Gates

The doctor is running late. He dashes through the hallway with a prescription in hand, then slips into an examination room. Waiting nearby is a 53-year-old mother who once worked in Walmart as an overnight stocker. Like all of doctor Zane Gates’ patients, she does not have health insurance. Before she was referred to his clinic—a tiny suite across the street from a rail yard—she had not seen a doctor for 15 years. Her plight is not unusual for the working poor and those who struggle to make ends meet. Gates understands. He has been there.

He vividly recalls his youth, returning home after school and walking the dimly lit hallway to 309B, the drafty apartment where he lived. The furniture was secondhand, and his clothes had first been worn by others; but he had treasures, too. As he prepared to do homework, his mother, Gloria Gates, would often be in the kitchen, feeding a few neighborhood kids. Later, one or two might be invited to stay overnight, if need be. Every child deserves a chance, she would tell her son, and what truly matters is being able to make other people’s lives better.

This message still nourishes the life of Zane Gates, who recalls many such boyhood afternoons. Though born in Philadelphia, he grew up in Evergreen Manors, a public housing project in Altoona, Pa. His mother walked nearly a mile to work and fed her family with sandwiches left over from the priests for whom she cooked. She would give her neighbors her last $2. Because she lacked full medical coverage, she used spare change to pay for her medicines. Other caring adults pitched in with Christmas gifts, clothes, and years of steady encouragement.

Within this circle of care, Gates set his sights high early on. He aimed to study medicine. “It’s something I always wanted to do, ever since I was 5 years old,” he says. Though he knew it was a long shot for a boy from the projects to become a doctor, Gates still dreamed, and he worked toward his goal.

He started college at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, then transferred to the Pittsburgh campus for a School of Pharmacy degree. When his mother died during his sophomore year, he found support and encouragement from his Pitt peers. It gave him confidence to keep going, ultimately winning admission to Pitt’s medical school. There, he volunteered with Operation Safety Net, a project founded by physician and alumnus Jim Withers (MED ’84) to provide medical care to the homeless.

Gates earned his medical degree in 1995 and, inspired by Withers’ program, the young doctor returned to Altoona where he began traveling to community centers, working from a Ford van to provide free medical care to the poor. Eventually, he settled into the building across from the rail yard.

This year, the free clinic he created, Partnering for Health Services, has a budget of about $300,000 and will serve more than 4,000 patients. The clinic also has a generous partner—Altoona Regional Health System—which writes off the extra costs for laboratory tests and medication. But it is Gates (PHARM ’90, MED ’95) who keeps the clinic’s heart beating; and, in his spare time, the father of four writes medical thrillers.

So far, his clinic has inspired a legislative bill likely to extend free clinic support across Pennsylvania, and a Pittsburgh Steeler is teaming with Gates to reproduce the clinic in rural Mississippi. The doctor’s vision and accomplishments have earned him the honor of being named a Health Hero by WebMD.com.

Still, Gates is not done giving. Recently, he honored the selfless spirit of his mother—an eighth-grade dropout and once almost homeless—by creating an after-school program that serves more than 100 children in three housing projects, including Evergreen Manors. The Gloria Gates Memorial Foundation is a tribute to the woman who shaped his belief that you must forge your own path and help others along the way.

This year, the free clinic he created, Partnering for Health Services, has a budget of about $300,000 and will serve more than 4,000 patients. The clinic also has a generous partner—Altoona Regional Health System—which writes off the extra costs for laboratory tests and medication. But it is Gates who keeps the clinic’s heart beating; and in his spare time, the father of four writes medical thrillers.

So far, his clinic has inspired a bill likely to extend free clinic support across Pennsylvania, and a Pittsburgh Steeler is teaming with Gates to reproduce the clinic in rural Mississippi. The doctor’s vision and accomplishments have earned him the honor of being a WebMD.com Health Hero.

Still, he’s not done giving. Recently, he honored the selfless spirit of his mother—an eighth-grade dropout and once almost homeless—by creating an after-school program that serves more than 100 children in three housing projects, including Evergreen Manors. The Gloria Gates Memorial Foundation is a tribute to the woman who shaped his belief that you must make your own way and then help others.

Rosano

Physician Caterina Rosano walks toward Fifth and Bellefield avenues on her way to work. As she approaches the corner, the pedestrian walk-light is blinking “go,” yet she observes an elderly woman hesitating to cross. It’s raining, and the woman juggles an umbrella in one hand and her purse in the other. Rosano is hardly inconspicuous as she nears the corner. She’s dressed in a stylish black leather jacket, black slacks, not-exactly-practical boots, and a red scarf. Still, she emits a quiet, observant presence. What she sees is a woman, probably in her late 70s, calculating risk versus reward: Is there enough time remaining to cross the four-lane boulevard before oncoming traffic springs ahead? On another level, what she sees is someone striving to maintain independence in the face of increasing limitations­­—someone facing the realities of aging. For Rosano, it’s a reminder of the essence of her scientific work, which explores the riddles of aging.

“There’s something mysterious about older adults,” she says. “Why do some adults live longer and better, surviving against all odds”?

Rosano—an accomplished researcher in the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Aging and Population Health—defines healthy aging as the ability to function independently. Her work suggests that it’s not an absence of health obstacles that matters, but rather an ability to compensate for them.

Rosano doesn’t have much of a view from her campus office in the Bellefield Professional Building. That’s why she has panoramic photos of her native Italy taped to the walls. The pictures give her a semblance of sunlight, even on gray days. Usually, though, her focus is not on the weather or the view. Instead, images and articles about the brain dot the wall above her desk. Much of the time, Caterina Rosano has the human brain on her mind.

That’s really nothing new. From her youngest days, she was eager to improve her own brainpower. During her childhood, she had a hearing impairment that has since been corrected, but the initial ailment pushed her to compensate for her less- than-perfect hearing. She wanted to be smart, then smarter, which launched her odyssey to learn and keep learning.

She found a ready ally in her father, who had a roomful of books, many about improving brainpower and boosting IQ. Together, they spent hours in his library, playing games, solving puzzles, and challenging each other to be better, faster, smarter. Sometimes she did well on a quiz and sometimes not. She wondered: Why was that? What accounted for her learning well, or not? What, exactly, was going on in her brain?

“I know,” she admits now, “it sounds very dorky.” But that’s where her passion for the brain—her passion for improving the brain—started. And never stopped.

Her youthful curiosity and her eagerness to learn ultimately led to medical school at the University of Palermo in Italy. There, she began to delve into biological models of how the brain learns. When she graduated in 1995, she accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. At the time, her research focused on the brain’s ability to regenerate tissue.

In those early days of her career, Rosano’s drive to understand the brain was confined to the laboratory, working with animal models. As a “bench” researcher, she spent her time examining cells and molecules in the brains of rats. She examined the effects of stress on brain chemistry, on cell survival, and on learning. She also looked at factors that protected cells from the potential damage of stress. The research was intriguing, but it would take years, perhaps decades, to yield benefits for humans.

So, her quest to learn more and to help people more directly led her to Pitt’s Center for Neuroscience, which she joined as a research associate in neurobehavioral studies in 1999. The center is a premier site for brain-function studies, versed in the latest brain-imaging technologies. A key tool in those endeavors was magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a scanning technique that reveals remarkable anatomic and physiologic details. Rosano began to use the technology to explore human brain performance in both young and old adults. It offered an entirely new realm of possibilities for unraveling the enigma of the brain.

As so often happens at the University of Pittsburgh, she soon learned about other intriguing research opportunities. She also began to pursue a master’s degree in epidemiology—the study of the causes, transmission, patterns, and prevention of diseases in populations. In 2001, she was awarded a National Institute on Aging (NIA) fellowship to pursue studies on the epidemiology of age-related brain-function impairment, and she conducted research in Pitt’s Department of Epidemiology within the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH), which ranks third in the nation in attracting federal funds for research enterprise.

During this time, Rosano contributed by bringing her brain-imaging skills into studies of gait and balance. Slow-downs in gait and disorders of balance can be disabling, create falls, and may limit independence. She worked closely with epidemiologist and Pitt researcher Anne Newman. At GSPH, Rosano—who earned a master’s degree in public health in 2003—was able to combine MRI technology with a treasure trove of existing data on elderly populations.

In 2005, she became a scholar in the Pittsburgh Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, a program in Geriatric Medicine funded by the NIA that partners with the Center for Aging and Population Health in GSPH. Along the way, she received grants and more intensive training through the center, where she was working with a range of Pitt experts on aging and the brain, especially Stephanie Studenski, a Pitt professor of medicine and the Pepper Center’s director, and Howard Aizenstein, a professor of psychiatry and bioengineering, as well as director of Pitt’s Geriatric Psychiatry Neuroimaging Lab.

With the help of Newman and other epidemiology colleagues, Rosano began to delve into the department’s huge database of longitudinal studies—studies conducted in populations over long spans of time to acquire scientific insights about health through the years.

For example, back in the mid-’90s, Newman launched the Health, Aging, and Body Composition Study, involving more than 3,000 adults, to identify risk factors important for maintaining mobility. In 2005, Rosano recruited 300 local residents from this study and took MRI scans along with sophisticated gait measurements. Now with approximately 250 of the original volunteers still living and still participating, Rosano is able to conduct comparative follow-up studies.

She intensified her search for evidence of age-related brain changes that affect cognitive and physical functions. Her research, using advanced software on brain images acquired in the Cardiovascular Health Study, for instance, identified vascular brain abnormalities that seemed to affect gait. Elders with slower gaits and balance difficulties also had less gray matter in particular regions of the brain. A smaller prefrontal lobe, even in the absence of cerebral vascular disease, appeared to be related to slower gait.

But her work also began to reveal more hopeful evidence. Last spring, The New York Times and other national media reported on Rosano’s research with a group of elders, all more than 70 years old.  One group committed to physical activity—walking at least 150 minutes a week—the other half remained sedentary. She found intriguing differences in the brains of the two groups. Even up to two years after the end of the year-long study, those who walked regularly were faster at test-taking and made fewer errors compared to the others. Rosano’s brain imaging scans showed that more parts of the brain were activated in the walkers versus those who were sedentary. In the Times May 2010 story, Rosano concluded: “Some level of physical activity, even started later in life, can potentially impact the brain.”

Now, Rosano is extending and broadening such studies, breaking new ground in the field of neuroepidemiology. By understanding the relationship between the brain and physical functions, she aims to identify predictors of successful aging. The goal is nothing less than to unriddle the mysteries of aging.

“A mystery,” she says, “makes me want to know what’s behind it, don’t you think? That’s the essence of someone who does research—the investigator, the detective. That’s how I see researchers, as detectives trying to put togther all the clues and the pieces of the puzzle.”

She’s getting help from various Pitt research collaborators, many of whom are increasingly interested in the exception rather than the rule. Among them is Newman, who today is chair of Pitt’s Department of Epidemiology, director of the Center for Aging and Population Health, and a professor of epidemiology and medicine. Aging is tough, says Newman, and there’s a lot to be learned from the people managing to do it well.

“One of the first times I met Anne,” Rosano recalls, “she told me we should study the cream of the crop, and it really stuck with me because, at first, I didn’t know what that meant. What’s the crop? What’s the cream?”

Although the expression did not initially translate well, Rosano soon understood the sentiment: Focus on those who age better than the rest of us, who rise above the inevitable maladies of a long life.

Examining health data from older adults gathered over the course of decades, Rosano found something she expected—a segment of elders who managed to stay relatively healthy despite the onset of aging. In research parlance, these are the “outliers,” people who fall outside the normal ranges of their group. These are the cream of the crop for her research pursuits. But there was a deeper mystery, something even more elusive than the health of the cream of the crop: Another group of elders defied every expectation.

In a separate subset of about 6,000 aging adults, Rosano and her research team examined data from MRI brain scans and pen-and-pencil tests that gauged cognitive function. About 20 percent of the test group scored poorly in terms of the physical condition of the brain in MRI images, yet these same individuals scored extremely well on the cognitive tests. She retested, looking at additional data. Again, about 22 percent had the resilience factor—bad brain MRIs but good test scores.

“One-fifth of the people we look at completely escape any sort of prediction,” she says, “and this is what is fantastic to me. These people function and move around very well, but their brain MRIs don’t look good, and we don’t understand why.”

The members of the one-fifth club apparently have a secret that enables them to live longer and live longer free of dementia than the other four-fifths of the test population. So, she asks: What’s the mystery? What’s so different in the pasts of these people to account for their resilience?

Among the possibilities, spikes in blood pressure appear to be more detrimental to the brain than a measured rise in pressure over time. Perhaps a slower progression in pressure gives the brain time to adjust, without causing harm, Rosano speculates. In another of her studies, she is beginning to see that the brains of those with diabetes appear older than usual—could high glucose be a factor in causing the brain to age more quickly?

Rosano’s research offers tantalizing clues about the aging brain. Maybe it’s a greater ability to problem solve, along with the ability to rewire new connections in the brain. Scientific revelations during the past decade have shown that the brain has a lifelong ability to rewire neural pathways, to compensate for damage. It’s a burgeoning field of study called brain plasticity. Could some elders have a better capacity for neural rewiring; if so, why?

“We are beginning to see that we have to look at the brain in much greater detail,” she says. “It’s not enough to look at how big it is, not enough to look at how much blood goes through it. We have to look at neural activity and micro-structural changes combined. We have to look at how fast and where specifically these changes occur.”

So, Rosano and her research team are using more advanced, cutting-edge brain MRI scans to see greater details. And they’re creating new ways to examine these elusive details. As usual, Rosano wants in on the secrets of brain power, and she’s committed to understanding it.

“We have learned a lot already,” she says. “If we continue to search, we’ll get more pieces of the puzzle.”

The aromatherapy scents of flowers and herbs surround a Rhode Island grandmother as she lays in her bed at a nursing home. It’s the final hour of her life. Her son looks on silently. The only noise is the soft purr of a furry, gray-and-brown spotted cat curled up next to the woman, Marion McCullough. The cat knows better than anyone that she will be taking her last breath soon.

The feline holding this vigil is Oscar, the resident cat in the dementia ward of Steere House nursing home in Providence, R.I. He moved into the facility in 2005 when he was just a kitten. Six months later, nurses and staff began to notice Oscar’s uncanny ability.

While generally not very affectionate, Oscar seems to know when patients are near death. He curls up next to them, remaining there until they pass. The first time this happened, the patient was Marion McCullough. Since then, Oscar has sat in vigil with nearly 50 patients. Now, when he nestles into a patient’s bed, the staff nurses take the opportunity to call family and friends and tell them that their loved one’s time is soon coming to an end, giving them a chance to say goodbye.

David Dosa (GSPH ’03), a geriatrician and health services researcher at Brown University, has worked in the home since 2003. A head nurse on the dementia ward told him about the cat’s prescience. Initially, Dosa was skeptical about the cat’s behavior, but he also was intrigued.

His curiosity led to his book, Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat (Hyperion), in which he interviews the caregivers of those who passed on with Oscar beside them.

During his career, Dosa became well versed in the disease of dementia but, he says, he never related fully to its devastation until his own mother-in-law was diagnosed with dementia while he was writing the book. “You can only truly understand when you’ve experienced it firsthand,” Dosa says. His book is an exploration of that understanding. He surveys all aspects of caring for someone with dementia—someone who, as he describes it, is “unlearning life” and reverting back to infancy. Roles are reversed. Children become the parents.

Dosa reveals, too, that caregivers are also in pain. They are the ones forgotten, not the ones forgetting. Ultimately, says Dosa, the significance of these moments goes beyond how or why the disease destroys. It’s not solely about the science behind the cat’s behavior—there is speculation that Oscar smells certain human pheromones that arise prior to death. Instead, there’s much to learn from the emotional support the cat offers to those in need.

Marion McCullough’s son is interviewed in the book, which spent weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. He and other caregivers acknowledge the importance of Oscar. Despite the difficult experience of attending a loved one dying of dementia, they can’t help but smile at the mention of this feeling feline and his presence during those conclusive hours.

Oscar puts patients at ease. He offers comfort to the caregivers. When there are no family or friends present, he sits in their place. Although most people shy away from death, Oscar curls up next to it.

—Sarah E. Beauchamp

An ant crawls stealthily across the kitchen counter, quickly descending into the sink in a hunt for food. The foray pays off with the discovery of a coffee teaspoon still dripping with cream and sugar. After a furtive taste of the sweet stuff, the ant speedily returns to its colony. Soon, fellow ants follow a scented trail into the sink, then return to the colony carrying a feast—sugar crystals.

Last summer, married Pitt engineers Anna Balazs and Steven Levitan saw this drama of nature unfold in their kitchen. “The ants came out of a socket and went all the way around the counter and into the sink to find the spoon of sugar,” Balazs recalls. “We actually sat there and watched it for a while—we were both fascinated.”

This insect encounter was riveting for the husband-and-wife team because it offered a real-life demonstration of what they had striven for months to accomplish in their research—the creation of “virtual” biology.

After ant-watching, the couple did what most homeowners do when summertime insects show up in the kitchen. Let’s just say it didn’t end well for the ants. But the ants’ behavior remained an inspiration.

For the past two centuries, scientists have been trying to understand the microscopic inner workings of cells and to make sense of the extraordinary complexity of these fundamental building blocks of life. Balazs, though, is not a cell biologist; she is a chemical engineer. Still, she draws on what is known about how living cells are made and how they function to inform the digitally driven, artificial systems she designs.

She seeks to create biomimetic materials—products that mimic processes or behaviors found in nature. In other words, biology is her inspiration for advances in engineering.

Since 2006, Balazs—Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and the Robert Von der Luft Professor in the Swanson School of Engineering—has been working to build a system that mimics cell signaling—a vital biological process. Cells in organisms of all kinds have complicated machinery that allows them to share information with each other, often by releasing signaling molecules. These communication networks play a key role in cellular activities involved in everything from tissue repair to organ development to complete biological functioning.

It wasn’t Balazs’ goal to reconstruct the elaborate pathways that allow real cells to communicate with each other. Instead, she simply wondered whether she could devise a stripped-down version of a biological cell that could talk to other cells of its kind—without all the intricate parts used in actual cell signaling. “The real challenge was how do you mimic the complexity of biology when all you have are basic tools,” she says.

The basic tools she started with were microcapsules, which are fluid-filled balls enclosed by an elastic shell—no bigger than a micron in diameter. The period at the end of this sentence is roughly 400 microns. These cell-like microcapsules can secrete even more minuscule nanoparticles, much like the way biological cells release chemical signals to communicate with one another.

“Essentially we wanted to use purely synthetic materials to have one round thing send a message to another round thing, and through that communication, perform some function,” she says about her micron-scale experiments.

Postdoctoral researchers German Kolmakov and Victor Yashin helped Balazs develop a computer model of such a system using the high-powered supercomputers in Pitt’s Center for Molecular and Materials Simulations, which was established in 2000 to support computational research on campus.

In their model, the microcapsules exchange two different types of nanoparticles. A “signaling cell” begins talking by secreting nanoparticles known as agonists. These agonists then prompt a “target cell” to enter into the conversation by releasing nanoparticles known as antagonists. But the antagonists, in turn, stop the first cell from releasing agonists. That means once the signaling cell falls silent, so, too, does the target cell, which makes the signaling cell start talking again.

And so on and so on, the dialogue continues back and forth.

The most intriguing facet of Balazs’ model is that the nanoparticles released from a signaling cell make the surface underneath them stickier. This causes the target cell to move toward the signaling cell. But when the target cell gets too close, it is triggered to release antagonists, which make the surface less sticky, causing both cells to move away from that spot together.

In this way, groups of capsules begin to form as the signaling cell rolls along, picking up new target cells. And by changing the parameters of the system, the scientists discovered they could control the motion of these capsules to create different, creature-like shapes. One formation they have made resembles a two-headed dragon, with two cooperating signaling cells leading a long chain of target cells. They also have made curvy snakes, with competing signaling cells each pulling its own line of target cells.

In essence, the computer model was able to stimulate synthetic materials to act in a way that mimics basic communication between living cells. Virtual biology.

