medal at the Pennsylvania State Judo Championships. He’s a psychologist with the Philadelphia Consultation Center.

1999 Melissa Black McLeod A&S ’99 and her husband, Stephen McLeod, announce the September 2008 birth of their daughter, Marin Elizabeth. Carol Guerrero Shreiner A&S ’99 received the Paul E. Martin Award from Hiram College in Ohio for her outstanding contributions to academic programs and educational life. Through her leadership as advisor of the college’s chemistry club, the organization was named the “Most Improved Student Organization” in 2008.

2000 Deena Marie Dominick Bortz UPJ ’00 married Karl Bortz in October 2008 at the United Church of Christ in Greensburg, Pa. Several Pitt alumni and Delta Zeta sorority sisters attended the wedding. The couple resides in Norfolk, Va.

2001 Faith Renee Myden Campbell GSPIA ’01 married Timothy Campbell in June 2008 in Thompson, Ohio. They reside in Bedford, Texas. Timothy J. Lyon A&S ’01, LAW ’05 began a judicial clerkship with Joseph F. Weis Jr. LAW ’50, judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Pittsburgh.

2002 Robert Lee Skertich ★ GSPIA ’02 was named an assistant professor of public administration in the School of Business at Pittsburgh’s Point Park University. He’s also a doctoral candidate in the public administration and policy program in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

2003 Gary J. Schaub GSPIA ’03 was named a visiting research fellow with the Air Force Research Institute at the Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala.

2004 Sarah Kura Justin CBA ’04 and Gusphyl Justin A&S ’01, ENGR ’04G, ’07G announce the November 2008 birth of their first child, Quentin Edwin Justin. Vicki Krimbel SIS ’04 joined Elias/Savion Advertising in Pittsburgh as a software engineer. She has more than 10 years of experience in software and database development.

2005 Melissa D. Wade A&S ’05 received a Juris Doctor degree from the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

In Memoriam

Judith Reynolds Brueckman EDUC ’63, a retired guidance counselor, died in October 2008 at age 68. She worked for 15 years in the alternative schools program of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina. She also taught aerobics for 14 years at a local YMCA and regularly volunteered with Friendship Trays to deliver meals to elderly and handicapped people.

Charles H. Gaut ★ ENGR ’53 died in October 2008 at age 78. He had a long and successful career with the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Long Island Railroad. He also served as a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve.

Jesse Gloster A&S ’47G, ’55G, who was among the first African American bank owners in Houston, died in September 2008 at age 93. He was a founder of Riverside National Bank and of TSU Finance Corporation. He also taught economics at Texas Southern University for more than 30 years.

David E. Johnston MED ’81, a retired gastroenterologist, died in August 2008 at age 55. During his career, he practiced at The Everett Clinic in Washington and was a fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Alvin B. Kingsley CBA ’58 died in July 2008 in Boca Raton, Fla., where he retired after a 35-year career with Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh. He was a senior vice president and general merchandise manager at the store.

Keiko McDonald, a Pitt professor of Japanese literature and cinema, died in September 2008 at age 68 during a fishing trip in Indiana County, Pa. A renowned scholar in her field, she wrote more than six academic books and received the Tina and David Bellet CAS Teaching Excellence Award, as well as three Fulbright Research Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.

Dodell

The six fraternity brothers—five Pi Lams and a Sigma Chi—were in luck. They had just cut through a security fence, at West Point, as well as a second fence where they discovered snoozing guards. Their mission was on target. They’d driven from Pittsburgh to accomplish one goal: Steal the Army mascot—a mule named Poncho stabled at the West Point campus—and take it to Pittsburgh, Pa.

Pitt and Army were about to face each other on the gridiron back in Pennsylvania, and the six came up with the idea of stealing Army’s mascot and riding it onto the field the day of the game. Their scheme lacked only a few minor details, among them how to transport the mule back to Pittsburgh.

Undaunted, the group drove east to New York, stopping in Eastchester to have dinner with the parents of Herb Dodell, one of the Pi Lambda Phi brothers who planned the prank. Then they drove to West Point, broke in, found the guards asleep, and completed Phase One of their plan by stealing the mule. “It wasn’t as elaborate as it should have been,” recalls Dodell, who was a sophomore at the time. In fact, there wasn’t much of a plan beyond Phase One; the local truck rental companies were closed until morning.

The group decided on the spot that four of them would hide the mule in a wooded area near the Hudson River while two of them, including Dodell, drove to nearby White Plains, N.Y., to rent a U-Haul for a later rendezvous with the rest of the group and the mule. While they were en route, Dodell noticed a lot of police cars and military vehicles driving past them in the opposite direction. A local had seen the pack leading the mule through town and alerted authorities. “All of a sudden, we looked in the mirror, and the police and military vehicles had turned around and were behind us,” says Dodell. He and his fraternity brother were pulled over and arrested, then taken to West Point, where they were thrown into the stockade with the rest of their crew. “Nobody was taking it that seriously,” says Dodell. “But,” he adds, “we didn’t know that. There were six of us in the can. The cadets wanted to shave our heads, but we were protected by the military police.”

Eventually, the group was set free—sans mule—but not until someone snapped a photo commemorating the occasion. The picture, signed by William Westmoreland (who later commanded American military operations during the Vietnam War), hung on the wall in Dodell’s law office for years, a reminder of the social side of his undergraduate days at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dodell went on to build a distinguished legal career and now serves on the Board of Directors of the Pitt Alumni Association. Yet, a glimmer of irreverence still shines in him. “I was always kind of a prankster,” admits Dodell, who came back a campus folk hero after that 1958 brush with the law. “I was a real fraternity guy; in those days, your whole social life was the Greeks.”

Originally, Dodell—always a sports fanatic—came to Pittsburgh to check out the University and visit a nearby relative. Thrilled by the football team’s success, he enrolled, quickly becoming immersed in Pi Lambda Phi and student government, where he served as chief justice of the student court, a Druids member, and as interfraternity rush chairman. During his undergraduate years as a history major, he sold women’s shoes and worked as a delivery boy before graduating in 1961.

Dodell used his Pitt education as a springboard for law studies. While at Brooklyn Law School, he finished classes at noon and worked as a store detective for Lord & Taylor from 1 to 10 p.m., eventually becoming head of security for the Eastchester branch store. He began his legal career when ABC hired him as a staff lawyer. He soon transferred West to California. Stints with a television production company, as a resident counsel and business affairs executive, and with the Los Angeles district attorney’s office followed. Then, Dodell was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime: Warner Brothers offered him five times his DA salary, plus perks like the use of Jack Warner’s sauna and tennis court, to become the company’s director of business affairs. For a man in his late 20s, it was a dream come true.

After years immersed in the business and law of entertainment, Dodell is today a consultant to the Law Fund Management Group, LLC, a company that invests in lawsuits by funding litigation that individuals and companies can’t afford to pursue. He represents parties in civil and criminal insurance litigation matters.

He is a member of the Million Dollar Advocates and the American Board of Trial Advocates, and he has argued successfully before the California Supeme Court. Recently, he became a Superior Court judge (pro tempore) in Los Angeles County. His wife of 30 years, Shelli, works as his firm’s office administrator. His son, Gregory, graduated from Pitt and is now a resident at New York’s St. Luke Hospital. His daughter, Alyson, is an aspiring singer.

Dodell, who is president of the Southern California Pitt Club, raises funds for Southern California students to attend Pitt. Some fundraising events have been staged at Sony movie premieres, including the films The Da Vinci Code, Spider-Man 3, and Quantum of Solace, with food catered by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck.

The Pitt Club of Southern California has raised more than $40,000 during the past three years. Last year, the club awarded its first scholarship to Pauline Gonzales, who was awarded a four-year scholarship.

Whenever Dodell returns to campus—usually three times a year—he likes to walk through the Cathedral of Learning, visit his old fraternity house, and attend a football or basketball game. “I’m dedicated to doing something meaningful, and Pitt’s part of it. I have very warm, fond feelings for the school,” he says. “I guess I’m just a kid at heart.”

One of the great pleasures of this job is working with our volunteer leadership. You’ll read in these pages about three admirable examples. M. Allison Williams is working hard to reconnect alumni through the African American Alumni Council. Jane Allred shares her marketing savvy with us as a member of the Board of Directors. Herb Dodell has ignited interest in Southern California alumni and raised scholarship funds through his Sony premiere events in Hollywood.  They are indeed three great exemplars of alumni spirit.

Alumni spirit was certainly in evidence when the men’s Panther football team played in the Sun Bowl on Dec. 31. Hundreds of fans joined the alumni association for the trip to El Paso and enjoyed events held especially for them. One volunteer, Rick Gradisek (A&S ’77, DEN ’81), who was part of the 1975 Panthers Sun Bowl team, spearheaded an effort on the part of the 1975 team, Coach Johnnie Majors, and some of the 1989 team to donate more than $2,700 to provide game tickets for local kids and for soldiers serving at Ft. Bliss in El Paso. Capt. Charles Schwab, who coincidentally spent a term at Pitt before finishing his studies at West Point, happily distributed tickets to the men and women under his command. The El Paso trip was certainly memorable.

During the year, alumni events are held throughout the world. Visit www.alumni.pitt.edu and follow the link to the Calendar of Events to find one near you.

On a final note, I’m especially pleased to let you know that, as of Jan. 2, 2009, I will officially carry on as your permanent executive director. I’m looking forward to making a great organization even greater—with your help.

Hail to Pitt!
Jeff Gleim
Executive Director, Pitt Alumni Association
Associate Vice Chancellor for Alumni Relations

Jane Allred

Walking through the jammed and hectic streets of Tokyo, Jane Allred inhaled the scents of a city that she thought of as “New York on steroids,” home to restaurants that offered a modest lunch for about $75 in U.S. currency and to department stores where the saleswomen wore white gloves to present beautifully wrapped packages.

She had just finished giving a presentation to the leaders of a 60-year-old Japanese company, including its marketing board and overseas affiliates. The company’s executives were thinking about buying into Allred’s proposal involving global Web marketing.They were attracted by the strength of her experience in high-tech marketing, which may surprise those who knew her as an English literature major during her time at the University of Pittsburgh.

As she strolled through the Tokyo streets, she thought to herself: “How did this happen?” How did a self-described “little Ukrainian girl from Carnegie, Pennsylvania” end up in a Tokyo office suite on the verge of profiting big-time from the success of a company she founded? Walking and reflecting, she took a deep breath; she swore she could see the Cathedral of Learning.

The road from her childhood home in Carnegie to the board room in Tokyo was a curious one, a route Allred never would have predicted when she stepped onto the campus that her dad, a Ukrainian immigrant, had loved for its football teams.

“When I was a student at Pitt, I can remember thinking that the Cathedral of Learning and Heinz Chapel were the two most beautiful buildings I had seen in my life,” says Allred (A&S ’71). “For people from blue-collar families, Pitt was an education that I think was far above what I could have gotten from a number of other opportunities that were available to me in the area.”