When Balazs was a youngster, biology was common fodder for conversation around the family dinner table. Her father had a degree in veterinary medicine and was passionate about his job, which involved toxicology research. “We talked about science and his work all of the time,” recalls Balazs. Her parents, along with thousands of other intellectuals, escaped Hungary following the 1956 revolution that was quashed by the Soviets. They first settled in Canada and later moved to New York.

Balazs earned her bachelor’s degree in physics from Bryn Mawr College in 1975, then completed her master’s and PhD degrees in materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the Pitt faculty in 1987 along with her husband, Steven Levitan, who is now the John A. Jurenko Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also holds a joint appointment in Pitt’s computer science department.

Levitan studies the design of new computing devices based on emerging nanotechnologies and is especially interested in how to build microchips through a process called bottom-up self-assembly, whereby tiny parts organize themselves into working circuits.

Just like in Balazs’ childhood home, science is a regular topic of mealtime discussion for the Pitt couple. “We usually talk about our work over dinner,” he says. “Often we just complain to each other,” he jokes, “but sometimes it is constructive.” Such was the case one late night a few years ago, during a conversation over a good bottle of wine, when Balazs was sharing her excitement about her progress on her microcapsule research. Levitan had just returned from a conference where his colleagues were discussing ant colony optimization—a hot new topic in computer science.

As Balazs and Levitan would later observe in their own kitchen, ants use pheromones to signal the most direct route to a food source. It’s a biological phenomenon called stigmergy in which social insects use their environment as a medium of communication rather than coordinating their behavior through any direct exchange of information.

The lone ant on their countertop laid down a trail of pheromones on its way back to the colony, “mapping” the direction to the sugar crystals. These chemical compounds alerted the other ants in the nest that there was a meal to be had. One by one, they followed the scent, reinforcing the shortest path to the sink with their own pheromones as they headed back to the colony so that other ants could also find their way to the food as quickly as possible.

Computer scientists have developed mathematical algorithms that aim to simulate this process as a way to pinpoint optimal solutions to difficult computational problems. Perhaps, reasoned Levitan, his wife’s microcapsules could behave like ants in this way, laying down a trail of “pheromones” for other cells to follow.

“After another glass of wine, I said ‘I’m going into the lab tomorrow to tell my team to get started on that problem,’” Balazs recalls, then laughs.

The researchers found that by delaying the nanoparticle release of one microcapsule group until another passes by and activates it, the trailing group would follow the chemical residue left by the leading group—like ants following a pheromone trail to food. “It was really this beautiful inspiration of Steven’s that brought all of this work together,” Balazs says.

Their results were published last July in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, marking just the second time Balazs and Levitan had coauthored a study together in 26 years of marriage. Their paper made headlines in the scientific community and also caught the eye of techies worldwide, as videos of “ants,” “dragons,” and “snakes” went viral on YouTube.

Cool videos aside, the study marked the first time anyone had shown how to get inanimate, microscale objects to communicate with one another to carry out a concerted action, says Daniel A. Hammer, an international expert in cell behavior who is the Alfred G. and Meta A. Ennis Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

“What they have done that is so special is to show that you can basically make mimics of communicating organisms by using inert particles, without having anything that’s living whatsoever,” Hammer says.

The potential applications of these animal-like cells are limitless, according to Hammer. In biomedicine, they could act like trucks that haul drugs to cells inside the body. Or they could be used in microfluidics, which are small-scale devices used for rapid biological assays or to synthesize minute quantities of chemicals. Or they could be put to work carrying tiny electronic parts—or laying down the pattern for these components—in microchip assembly, which is what interests Levitan the most.

“It’s the question of how we control and predictably move material from one place to another on the microscale to do complex assembly without using little tweezers or electric fields or something else,” he says.

Meantime, Balazs has made further advances with her models, demonstrating together with postdoctoral researcher Amitabh Bhattacharya how chemical waves can be propagated along a string of microcapsules to mimic cell signaling over longer distances. Her team also has developed a snake that can pick up a bunch of nanoparticles and drop them off elsewhere, and they are working to vary the kind of information the snakes carry.

For Balazs, the real reward comes from seeing an amazing process like ant foraging behavior, developed over millions of years of evolution, come to life in her computer models in a way that could have far-reaching impact: “It’s quite stunning to me that if you put the right chemistry and physics together, you can mimic aspects of biology.”

On a day that falls between the beginning of the annual coffee harvest and the end of the rainy season, a group of Pitt medical students climbs into the bed of a pickup truck in Honduras.

From a health clinic in the village of San José del Negrito, they ride into the mountains, where coffee orchards are freckled with the mud-brick homes of families who tend to the coffee trees.

When mud on the road gets as mushy as brown bananas, the medical students abandon the truck and continue uphill on foot. After an hour, they reach an adobe house. A mother invites them inside. Student Amy Soni converses with her, using the Spanish words she can remember from high school and college classes. They talk about agua—water.

Every morning, women in this region emerge from their earthen homes and carry vessels to nearby springs or spigots. They fill them with water, repeating the same chore that their ancestors carried out in centuries past. But in the 21st century, many of them have added a new step to their daily routine. When they return to their kitchens, they don’t let the water sit in their vessels. Instead, they pour the water into ceramic bowls suspended over plastic buckets. The water seeps through tiny holes in the bowls and trickles into the buckets, rendering it clean for drinking or cooking. Many of the women learned about this filtering technique from a PowerPoint presentation shown on a computer at the health clinic in the village.

At the adobe house, the mother shows the medical students her filter and bucket, which cost $15, a significant investment for her family. Coffee farmers in this region earn only about $250 per year. Soni asks her questions from a scientific survey she prepared.

“¿Con qué frecuencia limpia usted el filtro?” How often do you clean the filter?

“¿En general, ha mejorado la salud de la familia despues de usar el filtro?” In general, has the health of the family improved since using the filter?

While Soni and the woman talk, the other students draw water from the filter with a syringe. Then they head outside and clamber down a ravine to find the well from which the woman draws her water each day. They fill up another syringe with water that’s swirling with bits of sediment and plant life. This is the kind of impure water that millions of people around the world drink every day.

Meanwhile, the mother tells Soni that she cleans her filter regularly. She says her family has been healthier since she began using it, but they’re still dealing with parásitos and diarrhea. Soni takes notes. Then she wishes the woman well, and the students hike to the next home to continue their study.

When she returns to the clinic, Soni sets up an experiment with the collected water samples. She adds a special liquid that detects E. coli and other bacteria and viruses. A few days later, some of the samples turn pink and purple, indicating that germs are present. The verdict is surprising: Water from the women who had been the most diligent at cleaning their filters was the pinkest and dirtiest. Soni wonders: Why?

During this same week, which falls between the beginning of autumn and the end of daylight savings time, engineering student Curtis Larimer is in the middle of a different kind of study on the water filters used by the women of San José del Negrito. He’s 2,000 miles north on Pitt’s campus, operating a digital optical microscope in a windowless laboratory in Benedum Hall. He places a piece of a water filter underneath the microscope’s eye and then zooms in on the surface. The filter suddenly looks like a rugged mountain range as seen from an airplane. Larimer, a PhD student, snaps photos with the microscope. Eventually, he will use these data to create topological maps of the water filters. The maps may contain some answers as to why Soni got surprising results from the samples she and her colleagues collected in their travels to remote Honduran households.

In recent years, students and faculty from across the University of Pittsburgh have been working toward a common goal—to help poor people clean their water. In many nations, water is a hazard. Even if it comes out of a pipe and looks clear and clean, it can contain invisible bacteria and viruses. For adults, a glass of water is a diarrhea cocktail. For children, it can be a fatal beverage. More than one million children die each year because of diseases they contracted from drinking contaminated water, according to the World Health Organization. Children are also more susceptible to diarrhea, the most common side effect of consuming contaminated water. Repeated bouts of the illness can lead to malnutrition and even stunted brain growth.

There are plenty of ways to clean water. You can add chlorine (but not too much), or boil it (without wasting precious heat resources), or pour it through a filter (if you can afford it). You can store it in a copper vessel, like people in India have done for centuries, and trust that the copper will destroy the invisible bacteria. But it might take a whole day for the copper to work its magic. And be wary of putting excessive amounts of copper in your water. It could give you, literally, blue diarrhea.

For every successful water-cleaning method, there’s a caveat of some kind. Too many chemicals, too much money, or too many miles between your house and the nearest store are all factors in the precarious balance between clean water and dirty water. For millions of people living in poor rural areas, like those of northern Honduras, there aren’t any easy solutions.

Pitt doctors, nurses, students, and other volunteers began providing medical care in San José del Negrito back in 2000. Three doctors—N. Randall Kolb (MED ’82), William Markle, and Mark Meyer—set up a permanent clinic there after their interests converged. Kolb, a Pitt alumnus and faculty member in Pitt’s Department of Family Medicine, had treated people in Honduras two years before, just after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country. He was eager to return and continue helping the sick. Markle, an assistant professor and a global internship coordinator in Pitt’s School of Medicine at the time, was serving on the national board of the Global Health Education Consortium. He knew colleagues in the consortium who were looking for help with another clinic they were already running in Honduras. Meyer, a Pittsburgh physician, was eager to work at a permanent clinic abroad, in a village where he could build and maintain relationships with patients over time.

Together, the doctors founded a nonprofit organization named Shoulder to Shoulder Pittsburgh-San José, a branch of the Shoulder to Shoulder organization that Markle’s colleagues had already founded in Honduras. His colleagues had helped them to identify San José del Negrito as a remote village that would benefit from access to medical care. The doctors set up a schedule. Every six months, they’d lead a brigade of fellow doctors, nurses, medical students, and volunteers—many of them with Pitt connections—to the village. They’d also work with a health committee of local residents who could make decisions about what medical and public health projects would be the most practical and important to them.

When the Shoulder to Shoulder brigades began in San José del Negrito, people lined up at the clinic by the hundreds. Most of them, especially children, were malnourished. The doctors’ first line of business was to work with the health committee to set up school-based feeding programs and milk distribution programs. Then they began to think of other ways to combat the problem of malnourishment.

Many of the patients who came to the clinic also had frequent cases of diarrhea, which excretes important nutrients from the body. The rate of diarrhea indicated to the doctors that the local water supply was probably not clean. Figuring out how to get clean water to the 1,600 residents in the village, plus the 4,000 coffee farmers living in the surrounding mountains, would be a challenge for a number of reasons.

To the people of San José, a case of diarrhea indicated that it was just another normal day. After all, it was common for kids to have four to six bouts a year. Most of the residents didn’t think diarrhea had anything to do with their water. When one Shoulder to Shoulder brigade conducted a survey asking people what likely caused the diarrhea, most said it was mal de ojo, a mythic evil eye that influences life and death.

Some residents had been cleaning their water by adding chlorine, but most hadn’t, either because they didn’t like the taste, they couldn’t afford it, or they didn’t think it needed to be cleaned. For a while, Kolb, Markle, and Meyer weren’t sure what to do.

Then an unexpected solution appeared in the form of an art professor. Markle was browsing a newspaper in his doctor’s office when he read about a man named Richard Wukich who had been traveling all over the world on a quest to train pottery artists to create cheap but effective water filters and sell them in their communities. Wukich is an art professor at Slippery Rock University north of Pittsburgh.

Markle invited Wukich to the next Shoulder to Shoulder board meeting, where he showed up wearing overalls. Wukich explained the steps to making the filters: First you knead clay and sawdust or straw together, materials that are available almost anywhere. Then you shape the “dough” into a bowl form. You fire it in a kiln, where the sawdust burns up, leaving a tiny capillary system in the bowl. This allows water to seep through but traps large bacteria and other microbes. Finally, you paint the bowl with a liquid containing water and silver. The silver kills other germs in the water that would make a human sick. You only need a pinch of silver per bowl, which keeps the cost of the filters low.

“They seemed too fruity and cheap to be real,” Meyer recalls thinking at the meeting. Yet, studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities had shown that these water filters were 99 percent effective in removing germs. The filters, known as ceramic water filters, were designed in 1981 by a chemist in Guatemala and have since been cited by the United Nations as an appropriate technology for cleaning water in developing countries. They’re used in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

Then the next Shoulder to Shoulder brigade went to Honduras in April 2006, Wukich arranged for a ceramic water filter expert from Nicaragua to visit the clinic and give a presentation. He also invited a potter from the region of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, to come. Nearly 100 women walked to the clinic to see the presentation. The clinic was the only building in San José with electricity, run intermittently by a generator. That day, they used it for a PowerPoint presentation that showed pictures of the filters and how they work. The women asked numerous questions about how long it took for the water to filter (answer: one hour) and whether the filters really would reduce diarrhea (the doctors said yes). In the end, the consensus was that it was worth a try.

After the meeting, the potter began making the filters. By the summer of 2007, the clinic in San José had distributed dozens of filters and buckets.

That same summer, Ian Nettleship, a Pitt engineering professor, took his 8-year-old daughter to an exhibition of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. One photo in particular stood out—a starved girl in Sudan, hunched over an empty bowl. A few yards behind her, a buzzard waited.

Nettleship felt acute sympathy for this girl who happened to have been born in a place where food and water weren’t taken for granted, unlike his daughter, who was born in the United States and had happily joined him on that father-daughter outing. In thinking about those dual realities, Nettleship felt inspired “to get into the business of saving lives,” but what could he, as a ceramics engineer and professor, possibly offer? He started by printing a copy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo from a Web site and tucking it into his wallet.

Not long afterward, he too read an article about Wukich, the art professor. Nettleship was delighted by the simplicity of the ceramic water filters. He also was excited to learn about a project that combined ceramics and humanitarian aid. Ceramics are what Nettleship knows best. As a materials science professor, he’s written and published dozens of scientific papers about the internal properties of ceramics. He was sure there would be plenty of interesting ways to improve the water filters, which were designed to help needy people like the Sudanese girl. Through materials studies, he could, for example, modify the strength of the ceramic filters or experiment with the water-flow rate through the filters. He called Wukich and offered to help.

Soon, a portion of Nettleship’s laboratory was dedicated to the water filters. He began advising student Curtis Larimer, who had become interested in the worldwide problem of water contamination after participating in an undergraduate research program in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with Pitt’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation in the Swanson School of Engineering. The pair began visiting a pottery studio that Wukich had founded in the basement of the Carnegie Library in nearby Braddock, Pa. There, they got their fingernails dirty with clay as artists taught them how to make water filters. They also made small tiles of the same material as the water filters and painted them with the same silver-and-water liquid that potters put on the filters. The square tiles would be much easier to fit under microscopes than the large, bowl-like filters.

Under Nettleship’s supervision, Larimer began conducting various experiments, mainly to see how the silver was interacting with the ceramic material of the filters. He earned his bachelor’s degree in the spring of 2008, then decided to continue his research by enrolling as a PhD student in mechanical engineering and materials science. In the fall of 2008, he regularly examined the tiles under a digital optical microscope.

By that time, the women in San José del Negrito were using the filters with great success. Once mothers saw that their children were having fewer cases of diarrhea, they told their neighbors, who told their friends. Everybody wanted one. When Soni went on the brigade as part of her rotation in family medicine, they’d become very popular. Even though some of the water samples she tested turned pink and purple, the filters were working well overall. Families were experiencing dramatic drops in the rate of diarrhea. Still, the filters weren’t perfect. After some pondering, she suspected that women who were cleaning their filters too much were scrubbing off the silver that was vital to killing bacteria.

Larimer’s tests later confirmed her data. By using the topological maps, as well as other techniques, he found that the silver was not staying inside the filters for very long. When he painted the silver-and-water liquid onto his tiles, it seemed like the solution permeated the material because it was wet. When the solution dried, the water evaporated out of the material, and pulled the silver to the surface. Because the silver was only on the surface, it could chip off easily or be rubbed off by cleaning.

These days, the doctors with Shoulder to Shoulder are encouraging people to get their filters repainted with the silver liquid at least once a year. The doctors are also staying in contact with the Pitt engineers, Wukich, and other ceramic filter experts worldwide who are continually improving and creating new ways to clean water. Markle and Meyer have received calls from nonprofit organizations all over Honduras, including the first Shoulder to Shoulder clinic that helped them to get started, to ask how they can distribute water filters, too. More than 400 filters have been distributed from the clinic in San José del Negrito. Soni (MED ’09) is now a resident in women’s health in the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Pitt.

In January, Larimer published his first academic paper, “The segregation of silver nanoparticles in low-cost ceramic water filters,” in Materials Characterization. His advisor, Nettleship, has been encouraging members of Pitt’s Engineers Without Borders undergraduate student organization to get involved. They’re now building a laboratory at the pottery studio in Braddock, where they’ll be working on improving the ceramic filters with an engineering mindset—increasing production, developing quality-control methods. Nettleship envisions generations of undergrads learning the techniques there, then fanning across the world to share them with potters.

Most importantly, hundreds of children in San José del Negrito aren’t getting sick from a basic need—water. They’re going to school, playing soccer, and learning how to care for the coffee trees.

Listen. Just listen. To the timbre of voices. To the inflections and stutters. To the stories of history, drama, and life told by the people of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community. This is the unique experience offered by a Jewish oral history project recently mounted online through a collaboration between Pitt’s University Library System and the Pittsburgh Section of the National Council of Jewish Women. The project consists of more than 500 audio interviews dating from 1968 to 2001. They’ve purposely never been transcribed so that people must listen. Tune in at http://digital.library.pitt.edu/n/ncjw

Pitt was named the top public “Best Neighbor” educational institution in the country for its positive relationship with the City of Pittsburgh. Pitt achieved the ranking in the 2009 edition of Saviors of Our Cities: A Survey of Best College and University Civic Partnerships. The survey assessed institutions based on their length of involvement with their communities, real dollars invested, and influence on cultural renewal, among other
criteria.

1943
Richard A. Kiman DEN ’43 is an associate professor in New York University’s College of Dentistry. He celebrated his 90th birthday in 2009.

1950
Jack Young CBA ’50 is retired and living in Hilton Head Island, S.C., where he has been writing poetry as a hobby. He recently wrote “Terrible Towel” in memory of the late sports broadcaster and Pitt alumnus Myron Cope (A&S ’51).

1952
Cyril Wecht A&S ’52, MED ’56, LAW ’62 was named chair of the American Board of Forensic Medicine of the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute in October. That same month, the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s primary laboratory was named the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science as a tribute to his history as a coroner with the department.

1962
Arnold B. Silverman LAW ’62✪ was named a Pennsylvania Super Lawyer in 2009. As an attorney with Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott in Pittsburgh, he specializes in intellectual property law. He is the author of more than 90 law articles and is a member of the British Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys.

1963
Penina Kessler Lieber A&S ’63, ’73G, LAW ’86 ★ was reappointed to the Pennsylvania Interest on Lawyers Trust Account Board, which raises money to provide civil legal services to disadvantaged people. She’s an attorney with the Pittsburgh office of the Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel law firm.

1967
Marvin J. Rudnitsky LAW ’67 was named a Liberal Arts Centennial Fellow by Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts. He’s a managing partner of Rudnitsky & Hackman law firm in Selinsgrove, Pa., where he specializes in business, trust, and estate planning.

1968
Gary Reiswig EDUC ’68G, ’73G wrote The Thousand Mile Stare: One Family’s Journey Through the Science and Struggle of Alzheimer’s (Nicholas Brealey Publishing). It includes a section on his family’s participation in an Alzheimer’s study at Pitt. He resides in East Hampton, N.Y.

1969
Constance M. Carroll A&S ’69G, ’96G ★ was named a Remarkable Leader in Education by the University of San Diego’s School of Leadership and Education Sciences. She’s chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, which includes three community colleges and six adult education centers. She’s also a board member of the American Council on Education.

1972
David W. Busija A&S ’72 was awarded the Doctorem Medicinae Honoris Causa from the University of Szeged Medical School in Hungary. The honorary degree, awarded in November, recognized his collaborations with the school’s faculty and scientists. He’s a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina.

1973
Michael D. McDowell LAW ’73, an attorney, arbitrator, and mediator based in Pittsburgh, was elected to the National Academy of Arbitrators.

1975
Steven E. “Tim” Riley Jr. A&S ’75, LAW ’78 ✪ was named a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers in October. He’s a partner in the firm of Conner Riley Friedman & Weichler and has been practicing in Erie, Pa., since 1978. He serves on the Board of Governors of the American Association for Justice. Kathryn Simpson KGSB ’75, LAW ’78 was named one of the top attorneys in Pennsylvania by Super Lawyers magazine. She practices with Mette, Evans & Woodside in Harrisburg, Pa. She is a frequent speaker and author of continuing legal education course materials for the Pennsylvania Bar Institute.

1976
Robert Kocent SOC WK ’76, ’78G, GSPH ’86 was appointed executive administrator of the Baptist Homes retirement community in Mt. Lebanon, Pa. Michael F. Marmo A&S ’76, GSPIA ’78 was sworn in as a judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County, after being appointed by Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell. He was assigned to the court’s Family Division.

1978
Patricia Rogus KGSB ’78 was recognized as a “Best in Client Satisfaction Wealth Manager” in the July 2009 issue of Pittsburgh Magazine. She’s a financial advisor with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Pittsburgh. Donald J. Ryan CGS ’78 is president and majority owner of R-Tech, a manufacturer of electro-mechanical products in Gadsen, Ala. The firm contracts with companies like Lockheed Martin and AT&T. “My experience at Pitt and the base that it gave me to pursue my career have given me and my family a great life,” he says.

1984
Norm Kerr CGS ’84 is a principal in the health and productivity practice of Buck Consultants, an employee benefits consulting firm in Pittsburgh. He also coaches youth soccer, basketball, and baseball.

1985
Majdi Abulaban ENGR ’85 ✪ was named president of Delphi Asia Pacific, a global supplier for the automotive and computing industries. He’s also continuing in his position as president of Delphi China. Read more about him in the Fall 2008 issue of Pitt Magazine.

1986
George Frank Verbanic III ENGR ’86 was honored by the American Red Cross with the 2009 Good Samaritan Award for successfully performing CPR on a man who suffered a heart attack while golfing. As a mechanical engineer and safety director of the Canonsburg, Pa., office of Paul Wirth, Inc., he oversees Red Cross CPR and First Aid classes at the company.

1987
Arlie Nogay LAW ’87 was one of 10 professionals nominated for the national 2009 Corporate Secretary of the Year award given by Corporate Secretary magazine. A corporate secretary with BNY Mellon in Pittsburgh, he was the only nominee from a financial services firm.

1988
Frank Treu A&S ’88, SIS ’97G was named vice president of technology for Authoria, a company based in Waltham, Mass., that offers human resources management services.

1989
Yvonne Potts Hudson A&S ’89G ✪ was named director of development for The Harbour School, a special education institution that has campuses in Baltimore and Annapolis, Md. She’s also an actress who works on dramatic projects, including a one-woman show based on the life of Shakespeare’s wife. Kelly Miller Quintanilla UPG ’89 was appointed dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. She’s also a professor of communication and theater at the university. Steven Walton A&S ’89 was named an associate with Leech Tishman Fuscaldo & Lampl in Pittsburgh. He’s a member of the law firm’s corporate, employment, and immigration practice groups and has represented clients in hearings before the U.S. Department of Labor.

1990
Robert L. Ciervo A&S ’90 ★ is campaigning to become a representative for the 31st legislative district of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The district is in Bucks County, Pa. He’s a township supervisor in his hometown of Newton, Pa., and the director of the Rutgers-Camden Learning Center at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Tammy Singleton-English LAW ’90 was re-elected to serve as a council member of the Solo and Small Firm Practitioners section of the Allegheny County Bar Association. She offers estate planning services through her Singleton-English Law Office in Bethel Park, Pa. This summer, she’s planning to serve as a parent volunteer coordinator for a People to People Student Ambassador trip to Australia.

1993
Mark A. Ellebie A&S ’93 is an assistant vice president/application developer with JPMorgan Chase Global Customer Care Technology and Securities Services in Tampa, Fla. Amy Kerr Parker A&S ’97, LAW ’01, a commercial litigator with the Pittsburgh office of Fox Rothschild, was elected to the board of directors of Lydia’s Place, a nonprofit agency that helps female offenders and their children in Allegheny County. Anita Pytlarz Ponchione A&S ’97 ✪ and her husband, Marc, announce the birth of their daughter Madeline Rose. She was born in September 2009 in Washington, D.C. Matthew Yanni KGSB ’97 founded Yanni & Associates Investment Advisors in Wexford, Pa., in 2007. The business is growing—he’s been establishing new client relationships and hiring new staff.

1998
Neilesh Bose A&S ’98 received a PhD in history from Tufts University in 2009. He also edited a book, Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from the South Asian Diaspora (Indiana University Press) and coedited and cotranslated The Rights of Man (Seagull Books India). He’s now an assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Tyson Erlewine SHRS ’98G was selected as one of the Best and Brightest 35 and Under by Greenville Business Magazine, which honors young leaders for their professional and community contributions in Greenville, S.C. He’s a supervisor of therapies at Hillcrest Memorial Hospital and he created a health education program for seniors at the Golden Strip Emergency Relief and Resource Agency. He also coaches youth baseball and football on a volunteer basis. Deborah Sales Garver KGSB ’98 was named president and chief operating officer of Fragasso Financial Advisors in Pittsburgh, where she’s worked for 16 years. Mark A. O’Neill A&S ’98 ✪ was named one of Forty Under 40 award recipients by the Central Penn Business Journal in October for his professional leadership in the Harrisburg region. He was serving as executive director of Lancaster Gastroenterology, a colon cancer treatment center, but was recently called to duty with the Navy Reserve. A lieutenant and medical service corps officer, he has been deployed to the Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany to serve as chief of patient affairs.

1999
Michael C. Bosco Jr. EDUC ’99G, a physical education teacher at Brashear High School in Pittsburgh, was honored with the American Red Cross’s Educator Award for using CPR to save a student in cardiac arrest. He’s a volunteer CPR instructor with the Red Cross.

2000
Mark A. Bartholomaei LAW ’00 joined the Cozen O’Connor law office in Denver as an associate in the global insurance group. He’s a member of the Defense Research Institute’s Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility.

2002
Heather Kiraly Orkwis A&S ’02 earned a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in May 2009. She’s continuing her medical training at Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood, Pa.

2004
Lauren Comisky A&S ’04 earned a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in May 2009. She’s continuing her medical training with the Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa.

2006
Nicole E. Schwab A&S ’06 ★ is a reporter for U.S. News & World Report in Washington, D.C., and recently made her first television appearance—on Russian TV.

2008
Rob Cartia KGSB ’08 ★ wrote “Moving Right Along,” an article about a new car manufacturing technique, for the October 2009 issue of the American Society for Quality Trade.

2009
Jared Roach LAW ’09 was named an associate with the Leech Tishman Fuscaldo & Lampl law firm in Pittsburgh, where he is a member of the bankruptcy and creditors’ rights practice group.

Legend
G = Graduate Degree
H = Honorary Degree
★ = Alumni Association Member
✪ = Alumni Association Life Member

In Memoriam

Serafino Dante “Foge” Fazio A&S ’60, EDUC ’65G, ★ a former Pitt football coach and player, died in December 2009 at age 71. He played linebacker and center as an undergraduate, then became a graduate assistant coach while earning a master’s degree in education. He later held coaching jobs with Boston and Harvard universities and served as Pitt’s head football coach from 1982 to 1985. At the time of his death, he was starting a football program at Our Lady of Sacred Heart High School in Coraopolis, Pa.

Gertrude Blackwood Kelly A&S ’45, ’48G died in March 2008 at age 83. During her career, she served as an editor with the National Institutes of Health and with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, both in Bethesda, Md. She also edited physics textbooks and worked as an instructor of psychology at West Virginia University.

Judith Krug A&S ’62, a national leader who campaigned against banning information from libraries, died in April 2009 at age 69. She served as director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive director of its Freedom to Read Foundation. She cofounded Banned Books Week in 1982, which encourages libraries to hold annual readings of books that people have attempted to ban. In recent years, she also challenged censorship of the Internet.

Margaret Clara Matuschak Levin A&S ’37, a scientist, amateur pilot, and mother of seven children, died in July 2009 at age 92. After graduating from Pitt with a degree in chemistry, she worked at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, researching the effects of fluoride on dental health. She also learned to fly small planes and raised five daughters and two sons. She volunteered with the Mon Valley Red Cross, Youth and Teen Association, Rostraver Women’s Club, and the Mon Valley Hospital Auxiliary.

Penelope Pappas Mahon GSPIA ’76 died in July 2009. She was an assistant to the president of the University of Hartford in Connecticut. She enjoyed cooking and gardening.

Rudolph Malandro KGSB ’49,’65 died in October 2009 at age 86. He was a retired professor and chair of the accounting department at Kent State University in Ohio. During World War II, he served in the military as a master sergeant.

Richard Paul O’Shea ENGR ’57, ’61G, ’63G died in October 2009 at age 74. He worked as a senior system engineer for U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh for 15 years and then became a Pitt professor at the University’s Pittsburgh and Johnstown campuses. In 1997, he retired as an associate professor from the Southern Polytechnic State University in Georgia.

Walter Teixeira GSPIA ’63 died in June 2009 in his native Brazil. He was president of TX Consultoria, a Brazilian consulting firm based in São Paulo. In October 2008, he attended 50th anniversary celebrations for Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

Juanita Warman NURS ’96, ’00G died in the November 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood army base in Killeen, Texas, while preparing to be deployed to Iraq. She was 55. Her military career spanned 25 years. She was a certified psychiatric nurse practitioner who specialized in caring for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries. In 2006, she received an Army Commendation Medal for her meritorious service at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where she treated soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For two years, Pitt researchers collected data on 1,136 men and 1,047 women from 28 hospitals nationwide to find that senior men treated for community-acquired pneumonia tended to be not only sicker than women upon admission, but also more likely to die within the year following hospitalization.

Lead researcher Derek Angus and coauthor Sachin Yende—both on the faculty in Pitt’s Department of Critical Care Medicine in the School of Medicine—found that the disparities in survival rates may be linked to dissimilar immune responses between men and women.

Yende speculates that men are more prone to engage in risky behaviors, like smoking, that weaken immune response. They also are more likely to have chronic health conditions like heart disease or cancer. Sex hormone levels, says Yende, differ between men and women, which also may explain disparate immune-responses. The complete answer will likely be found in genes, which not only determine one’s gender but also shape one’s biological capacity to fend off infection.

Although it is well known that women tend to outlive men, the study—which was conducted with a team of researchers from several Pitt departments— suggests that one avenue for future research may involve developing gender-specific treatments for fighting infection. Understanding how the two genders respond differently, says Yende, could narrow the gap in life expectancy between men and women.

Classes are done for the day, and the wide hallways encircling the rotunda of the Frick Fine Arts Building are quiet. Only the soft echo of a few voices can be heard, slipping through a door that’s slightly ajar.

Inside the University Art Gallery, a student balances atop a high ladder, using a staple gun to hang a shiny orange, black, and green drapery in a doorway. She crafted the drapery herself, using Japanese Kabuki theater curtains as a model. A classmate directs from below, ensuring that the fabric hangs evenly.

Nearby, other classmates carefully balance a Japanese bench between them, slowly lowering it to the floor. Woodblock prints are propped up against the surrounding walls, waiting to be hung.

The Pitt students, who are all seniors majoring in the history of art and architecture, are spending their Wednesday night in the gallery as part of a museum studies course. The course includes a unique assignment—the successful execution of an art exhibition. Their instructor, Eric Shiner (A&S ’94), is the Milton Fine Curator of Art at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. He’s advising them as they take on the challenge.

Titled “Making Face: The Depiction of Women in Japan from Edo to Today,” the exhibition features Japanese woodblock prints from the 18th and 19th centuries. The prints are from the collection of Barry Rosensteel (EDUC ’76), who recently donated more than 100 similar pieces to Pitt. The class of 25 students has been working in three teams, dividing up tasks like establishing the show’s theme, writing labels to describe the art, and determining optimal hanging heights and lighting. Now, they’ve all joined together, alternating shifts in the gallery to prepare for the opening in just two days.

One of the students, Adrienne Rozzi, settles into a square antique chair where visitors will be able to rest as they view the show. She surveys the gallery, envisioning how the art will look from this angle. As part of the class’s curatorial team, she helped to select the room’s theme—“Women and Labor”—and developed a layout to contrast portraits of courtesans, who were prostitutes, and geishas, who were entertainers. She’s proud of her hands-on work. Between classes, she has been working part-time as a gallery attendant at the Warhol Museum, where she has witnessed the development of several exhibitions but has only been able to imagine what her own approach might be. Now, it’s real.

At the exhibition’s opening, Rozzi and her classmates stay busy mingling with viewers, but they all know there’s something more worth celebrating—they’re officially curators.

At a popular nightclub on Pittsburgh’s South Side, a rock band wearing medieval jousting gear thrashes about onstage, unleashing a wail of music. Punks in the crowd—many of whom smell like they’ve gone for days without soap—scream and point toward the stage. The band, called Dethlehem, isn’t just playing heavy metal music to create a jolt of sound: The musicians also are pretending to fight an imaginary demon with their music.

The band’s front man shouts to the hyped-up fans that the demon’s hunger for power has recently grown—and a cameraman zooms in on him. The cameraman, Pitt student Andrew Pollack, is filming a live music video. As the metal show progresses, he pans from one side of the stage to another, his fingers sliding from the top of the camera to the bottom, flicking controls and adjusting settings along the way. “I want to make sure to capture every interesting aspect, and sometimes I’ve got to make a choice about what to capture,” he says. “I have to be looking in two directions at once.”

Pollack is filming the band as part of his work with Pittsburgh Pulse, a music promotion company that he founded last year with Pitt alumnus Jonathan Furman (CBA ’09). A film studies major and a fan of live music, Pollack was looking for a way to put his academic skills and passions to use. Through the company, he’s now helping local bands improve their online marketing content, mainly through the creation of videos.

Hours later—after Dethlehem has defeated the demon, and the show has crashed to a close—Pollack is back at his house in Squirrel Hill. He types on his computer, his fingers working faster than the lead guitarist’s. He syncs the audio recording with videos from several cameras used throughout the set. During a guitar solo, he cuts to the guitarist. A drum solo? The video moves right to the drummer. He decides what material to cut, what to keep. The mixing takes hours. Frequent gulps of coffee keep Pollack awake through the night. “It never feels done,” he says, “I always go back to it. You say, ‘I could do this, I could do that.’ It really never ends.”

Eventually it has to, though. After hours of clicking through what seems like decades of tape, Pollack has completed and posted a music video online. Ideally, it will draw more fans to the band. And when another client sets up a show, Pollack will be there with his camera, looking two ways at once.

A bright red helicopter emblazoned with “London’s Air Ambulance” descends into Trafalgar Square, the epicenter of London. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and hundreds of tourists are viewing sculptures in Britain’s cultural center. On the ground, police struggle to clear space for the aircraft. As soon as the helicopter lands, paramedics—including Pitt student Patrick Lambert—rush toward a boy who’s wedged under a double-decker bus.

While the crew pulls the boy to safety and examines him for wounds, Lambert watches and takes mental notes. He’s an emergency medical technician in the United States, but he’s not certified to care for patients abroad. He’s here to conduct research on helicopter emergency medical services for his undergraduate honors thesis at Pitt. For the project, he’s visiting England, Germany, Qatar, and Canada to shadow emergency flight crews and see how helicopter paramedics perform their jobs in various regions of the world.

Lambert pursued this research during fall 2008 with funding from the University Honors College. When he returned to campus the following spring semester, he delivered a lecture and wrote a thesis about what he learned. He described how he became familiar with advances in medical technology, like a needle chest-decompression device used in Canada. He recounted a case in Qatar in which cultural differences shaped how treatment was administered—a woman suffering from cardiac problems refused to be transported to a hospital until a consenting male arrived.

In his report, Lambert also outlined safety procedures he learned that he would like to employ in the United States. “We don’t know that much about how things are done outside the U.S.,” he says. To share his knowledge, he gave his thesis to Pitt’s Department of Emergency Medicine before earning his 2009 bachelor’s degree from Pitt’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. Now, he’s aiming to publish academic articles based on his international research. He’s also continuing his work as a paramedic in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County, as well as training to become a pilot so that he can fly medical helicopters, too.

That day in Trafalgar Square, Lambert listened carefully as the British paramedic crew tried to communicate with the injured boy and his family, who were from Eastern Europe and spoke little English. Through a lot of patience and hand gestures, everyone was finally able to understand that, fortunately, the boy didn’t sustain any serious injuries after being dragged several meters by the bus. It was the sort of outcome that had motivated Lambert to become a paramedic. Soon, he was back in the red helicopter as it launched into the London sky, ready for the next mission.

On a reality show broadcast last fall on public television, two teams of high school students competed to solve a science mystery. They conducted laboratory experiments in Pitt’s Department of Biological Sciences and on the Pitt Mobile Science Lab to figure out whether amoebae in the human digestive tract have tastes for specific kinds of bacteria. Judges from the department then decided which team provided the most convincing results. The show, “Science Mission 101,” was a pilot educational program that aired on WQED in Pittsburgh and has been accepted for national distribution by American Public Television.

In a new twist on an old winter pastime, the Internet brought together a crowd of about 200 people—most of  them students—for a weekend snowball fight on the Cathedral of Learning lawn. During a massive Mid-Atlantic snowstorm, Pitt’s Andrew Max—an undergraduate majoring in anthropology and economics—created a Facebook posting for a Pitt Snowball Fight at 3 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday. The next day, a flurry of responders charged through the snow, flinging white stuff at each other with glee. As reported in The Pitt News: “With the brawl over, chants of ‘P-I-T-T, Let’s Go Pitt!’ soon followed.  Then the crowd melted away.”

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Photograph copyright @Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2010. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission, Bill Wade.

Legacy Scholarship launches research career

Jennifer Humensky was at a loss. Walking through Wimbledon, the London neighborhood where she had lived for a semester as a Pitt undergraduate, she realized that in little more than a decade, it had become nearly unrecognizable.

Everything around her was familiar, yet unfamiliar: Buildings had gotten taller. Traffic had swelled. Gone was the village from which she commuted on the Tube to her job in the heart of London’s political scene: In its place was a city neighborhood whose population was growing. She didn’t even recognize the street where she had lived with an elderly couple: “I literally walked past it and saw the street sign,” which caused a double-take, she says.

In many ways, that five-day trip to London in the summer of 2009 reflected Humensky’s own journey. Were it possible to ask the city, it probably wouldn’t recognize her, either. Now, with a PhD degree and a job as a postdoctoral researcher with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Chicago, Humensky has done some growing up of her own since interning with Britain’s Conservative party in the days just following Tony Blair’s rise to power.

Yet Humensky (A&S ’99), who graduated summa cum laude with a double major in economics and political science, can still vividly recall her days as a budding undergraduate.

She was known as Jennifer Kettren when she arrived at Pitt, her mother’s alma mater, in fall 1995. As late as May of her senior year in high school, she hadn’t been sure whether she would be able to attend. It was a stretch financially, and although she had earned one scholarship to pay for roughly half of her fees, it wasn’t until she learned she would receive the Pitt Alumni Association’s Legacy Scholarship that her academic future was secure. “For me, it was such a miracle,” she says of the scholarship. “It was what allowed me to go to Pitt. It opened up a lot of doors.”

Academics were never a barrier. From the beginning, Humensky had a game plan. “I sat down with the bulletins at the beginning and said, ‘I want to be a double major; I want to study abroad. How do I do this in four years?’” she recalls. Her only boundary was the scholarship: When it ran out, her coach would turn back into a pumpkin, so she decided to fit everything she wanted into the time she had available.

Humensky worked as an office assistant in the Department of Epidemiology, getting copies of articles from different sites around campus. That type of pre-Internet legwork came in handy when she arrived in London, where the Conservative party’s research department had just one computer with dial-up access, leaving Humensky to look up briefs and other materials the old-fashioned way.