She graduated in 1971 with an undergraduate degree that might not have seemed like ideal training for a job in technology. Yet, it set her up for future success. “Looking back, I think the ability to communicate was what led me down the path I eventually took,” says Allred. “Through the liberal arts, I was taught how to understand things that were perhaps not in my field of study. I used those analytical abilities to adapt to a field where I had not been functionally trained.”

After receiving her Pitt undergraduate degree, Allred attended Kent State in Ohio, where she earned a master’s degree in personnel administration and worked as director of fraternity affairs. She later joined Marshall University in West Virginia to serve as an associate dean of students before returning to Pitt for her doctorate in educational administration. During the research phase of her dissertation, through a connection with a Pitt adviser, Allred took a job with a company that managed technological trade associations. She was hired to help develop educational programs for the technologies involved, and she acquired industrial engineering knowledge, absorbing information about clients’ international products and processes so she could prepare their promotional materials. Later, she moved to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and worked in tech business development for a large advertising agency.

In 1985, flush with experience and confident in her ability to develop strategies on her own, she founded Allred Marketing. The firm integrated principles of marketing with Allred’s knowledge about how people learn. The firm also incorporated new technologies, as they developed, to advance marketing and communications programs—for instance, quickly integrating the Internet and Web sites into marketing strategies as those tools became available.

Nearly two decades later, in 2004, Allred traveled to Tokyo to make her presentation to international executives. Soon after, the Japanese firm made an offer to purchase her digital business, and she decided to take it. Today, she works as an independent marketing

consultant.

Saying she is “addicted to my own adrenaline,” Allred, who now lives in Paradise Valley, Ariz., seeks diversion in fishing, a passion she shares with her husband, Jim. Together, the two have traveled the world in pursuit of the sport, whether stalking bone fish on Christmas Island or landing sea-running brown trout in Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina. Allred speaks with equal enthusiasm about the rainbow trout in Russia’s Lost World of Kamchatka and the couple’s summer home on the Bitterroot River in Montana, where she can practically cast a fly from the deck. “It doesn’t matter what river you’re on,” she says. “All the sights and sounds of the river, the sound of water, the beautiful surroundings—there are usually mountains in the distance—it’s sensory overload.”

Throughout her career, Allred says, she has relied heavily on the foundation she built at Pitt. Each time she flew to western Pennsylvania to visit family, she would crane her neck to see the Cathedral of Learning through the airplane window; it became her touchstone, not to mention a running family joke. Whenever Allred would find herself up high, such as during a helicopter ride through the mountains in Mongolia, she would turn to her husband and say, “You know, Jim, I can see the Cathedral from here.”

She was only half-kidding. “The funny thing is that I can see the Cathedral in almost everything I do,” says Allred. “Without it, I wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I had,” she says. “I see it all the time. The wide-eyed wonderment has never gone away. I don’t care how much travel and cultural experience I may have had in my life, I see every day as a new opportunity to learn, to do, and to serve others.”

Thinking more on the subject, she adds: “So, in fact, I’ve seen that Cathedral of Learning everywhere.”

A native of Bay Shore, N.Y., she earned Pitt bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, as well as a doctoral degree in exercise physiology. As a student-athlete at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s, she won six Big East titles in the hurdle events and was a three-time NCAA All-American. In 1994, she was named the NCAA Woman of the Year in Pennsylvania for her athletic and academic achievements. As head coach at Grove City College, she shares her knowledge, skills, and a commitment to excellence with a new generation of athletes.

I still have . . . a tie-dyed T-shirt I had as a freshman at Pitt. It’s blue and gold and has lots of holes, but I still wear it.

My first meal in Oakland was . . . fries at the “O.” I asked for a small order, and they came spilled out all over the place.

Pictures of me from those days . . . make me look really young. I look like I’m 12 years old.

My first residence-hall room . . . was in the Towers, and I didn’t have a computer or a TV. My roommate had a double-tape deck we would play.

Most people think my job . . . pays a lot more than it does. But there’s more to making a living than take-home pay.

The most important thing about being a good teacher . . . is preparation.

Today’s students . . . are less independent than past generations; they have traveled the world, but they can’t wash their clothes.

My favorite section of the grocery store is . . . with the fruits and  vegetables. I’m a vegetarian.

My favorite spot in Oakland is . . . the walkway between the Cathedral and Heinz Chapel. A brick with my name engraved for the 1993 Blue-Gold award is along the sidewalk.

I wish I’d kept . . . my old Pitt sweatshirts with the script Pitt logo. That was our athletic gear, and I had a closet full of them. But I pitched them, and now they’re all retro and cool. They’d be worth a mint.

Chang

Moore

Pitt researchers are learning more about a virus they discovered last year. Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCV) is the likely cause of a rare but aggressive and deadly skin cancer found in about 80 percent of Merkel cell tumors, says Patrick Moore, professor of microbiology and molecular genetics in Pitt’s School of Medicine. Previously, it wasn’t clear whether the virus actually caused the cancer or just coexisted with already cancerous cells. Researchers, led by Moore and his wife, Yuan Chang, a Pitt professor of pathology, have now confirmed that MCV appears to cause the cancer, as they reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“MCV infects normal cells before they turn into cancer cells,” says Moore, who also is director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute’s Molecular Virology Program. It seems that MCV is harmless in a healthy cell until the virus mutates and causes the cell to multiply abnormally, creating a cancerous tumor. “It looks very much like MCV is the culprit that causes the disease,” he adds.

Only seven viruses are known to cause human cancers—and two of them were found by Chang and Moore. In 2003, they shared the prestigious Charles S. Mott Prize for identifying KSHV, a herpes virus, as the cause of Kaposi’s sarcoma, the leading AIDS malignancy.