Back in Pittsburgh, as part of the Christian Student Fellowship, she met her future husband, Brian Humensky, now a research scientist in Chicago. The two were married in 2001. During the intervening years, Jennifer attended graduate school at Georgetown; worked at Mathematica, a nonpartisan policy research firm; and entered a PhD program at the University of Chicago.

It was Brian’s job that took Jennifer back to London for a visit in 2009, and the couple rented a car and drove throughout England and Scotland. They also return to Pittsburgh occasionally to visit family—Jennifer’s mother still lives in Latrobe, Pa.—and for friends’ weddings.

Currently, she is using reams of government data to study the effects of substance abuse on employment outcomes for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She sees her future in researching health services to formulate domestic policy and is excited about the opportunities available at the VA.

A life member of the Pitt Alumni Association, she says she will always be grateful for the scholarships that gave her those early opportunities and for the campus that allowed her to forge her future.

“Pitt’s a huge campus, but once you find your niche, you have really good, close friends,” she says. “There is a lot of room to make it your own.”

A conversation with Robert Young (EDUC ’09G), the alumni council coordinator in Pitt’s Office of Alumni Relations. He plans events and coordinates activities for multiple alumni councils. Currently, he’s assisting Pitt’s African American Alumni Council with aspects of its $3 million scholarship campaign.

Interview by Michelle K. Massie

I’ve been passionate . . . about jazz my entire life. When I was younger, I played both alto and tenor saxophone in my elementary school jazz band. Throughout the years, I have had posters of jazz musicians on my walls and even named our family cat Satchmo, after Louis Armstrong. Anytime you walk into my office, you’ll probably hear jazz being played.

What I cherish the most . . . are the trips to Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, and Costa Rica that I shared with my mother, Caroll Mills Young, a university professor. I often joined her as she presented at conferences and conducted research in her field of Afro-Uruguayan literature. She organized many study-abroad trips, and we climbed the same pyramids, year after year, with a different group of students. She passed away from pancreatic cancer three years ago; I’ll always treasure the memories of our travels together.

Something I’ll always remember . . . I had the chance to play music with the Grammy-winning trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis when he visited the region for a concert. When I was an undergraduate, he came to our jazz band rehearsal and played with us for a while. Great experience!

My favorite Pitt experience . . . was my higher ed administration graduate program internship, where I began learning from and interacting with many great professionals throughout the University. Also, working with Pitt students and local high school students, I saw firsthand how much of an impact you can have on the lives and future of youths.

My personality type is . . . Generally, people describe me as calm, quiet, collected—like smooth jazz. It fits my personality, the way I carry myself, and the energy I give off.

One special memento from Pitt is . . . There isn’t just one. It’s all of the great friends I was able to make here. Not only are some of them my mentors, but I’ve also had the fortunate opportunity to become colleagues with many of them through my work.

So much is going on at Pitt that it’s hard to keep up with all the news. Recently, alumni who also are faculty and staff members got an update from the chancellor at a luncheon sponsored by the Pitt Alumni Association.

About six weeks earlier, the news was surely good at the Meineke Car Care Bowl in Charlotte, N.C., when Pitt beat North Carolina, 19-17. Of course, the association was there to get the fans fired up.

Want to find an association event near you? Need your academic transcript? Want to get away from your hometown’s weather? Find out about all this and more at www.alumni.pitt.edu.

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

They were a typical gang of weekend warriors in the mid-1970s, the crew that played pickup basketball on Sunday nights at the old Field House. Some were students, some alumni, and some just friends of a friend. A group of them still hung out with Pitt’s basketball coach at the time, Tim Grgurich (EDUC ’64, ’67G), and they were all ardent Panthers fans.

Lee Baierl

The group liked to workout together, play some ball, joke around, and hurl friendly abuse at one another. One of the crew was Bill Baierl (EDUC ’51), who played basketball for Pitt and went on to work in his family’s car dealerships. His young cousin, Lee Baierl, liked to come with him and watch the pickup games.

David Marrangoni, who was still in college, was another one of the Sunday night regulars. He liked Bill, a friendly, big-hearted man whose leadership was starting to expand the family business in greater Pittsburgh. But that didn’t mean David was willing to give Bill’s cousin any slack when he joined a game. “After all, even though he was younger, he was as tall as me even then,” says Marrangoni, with a laugh.

After graduation, Marrangoni stayed in touch with the Baierl family, stopping by the dealership when he needed cars for business. Along the way, Lee finished high school and enrolled at Pitt, where he would play strong safety on the Pitt football team from 1977 through 1980. Eventually, they all became part of a group that would travel to other Big East cities to cheer Pitt teams on the road, and Lee and David became roadtrip roommates.

It became an enduring friendship that has lasted through the growth of the Baierl dealerships, Marrangoni’s moves in and out of the advertising business, and the start of Lee’s family.

In 2007, their bond took on an even deeper dimension. That was the year Bill Baierl, by all accounts a workaholic who loved his career, died unexpectedly on the job. Suddenly, Lee—who had worked his way up through the business from apprentice mechanic to MBA in the front office—was without the man he considered a second father, and he was going to be in charge of a business that had become a family legacy.

“Once that happened,” recalls Marrangoni, “Lee said, ‘I have a vision, and I want you to be there.’” Longtime friend Marrangoni was hired to serve as Baierl Automotive’s vice president of marketing, and the two men forged ahead with plans to move the company into its next generation.

Lee Baierl might once have entertained thoughts of becoming a doctor, but it was the family business that held his attention from a very early age. His father, who founded the dealership, and his cousin Bill Baierl, who grew it, moved him through every part of the business so he would learn it from the ground up. He wrote service orders, detailed cars, and sold them.

“I knew I had the family business to fall back on, and I certainly don’t regret it,” says Lee. “They expected more from me than the average person who was working here.”

It’s the same with his own children, Lee (CBA ’09) and Lindsay (CBA ’08), who followed in his footsteps and joined the business after graduating from Pitt. (Baierl has two other children in college: Kelly, a senior at Arizona State, and Jordan, a freshman at Virginia Tech, as well as a 2-year-old son, Calvin.)

Baierl (A&S ’81, KGSB ’82) believes his Pitt education, particularly the MBA he earned, gave him the financial management skills that he still applies daily.

“The other thing it gave me, more than anything, was a year of dedication—working hard, proving I could do something,” he says. He recalls how an academic advisor was skeptical whether Baierl, who was contemplating a fifth year of undergraduate work to maintain his football eligibility, would have the academic chops to succeed in such a highly competitive business program.

Motivated to prove the advisor’s doubts unfounded, Baierl buried himself in his studies, graduating just shy of the top of his class and earning a spot in Beta Gamma Sigma, an international honor society for business students. “It gave me another year to grow up, which I needed before I entered the work force,” he says.

Under his leadership, the business has expanded its Internet presence, and despite the well-publicized hits the automobile industry has taken in the past year, the company remains robust.

Even though long hours are synonymous with working in retail, Baierl still comes home every night for a family dinner with his wife, Susan, and his youngest son. That’s when business is put aside for games of Candy Land or Bingo, unless he’s heading out to one of his beloved Pitt football or basketball games, which he still attends with Marrangoni.

“It took a long time, but now I’m in a position where I’m actually running the business and trying to create my own stamp,” he says. “I had my dad, I had Bill, and I certainly have big shoes to fill. But we’ve changed things and had
a lot of success, even in tough times.”

The Power of One—Plus Education

In two months, my niece MacKenzie will graduate from high school and begin to look ahead to her freshman year of college. During the past few weeks, the mail has arrived with letters—so far from schools in New York, Vermont, and North Carolina—filled with possibilities about what her future might hold. Her friends, too, are hearing from schools around the country and are weighing their options. It’s an exciting time in her life, poised between the known world of her family and high-school pals and a new life out there on the horizon, where she will become an independent adult.

One thing I know for sure is that MacKenzie will find a way to make life better for others. Already in her young years, she has spent time with her family volunteering for several weeks at an orphanage in Guatemala. She continues to raise funds for projects to help people in Haiti and was doing so even before the recent earthquake. She participated in a Youth Legislature project and also in a Governor’s School to gain leadership skills. These kinds of experiences are bound to be a great beginning for what’s ahead in her life.

This issue of Pitt Magazine—with its inspiring stories of service, human rights, leadership, and advanced learning—shows the power of a University education to leverage an individual’s ability to achieve meaningful outcomes. Here, you’ll read about an accomplished Nigerian woman who applies her Pitt-enhanced skills to help women with disabilities globally. You’ll see what can happen when a Pitt graduate takes the helm of a local paper and begins to focus on civil rights. You’ll meet a University alumnus who guides an international effort to ensure that effective leaders flourish, beginning with undergraduates. And you’ll learn about the rigors and results of PhD education through the story of a promising Pitt neuroscientist who also is a graduate student.

At one time, all of these Pitt people were teenagers looking toward the horizon.  Some had more obstacles to overcome than others, but all pursued a future that was not self-centered or self-motivated. With the help of a University of Pittsburgh education, they would go on to create far brighter possibilities for many others.

These and other stories in this issue show how higher education can boost individual vision and a “call to service” in ways that can truly transform the world. I can’t wait to see what MacKenzie—and all of the freshmen of 2010—will achieve in the years ahead. Our planet can surely use the help.

Cindy Gill
Editor in Chief

Members of a Zambian research team joined colleagues in the School of Medicine’s Department of Family Medicine for a 2009 dinner held in the home of Robert Hill, Pitt vice chancellor for public affairs. The Zambian researchers were invited to Pittsburgh through a University Center for International Studies and Center for Global Health grant that supported a Maternal Health Disparities Conference and seminars for undergraduates, law students, and faculty. Clinicians and scientists from the University of Zambia and Pitt have formed a collaborative to address the continuum and quality of care for maternal and child health in Zambia as well as Western Pennsylvania. Pitt’s efforts are led by Jeannette South-Paul, the Andrew W. Mathieson Professor and Chair in the School of Medicine’s Department of Family Medicine. Pictured, from left: South-Paul with her husband, Michael Paul; Zambian researchers Obed Lungu, Getrude Tshuma, Fastone Goma, Beatrice Zulu, and Dhally Menda; and Pitt’s Robert Hill.

Abdelhak

Pitt’s Mervat Abdelhak has been recognized as a notable educator, leader, and mentor in the field of health information management. She received the Distinguished Member Award from the American Health Information Management Association. She’s chair of the Department of Health Information Management in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.

In 2008, a group of Pitt civil and environmental engineering students took a two-week trip to northeast India. There, they partnered with local engineers and community members to improve building methods in a region that offers engineers plenty of challenges, including frequent earthquakes and landslides. Many of their discussions focused on building with bamboo, a traditional and locally available construction material that has been pushed aside in favor of other materials like concrete.

During their meetings, the Indian engineers and architects talked with the Pitt students—Bhavna Sharma, Maria Jaime, and Derek Mitch—about bamboo’s strength and lightweight properties, which give the material some advantages in withstanding earthquakes and landslides. Bamboo also has a rapid three-year growth cycle, which makes it possible to replenish the supply routinely. And because it can be harvested locally, it doesn’t need to be transported long distances over difficult terrain.

For Sharma, a doctoral-degree candidate, the trip to India increased her enthusiasm for studying how bamboo can be used as a building material. Afterwards, through an Indian organization called Sustainable Hill Environment and Design, she contacted three doctoral students from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (IIT-Kanpur) who share her interest. Together, they’ve been working on a project to promote the use of bamboo as an internal reinforcement in masonry-constructed buildings in West Bengal and the neighboring region of Sikkim.

Last fall, the project attracted the attention of the United Nations. The Pitt and IIT-Kanpur team won a Silver Award in the 2009 Mondialogo Engineering Award competition, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the German automaker Daimler. The competition included 932 teams from 94 countries. The Pitt-IITK team entered with the help of Sharma’s advisor, Kent Harries, who is a William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow in civil and environmental engineering.

In 2010, the team is planning to meet in the Indian Himalayas to share their bamboo construction methods with local engineers, architects, and craftsmen. Let the bamboo building begin.

A seismic station installed this year at the University’s Allegheny Observatory has revived Pitt’s work in seismology and—as the region’s only seismic station—united Western Pennsylvania with a global network of scientists aiming to better understand the Earth’s structure. The Cathedral of Learning originally housed an earth-floor “seismic vault” equipped with a seismograph, but the antiquated apparatus was dismantled several decades ago. The new station boasts a highly sensitive seismograph—a heavy steel canister that must be perfectly level—that can detect as little as a half-nanometer-per-second displacement of the Earth’s crust caused by earthquakes anywhere in the world. Its readings are fed into the public database of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a consortium of universities pooling and analyzing seismic data.

Could feeding babies a special milk formula help to prevent the onset of Type I diabetes? Pitt pediatrics professor Dorothy J. Becker is exploring that question as the principal investigator of a 10-year study involving six centers nationwide. A renowned endocrinologist and chief of the Division of Endocrinology and Diabetes at Children’s Hospital of UPMC, she’s been a leading figure in the study of Type I diabetes for more than three decades. This fall she was elected president of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, which represents more than 900 health care professionals who treat children with endocrine disorders such as diabetes.

Nordenberg

Every year at the University’s opening convocation for freshmen, Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg addresses the sobering topic of alcohol abuse. It’s not a typical part of his interactions with students—he prefers encouraging exploration of their academic passions—but it is, he believes, a necessary one.

His attitude toward responsible drinking and his support of numerous antidrinking programs at Pitt earned him a national accolade in November. He received the Presidential Leadership Award, an annual honor that recognizes one college or university president nationwide for alcohol-prevention efforts. It includes a $50,000 prize, which will be used to further support Pitt’s alcohol-prevention programs.

The award is given by the Gordie Foundation in memory of Gordie Bailey, a freshman at the University of Colorado who died of alcohol poisoning in 2004, as well as by Outside the Classroom, an organization that assists universities with alcohol-prevention programs.

Juggling a six-foot long microphone cord, cables, and a camera, four Pitt students film a busy laboratory at Compunetix in Monroeville, Pa. One student balances the camera on his shoulder and films lab technicians as they show off components of teleconferencing systems they’ve developed. Another holds the cable cords and asks the technicians questions about their work, while the third hoists the microphone over the scene and the fourth supervises the action.

Then the students—Antonio Paolucci, Flavia Tiberi, Michele Giacardi, and Juri Fantigrossi—conduct an interview with Compunetix’s president and founder. Surprisingly, everyone converses in Italian. The interviewee, Giorgio Coraluppi, is one of several Italian immigrants who have established thriving companies in the Pittsburgh area. The students, who are all native Italians, are filming a segment that will only be aired on television in Italy.

They arrived in Pittsburgh unexpectedly in 2009, after a 6.3 magnitude earthquake last April destroyed L’Aquila, a city in central Italy, where the student filmmakers were studying at a university. The disaster made international headlines, and their university was reduced to stone ruins. Classes were cancelled indefinitely, and the students weren’t sure how they would continue their studies.

Then officials at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s hospital in Palermo, Italy, offered to help. The students were invited to study film at Pitt and at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, with financial support from the Office of the Provost and UPMC. During the fall semester they took advantage of their new location by filming Italian-Americans, like Coraluppi, as well as creating a documentary about how Pittsburgh has transformed from an industrial hub to an environmentally responsible metropolis. “We are having a wonderful experience, the American Dream, but this great opportunity came from enormous disaster and suffering,” says student Flavia Tiberi. “We’ll never forget it.”

Now back in Italy, the students are continuing to document experiences of life and others’ lives, enriched by an unexpected visit to Pittsburgh.

Newsboys (and girls) added to the evening's ambience by delivering free Courier newspaper facsimile programs. Front row, from left: Anwara Tayloradams, Lana Macklin, and Keanu Davis. Back row, from left: Naeem Davis, David Humphrey, Amani Davis, Alexis Dixon, and Daniel Humphrey.

Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg and Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Robert Hill hosted a world-premiere screening of a new documentary, Newspaper of Record: The Pittsburgh Courier, 1907-1965, by filmmaker and Pitt alumnus Kenneth Love (A&S ‘71). The by-invitation event served as Pitt’s 2010 K. Leroy Irvis Black History Month Program and was attended by about 600 Pitt faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members. The film celebrates the illustrious history of The Pittsburgh Courier, which was, in its era, the most influential Black newspaper in the nation (see full story in this issue). This year, today’s New Pittsburgh Courier is celebrating the 100th anniversary of Pitt alumnus Robert L. Vann’s  arrival as the Courier’s publisher and editor.

Root

Deane Root, one of the nation’s leading music historians, has been named editor in chief of Oxford University Press’ Grove Music Program, renowned as the largest, most prestigious, and most authoritative single reference work on Western music.

Root, who is director of Pitt’s Center for American Music, will select and chair an editorial board to guide the academic direction of Grove Music Online, the leading Web resource for music research, and related print projects.

In his new post, Root—professor of music and the Fletcher Hodges Jr. Curator of Pitt’s Foster Hall Collection—will help determine new subject areas, oversee revisions, and recommend scholars to serve as reviewers or editors.

Bartholomae

Professor David Bartholomae is consulting with faculty at the Universidad de Deusto in Bilbao, Spain; writing a philosophy and rhetoric book; and researching Basque novelist Ramiro Pinilla this year. A Pitt professor of English and the Charles Crow Chair, Bartholomae has been teaching or conducting scholarly work with the Spanish university since 1982, when he served there as a Fulbright Lecturer.

Barrax

When Gerald Barrax served in the U.S. Air Force during the 1950s, poetry was his solace and his passion. In his bunk, he would write free verse, sonnets, and other forms of poetry, using The Poet’s Handbook—which he found at a used bookstore—as his guide. Eventually he studied poetry in college and earned his master’s degree in English from Pitt. Since then, he has published six books of poetry, including Leaning Against the Sun, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. He also served as a professor at North Carolina State University for 27 years. This fall, Barrax (A&S ’69) received the 2009 North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor, in the literature category.

Switala

Derricotte

Blum

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania honored several Pitt women this year, including a math teacher, a poetry professor, and a bank executive. Michelle Switala, a PhD candidate in the School of Education, was named the 2010 Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year. She’s an algebra and calculus teacher at Pine-Richland High School in Gibsonia, Pa.

Each year, the Governor and First Lady recognize a select group of women as Distinguished Daughters of Pennsylvania, honoring individuals for notable service through their careers or volunteer endeavors.  In 2009, Pitt poetry professor Toi Derricotte and trustee Eva Tansky Blum (A&S ’70, LAW ’73) were named Distinguished Daughters of the state. Derricotte is cofounder and director of Cave Canem, an organization that promotes African American poetry. Blum, who cochairs the University’s capital campaign, is the senior vice president and director of community affairs at PNC Bank, and chair and president of the PNC Foundation.

Arutynov overlooking the Mikvari River and Miskhela, an ancient capital of Georgia that dates to 5,000 BCE.

This year, Pitt senior Natalie Arutynov is living with a host family in Tbilisi, Georgia, where she’s interning at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies and studying the Georgian language. Her work is being supported by the National Security Education David L. Boren Scholarship, a competitive scholarship that supports U.S. undergraduate students who are studying in areas of the world that are critical to national security interests. Arutynov, who is majoring in economics and political science, was born in Georgia but immigrated with her family to the United States when she was 5 years old.

Burke

The dean of Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, Donald S. Burke, was elected to the prestigious Institute of Medicine, an independent organization that advises national policymakers on medicine and health care. This honor is bestowed only on those physician-scientists who have made remarkable contributions to the fields of health and medicine. Burke is an expert in the prevention, diagnosis, and control of infectious diseases. His lifelong mission has been to prevent and lessen the impact of epidemic infectious diseases around the world. He is the associate vice chancellor for global health at the University, director of Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-Jonas Salk Chair in Global Health.

Lipschultz

Pitt’s School of Information Sciences has been practicing what it teaches—especially in electronic records management. Wesley Lipschultz, the school’s manager of student services, was honored by the National Academic Advising Association for increasing the efficient use of technology in class registration and records management. He received the 2009 Service to Commission Award from the association’s Technology in Advising Commission.

A Courier driver appears to give the latest scoop to a reporter.

On Sept. 4, 1935, in four short rounds, boxer Joe Louis delivered three lightning-fast left jabs to the jaw of Max Baer, knocking him out before a crowd of 84,000 in New York City. They were punches heard around the world. The win was also a blow to pervasive segregation and widespread discrimination, and positioned Louis, the so-called Brown Bomber, to become a top contender for the world heavyweight championship. The Associated Press would name him Athlete of the Year. Masses gasped at his speed and power. Like some sort of Black Atlas, Louis carried on his muscular shoulders the pride of African Americans everywhere. With his win, thousands poured into the streets whooping in celebration. It was banner news.

Three hundred miles away, in the bowels of a Pittsburgh press shop, a teenage worker sprang into action. It was his first day—and night—on the job. He had just finished high school; his pay was $40 a month. He was employed by a newspaper that prided itself on 14 separate editions delivered nationally every week. The office phones rang nonstop as people clamored for details about the Louis fight. Some wanted 100 papers or more.

The presses—giant, ink-stained steel engines—stood on the first floor and reached to the ceiling. They churned all night. The teenager—who worked as a pressroom mailer—lifted reams of newsprint, he bundled hundreds of papers, and he routed the national editions so that Pullman porters on U.S. rail lines could quickly distribute them to hundreds of thousands of readers East, West, North, and South.

The young man’s workplace was The Pittsburgh Courier, a now-legendary publication that thrived during the 20th century. In the 1930s, the newspaper was the top-selling and most widely circulated newspaper for Blacks nationwide. At one point, it was also distributed in Europe, Cuba, Canada, and the West Indies.

A three-story brick and mortar beacon of truth, the newspaper’s office sat on Centre Avenue, the main artery of the Hill District, central to Pittsburgh’s Black community. It was the first such newspaper to own its printing presses, and its impact on politics, culture, and daily life was wide-ranging. Over the years, the Courier’s influence helped to spark the U.S. civil rights movement.

The Courier's office and pressroom in Pittsburgh's Hill District.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of The Pittsburgh Courier’s birth as a legend, when the fledgling newspaper came under the leadership of Pitt alumnus Robert L. Vann as its publisher and editor in 1910. Vann, an attorney, also served as the paper’s treasurer and legal counsel, and he moved the Courier far beyond its tentative beginnings when aspiring writer Edwin Nathaniel Harleston, who worked as a security guard at the Heinz pickle factory, had founded the publication a few years earlier.

Not surprisingly, the stories of the Courier’s success are intertwined with the aspirations and accomplishments of Pitt graduates. Many in the newspaper’s family—the people whose enterprise changed the nation—were also the sons and daughters of the University of Pittsburgh. As long as there are stories to be written, what these alumni accomplished will be a story worth writing about, beginning with Vann, the Courier’s visionary publisher.

Vann

Born in 1879, Vann rose from poverty in North Carolina, eventually attending college-preparatory school in Richmond, Va. Attending prep school was common for many Whites during the late 19th century, but rare for Blacks. In Richmond, Vann was influenced by the editor of the Richmond Planet newspaper, which railed against Jim Crow segregation laws and the disenfranchisement of Blacks. At the time, the nation practiced segregation, discrimination was rampant, and lynchings were a reality.

In about 1904, Vann arrived in Pittsburgh, where he attended the University on a scholarship, established decades earlier through the endowment of a wealthy White Pittsburgh abolitionist, Charles Avery. At Pitt—then known as the Western University of Pennsylvania—Vann deployed the determination and grit that would lift him into history. On campus, he became a debate champion and the first Black man to serve as editor of the student newspaper. He earned a bachelor’s degree and, in 1909, became the first Black man to graduate with a law degree from Pitt. Within a year, he was among those building the legend of the Pittsburgh Courier, and he was soon leading the newspaper.

A dashing figure with café-au-lait skin and coal-black hair, Vann wore three-piece suits and, during his career, befriended presidents and sports champions. He was a fiercely private man, but he glowed at public events, where he handed out $5 bonuses or state-of-the-art appliances at newspaper promotions. Otherwise, he didn’t mingle much with reporters and was aloof with staff, often retreating to his letter-cluttered office on the second floor to plan coverage. From there, he pushed his journalists to find the story behind the story, and he distinguished himself and the Courier as champions of social causes. The paper confronted segregation in the major sports leagues, in the armed forces, and in housing and employment. It made the coverage of lynching prominent, often showing the burned bodies of men strung from trees.  It used White reporters to infiltrate the Klan.

In a segregated Pittsburgh, the Courier also fueled a growing Black middle class, providing jobs to scores of professionals: accountants, writers, editors, stenographers, and ad men. Those who worked at the newspaper were a proud family who came to work dressed in their finest. In the newsroom, they shared big square wooden desks, old black typewriters, and a mission to achieve. Mostly, they were young, some hired right out of high school. They called themselves the “Courier kids,” and they spent time together beyond the workplace: The Courier thespians performed at nearby Wesley Center Church, and the Courier swim team practiced at the local Y. They dated together, and some married each other, too.

“It was the best job I’ve ever had,” says Mary Jane Page. Just out of business college, she began working at the newspaper as a switchboard operator and became a secretary to the editorial department. Inspired by the strivers at the paper, she went back to school at Pitt, eventually becoming one of the city’s first Black principals and one of the first Blacks to serve on the University’s board of trustees. “I learned at the Courier,” she says, “that I could reach for the American dream.”

And, why not? From where she sat in the newsroom, Page (EDUC ’48, 53G) had a front-row view of the celebrated who ascended the Courier’s steps to meet editors and reporters. Those luminaries included Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson. Undoubtedly, too, Page was influenced by some of that era’s literary giants and scholars who attached themselves to the paper—poet Langston Hughes, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, nationalist Marcus Garvey, and anthropologist Franz Boas (whose cutting-edge reports on science refuted studies suggesting differences in brain size among the races).

The newspaper’s courage in tackling issues of human rights and social justice changed the very fabric of America itself. Notably, publisher-editor Vann turned the tide of Black voter participation nationally. In the 1932 presidential election, most African American voters belonged to the GOP, the party of Lincoln. Vann saw a need for change, and he advocated that his readers “turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall.” He favored the New Deal program set forth by Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat. His influence significantly helped Roosevelt to win the election, and the president named Vann as a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general. Today, most Black voters remain Democrats.

Vann died in 1940, but the Courier’s crusades did not. During World War II, the paper challenged the Red Cross. At the time, the humanitarian agency refused to allow integrated blood transfusions. The Courier’s stories on discrimination and the science of blood as neither Black nor White resulted in the Red Cross changing its policies.

The newspaper’s most celebrated campaign began with World War II and soon gained remarkable momentum. The symbol of the Double V—representing victory overseas and victory against racism at home—was promoted by the Courier and became a national movement. It drew in movie stars, homemakers, and steelworkers. At the end of six months, more than 200,000 individuals were part of the campaign to battle hatred at home and abroad. There were songs, slogans, and beauty queens. In the newspaper’s office, a Double V flag was stretched against a wall.

Pitt history professor Larry Glasco underscores that the Double V campaign had a tremendously positive effect on American race relations. Before the movement began, the most vocal critics of racial discrimination had long been Socialists and Communists, which made outspoken, racially fair-minded Whites vulnerable to being labeled un-American and subversive. “The Double V campaign,” says Glasco, “transformed the struggle for racial justice into a patriotic act that would help win the war by setting America morally apart from its racist, fascist enemies.”

In its masthead, the Courier promoted “all-American” values: “Work, Integrity, Tact, Temperance, Prudence, Courage, Faith.” These were the values that became embedded in the work of several remarkable individuals who shaped the paper. Among them was Edna Chappell McKenzie, who began her career at the Courier in the 1940s, first as a typist, then a writer. McKenzie, a preacher’s daughter, grew up in Pennsylvania’s coal-mining country. After high school, she sharpened her journalism at a small African American tabloid in Los Angeles, where she covered murder, music, and everything in between.

At the Courier, she became one of the news desk’s first female reporters. She covered fires and stepped over dead bodies to do her job. Her assignments took her into the belly of racism as she sat at lunch counters and walked into small hotels that told her she didn’t belong. McKenzie, a small-framed woman with a head full of dark curls, braved intimidation. She sat through name-calling and being refused service because of her race. A trained pianist and a mother, McKenzie remained stoic on the job, but she described it as a horrible time, “worse than fighting a war.” When a deadline was over, she went home and cried herself to sleep.

She fought back with her pen, meticulously detailing the threats and harsh treatment of racism. In the mid-1940s, she wrote about the “evils” of segregated housing and a Presbyterian community center that was closed to Black children. Her news stories stoked the collapse of restrictive covenants in housing and public accommodations. Her work was groundbreaking, coming at least a decade before the start of the modern civil rights movement.

She left the paper in 1950, but continued her pioneering ways. McKenzie (A&S ’71, ’73G) became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in history at Pitt. She later established the Department of Ethnic and Diversity Studies at the Community College of Allegheny County and dedicated her life to teaching and human rights. She passed away in 2005.

Another keen reporter was George Barbour, a spirited young man from rural Allegheny County who began at the Courier as a photojournalist in 1953. He was 27 when he began working his way into being a well-respected civic affairs reporter. Previously, Barbour (A&S ’51) had been an outstanding journalist for The Pitt News, training that he says prepared him to cover the rough-and-tumble world of city politics.

Barbour tracked which public restaurants would—and would not—serve Black patrons and documented those racial patterns, with the help of another Courier staffer who posed as his wife during restaurant visits. On his own, he investigated discrimination in county home sales. In 1962, he reported on the lack of diversity among city and county staff. He once had a heated meeting with then Pittsburgh Mayor Joseph M. Barr, who worried that Barbour’s stories on discrimination would discredit him among Black voters. In time, Barbour’s articles led to policy changes that allowed more Blacks to seek positions in local government. From 1962 to 1964, Barbour served as the Courier’s first city editor and later joined KDKA radio, becoming the first full-time Black reporter for a major Pittsburgh station.

During his years at the Courier, Barbour’s editor was Frank Bolden, a mesmerizing storyteller who covered the world on his reporting assignments. Bolden began as a stringer while studying at Pitt. His writing was so luminous, he earned $5 a week instead of $3. After graduation, he joined the staff full time and made his mark covering the streets. His beat was Wylie Avenue, a busy stretch that began at the downtown jail and ended at a Hill District church.

Along the way, Bolden (EDUC ’34) delved into the full cultural, political, and social soul of Black Pittsburgh.  He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the Black community, no doubt honed from his nearly 30 years with the Courier. In that time, he interviewed Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, and Count Basie, among many others.

At the start of World War II, the Courier tapped Bolden to tell the stories of Black soldiers. He became one of the first two accredited Black war correspondents, traveling into sweltering jungles to cover Black troops. He called it a “green hell.” On the Burma Road, he saw Black engineering troops die of fever, enemy fire, and cobra bites. Bolden’s stories of their valor changed the way the nation perceived Black soldiers and fueled their movement for equity once they returned home from the war.

Before the conflict ended, Bolden found his way to India, where he sat cross-legged and ate with his hands as a houseguest of famed Mahatma Gandhi. He then stayed 12 days with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. His articles on these leaders were well received by the newspaper’s audience as he drew parallels between the Indian struggle for independence from Britain to the awakening civil rights struggle in America.

In the 1950s, Bolden wrote an eight-part series on prominent Pittsburgh African American families, tracing one family’s history back to 1728.  Later, in a documentary on the history of the Black press, Bolden said that at the Courier, “under Bob Vann’s leadership, we made building stones out of stumbling blocks.” The Black press, he said, was “the advocate for all of our dreams, wishes, and desires …. It gave us the inspiration to move ahead.”

Today, another Pitt alumnus is paying homage to the Courier’s legacy. Filmmaker Kenneth Love (A&S ’71) knew a few of the Courier editors and reporters. His new documentary, Newspaper of Record: The Pittsburgh Courier 1907-1965, took root in 2001. That’s when retired Courier editor Frank Bolden invited Love to his home and suggested he make a film chronicling the newspaper’s storied history. Love protested that the story was especially complex; he was concerned that, with such a significant chronicle, he didn’t have the necessary resources. When Love was done, Bolden simply said, “You have me. We’ll start now.”  So, it began; and the creation of the film continued, too, after Bolden’s death in 2003.

This year, on Feb. 1, the film had its world premiere, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh as part of Pitt’s annual K. Leroy Irvis Black History Month Program. The documentary will soon be telecast nationwide on PBS public television.

The film is a 75-minute retrospective on the “amazing Pittsburgh Courier people” who gave a voice to the voiceless. “Their words are as important and fresh today,” says Love, “as they were when they were first written.” That history includes the essential contributions of Pitt people to the transformative power of truth embodied by the Courier, a forerunner of what became today’s New Pittsburgh Courier.

Robert Lavelle is proud to be one of those people. In 1935, on that famous day when Joe Louis knocked out Max Baer, Lavelle (BUS ’51, KGSB ’54G) was the skinny 19-year-old pressroom worker who helped churn out 14 national editions of The Pittsburgh Courier.

Joe Louis signs autographs at the Courier offices.

Leading up to that night, the Courier had published a series of articles on the heavy-hitting boxer, Louis. To much of America, he came to represent an honest, hardworking fighter in a sport riddled with corruption and a world brimming with hate in the form of Mussolini, Hitler, and other power mongers. Courier reporters and photographers—including Charles “Teenie” Harris, whose photos now reside in museums and private collections—practically lived with the rising athlete. Louis’ prominence, the excitement of his fights, and his struggle to defeat prejudice made these stories read like a soap opera. He was on the road to becoming heavyweight champion of the world—and a hero to the entire nation.

On that blue-black night, after Louis knocked out Baer in the fourth round, a boisterous crowd gathered outside the newspaper’s Centre Avenue office, waiting to read about the Brown Bomber’s big victory. It was not just any story—it was a Pittsburgh Courier story, their story. Inside, under the roar of the presses, the teenage Lavelle was lifting, bundling, and wrapping as fast as he could.

Battaglia

On a muddy lawn between the Cathedral of Learning and Heinz Chapel, 16 Pitt students stand at attention with broomsticks between their legs. “Go!” shouts the captain, and the players storm the muddy field. Bodies and broomsticks clash. The captain—distinguished by his colorful bandana—scoops up a pink volleyball, known as a quaffle. An opposing player, black dodge ball in hand, chases him toward the goal. She hurls the ball, which strikes him. He drops the quaffle. Before he can re-enter the game, he laps the field, galloping like a horse on his broomstick. Meanwhile, another player with mud-splattered calves intercepts the quaffle and shoots it through a lollipop goal! A wedding party outside the chapel snaps photos of the frenzy. A woman wonders out loud, “What is this?”

The students are playing what Harry Potter aficionados know as the sport of quidditch. But unlike the wizards and witches of Hogwarts, the Pitt team lacks one fundamental component—magic. Though the broomsticks don’t fly, a human version of the fictional sport has become popular on college campuses nationwide. More than 200 institutions have formed quidditch teams and joined the Intercollegiate Quidditch Association (IQA), founded a few years ago at Middlebury College in Vermont.

The captain of Pitt’s team, John Battaglia, started playing quidditch in high school after he and some friends discovered online videos of game play and the IQA’s official rule book. Battaglia, a sophomore majoring in business as well as politics and philosophy, was hooked by both the athleticism and ridiculousness of the sport, a hybrid of handball, dodge ball, and literature come to life. Last spring, he discovered other quidditch enthusiasts—this time at Pitt. They built a team by recruiting friends, Potter fans, athletes, and curious onlookers. They also bought PVC pipes and duct tape to build the circular lollipop goals through which players throw the quaffle to score. Now, they spend Sunday afternoons on the lawn, running drills, practicing aim, inventing strategies, and mystifying passersby.

This past fall, Battaglia’s battalion headed to “quidditch country,” where they competed against more than 20 teams in the 2009 IQA World Cup at Middlebury. Caped entertainers juggled flaming batons and chanted spells while 500 spectators watched Pitt land in the Final Four, the only first-year team to do so.

“Everyone seemed to love us because we were the underdogs,” says Battaglia. “We couldn’t believe we made it that far.” Perhaps it just took a little bit of magic.

Photograph by Tom Altany

Every Saturday, a high-school student visits the house of a neighbor. She travels by foot and carries a bag filled with homework. Although she walks with a crutch, it doesn’t take long for her to traverse the bustling streets of the Nigerian city, Enugu. She’s eager to reach her destination.

Umeasiegbu

The neighbor, Veronica Umeasiegbu, greets the girl warmly, as though she’s welcoming a younger sister. Inside, the home smells of warm rice, freshly cooked. The two chat, which is part of their weekly routine. The neighbor knows that her young visitor is beautiful and smart, but she also knows the teenager doesn’t see this. Instead, the girl is shy and insecure, especially about her disability and her crutch. Umeasiegbu understands.

Each week, they share a meal of rice with okra or yams or peppers. Afterward, the student pulls books from her schoolbag and begins to work. As she composes an essay, she stops to ask for advice about grammar, how to connect paragraphs. Umeasiegbu helps with these tasks, but she also offers unspoken gifts—of encouragement, possibility, and joy—the same gifts that she received from a family member years earlier, the same gifts that have multiplied during her own remarkable journey.

Umeasiegbu was born in Eastern Nigeria, where she contracted polio at the age of 2. The disease left her legs paralyzed and her mother ashamed. Some neighbors believed that her illness was the result of witchcraft or punishment from God. Before long, Umeasiegbu’s mother left the family. Her father raised her until he died, when she was in elementary school. Then, her half-brother, Rems Umeasiegbu, took care of her and made sure that she continued her education. He paid her school tuition and challenged her to read books and newspapers. He became her guide through life’s shoals.

A literature professor and a scholar, he was known as a “story hunter” because he traveled across Nigeria collecting oral folklore from storytellers.Umeasiegbu hunted stories, too, in her own way. She enjoyed moonlit nights when family elders would tell folktales about tortoises, clever women, and the virtues of hard work and helping others. At school, she liked reading about every subject, especially science, politics, and art. When she wasn’t able to get to school on her crutches, she nagged friends and cousins to let her borrow their textbooks.

Eventually, through her own resilience and with Rems’ support, the young Nigerian understood many things about the world beyond her doorstep. She also knew she could help others like her find their way in that larger world.

Umeasiegbu enrolled at the University of Nigeria, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physical therapy. Soon, she began working to help others with physical impairments. Every day when she was shopping or commuting to work, she saw in the streets disabled beggars, including mothers and toddlers. She knew that, without her education and family, she could have been squatting in those same dusty places. The beggars needed more than crutches.

Umeasiegbu also knew that disabled children in Nigeria, especially girls, are often hidden at home—because of shame, poverty, or low expectations—instead of being sent to school. So, in her free time, she volunteered with an organization that helped these girls to attend school. As part of her role, she traveled to rural churches and encouraged families to educate their disabled daughters. During her presentations, she showed her crutches and explained that she held university degrees. Look at me, she said. I am not begging for alms. Your daughters, too, can accomplish things.

She also volunteered to mentor newly enrolled schoolgirls, like the teenager who made pilgrimages to her home every Saturday. Often, these girls had psychological, academic, and social issues that went far beyond their physical disabilities. Umeasiegbu counseled them based on her own experiences with a disability, but she didn’t feel prepared to offer comprehensive solutions. Although she was a seasoned professional with a graduate degree, she decided that she needed more education. She wanted to learn how to help those with physical disabilities in a more profound way.

In 2007, with a scholarship grant from the international Ford Foundation, Umeasiegbu traveled more than 5,000 miles to Pitt’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences to begin studying rehabilitation counseling in Pitt’s Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology. The program trains students to empower those with disabilities to become fully integrated into their communities. The Pitt students learn how to provide career counseling, psychological therapy, and management of medical plans.