In January 2008, Moore and Chang, who codirect their lab, reported their initial identification of the Merkel cell virus in Science. At the time, they noted that although up to 16 percent of the population carries MCV, very few will develop cancer.

There is no current treatment for MCV infection, but identifying the source and understanding how it triggers disease could lead to future treatments.

Institutional Advancement is committed to reaching the University’s ambitious $2 billion goal. Pitt’s alumni and friends have contributed generously, making our current campaign total $1.3 billion!

Wearing a hard hat, safety glasses, and coveralls, a Pitt junior goes to work 400 feet below the Earth’s surface. Jim McCaffrey, a mining engineering major, is spending his summer with CONSOL Energy, a coal and gas company south of Pittsburgh. For the rest of the season and later, on weekends and vacations, McCaffrey mines coal, builds roof supports, and installs conveyor belts. He uses his wages to pay his Pitt tuition.

That was the summer of 1975. Three years later, with an engineering degree from the University, he was hired by CONSOL as a mining engineer, charged with improving the company’s mining methods. He’s still with the company today, after rising through the ranks during his 32-year employment. His current position is senior vice president of CONSOL’s material and supply chain management group and CNX Land Resources, a subsidiary.

Not too long ago, McCaffrey’s company sent him back to school as a volunteer instructor at Pitt, teaching an introductory course in mining engineering. He’s also an unofficial ambassador for his profession, sparking interest in mining careers among a new generation of student-engineers. The world has changed a lot since McCaffrey was an undergraduate and mining engineering was in its heyday. In the 1980s, an economic downturn pummeled the coal mining industry, research funding waned, and the University phased out its mining engineering courses. Today, CONSOL and other coal companies face a workforce generation gap.

At Pitt, McCaffrey is bridging the gap by reaching out to talented young people who can help lead CONSOL and other mining and energy production companies into the new world of 21st-century energy production. Mining engineers across the globe are pursuing ways to produce affordable energy and to meet the demands of rapidly emerging industrialized regions without jeopardizing the Earth’s environment.

By partnering with CONSOL to revive interest and resources in mining engineering, Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering is leading the way to help solve the energy riddle. Their collaboration is important—more than 50 percent of electricity in the United States and 25 percent of the world’s energy is generated from coal, a resource that is abundant in the Northeast and Midwest.

Engineers at CONSOL and elsewhere are working to develop technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal. Developing the technology will require hiring people, as well as acquiring about $2 billion in funding over the next six to 10 years.

CONSOL and Pitt are poised to be at the forefront of this new wave. The energy firm and the University have been collaborating to create new mining engineering classes at Pitt. McCaffrey assisted in teaching those classes. Also, the Swanson School has developed a plan that would enable students to earn a certificate related to mining engineering. The certificate courses are part of the Swanson School’s energy and sustainability initiatives. The school has also revived classes in nuclear engineering and power and energy engineering. Proposals have been submitted for similar certificate programs in these fields, too.

CONSOL’s partnership with Pitt goes back more than a decade. In 1991, the CONSOL Energy Mining Map Collection began as the company made its first donations to the University Library System of what is now a priceless compilation of 8,000 vintage engineering maps and photographs. The maps, some of which date to the 1850s, display in great detail the underground veins of coal mines and their depths, evidence of the rich history of mining in this area. Many of these colorful, hand-drawn maps are also works of art.

In January 2005, a mine blew out in McDonald, Pa., a rural hamlet in Washington County. Every minute, up to 10,000 gallons of water and mine drainage gushed from the 1930s-era Nickel Plate Mine. Streets were flooded and homes were threatened. Because the Environmental Protection Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation had studied mining maps from the Pitt collection, environmental and safety officials found a location to build a permanent gravity drain system, which included an overflow area, to control the mine discharge and keep homes and residents safe. The accident revealed just how important the collection of such maps could be and led to the modernization of mining map collections, including the one at Pitt.

Now, the U.S. Office of Surface Mining is searching for old maps to digitize and post on its Web site. The department has found maps at universities, historical societies, and in private homes. Pitt is providing metadata on the maps in its collection to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which is storing the digital files. Pitt will link to the state’s DEP maps Web site when it is completed. Recently, the state DEP and the Office of Surface Mining agreed to provide $81,242 to support the map project, and CONSOL committed $100,000 over five years to clean, repair, catalogue, and better preserve the maps at Pitt.

Meanwhile, in the hills of Appalachia, McCaffrey has taken a group of students on a field trip to Enlow Fork, one of the longest coal mines in the region. The students walk underground and watch CONSOL’s miners and managers work. McCaffrey stands nearby watching the students, looking for those who might not mind the hands-on work of going deep into the Earth to harvest energy for a new generation.

]]> http://www.pittmag.pitt.edu/?feed=rss2&p=559 http://www.pittmag.pitt.edu/?p=557 http://www.pittmag.pitt.edu/?p=557#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:03:19 +0000 hartley http://www.pittmag.pitt.edu/?p=557 The past several months have been challenging for our entire nation. As we all continue to deal with the uncertainty of our economy, we at Pitt are acutely aware of the impact this is having on our students and their families. We continue our dedication to raise funds to support Pitt students and know that [...]]]>

Votruba-Drzal

On a visit to Washington, D.C., the young sightseer squints at the gleaming marble buildings. She’s touring the U.S. capital’s grand monuments, which all seem to consist of broad columns of white stone. In this section of town, the lawns are fresh, the streets are clean, and many well-dressed people hurry along the city’s avenues and corridors of power.