From the moment Umeasiegbu was greeted by fellow students at Pittsburgh’s airport, she knew she was not alone in her quest to help women with disabilities to improve their lives. For sure, she wouldn’t be the first such woman to glide through the automatic, handicapped-accessible doors of Forbes Tower, where the department is located. Women from many regions around the world, including Russians, Palestinians, and Saudis have studied rehabilitation counseling here in recent years. About 20 percent of the department’s graduate students are international. Students have completed internships in New Zealand and India. Several faculty members have built high-profile international careers, while also facing the challenges posed by their own physical circumstances.

At Pitt, Umeasiegbu began using a wheelchair instead of crutches for the first time in her life. Although she thought the hills and rivers of Pittsburgh were beautiful, the things that impressed her the most about the city’s landscape were its wheelchair ramps, dropped curbs, concrete sidewalks, and buses that could hoist people in wheelchairs directly inside. In Nigeria, the lack of that infrastructure makes wheelchairs impractical. In Pittsburgh, she zoomed to the store to buy rice or flowers. She zoomed to Hillman Library to hunt for stories and to read her textbooks. She learned not only how to navigate a motorized wheelchair, but also how Pitt researchers are creating innovations in wheelchair technology through the University’s Wheeled Mobility Research Center and the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center, among others.

One reason that Pitt’s Department of Rehabilitation Science and Tech-nology has so much international activity is its emphasis on developing the newest assistive technologies, which advance what’s possible for those with disabilities. The curriculum of the rehabilitation counseling program is one of the few in the world that incorporates mandatory courses in the use of assistive technologies such as motorized wheelchairs, software that reads newspaper articles aloud, and devices that allow people to control computer cursors by blinking. With these devices, people can overcome physical challenges in ways that were never possible before. That knowledge is important for rehabilitation counselors as they help others to retool lives disrupted by disabilities.

During her classroom experiences, Umeasiegbu learned about a gamut of assistive technologies, including a conference-room hearing device that one of her professors who has a hearing disability used during class discussions. With this device, students speak into a wireless microphone that connects to a hearing aid in the professor’s ear, enabling her to listen and respond to students’ comments. It’s just one example of how assistive technology removes obstacles and creates entirely new possibilities.

That professor, Katherine Seelman—the associate dean of disability programs in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences—is another significant mentor for Umeasiegbu, who has spent many hours in Seelman’s colorful office, which is bulging with books and contains photos of Seelman posing with international dignitaries.

During the Clinton administration, Seelman served as director of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. Currently, she’s part of an international committee that’s creating the World Health Organization’s first report on disability. Last summer, she teamed up with Pitt colleagues to arrange a two-day international conference, where the hot topic was the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a U.N. treaty that’s being signed by countries around the world. She also has connections with the international Ford Foundation, the organization that helped Umeasiegbu get to Pitt.

From the start, Seelman expanded Umeasiegbu’s already optimistic view of what is possible for those with disabilities. She shared stories about traveling all over the globe and meeting with many others who are striving to improve the rights of the disabled, as well as the opportunities for them. She emphasized that there is work to be done everywhere—in the United States, in Nigeria, and far beyond those boundaries.

Not long after she began these mentoring sessions, Seelman encouraged Umeasiegbu to apply for an internship with the World Health Organization—and the encouragement worked. In 2008, Umeasiegbu spent a thrilling summer in Geneva, Switzerland, at the World Health Organization, where she used her physical therapy expertise to strengthen evidence-based reporting about rehabilitation. She organized and prepared materials for a rehabilitation conference in Thailand. She attended biweekly meetings about polio eradication, and she initiated two book drives to send textbooks to a university and a nonprofit organization in Nigeria. On weekends, Umeasiegbu also achieved some personal dreams by visiting the grand European cities she’d read about in books.

On top of all that activity, Umeasiegbu wrote an essay for a competition that challenged interns at United Nations agencies to think of ways to implement the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals. In her essay, Umeasiegbu contended that the U.N.’s goals for improving education, health care, and gender equality—established by world dignitaries in 2000—would not be accomplished by the 2015 deadline if women with disabilities were left behind. The judges agreed with her vision of a world where all women are respected, educated, and empowered. Her essay was a winner in the U.N. competition.

In April 2009, Umeasiegbu earned her Pitt master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling. Now she is pursuing a PhD in rehabilitation counseling at the University of Kentucky. With her newfound expertise, she is ready to expand the possibilities for others beyond any seeming boundaries. “I see myself as one who can make an impact in every part of the world—who can do research in Africa and who can still contribute to the field in the United States,” she says. “I see myself as someone who can go anywhere at anytime.”

Meanwhile, Umeasiegbu sends regular e-mail updates about her progress to her longtime mentors, including her half-brother and Pitt’s Seelman. She trusts, too, that elsewhere in the world, a young woman who used to visit her on Saturdays now looks in the mirror and sees her true self—beautiful and smart, a story still unfolding

A nervous-looking squirrel follows a pair of German hikers. The critter is desperate for any junk food they might leave behind. “I’ve lost my fear of humans!” the squirrel shouts to a nearby raven. The raven also is trailing the hikers—but for their stories, not their junk food. The bird hops off a log and crosses over a stream.

Except the stream is actually a long roll of fabric. And the setting is not an enchanted forest, but the studio space in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning. The squirrel and the raven are performing in a new German-American theater project.

The project, Yinzerspielen, is a series of two plays: “You Can’t Get Lost in America,” written by Pitt alumnus Cory Tamler (A&S ’09), and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” written by Nora Schuessler, a student at the University of Augsburg in Germany. The show debuted in Augsburg this past June and arrived in Pittsburgh in September.

The project developed last summer after Tamler and fellow Pitt alumnus Christina Kruise (A&S ’09) earned Pitt Research Abroad Project Grants to travel to Germany and work on a production of Neil LaBute’s Autobahn. There, they befriended Schuessler, who also was involved in the production, and the three conceived their own collaborative project.

“We knew that we wanted to produce our own original work,” Tamler says. “We wanted our project to be bilingual, and we wanted to include both Germans and Americans.” They began calling it “Yinzerspielen,” a fusion of the Pittsburghese word Yinzer, usually meaning a Pittsburgher, and the German word Spielen for “play.”

The project has posed challenges for the collaborators because they’ve had to handle very different acting styles. “Americans are taught to approach a character from the inside out,” says Tamler. “They ask questions like: ‘Why does my character do this? What’s his motivation?’” Germans, by contrast, take “an ‘outside in’ approach. German actors ask: ‘What should this look like?’ ‘What do you want me to show?’”

During rehearsals, the actress who plays the squirrel—Pitt alumnus Mary Heyne (A&S ’08)—practiced her role by focusing on her character’s intense love of junk food. By contrast, Simon Karrer, an Augsburg student who plays the raven, spent his time practicing how to twitch his head like a bird and walk with a raven’s quick, jerky steps.

At the performance in the Cathedral basement, the raven and the squirrel catch up to the hikers. They find the brother begging his sister to speak English. She answers him in fluent German. Her arms are crossed and the siblings stand on opposite sides of the stream. Despite being challenged by culture, language, and even species, the characters are nevertheless drawn together. Aww, Yinzers …

Marouf

On a spring morning, a purposeful young woman walks briskly along a tree-lined pathway on her way to the Cathedral of Learning. In the early sunlight, the leaves blush like emeralds, turning her thoughts to her native Kuwait, with its palm trees full of dates and its gulf waters sparkling in the sun. Home. That’s what floats into Laila Marouf’s mind as she strolls across the Oakland campus.

Inspired to teach and make a difference in her community, Marouf took steps to come to Pitt nearly a decade ago. Already well educated in her native land, she knew from experience that higher education offered a door to opportunities. She was ready to open the next door. In 2002, she traveled to the United States in search of a graduate school where she could pursue a PhD degree. The University of Pittsburgh was the first stop on her tour roster—and the last. She loved what she experienced on campus that day, and she canceled her plans to visit other universities. Pittsburgh felt like home. It glistened with promise. Before long, she was attending the University, far removed from the life in Kuwait that she had built with her husband and two children.

Marouf grew up in Ahmadi, a modern city in the country’s southeastern region. She was an inquisitive youngster and a good student during a time of expanding opportunity for Kuwaiti women. At age 18, she enrolled at Kuwait University, initially earning degrees in computer science and statistics. Eventually, after getting married and beginning a family, she returned to earn a master’s degree in library and information science, finishing at the top of her class.

When Marouf began doctoral studies at Pitt’s School of Information Sciences, she was particularly intrigued by the trendsetting discipline of knowledge management. It involved people-driven research, investigating how knowledge is formally and informally passed through society. During her master’s studies in Kuwait, Marouf had spent a lot of time researching corporate culture and human-resources development. Her doctoral research pushed beyond that, focusing on the significance of knowledge passed through social ties and family networks, which could be especially influential in the Middle East, where culture and family play pervasive roles. She enjoyed exploring the cultural and gender differences in how knowledge is shared. She knew such insights could lead to new ways to connect people, all people.

An award-winning scholar, Marouf earned her Pitt PhD degree in 2005, and today she teaches knowledge management and computer and information skills as a professor at Kuwait University. She uses classroom presentations and online discussions to help students reach beyond cultural and gender stereotypes. Through the lens of her profession, she sees progress, particularly in the Middle East. Women, she says, are more visible in government and day-to-day decision-making, but male-centered customs are changing, too. In Kuwait, for instance, the traditional Diwaniyah—an informal gathering of friends and families—is being transformed. In the past, men assembled on wooden benches in the cool of the evening. They played card games and chatted about life and politics. Women gathered separately from the men for tea and conversation. Now, the Diwaniyah is becoming more inclusive; the gatherings occur for networking and friendship across genders and cultures, especially among younger participants. Information and knowledge are being shared broadly, across former boundaries.

Every summer, Marouf (SIS ’05G) discusses these information-driven social changes when she meets with friends and colleagues back at Pitt, walks among the emerald trees, and recalls her initial decision to study here—a place that still feels a lot like home.

Photograph by Tom Altany

Hesselbein guides a leadership seminar at West Point.

The President of the United States stands on a podium in the East Room of the White House, speaking to an attentive audience. The elegant room is lit by several grand crystal chandeliers; its floor-to-ceiling windows are adorned with gold curtains that bathe the setting in a glow of warm light. The audience, too, contains luminaries—a group of exceptional individuals, sitting in the front row, who are about to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The medal recognizes extraordinary contributions to U.S. national interests, to world peace, and to cultural and other significant endeavors.

On this January day, the honorees include several prominent human rights activists, a distinguished statesman, a highly decorated four-star Navy admiral, a few famous philanthropists—and, among others, a petite woman born in a steel-and-coal town in the mountains of western Pennsylvania.

On the podium, the President extols the qualities of each honoree. Regarding the Pennsylvania native—Pitt alumnus Frances Hesselbein—he says, in part: “She has shared her remarkable recipe for inclusion and excellence with countless organizations whose bottom line is measured not in dollars, but in changed lives.” Among the noted hallmarks of her leadership style are an openness to innovation, a willingness to share responsibility, and a respect for diversity. “With skill and sensitivity, Frances Hesselbein has shown us all how to summon the best from ourselves and our fellow citizens,” he says. Then he calls her forward, describing her as a “pioneer for women, volunteerism, diversity, and opportunity.”

And so it was that, on Jan. 15, 1998, Hesselbein walked to the podium to shake hands with then-President William Jefferson Clinton. As she approached, her thoughts flowed back to a moment long ago when her journey to leadership began.

When Hesselbein was a child, her favorite place to visit was a special room in her grandparents’ home in South Fork, Pa. It was a music room, with high ceilings, stained glass windows, and a pipe organ. On a shelf, too high to reach, sat two colorful Chinese vases that completely captivated the young leader-to-be. She wanted to play with them. But her Grandmother Wicks wouldn’t allow this.

One day, when the youngster made a particular fuss about wanting the vases, her grandmother sat next to her and lovingly explained why the vases were so special. Years earlier, when Frances’ mother was still a child, Mr. Yee—a native of China who was the local laundryman—came to the door. He was holding a package that contained the two vases, and he told Mrs. Wicks that he wanted her to have them. He was returning to China to be with his family, and she had been a singular source of kindness and respect in a town where he had often been treated with disrespect. The vases, he said, were all that he had brought with him when he arrived in this country, and he wanted Mrs. Wicks to have them. There were tears in his eyes as he said goodbye, explaining that he had been in town for 10 years and, during that time, she was the only one who ever called him “Mr. Yee.”

Upon hearing this story, the granddaughter Frances understood that the vases were gifts representing something truly valuable—a common bond of worth and respect among all human beings. The story changed the way she saw the world. It was, she wrote years later, “the defining moment that would stay with me, would shape my life with passion for diversity, for inclusion.”

That lesson continued to be enriched and reinforced by the loving environment fostered by her parents and grandparents, and she also explored the larger world through books and her public-school education. As a teenager, she aspired to write for the theater; and, at age 17, she enrolled at the fledging University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown campus to pursue that dream.

Today, Hesselbein describes that freshman period as magic, saying, “It was everything I ever hoped for” in recalling the opportunity to spend entire days devoted to learning and exploring new ideas. “Every day was a gift.”

Then, six weeks into her new college career, tragedy struck. Her father died, and she had to make a choice. “I could leave full-time classes, get a job, and take care of my family,” says Hesselbein, “or I could go to Philadelphia, where my aunt was eager to have me live with her and attend college there.”

Her choice was to stay in town, find a job, take evening and Saturday classes, and support her mother and two siblings—“the family,” she says, “I knew my father would want me to keep together.” Making the right choices, living one’s values: These qualities, it turns out, are key to Hesselbein’s leadership philosophy, and they would continue to play a significant role in her journey to leadership.

Hesselbein (center) at the Global Academy's 2009 Student Leadership Summit surrounded by the inaugural group of young leaders.

Although her life had changed, she found inspiration and opportunity all around her, especially at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, where two of her professors and their spouses began to look out for her, encourage her to excel, and celebrate her successes. “The University of Pittsburgh took a 17-yearold girl and shared with her this vision of lifelong learning, civic engagement, service, and a wider world,” Hesselbein says.

She continued to work and attend classes, integrating her newfound knowledge into her daily life. In time, she married John Hesselbein (BUS ’35), gave birth to a son, and settled into family life. Then, one day in the early 1960s, Hesselbein was asked to volunteer as the leader of local Girl Scout Troop 17. She agreed to stay for six weeks until, she says wryly, a real leader could be found. Instead, Hesselbein and Troop 17 stayed together for eight years until all of the troop’s young women graduated from high school. Then, in 1970, she was selected to become the executive director of western Pennsylvania’s Talus Rock Girl Scout Council, one of more than 300 such councils nationwide.

As the council’s new leader, she began to use Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive with her Girl Scout staff. Drucker, who later became her colleague and great supporter, was an influential management author, strategist, and philosopher. He viewed management as a liberal art, and he fused his management advice with lessons from sociology, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Today, he is still cited as “the father of modern management.” An organization’s work, he insisted, must flow from a purpose so simple that its mission statement can fit on a T-shirt. One of Hesselbein’s favorite examples is “To serve the most vulnerable,” the mission statement of the International Red Cross.

Drucker made no distinction between the leadership of corporations and other institutions, believing that all institutions have a responsibility for the whole society. To Hesselbein, his ideas made perfect sense and resonated with her experiences of the essentialness of diversity, inclusion, and service to others. “The first day I walked into the Girl Scout office, I had under my arm copies of The Effective Executive for every staff member,” she says. “We all thought that Peter Drucker was writing for us.”

Before this first professional position, Hesselbein served on the national Girl Scout board, represented the U.S. organization at world conferences, and presented national training sessions for board members. It was Hesselbein’s executive involvement with the Talus Rock Council that ultimately led to an even bigger opportunity, which sealed her reputation as a legendary leader.

In 1976, she was tapped to become CEO of the national organization, the Girl Scouts of the USA. Hesselbein accepted the post at a critical time. The 1960s and early 1970s brought dramatic changes in the role of women, the push for human rights, advances in technology and science, the rise of global competition, and many other societal shifts. Most organizations, including the Girl Scouts of the USA, had not kept pace with these rapid and turbulent changes. Membership had declined. Merit badges in party hosting and good grooming had become passé.

Hesselbein, who was the organization’s first national executive to be hired from within the ranks, recognized that transformation was necessary. “The old answers did not fit the new realities….The old structures were not right for the next decade, let alone the next century,” she once wrote about these shifting times.

So, Hesselbein began to create a new environment, informed by a lifetime of her own values, experience, and constant learning. After a thorough sixmonth study, Hesselbein and her team concluded that the core Girl Scout mission—to help each girl reach her highest potential—was still valid, but profound changes would be required for the organization to remain relevant. Among the challenges were obsolete programs and a nearly all-White membership; yet Hesselbein recalls these as “enormous opportunities.”

She began, she says, to manage from the center, looking across; not from the top, looking down. Everyone was learning together. It was “a more fluid, circular view of the world,” she wrote about that era, adding that “the days of turf battles, the star system, and the Lone Ranger are over. The day of the partnership is upon us.”

From that vantage point, Hesselbein worked together with everyone else in the organization to create what she calls “one great movement.” She reached out, for instance, to four distinguished educators to revise the organization’s program content. New proficiency badges were created in career-oriented topics, such as math, science, and technology. “Computer Fun became the most popular proficiency badge,” she wrote about the transition to a contemporary organization. The Girl Scout handbook was updated to appeal to a more diverse cross-section of young women. The organization even began to address difficult issues like drug abuse. In time, Hesselbein also guided the development of a partnership with Harvard Business School faculty to create a management seminar, and later a financial seminar, specifically for Girl Scout executives.

The results of her innovative leadership were obvious. Membership increased dramatically. Minority membership tripled, to 15 percent. Inside headquarters, the Girl Scouts’ board and executive posts were richly diverse. “The organization had achieved its highest membership, greatest diversity, and greatest cohesion,” says Hesselbein
proudly.

Among those she credits with helping her to achieve the national organization’s goals is Peter Drucker—in person, not simply in books. In 1981, about six years into her national executive role with the Girl Scouts, she met Drucker at an event at New York University, when they both arrived on time and were the only people in the reception room, apart from two bartenders. Their conversation prompted Drucker to offer some of his own time to assist the national Girl Scout organization and, for the next eight years, he spent several days annually sharing his expertise with the board and staff. He touted the Girl Scouts as the best-managed organization in the country, and he later said that Frances Hesselbein could run any business in America.

In January 1990, six weeks after she left the Girl Scouts—the largest organization for girls and women in the world—Hesselbein became CEO of the smallest foundation in the world, with no money and no staff, just a passionate vision and mission. The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, now known as the Leader to Leader Institute, works globally to promote ethical, values-based leadership. While the mission is specifically to strengthen the leadership of the social sector (nonprofit organizations), the institute promotes the
view that all three sectors—public, private, and social-sector organizations—are part of the same community and that all organizations have a responsibility for building a healthy, diverse, inclusive society that cares about all of its people. In other words, every corporation, every organization—public, private, or nonprofit—has responsibility for the whole community, the whole society.

Drucker died in 2005, but the Leader to Leader Institute continues to promote Drucker’s philosophy of sharing the organization’s values and expertise with global leaders. Hesselbein travels extensively around the country, making presentations and participating in seminars about twice a week. She also schedules three trips abroad each year and has found allies for the institute’s efforts worldwide. Each country is chosen, she says, “because of the significance of its work in building the leaders of the future, the organizations of the future, and the society of the future.”

In fact, one of Hesselbein’s and the institute’s key priorities is to encourage and nurture future leaders. Her optimism is fueled by what she sees in today’s youth. “The emerging leaders I encounter are sending a powerful message of leadership, of building trust, of ethics in action, of the power of diversity, of inclusion, of courage, of celebrating the intellect, of leading from the front into an uncertain time,” she wrote in a 2008 Leader to Leader journal entry.

An integral part of Hesselbein’s philosophy is that ethical, values-based leadership is crucial for democracy. Last year, she was appointed as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She is the first woman and the first nonacademy graduate to serve in this leadership position, guiding seminars on leadership with the academy’s students. “Frances Hesselbein’s optimism resonates with cadets,” says Major Katie Matthew, who is on the West Point faculty. “She says it’s okay to be optimistic, despite political and economic struggles.”

Now the University of Pittsburgh is partnering with Hesselbein in a new venture to produce even greater numbers of experienced, ethical leaders equipped to address critical global issues. Hesselbein wants to encourage visionary and ethical leadership in the millennial generation she admires. “They can’t wait to tell me where they are volunteering. Not one says, ‘You didn’t say enough about how to get rich.’ They take for granted that to serve is to live,” she says about today’s undergraduates. She considers them to be the next “Greatest Generation.”

In 2009, the Hesselbein Global Academy for Student Leadership and Civic Engagement was established by Pitt to honor her and advance her life’s work. The mission is to inspire, develop, and reward accomplished student leaders to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Global mentorships, training, and service opportunities will be integral to the experience.

In July, the Hesselbein Global Academy held its first summit for outstanding students at the Pittsburgh campus. For four days, business and government leaders from public, private, and social sectors around the world shared their talents and expertise with 44 dynamic student leaders from the United States, Canada, and abroad who were selected to participate in Pitt’s inaugural Student Leadership Summit, part of the Hesselbein Global Academy venture. Pitt students in attendance were junior Sudipta Devanath, majoring in neuroscience, psychology, and sociology; sophomore Joseph Garbarino, a political science major; junior Molly Humphreys, majoring in mathematics education and business; junior Alexa Jennings, a business marketing and management major; doctoral student Michael Smith, studying pharmacy; and junior Aster Teclay, a political science and business major.

University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg spoke during the summit’s inaugural ceremony, remarking that, in addition to inspiring student leaders, Hesselbein’s Global Academy “honors the life’s work of a national and international treasure, Frances Hesselbein. No one has done more to advance effective approaches to leadership.” This heralded daughter of Pitt has received numerous awards from the University, including an honorary doctoral degree, a University medallion as a distinguished alumnus, and induction into the inaugural
group of preeminent alumni called Legacy Laureates.

Kathy Humphrey, Pitt’s vice provost and dean of students, was instrumental in launching the Hesselbein Global Academy and is essential to its ongoing development. She leads the effort on the Pittsburgh campus and coordinates activities with faculty and mentors in partnership with Hesselbein and her team. “We find students who have been making an incredible impact and give them the opportunity to work with strong leaders in our nation,” says Humphrey. “The result is that these students will gain even stronger leadership skills and will ultimately have an enduring impact far beyond their own communities.”

The academy’s future plans include an endowment to offer global internships, placing students in yearlong posts in the service sector. “We’ll raise the money,” predicts Hesselbein, “because the program is not just for students, but also for the betterment of communities all over the world.” She says she’s inspired by a vision of how a decade of academy graduates could change the world. “We will have 500 graduates by our 10th anniversary reunion,” she says. “And as I told our inaugural class, some will be there in person, and some will be there in spirit. But I give you my word, we will celebrate.”

At the Leader to Leader Institute’s headquarters in New York City, Hesselbein’s Park Avenue office is full of framed accolades, 20 honorary doctoral degrees, photographs with U.S. presidents and other world leaders. Among her many honors are the International Leadership Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, a TEMPO International Leadership Award for a “lifetime of remarkable work to develop and strengthen the talents of women worldwide,” and induction into Enterprising Women magazine’s Hall of Fame.

There, too, on the wall hangs a beribboned Presidential Medal of Freedom, the national honor she received from President Clinton at the White House in 1998. But accolades are not what drives her or what attracts her legion of admirers. Instead, she says, “You have to have values that aren’t on a plaque. You have to live your values. After all, leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do. To serve is to live.”

It’s a quiet fall evening as a writer sits on her sofa, a laptop perched atop her knees. She is working on her first novel, and she usually writes for several hours every day. Now, with nearly 100 pages written, she senses an intruder. It’s the mysterious Anna Karenina, the aristocratic figure from the enduring Russian classic. Rather than flee, the writer is still, letting Anna push her way into the work in progress.

When she’s done with the novel three years later, Irina Reyn (A&S ’01) has placed Anna at the center of her tale, which looks at the pressures of approaching middle age and how women cope with the renewed expectations they have for their lives. The result is What Happened to Anna K. (Touchstone), a modern version of the timeless Leo Tolstoy saga of romance gone bad.

Set in the Russian immigrant neighborhood of Rego Park in Queens, N.Y., the book has earned glowing reviews and been described as Sex and the City meets Fiddler on the Roof. After a number of tortured love affairs, 36-year-old Anna takes the conventional route—marriage, and then a child.  Eventually, though, she follows her heart, a path that does not lead to happily ever after. While the novel’s setting may reflect Old World ways in a Russian immigrant neighborhood, the author says that the questions Anna grapples with are universal and 21st century.

Reyn—who is a Pitt English professor—knows both worlds firsthand. She was born in Moscow and immigrated to Brooklyn with her parents in 1981, when she was 7. Two years ago, she returned to Russia for the first time. It was a fascinating but emotional journey, especially for her parents, she says. She detailed aspects of the experience in a 2008 article for Town & Country Travel. In addition to earning degrees at Rutgers University and Bennington College, she received a Pitt master’s degree in Slavic languages and literature.

While Anna K. is Reyn’s first novel, her fiction and essays appear in anthologies, including Not Like I’m Jealous or Anything: The Jealousy Book; Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women; and A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection. She has reviewed books for major American daily newspapers and is the editor of the nonfiction anthology Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State. She recently was awarded the prestigious Goldberg Prize for emerging Jewish writers.

“I was raised on 19th-century British literature—George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Dickens,” Reyn says. She also developed a taste for more modern authors like Virginia Woolf and, later, Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. Multicultural authors like Richard Rodriguez and Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat, among others, helped her find her voice. “Those were writers who were really influential in getting me to start writing myself,” she says.

Those were writers who taught her to welcome and nourish the characters that arrive uninvited in the quiet hours of the night.

The Lost Throne
The cryptic ramblings of a famed archeologist spark a global adventure, more than a century after his death. In The Lost Throne (Putnam), the fourth thriller by Chris Kuzneski (A&S ’91, EDUC ’93G), the plot unfolds through the investigation of a massacre at a Greek monastery and the search for an American historian who is running for her life in Russia. Eventually, the storylines merge together in a shocking conclusion, revealing an ancient secret.
—Peter Kusnic

Welcome to the Poverty Class
Growing up during the Great Depression, Nicholas Kayafas saw his father give groceries from his store to men struggling to feed their families. Later, as a manager, he witnessed the inner workings of a billion-dollar corporation. In Welcome to the Poverty Class (RoseDog Books), Kayafas (CBA ’54, KGSB ’60) draws from experience to inform his analysis of the growing underemployment and unemployment problems of recessionary America.
—PK

The World of 1950—The End of Innocence
Discharged from the Navy, the young sailor returns to Pittsburgh’s North Side. He finds his father sick, his brother drunk, and his mother worried about feeding her family. Phillip Gross vows to free himself from grinding poverty and, with the odds against him, pursues medicine. So begins the semi-autobiographical novel, The World of 1950—The End of Innocence (Vantage Press) by Will Roth (A&S ’50, MED ’58). The story depicts a driven young man who, despite an unsupportive family, marshals the power to believe in himself.
—PK

The Fiddle Case
In the intoxicating heat of July 1972, best friends Anna and Cindy rescue a stolen fiddle from a Kentucky music festival. With an obsessive folk music cult in pursuit, the two cross the country to find its rightful owner. On the way, sex, lies, guns, and a broken-down car threaten their friendship and lives. The Fiddle Case (GATE Press), the second novel by Christine Palamidessi Moore (A&S ’73), expresses in lyrical prose the dark underbelly of the peace and love generation.
—PK

Something remarkable happened at the University of Pittsburgh between the academic year that spanned 1969 and 1970. Within roughly a year, enrollment of Black students doubled to more than 600, a Black Studies Program was created, and the number of African American faculty members began to increase. Looking back, that period marked a defining moment in Pitt’s long and complex history, making progress toward a more multicultural campus.

Wharton-Boyd

Today, African American professors at Pitt continue to attract national and international distinction. A Department of Africana Studies (formerly Black Studies) offers a multitude of courses, academic paths, and perspectives on the Black experience worldwide, advancing the work of both faculty and students. Thousands of Black students apply to attend the University and, each year, many are accepted to enroll as undergraduate or graduate students. Among these students, some have earned top academic honors, including prestigious Truman, Goldwater, Marshall, and Rhodes scholarships—and even a MacArthur genius award and a Nobel Prize.

“I hope what has happened at Pitt in recent decades will set a standard and be a model for other academic institutions,” says Linda Wharton-Boyd, president of the University’s African American Alumni Council.

What has happened at Pitt was sparked by an event that took place four decades ago. At the time, the nation was experiencing political turmoil and social unrest. The Vietnam War was dividing the nation, stirred by a national military draft. The civil rights movement was advancing. Sit-ins and street protests were common. Violence sometimes erupted in this sea of change, including the assassinations of three national leaders: President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968.

During that turbulent era, many students at Pitt and other universities were swept up in the issues of the day. Black students, for instance, often felt invisible—enrolled in small numbers, lacking Black faculty mentors, excluded from the fullness of campus life, and studying in courses that largely ignored their culture and history. Following King’s assassination, some Pitt students pressed the administration for change, without satisfactory results.

So, on January 15, 1969—the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., nine months after his 1968 assassination—the students took action. On a crisp winter night, about 50 students who were part of the new Black Action Society left the William Pitt Union, crossed Bigelow Boulevard, and entered the Cathedral of Learning. They took elevators to the eighth floor, where they gathered in the campus computer center, a central depository of important University records.  There, they barricaded the center’s doors and began a sit-in to bring change to campus.

The students, led by Joe McCormick (A&S ’73G, ’79G), wanted active recruitment of more Black students, faculty, and administrators. They wanted greater campus recognition of Black life and culture. They wanted to be visible, full members of the University community.

News of the sit-in traveled quickly. Student organizers entered other classrooms and recruited additional protesters. Members of the local community arrived with food and warm clothing. Several academic leaders served as intermediaries between the students and the administration, assisting negotiations. It took about seven hours, but eventually the doors to the computer center opened and so did a new era of progress at Pitt.

Today, more than 16,000 Black students are Pitt alumni, living and working as leaders, professionals, and contributing citizens of the world. Among them are Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai (A&S ’65G), MacArthur Fellow and Pitt trustee William Strickland (A&S ’70), Rhodes scholar Donna Roberts (A&S ’85), Marshall scholar Rebecca Hubbard (A&S ’99), Truman scholar Adam Iddriss (ENGR ’07, A&S ’07), Goldwater scholar Benjamin Gordon (ENGR ’07), and super-achiever Daniel Armanios (ENGR ’07, A&S ’07) who won Rhodes, Truman, and Goldwater scholarships during his years at Pitt. Today, the Black experience is routinely celebrated on campus through activities like the K. Leroy Irvis Black History Month Program, the art of the Kuntu Repertory Theatre and Kuntu Writers Workshop, the performances of the Black Dance Workshop and the African Drum and Dance Ensemble, and the endeavors of the Black Action Society. Today, the University of Pittsburgh is enrolling some of the best students—of many heritages—from throughout the nation and around the world. And much of this was sparked by courageous students who, in 1969, had their own dream of what the future could be.

To commemorate that dream and all that has become possible since 1969, Pitt’s AAAC—led by Wharton-Boyd, who is CEO of the Wharton Group, a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. —recently launched a historic $3 million scholarship campaign. Through the years, the group has reached out and provided support to students of color at Pitt. With the assistance of Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg, the AAAC has helped a number of students on campus, nurturing future leaders and change-makers.

The new scholarship campaign will ensure that many more students with high aspirations, from disadvantaged backgrounds, will have the financial support to complete their degrees and pursue their dreams.

Wharton-Boyd (A&S ’72, ’75G, ’79G) says the greater potential of the campaign is not only to raise funds, but also to increase alumni participation. “We realized that we had so many alumni who needed to be reconnected,” she says. AAAC board members knew that some alumni who attended Pitt during the civil rights era needed to see the new Pitt and have an opportunity to reconcile their old feelings about their University experience. Remarkably, many of those alumni are now the AAAC’s strongest supporters.

Luddy Hayden (A&S ’66, EDUC ’68) was an assistant dean in 1969 and served as a key negotiator on that January night, along with Jack L. Daniel (A&S ’63, ’66G, ’68G) and Eugene Davis (EDUC ’69G, ’72G). Today, Daniel is Distinguished Service Professor of Communication at Pitt and the University’s former vice provost for undergraduate students and former dean of students.

Hayden believes the new scholarship campaign shows that Black alumni “are proud to be part of this University and want to help ensure that African Americans have opportunities to attend and have success at Pitt.”

The energy of the AAAC mission is driving change. The group participates in the Apple Seed Community Project with Pittsburgh schools. It has reintroduced to the University an annual baccalaureate service and also has initiated the RISE mentoring program. In 2006, AAAC held its first freshmen send-off event in the D.C. area, sparking expansions to Baltimore, Harrisburg, Cleveland, and Atlanta. In October 2009, the Sankofa Homecoming Weekend marked one of the largest turnouts ever. It also launched the public phase of the $3 million scholarship campaign. The AAAC intends to grow financial resources and also support the student experience through an extensive network of accomplished alumni who can offer mentorship and guidance.

So far, the fund has raised more than $1 million from 707 donors and established three giving priorities: the Bebe Moore Campbell Scholarship Fund, the Jack L. Daniel Endowed Book Award, and the AAAC Endowed Scholarship Fund. One of many beneficiaries is freshman premed student Kyle Anthony, a Chicago native with eight siblings. His AAAC scholarship will make it possible for him to reach his goal of becoming a doctor. He walks through a door of opportunity opened years ago by a group of students who pushed for positive change at Pitt. Many of them went on to distinguished careers and lasting success. That’s something worth sharing.

Swaminathan

The child is dressed in shorts and a simple shirt. Shoeless, he walks through brown fields to get to the village store. The shop’s walls, shelves, and corners are filled with cans, boxes, fruits, and other goods. The child, about 6 years old, enters and asks for a brand-name soap—he insists on this brand.

Nearby, an adult is intrigued by the exchange. She notices the boy’s attachment to the brand name; she has witnessed this before. Surprisingly, brand loyalty is widespread in this remote village in northern India, a place connected to the nearest town only by a dirt road. Few here have electricity, and there is only one television in the entire community. The village economy depends on agricultural products, which local farmers carry in creaking bullock carts to sell in neighboring towns. When they return, their carts are laden with brand-name products.

A newly minted MBA, Vanitha Swaminathan, was the observant adult in the village store. “Here was a child who could barely read or write, but he knew the brand name of a soap marketed by a multinational company,” she recalls. At the time, she was working as a marketing manager at a consumer goods conglomerate. She was in the village to explore how to strengthen distribution systems to more effectively supply rural areas. She was struck by the power of commercial brands to reach so deeply across cultures, class, and life situations to influence purchasing decisions.

Swaminathan, who is today a marketing professor in Pitt’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, says the encounter with the young boy shaped her business interests and her research, influencing her to pursue the links between shopping habits, individual values, upbringing, and self-perception.

“In fast-growing economies like China and India, the middle class is increasingly status-conscious and brand-conscious,” says Swaminathan. “This increased focus on brand names—and global brand names, in particular—symbolizes consumers’ aspirations to become integrated with the global scene.”

At the Katz School, Swaminathan’s research explores how companies build relationships with consumers through brands. Her expertise is in branding strategy and the role of marketing strategies in creating value for a firm and its shareholders. Her work examines the fascinating world of consumer behavior and attitudes in response to branding and marketing strategies.

Marketing strategies have moved beyond simply trying to persuade consumers to purchase goods. Today, companies also try to increase consumers’ attachment to brands. And that attachment reflects a complex set of factors.

A few years ago, Swaminathan began working with Pitt PhD student Karen Stilley and colleague Rohini Ahluwalia of the University of Minnesota’s management school. Their research results were published last spring in the Journal of Consumer Research in an article titled “When Brand Personality Matters: The Moderating Role of Attachment Styles.” The research built upon previous work by others which showed that brand personality—qualities associated with human traits like sincerity or excitement—can be a vehicle of consumer self-expression, instrumental in a consumer’s expressions of actual self, ideal self, or aspects of self.

Swaminathan and her research colleagues conducted a series of three survey-driven studies, each with 150 to 200 student participants. The research examined how consumers “attach” to various brand styles and how that attachment—which can offer social or emotional security—may be linked to a brand personality. For instance, some young adults taking the study viewed Nike shoes and Pepsi as exciting—brands that exude qualities such as individuality, youthfulness, and vitality. Other study participants associated Gap jeans, Coca-Cola, and Campbell’s soups as sincere brands that exude warmth and caring.

The issues, though, are more complex. Consumers become attached to brands through a mix of factors involving the human psyche. Some individuals, explains Swaminathan, feel they are unworthy of love and fear rejection. For them, brand attachment translates into an emotional connection to material possessions. Beyond that, brand personality acquires heightened meaning when consumers interact with others in a social context. Then, it further signifies an external image that denotes a particular station in life, either attained or aspired to.

Swaminathan’s research integrates consumer habits with attachment theory, a principle that originated in social psychology and is now used to help describe an individual’s interpersonal relationship style.

“Those who have a low view of self and are afraid of rejection, but would like to have lasting relationships, are much more likely to choose sincere brands,” she says. “However, fearful individuals who have a low view of self and fear rejection, but who also have shallow and fleeting relationships, are much more attracted to exciting brands like Pepsi and Nike.”

Here, the study revealed something unexpected: Brand personality might hold the key to influencing purchases by these excitement-seeking consumers, a finding that was not obvious in previous consumer research.

The study helps us understand that consumers imbue material possessions and brands in particular with meaning; that brands are intimately connected with our hopes, feelings, desires, and relational aspirations, says Swaminathan. “Brands are bridges that help us connect to significant others.”

So, for the young boy walking through dun-colored fields in India to shop at a small store, the purchase of a brand-name soap connects him to something much larger and more complex. Already, he’s part of the global village.

Jimenez

Sometimes, when Daniel Jimenez closes his eyes at night, a galaxy of star-like fluorescent green spots appears against the pitch-black screen of his mind. In the constellations of his dreams, each star contains an amorphous nub surrounded by branches of thin, dangling strings. The strings float, undulating in the darkness like ethereal sea creatures moved by invisible currents.

In the waking world, Jimenez—a 28-year-old graduate student—spends many of his days hunched over a fluorescence microscope studying the brain sections of mice. He’s well along the path to obtaining a PhD degree. Since arriving at Pitt in 2004, Jimenez has focused on understanding the properties and promise of neurons, specialized cells in the nervous system that dispatch all the activities of the mammalian brain.

Unlike other cells in the human body, most neurons don’t reproduce. Their number is finite. Yet in a few areas of the brain, new neurons are generated throughout life and integrate into existing networks. These rarer neurons, born anew in adults, are believed to hold answers for the future treatment of traumatic brain injuries and degenerative diseases. Ultimately, those answers are what Jimenez pursues, and the work is intense.

“I see neurons even in my sleep,” he admits.

In his dreams, each fluorescent core represents the control hub of a neuron. Its dangling strings look like dendrites. In the real world, these branch-like fibers receive electrochemical signals from other neurons and transmit them to the cell’s information-processing center. How the newborn neurons build these transmission connections and what factors control this process are of tremendous interest to scientists seeking to coax other parts of the brain to generate new cells as replacements for damaged or dying ones.

Jimenez is a sixth-year graduate student in the final months of completing his Pitt doctoral degree. Graduate students are experts-in-training: They are the ones crafting the keys to unlock new, raw knowledge. He is part of a legacy of learning passed down through the centuries to create a factory, of sorts, for producing knowledge-masters. Graduate education continues to be the world’s greatest hope for solving daunting challenges in medicine and health care, energy, climate change, poverty, public education, space exploration, and on and on.

A key component of a Pitt doctoral program—in any field—is the opportunity for students to look at problems creatively, from various vantage points, says James V. Maher, a Pitt professor of physics, who recently announced he is stepping down from his long-held role as provost and senior vice chancellor to return to the faculty. “You have to be able to study a problem, look for holes in the data, and wonder from where you might be able to draw a solution. It’s essentially a creative process.”