For young Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, this is summer vacation. But her parents want to show their children all of the city, not just the tourist haunts. So the family visits a neighborhood not far away, where cracked concrete replaces green lawns, the streets are littered, and people are lucky to have clothes on their backs. Her dad, a college professor, and her mom, a high school counselor, miss no opportunity to expose their children to issues of social justice. From their early years, Elizabeth and her siblings learned there are those who have, and there are those who have not.

Votruba-Drzal took these lessons with her to college, where she began to research poverty’s assault on children. An award-winning student at Michigan State and Northwestern universities, she later sharpened her child advocacy skills by working with the U.S. Senate, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the Joint Center for Poverty Research.

She came to Pitt in 2005 as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. Votruba-Drzal, who also holds a secondary appointment in the School of Education, is the lead author of a groundbreaking study on the educational effects of kindergarten, particularly issues surrounding full-day versus part-day kindergarten sessions. Carried out in collaboration with scholars at Loyola University in Chicago, the study examines the achievement records of 13,776 children from the fall they began kindergarten through the spring of fifth grade.

The first kindergarten was founded in the 1830s in Germany by Friedrich Froebel, who shaped the concepts of social and creative activities based on the belief that children needed playtime to learn. Today, thousands of kindergartens offer 5-year-olds their first exposure to formal early childhood education. Roughly 65 percent of American children from all different backgrounds take part in full-day kindergarten, and 98 percent of all 5-year-olds in the nation participate in some kindergarten time.

Behind the sweet images of babes toying with blocks and romping freely, fierce policy and cultural debates rage over full-day versus part-day kindergarten. Advocates say full-day sessions provide individualized instruction and benefit working parents. Critics cry that the longer structured day stresses younger children and that the benefits don’t justify the costs.

Votruba-Drzal began her study about five years ago as part of her dissertation in the Human Development and Social Policy doctoral program at Northwestern University using data from “The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: Kindergarten Class of 1998-99.” The database comprises a nationally representative group of kindergartners, a mosaic of 20,000 kids—Black, White, Latino, urban, rural, and from all spectrums of the income scale.

Her study sheds light on the kindergarten debate, examining whether full-day kindergarten is associated with greater growth of academic skills and whether those advantages can be sustained through the end of fifth grade. The research project is one of the first to consider the benefits of full-day kindergarten using a nationally representative sample of children.

The study also is one of the first to take seriously the role of out-of-school settings, such as a child’s home and child-care environments, when comparing full-day versus part-day kindergarten. Part-time kindergartners still spend a significant amount of time every week in such settings. The failure to take these important contexts into account may produce misleading results. For example, children’s experiences outside school may differ widely; also, full-day kindergartners are more likely to be poor, African American, and come from single-parent households.

Given the significance of such issues, Votruba-Drzal’s research received national attention. Her study found that full-day kindergarten is associated with faster growth of math and reading skills when compared to part-day kindergarten. By the end of the school year, full-timers scored somewhat higher on math and reading tests.

However, the academic boost of full-day kindergarten was short lived, with the benefits of full-day versus part-day kindergarten fading within 36 months. The study posits that the fade-out was owing in part to differences among the children who attended full-day and part-day kindergarten.

“What this study suggests,” says Votruba-Drzal, “is that full-day kindergarten may be an effective way to enhance academic achievement in the short run, but it will not ensure long-term academic success.” Instead, later school experiences and other factors that buffet children living in poverty remain forces in shaping children’s lives.

One of Votruba-Drzal’s own sons recently began full-day kindergarten, so she’ll get a chance to personally weigh outcomes. But like the girl in Washington, D.C., who learned to view issues from all sides, Votruba-Drzal would like to build her own database to conduct additional studies that will examine many more aspects of the kindergarten experience.

Since 1987, the month of March has been celebrated nationally as Women’s History Month, thanks to a Congressional resolution. As some commentators have pointed out, “women’s history” is a relatively new concept, which developed with the rise of the women’s equal rights movement nearly 40 years ago. Historian and scholar Gerda Lerner has written that, until then: “People didn’t think that women had a history worth knowing.”

I’m glad that times have changed! While working on this issue of the magazine, which contains a special tribute to Pitt women, I was once again drawn to the achievements of the Stein sisters—Stella and Margaret Stein, who were the first women to earn undergraduate degrees from the University.

What must it have been like, in 1895, when the two sisters entered the University as sophomores, the only two women students on a campus full of men? Even more daunting was the circumstance that the men in their class had voted against the admittance of any women, only to be overruled by Chancellor William Jacob Holland, who was determined to increase enrollment.

What’s clear is that the situation didn’t dispirit the Stein women; in fact, it seems to have inspired them. They graduated at the top of their class, the two best students in the Class of 1898. Then, they entered an adult world in which women could not vote, had extremely limited occupational opportunities, and, typically, low-wage jobs. Most women of their era stayed at home, tending to their families and households. The Stein sisters, though, were among a new vanguard of women who sought to expand their horizons and seek their full potential outside traditional roles. They both went on to earn master’s degrees at the University and began careers in education, inspiring others to excel.

In this issue, Pitt Magazine marks Women’s History Month 2009 with a special section that celebrates the spirit and accomplishments of Pitt women. This issue also sheds light on a lost chapter of Western Pennsylvania history with the story of a Pitt exhibition that examines issues of Black, White, and the gray boundaries of freedom. The magazine looks forward, too, with a glimpse into the lives of today’s University students, who are part of a new millennial-era generation of achievers.

All of these stories reflect the University of Pittsburgh’s long history of progress in becoming, as stated in a board of trustees resolution, “one of the finest and most productive universities in the world.” The women celebrated in this issue are certainly key contributors to Pitt’s abundance of success; the students featured here inspire hope for the future; and our collective willingness to look back and learn from the past, as described in our story “Free at Last?,” is an invitation to never forget, yet always endeavor to move forward.

In a season when the nation has witnessed the inauguration of its first African American president, this issue celebrates those who have found a way to rise and to inspire, no matter the obstacles in their way. They are pathfinders and history-makers. Let’s go with them. Let’s build, together, a shared history worth knowing.

Cindy Gill
Editor in Chief

At a large table in the William Pitt Union, several generations of Black Action Society (BAS) members share stories about their Pitt experiences. They recall what it felt like to be a Black collegian in the ’60s, ’70s, and more recently. The same question hangs in the air: Was Pitt different for you than it was for me?

The BAS members are part of a panel discussion titled “Forty Years of Black Action at the University of Pittsburgh.” It’s one of several events that BAS is hosting this year to celebrate its 40th anniversary. BAS was founded to organize positive change for Black students in the social turmoil that erupted in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.

At the table, Richard Utley (A&S ’72) recollects the Afro hairstyles and Nigerian dashiki shirts he wore when he attended Pitt 35 years ago and notes that the student audience has a different sense of fashion these days. Of course, a lot more has changed than hairstyles. He says there was little interaction between Black and White students then, but now it’s not unusual for Black students to pledge with a variety of fraternities, to join intramural sports teams, and to attend parties with a wide mix of people. He’s pleased by this progress, but he urges everyone in the room, especially the current students, to continue supporting BAS.

Utley, who is now the deputy auditor general for administration in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, says that during his era as a Pitt student, he and other BAS members regularly campaigned to increase the numbers of Black faculty and students and to develop curricula for the academic study of Black culture. While progress has been made, BAS remains focused on its 40-year mission, which includes creating a positive environment for Black students at the University, establishing a sense of widespread community, and advocating for the needs and interests of Black students.

In her leadership role during the 40th anniversary celebration, BAS president Sheila E. Isong (A&S ’08), who graduated this spring as a political science and philosophy major, organized the campus gathering of past and present BAS members because she believes it’s important to revisit the past as a way to gauge future steps. “I would like to analyze how much progress has been made, making special note of the work that we still need to do to improve,” she says.

—J. D. Thrasher

During the filming of a public service announcement at a Baltimore children’s museum, one of the actors stops the scene after reading his line on the teleprompter: Children are the most important things in our lives. Wait a minute, he thinks. Something isn’t right. Children are not things. He asks the film crew to change the line: “Put ‘Children are the most important people in our lives,’” says the actor. The script is corrected.

That actor is Pitt alumnus David Newell ★ (CGS ’73). For nearly 40 years, he has played the character of the chipper postal worker Mr. McFeely on the classic children’s television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The show’s creator, Fred Rogers, died in 2003. Ever since, Newell has helped to keep the “Neighborhood” together by continuing to teach Mister Rogers’ lessons. “Words meant a lot to Fred,” he says. “And he would spend a lot of time analyzing how a certain word could mean something, or not, to a child.” Today, Newell still appears as Mr. McFeely at children’s events and is the public relations director for Family Communications, which owns the rights to the show.

One of the people on hand during the Baltimore filming was Paul Germain, a producer and director. But he wasn’t part of the crew. He was filming Newell for a documentary about the Pitt graduate’s life in and out of the Mr. McFeely costume. Released this year, the documentary is titled Speedy Delivery in honor of Mr. McFeely’s favorite phrase.

As the documentary shows, Newell’s mission is always the same: Show children that they’re special, important people.

With every ticking minute, undergraduate Shanika Brown strategically answers questions on her political science final exam. When she finishes, she will leave Pitt for the summer to apply similar knowledge and skills—not for academic reasons, but for her own small-business venture. Instead of focusing on historical facts and political processes, Brown will hone her decision-making and time-management skills by launching and operating a professional business.

In 2005, Brown and her older sister, Shariah, started a Harrisburg-based venture called Personal Touch Professional Cleaning Service. At the time, Brown was a junior at Pitt. The pair founded the company as a way to improve their family’s financial situation after their mother was laid off from her job. They were used to tackling household chores and knew they could be successful with a cleaning firm. Plus, the business was a quick start-up with low overhead, relying on family employees and long hours to transition the company into a viable enterprise.

Today, Brown (A&S ’06) is senior vice president of Personal Touch, overseeing marketing, sales, and finance. She also is vice president of marketing and franchise relations for Dirty Dog Franchising Group, a partner company that offers junk-removal services.

Inspired by her political science background, she keeps both companies sensitive to environmental and humanitarian issues. Personal Touch cleans “green” by using environmentally safe products, and Dirty Dog often recycles household goods, giving them to women’s shelters or families in need. “We are trying to put a new swing on an old business,” Brown says. Soon, she hopes to franchise the cleaning business statewide, using her own personal touch to advance the industry.

Abulaban (left)

At a General Motors plant in Shanghai, China, a business executive interviews a young Chinese man in his office, the only heated room in the old, Russian-style edifice. As managing director of a new GM business venture, Majdi Abulaban needs to find qualified managers—independent thinkers and problem solvers.

Pitt alumnus Abulaban ★ (ENGR ’85) moved from the United States to Shanghai in 1995 to expand GM’s ventures. Since then, his efforts have helped to create Delphi Packard Electric Systems Asia Pacific, a $1.1 billion company with 17 plants that produce electric systems for automobiles sold worldwide. Today, Abulaban—who earned a Pitt bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University—is president of the firm’s Asia Pacific operations, as well as board chair of Delphi Packard Electric Systems Co.

Abulaban attributes part of his success to the hiring of Chinese citizens as managers at a time when other companies in the region primarily hired Western expatriates. He believed that “locals” would better understand and adapt to the company’s challenges in the region. Indeed, the Chinese man he interviewed and hired in 1995 turned out to be an excellent manager and helped the business to expand. These days, the man is president of his own $100 million company.

Leaders throughout Asia have appreciated Abulaban’s business acumen. In 2005, he was a finalist in CNBC’s Asian Business Leaders Awards program. Last year, the City of Shanghai gave him its Magnolia Gold Award—a high honor given to expatriates who have made long-term contributions to the economic and social development of the city.

The Cathedral of Learning and the Stephen Foster Memorial look especially magical here thanks to a whimsical light display created as part of Pittsburgh’s Festival of Lights to help celebrate the city’s 250th anniversary. This fall and during Homecoming, the buildings were illuminated with colorful designs to represent different aspects of learning. The light projection shown here was inspired by the Gutenberg printing press, which became a symbol of learning during the Gothic era. The company Artlumiere created the display, working with German designers Friedrich Foerster and Sabine Weissinger.

Mark Oleksiuk (left) and Louise-Marie Gillis

The lake water churned, and frothy white caps rippled everywhere. Sitting on the unforgiving contour of a tiny bench in a narrow boat on a vast Southern lake, the novice rower was about to discover the frightening side of a newly embraced sport.

As a freshman member of the University of Pittsburgh’s crew team, Mark Oleksiuk had trained largely on dry land before taking a spring break trip to Camp Bob Cooper in Summerton, S.C. In a sleek scull on Lake Marion, far from shore, he and a few rookie crewmates were working on their technique when a surprise storm rolled in.

“I was in a boat of eight guys who knew nothing about rowing except the few basics we learned over the winter,” says Oleksiuk. Suddenly, one of them started yelling, Row for your life, get to the dock! “Talk about team-building,” says the Pitt student wryly.

It was a fitting initiation for a demanding sport, one that requires discipline, dedication, and sometimes quick courage. In four years of rowing for Pitt, Oleksiuk—who is captain of the varsity men’s crew team—has been caught in the wake of large commercial barges in Pittsburgh’s three rivers. He’s faced harsh winds that combine with currents to turn a training session into a Herculean feat. In the icy months of winter, he has endured the cold without gloves for as long as possible—gloves are a sign of weakness in rowing.

This year, his hard work paid off. He and fellow Pitt crew member Louise-Marie Gillis, a fifth-year pharmacy student, are the recipients of the Anita J. Angus Endowed Alumni Association Athletic Scholarship, which provides each of them with $3,000 to support their education. Established through a bequest, this scholarship is awarded each year to Pitt students who are Pennsylvania residents and participate in intercollegiate athletics, specifically football, basketball, or crew.

“It means a lot to me,” Oleksiuk says of the award. “Not only is it helping me tremendously to make it through my last year of school, but it’s also satisfying that people recognize the effort. I’m very thankful to receive any recognition, because it’s a sport where people are really not doing it for the glory.”

Oleksiuk, a fifth-year senior studying economics and statistics, followed in his brother’s footsteps by rowing for Pitt. When he arrived as a freshman in the fall of 2004, his brother, John Paul Oleksiuk (A&S ’05, SIS ’05), was a fifth-year senior and serving as the team’s novice rowing coach, a role his younger brother has now assumed.

Cowinner Gillis is a Montreal native who spent her high school years in a suburb of Philadelphia watching crew teams navigate the Schuylkill River out of the fabled Boathouse Row. She first took up the sport as a Pitt freshman. Since then, she has spent four years rowing for Pitt and has her sights set on one day competing in the Olympics.

“I was ecstatic,” Gillis says of the award. “I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot academically, but the crew team was something I wanted to achieve physically. I wasn’t the fastest or strongest, but we’ve all strived to better ourselves.”

To prepare for her future, Gillis is working with Pitt Head Coach Daniel Grancea, a former member of the Romanian national team. It was Grancea who nominated Gillis and Oleksiuk for the award. The coach is helping Gillis organize her education and her training to meet the regimens of a four-year Olympic cycle.

She believes the strict regimen only serves to make her a stronger student by underscoring the importance of discipline. “It helps a lot of the freshmen to stay out of trouble. Your first year of college can be pretty crazy,” she says.

Maybe not as crazy as getting caught in a nasty squall on a narrow boat—but Gillis and Oleksiuk agree that their Pitt experiences are preparing them to handle the challenges ahead, even the unexpected ones.

The Commons Room was a dream in many colors for the Alumni Welcome Back Reception during Homecoming. What a party! If you couldn’t make it, or even if you did, check out the photo galleries of Homecoming events at www.alumni.pitt.edu (follow the “about us” link). Let’s gather again soon!

Contact information:
The Pitt Alumni Association
Alumni Hall
4227 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
www.alumni.pitt.edu

Browning

As the plane descends into Pittsburgh International Airport on a soggy night, a recent high school graduate peers through the window and sees a world of smoke and furnace-stoked flames. “It was rainy, it was dark, and all I could see was fire,” recalls Douglas Browning about that night, his freshman-year arrival in Pittsburgh. “I was wondering what I got myself into.”

“At the time, the steel mills were pretty active,” says the Chicago-bred Browning, who began his undergraduate years at Pitt in the late 1960s, when the city was an industrial powerhouse in the worldwide steel industry. The smoky-city reputation was evident as he traveled the 20 miles or so from the airport to the University’s campus in Oakland. Before long, he entered the Tower residence hall where he had shipped his belongings in advance. Unfortunately, nothing had arrived. His room was empty and quiet. He couldn’t even relax, because he couldn’t figure out how the slide-out bed worked.

Like many first-day freshmen, Browning was flustered by his new surroundings, so far from home. “I was wondering, ‘How do you sleep on something like that?’ and I was about two minutes away from going back to the airport and back to Illinois.”

Just then, the door to his room swung open, and his roommate burst in. “What are you doing here?” said the roommate. “Everyone’s over at the Commons for a party.” Browning followed his roommate out the door and soon became part of an active student community. He was a resident assistant in the Towers and an officer with the Black Action Society.

After earning a degree in political science from the School of Arts and Sciences in 1972, and working briefly as a management trainee at Procter & Gamble, Browning studied law at Hoftstra University and became an attorney, then accepted a position with the U.S. Customs Service’s Office of Regulations and Rulings. He intended to stay for a few years before joining a private firm. But what he didn’t count on was how much he would enjoy working for the government, where he rose steadily through the ranks, as a senior attorney, district director, and then assistant commissioner of the Office of International Affairs with the customs service. He also served for two years as deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In May 2005, Browning became senior vice president of global customs modernization and border security for Sandler & Travis Trade Advisory Services, where he helps governments and multinational businesses modernize their customs and security procedures. He also is affiliated with the Miami-based international law firm of Sandler, Travis, & Rosenberg.

At Pitt, Browning is scholarship chair for the African American Alumni Council, a role that connects him with fellow alumni and potential students and gives him opportunities to tout the virtues of a Pitt education. Among those who hear his pitches is his own daughter, Rachel, who is entering her senior year in high school. Another family member, too, already has found his way to Pitt.

A few years ago, Browning helped his nephew Justin Lovett move to campus. Even though Pittsburgh has moved far beyond its industrial past to become a leader in technology, education, and advanced health care, the bustle of students with their move-in carts brought him back to his undergraduate days.

“The thing I noticed was how diverse the student body is,” says Browning. “It was visible to me. I think that’s important. That’s part of what living in the real world is about. It teaches you a level of understanding that allows you to value those differences. … That’s the beauty of a campus like the University of Pittsburgh: You’re part of a bigger community.”

A partnership between Career Services and the Pitt Alumni Association, the Network is a resource for alumni and students seeking career-related insight and advice.

Even though he’s a busy producer at CBSNews, Matt Nelko still makes time to help fel-low alumni as a volunteer for the Pitt Career Network. This spring, for instance, Nelko participated in a PCN event at the Big East Tournament, where he offered career pointers to visiting students and graduates. When he’s not “working” for Pitt, he’s the acting executive producer for CBS News’ Up to the Minute. His professional experience includes writing andproducing for the CBS Evening News, CBS Morning News’ The Early Show, and ABC’s World News Nowand Good Morning America. He also was an anchorfor Air America Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio, andhe wrote, produced, and anchored the news feedsfor CBS News Radio. Before moving to New York, he managed the newsroom at Pittsburgh’s KDKA Radio.His list of honors includes mentions in Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards for his work at CBS Newsand serving for nearly a decade on the board of directors for the Writers Guild of America, East.

Homecoming ’08 was a spectacular affair, from the Pathway to Professions networking reception, to the new Welcome Back Reception in the Cathedral of Learning for all alumni, to Alumni Central before the Homecoming game.

At the Pathway to Professions reception on Thursday night, more than 300 alumni and students noshed and networked in Alumni Hall. Sharing information about their professions is a great way for alumni to give back to their alma mater. And you don’t have to be on campus to join them. The Pitt Career Network, our online career networking site, is available to alumni from Pittsburgh to Paris and beyond. Signing up for the network is easy and you can choose how much or little time you want to invest.

On Friday, we celebrated the 25 association constituent groups that received Banner Awards. The awards are given to groups that help advance the University by, for example, involving alumni in the Pitt Alumni Recruitment Team (PART). PART volunteers help Pitt continue to recruit the best and the brightest students. Alumni can also help the University by participating in the Alumni Legislative Network (ALN), a group of supporters who advocate for increased funding for Pitt and higher education in general.

Visit our Web site, www.alumni.pitt.edu, and investigate our volunteer opportunities. I look forward to meeting you at an upcoming event.

Jeff Gleim

Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Alumni Relations

A conversation with Dolly Ellenberg (A&S ’73), vice president for development, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh; a former board member of Pitt’s Alumni Leadership Council Association; and a Life Member of the alumni association.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature in the School of Arts and Sciences. Coming from a family of educators, she thought she’d become a teacher. Instead, she began to help nonprofit groups to thrive. She has worked with Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museums for more than 20 years. “Sometimes I feel like I was hired by Andrew Carnegie,” she jokes. “I’ve worked in Oakland all my life, and from the window in my office I can see the Cathedral of Learning. In a way, I’ve never left the campus.”

The joy of my career is … working at an institution that has so much of an impact on Pittsburgh and the surrounding region.

Night at the museum … is either a big party or very quiet. It’s fun to walk out of your office and find yourself in the middle of a wedding reception.

The most important thing about being a manager is … appreciating each individual’s unique skills.

Pictures of me from my college days … are interesting. I don’t know who that person is.

From my days at Pitt, I still have … my Pitt lantern from Lantern Night (right, on tabletop). We went through the Cathedral of Learning at night, and all the lanterns were lit. It’s such a lovely ceremony. I keep it on a bookcase in my office at home.

My favorite album cover is … Abbey Road.

My passport is … always at the ready. I love travel. It’s a wonderful way to learn about people and cultures.

A food I associate with Pitt is … an Original hot dog. I still have one every once in a while.

A bright sunny day means … there’s a smile on my face.

A dark stormy night means … there’s probably still a smile on my face.