At the most fundamental level, doctoral education involves learning everything there is to know about a small part of the world—and then doing the original research necessary to deepen that understanding, says Patricia Beeson, Pitt’s vice provost for graduate and undergraduate studies. Increasingly, too, doctoral students must understand their own niches of expertise within a vastly complex world of evolving research, conducted by others worldwide. Each new piece of raw knowledge helps to solve the larger puzzle. “With PhD training, there is really no endpoint,” says Beeson, who also is a professor of economics and public policy. “It is all part of a continuum on the road to becoming an independent thinker and scholar.”

For Jimenez, that has meant literally years of his life devoted to advancing his own knowledge—observing brain cells through the lens of a microscope, reading the scientific literature on brain neuronal networks in the olfactory system, designing research projects to reveal new facets of information, analyzing computer data and figuring out how to interpret and communicate his findings, and writing grant proposals to fund his work.

Most of his time is spent in the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Neuroscience and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint venture between Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University.

Now, with graduation approaching, he can safely say he is one of the world’s foremost experts on neuronal activity in the mouse olfactory bulb and, specifically, how such actions affect the integration and survival of newly generated neurons in that region of the brain. “It’s a weird thing to think I am one of about five people anywhere who know all about how this stuff works,” he says.

Across the nation, interest in PhD education is on the rise, according to a recent report by the National Science Foundation. In 2008, the Doctor of Philosophy degree was awarded to 48,802 U.S. students, an increase of 14.5 percent over the past decade.

Reflecting these national trends, the population of PhD students at Pitt also has grown in recent years, as have the students’ achievements. The number of PhDs bestowed by the University has risen by 30 percent since 1995 to more than 400 each year. This increase ranks Pitt 18th among public institutions and 29th among all universities nationwide in the number of PhDs it produces, according to the Center for Measuring University Performance. Pitt has a particularly stellar tradition of research excellence across many disciplines, which is part of what draws top students, like Daniel Jimenez, to the University from throughout the nation and the world.

Jimenez has been interested in science ever since he was a youngster growing up as a first-generation American born into a successful family of Cuban immigrants. His father, now an attorney, and nine siblings escaped to the United States just before the Cuban missile crisis, fleeing oppression in Havana under Fidel Castro. The siblings were placed in orphanages and foster homes across the country before finally being reunited in Miami in the late 1960s.

“I’m proud of my family,” says Jimenez, naming their professions as he points out his aunts, uncles, and cousins in a photograph from a family reunion. A doctor. Two lawyers. A firefighter. Several small-business owners. A veterinarian. An engineer. “When I get my PhD,” Jimenez says,  “that will be a first—even in a family where everyone is working really hard and doing their best.”

Jimenez set out to become an engineer, earning his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. But during his undergraduate studies, he became fascinated with neuroscience and took advantage of the active collaborative ties between Pitt and its neighbor Carnegie Mellon. He began working in the laboratory of Pitt neurobiology professor Elias Aizenman, who studies cellular signaling pathways that lead to the death of neurons. “Neuroscience sits at this very creative intersection of biochemistry, genetics, physics, and many other disciplines,” Jimenez says. “I just fell in love with it.” Inspired by his research experiences in Aizenman’s lab, Jimenez applied to Pitt’s graduate program in neuroscience and enrolled immediately after completing his undergraduate education.

Making the transition from undergraduate school to unstructured graduate work isn’t always easy—and it isn’t for everyone, says Beeson. “You have to enjoy having extreme focus on one topic until you get your answer. Students who are really good at directed study can have a difficult time asking original questions and setting up their own course of study to answer those questions.”

Jimenez has thrived with this kind of intellectual freedom in Pitt’s neuroscience program, where years are spent doing independent research, which brings the joys of intellectual discovery and the anguish that occurs when students encounter inevitable hurdles. Overcoming those roadblocks requires persistence and a willingness to fail without taking failure personally—much like athletes seeking to excel at their sport, Beeson says. “Whenever you try to be the best at something, that’s painful,” she explains. “But with that pain comes this incredible feeling of satisfaction that you never knew you could actually know so much or do so much on your own.”

Jimenez recalls the frustration of long months when none of his experiments worked and his data weren’t making sense. “It seems to happen to everyone,” he says. “Somehow, with the help of your advisor, you get through it.” One of his principal PhD advisors is Nathaniel Urban (A&S ’91, ’96G, ’98G), who earned his own PhD in neuroscience from Pitt and also serves on the faculty here and at Carnegie Mellon. The mentor’s main role is to teach students how to ask original questions—and how to answer them—to advance their fields.

“A PhD gives you a certain mindset of thinking about things in a rigorous, data-driven, highly empirical way that is essential in so many other areas,” says Urban. “More and more careers today require a certain amount of technical sophistication. There’s a demand for people who can dive into a difficult area, where there’s not a great deal of understanding as to how things work, and figure it out. In some sense, that’s really what a PhD prepares you to do.”

The outcome that signifies mastery at the doctoral level is a dissertation, an in-depth research account that makes a novel contribution to an area of study and demonstrates mastery of scholarship in a particular discipline. In the humanities and social sciences, the dissertation usually serves as the foundation for a first book, whereas in science and engineering, it can comprise several technical articles published during the student’s graduate years. Ultimately, PhD students must defend their dissertations publicly before faculty committees that act as final juries in evaluating the work.

“The dissertation is the key component of doctoral training,” says Alan Sved, a Pitt professor of neuroscience and psychiatry. “It is developing a research project and seeing it through to completion,” adds Sved, who is chair of Pitt’s Department of Neuroscience. “Students must demonstrate that they know how to analyze the data they collect and that their findings are significant enough to be published.”

Still, everything a PhD candidate needs to know is not embodied in the dissertation alone. Doctoral students learn to become world-class researchers, but they also prepare for the demands of careers in academia and the world at large. This means developing the communications and management skills needed to run their own offices, mentorships, and laboratories—or, alternatively, to work in policymaking, industry, or other future-shaping careers. They learn from those who, before them, traveled across unexplored terrain to forge new paths of knowledge.

“It’s an apprenticeship model,” says Beeson, “and we still haven’t, after all of these hundreds of years, figured out a better way to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next.”

These days, a key aspect of this process is the ability to make leading-edge discoveries by collaborating with other smart people from various disciplines. And this is an area in which the University of Pittsburgh excels. In particular, Pitt has emerged as a leader in training young scientists, mainly by rethinking the very notion of what graduate studies can be. It has established new graduate programs that are based upon collaborations among multiple schools, including medicine, arts and sciences, and engineering.

More than half of Pitt PhD graduates obtain faculty positions at other colleges and universities, joining the ranks of those responsible for educating the next generations of university students and lifelong knowledge-seekers. The number and quality of these placements have increased in recent years—a sign that Pitt has clearly become a major player on the national stage vis-à-vis doctoral education. Many other PhDs receive postdoctoral fellowships, often the first step on a path toward key leadership positions in academia, government, industry, and entrepreneurial ventures.

The importance of doctoral education to the future of our society can hardly be overestimated, Beeson says. “We want to develop our PhD students as scholars in the fullest sense of the word—scholars who study, who learn, and who share what they learn in ways that benefit the broader community.”

During his years as a graduate student, Jimenez has worked to polish a range of skills. He is, for instance, working to promote diversity in neuroscience through an appointment to the professional development committee of the Society for Neuroscience. This year, he served as president of Pitt’s Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. He also organized science policy seminars at Pitt through his role on the Center for Neuroscience Outreach and Advocacy Committee. “Daniel understands that—for the scientific disciplines to survive—the public needs to know what we do and why it is important,” Sved says. “He is really energized to take up that cause.”

Beyond this whirl of activity, Jimenez remains keenly focused on his research, on the secrets still held by newborn neurons in the adult brain. Visions of fluorescent cells keep glowing in the dark, lighting the way ahead.

Henderson

In New York City, a teenage chef prepares a Southern-style meal. While she marinates a pork tenderloin, a woman peppers her with questions: “What are you doing now? What recipe are you using? When did you first fall in love with cooking?”

The woman asking the questions, Devra Pransky Henderson (A&S ’04), is preparing the chef for an appearance on the Today television show. Henderson is the senior director of communications for the Art Institutes, a system of 47 colleges throughout North America that provide education in culinary arts, fashion, and other artistic fields. Every year, Henderson manages four scholarship competitions for American and Canadian high school students. The winners receive tuition scholarships to Arts Institutes colleges.

Last year, Sammy Jo Claussen of Kansas City won the Best Teen Chef Competition. To promote Claussen’s success, Henderson set her up for a segment on Today. They spent two days in Manhattan rehearsing for the show. Henderson invited a food stylist to give the teen chef tips on presenting food for television, explained the do’s and don’ts of clip-on microphones, and role-played the part of a television host. Working with students, Henderson says, is one of the most rewarding parts of her job because she helps them to hone communications skills that they’ll use throughout their lives.

When the Today segment aired, Claussen smiled and spoke confidently, all while cooking under the studio lights. “She really just blossomed in terms of presence—from a senior in high school to an on-her-way professional,” says Henderson. Well done.

Flanigan

On the first day of school, a teacher greets returning students as they file into a classroom and find their seats. The last student to enter, a 14-year-old who speaks only Korean, is not sure where to sit. The teacher guides him to a desk and holds out his hand for a high five. The boy, who has autism, remains quiet, his face contorted with confusion. Every year comes with new challenges.

Luckily the teacher, Michael Flanigan, is not afraid of challenges. Diagnosed with epilepsy in the sixth grade, he experienced seizures that disrupted key points in his life as a young man—from a calculus final at Pitt to a supervisory job he held at a loading dock. He worried that epilepsy would prevent him from graduating college or having a career; but he also knew that many superachievers throughout history have excelled despite the condition.

So Flanigan (SIS ’85) pushed ahead. He earned a Pitt bachelor’s degree in information science and became involved in special education instruction in Maryland. He also earned a brown belt in Tae Kwan Do, which proved to him that the mind can overcome physical obstacles. He became a certified personal trainer to help others achieve their goals, too. In 2009, he wrote a motivational book, I Know I Can (Xlibris). The title references a mantra he has used to build confidence. The words also have become a mantra in Flanigan’s classroom.

Later in the school year, the Korean student smacks Flanigan’s hand. “High five,” he says as Flanigan playfully shakes the pain away. The teen is speaking some English and adapting to American culture. He’s surpassing challenges—just like his teacher.

Revis

Only the alert eyes of a New York Jets cornerback show through his face mask as he looks straight ahead at the wide receiver he’s covering on a hot  August day. When the quarterback takes the snap, the wide receiver sprints along the sideline and cornerback Darrelle Revis shadows him. As the pigskin spirals toward them, Revis and the wide receiver both leap. Revis is in a better position, and he grabs the ball in his outstretched fingers before falling on his back, inches from the sideline.

That interception was one of many impressive plays Revis made during the Jets’ summer football camp and throughout the regular season, topped off by the playoffs.

Pitt fans may remember other dazzling plays when Revis was a Panther—notably a punt he returned for a touchdown against the rival West Virginia Mountaineers in 2006. The ESPN network selected it as the “College Football Play of the Year.” The Jets took Revis (Class of ’08) in the first round of the 2007 NFL draft, and he started all 16 regular season games during his rookie season. He has played in the past two Pro Bowls and was named 2010 Defensive Player of the Year by USA Today.

Off the field, Revis pursues his interests in business and fashion as part owner of a clothing line called Loco Superstar. But football is his clear priority. Each time he hits the turf, he’s out there, leaping for that ball.

Novak

As the new year rolls along, I’m happy to offer some hopeful news. Despite the challenges posed by the economic recession, the University of Pittsburgh campaign ended 2009 on a positive note, thanks to all of you. We ended our past fiscal year in July 2009, by raising more than $100 million in commitments for the sixth consecutive year.

The fiscal environment has been challenging for our entire nation. Even so, we have found that our donors have remained engaged with Pitt and dedicated to helping us raise funds, especially in support of Pitt students.

Moving forward, there’s more good news. The University of Pittsburgh’s African American Alumni Council has launched the public phase of a $3 million campaign to fund scholarships for underrepresented students. The launch was part of the Sankofa Homecoming Weekend, celebrating diversity gains at Pitt during the past four decades.

The campaign is providing aid through several channels, including a scholarship fund that honors the late Bebe Moore Campbell—an alumnus, Pitt trustee, and nationally acclaimed best-selling author—who was a great believer in the power of education and the spirit of giving. Another endowed fund honors Jack L. Daniel—an alumnus, faculty member, and former vice provost at Pitt—who has encouraged diversity throughout his years as a student and academic leader.

To help Pitt support its students, please contact us by phone at 1-800-817-8943 or go online to www.giveto.pitt.edu. Thank you for your continued support of the University and its endeavors to create a better future for all of us.

Hail to Pitt!
Albert J. Novak Jr.
Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement

Pitt elected a new chair of its Board of Trustees this summer. Alumnus Stephen R. Tritch (ENGR ’71, KGSB ’77), a retired CEO and president of the Westinghouse Electric Co., leads the board that oversees University operations.

Keep pace with Pitt through Twitter and Facebook.
Find out what’s new at PittTweet or www.facebook.com/upitt.

Pitt undergraduate business students have won their third national automotive marketing competition since 2006. In June, students in a marketing course taught by business professor Robert Gilbert won first place in the Nissan Cube Collegiate Challenge for the nation’s best on-campus marketing campaign for the Nissan Cube car.

In recognition of her work to improve opportunities for underrepresented business owners, Pitt’s Audrey Murrell received the Minority Small Business Champion Award from the U.S. Small Business Administration. She’s a professor and director of the David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership in Pitt’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. To learn more about Murrell’s work, read “The M Factor” in the spring 2008 issue of Pitt Magazine.

G-20 Good Word

The city’s David L. Lawrence Convention Center, which hosted the summit, is the only LEED-certified “green” convention center in the world. Pittsburgh and the University also showcased the city’s many other “green” programs and technologies under development.

Many international journalists were impressed with what they saw in   Pittsburgh. Before the summit, Pitt and UPMC hosted media tours of innovative programs and sites. Reports by media organizations like England’s  Guardian and Germany’s Deutsche-Welle touted Pitt and other local institutions as crucial partners in the city’s economic revival.

The summit’s opening reception was hosted by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Oakland, not far from campus. After the G-20, Pitt students could visit the conservatory to view the locally crafted tables built especially for the event. The wooden tables were hewn from oak and London Plane trees salvaged from Pittsburgh’s Riverview Park.

The biological experiment should have been a success. The teenage researcher did everything her mentor told her to do; but now, for some reason, the numbers aren’t adding up.

She hunches over a lab bench and stares at the calculations in her notebook, trying to find the glitch. According to the numbers, there’s too much phosphorus in her lab solution. Why?

While the teen, Sanche Mabins, ponders what went wrong, her Pitt mentor, Alejandro Samhan-Arias, comes over and leans on the black laboratory countertop. He reminds her that, in science research, one tiny detail can alter an entire experiment. Together, they review her laboratory log. Perhaps she didn’t extract enough lipids from the mouse hearts at the beginning of the experiment. Perhaps she didn’t keep everything at the right temperature. Perhaps she didn’t pour her solution into the correct container. There are many points to examine.

Mabins is one of six Pittsburgh high school students who participated this summer in the Short Term Education Experience for Research (STEER) program in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health. The annual program, supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, exposes teenagers to the rigors of laboratory work, as well as to careers in environmental health.

“We have identified a rupture in the pipeline for future environmental health practitioners in undergraduate programs,” says Bruce Pitt, coordinator of the STEER program and chair of the school’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health. “The remedy is to reach down to students early, so they know their options before making long-term plans.” The program, jointly run by the department and by Pitt’s Center for Minority Health, also focuses on educating underrepresented students who might otherwise have limited experience with real-world laboratory work.

Mabins, who began her senior year of high school this fall, is interested in studying medicine. She applied to STEER to explore what laboratory research is like. She was paired up with Samhan-Arias, a postdoctoral environmental health researcher at Pitt, to participate in his studies of how the environment can affect cancers. “No matter what Sanche decides to do in the future,” he says, “learning to solve a problem is invaluable.”

Finally, as Mabins reviews her lab notes, it clicks. The solution evaporates at room temperature—of course! The loss of as little as 10 microliters of solution can dramatically increase phosphorus levels. That’s why her numbers are off.  Next time, she’ll know.

Infectious disease experts in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health have traced the genetic roots of the H1N1 flu to an illness that sickened pigs at the Cedar Rapids Swine Show in Iowa in 1918. In the 91 years since, the virus has mixed with other flu strains, notably reappearing in human populations at a military base in New Jersey in 1976, then in China and the former Soviet Union the following year. “Studying the history of emergence and evolution of flu viruses doesn’t provide us with a blueprint for the future, but it does reveal general patterns, and this kind of information is critical if we are to be as prepared as possible,” says Donald S. Burke, a senior author of the study, professor and dean of public health, and holder of the UPMC-Jonas Salk Chair in Global Health. The findings were published in the July 16 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The Pitt Alumni Association is changing. Take, for example, our presence at away games this year and the new ways we are acknowledging those who invest in life membership: Life members are now listed on our Web site and have received an exclusive 2010 Life Member calendar.

Some things never change, however, like the loyalty and dedication of alumni such as Valerie Ketchen and Arnie Epstein. They, and hundreds of volunteers like them, are invaluable to the advancement of Pitt. Also in this issue is a chat with Lindsay Retchless, staff member and alum from Bradford, representing one of our vibrant regional campuses.

Homecoming was more amazing than ever this year. You will find photos from the Pathway to Professions networking reception in our scrapbook and can look forward to more coverage of this fall’s Homecoming in the next issue of Pitt Magazine. Meanwhile, check out tons of photos from Homecoming and much more at our photo galleries by visiting our web site: www.alumni.pitt.edu.

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

When Pitt launched the Building Our Future Together campaign for the University of Pittsburgh, our overarching goal was to aid our students with scholarship support and to provide them with the highest quality education.

Our campaign to date has done just that by increasing scholarship support by more than 104 percent and providing Pitt students with classroom lessons and experiences that are top notch.

One such classroom experience is described in the story on the accompanying page. For decades, Pitt students have learned important historical lessons from a soft-spoken gentleman who lived through the unimaginable horror of being a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. Jack Sittsamer helped bring to light the very real terror that the Holocaust imposed on the lives of millions of innocent people.

The Sittsamer family has joined our effort to ensure that Pitt students will learn from the past. The family, with help from others, created the Sittsamer Fund for Holocaust Studies, which will support Holocaust education by bringing survivors into Pitt’s classrooms so that students can hear these personal stories, which will be preserved for future generations. The fund also will support students involved in related educational projects in future years, as survivors become increasingly scarce.

The newly established Sittsamer Fund reminds us that voices from the past can lead us to a better future. The courage and heart of Jack Sittsamer and other survivors will now have an enduring impact on generations to come.

Hail to Pitt!
Al

A strawberry plant reveals evolution in the making

Like some queen of green, the bold little Fragaria virginiana thrives inside a campus greenhouse. Five white petals guard her yellow pistils, all surrounded by a sentinel of jagged-edged leaves. To the untrained eye, this strawberry plant does not stand out as anything special. But she is a floral diva, worthy of the throne-size black flowerpot in which she sits in the biology department in Langley Hall.

More than a decade ago, Pitt biologist Tia-Lynn Ashman created this sprouting domain, where two long lines of strawberry plants in small black pots stand at attention like soldierly green minions before the queen plant. Early in her Pitt career, Ashman began searching for clues to a puzzle that has intrigued biologists for more than a century. What happened in the evolutionary process to create separate male and female biology?

Surprisingly, the Virginian wild strawberry plant, F. virginiana, is providing some intriguing insights into the mysteries of gender evolution.

Ashman, who studied behavioral ecology and evolution as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, earned a doctoral degree in ecology from UC Davis. She became fascinated by questions like: Why are some flowers fragrant dazzlers, but others plain and without perfume? Why do some blossoms thrive for months, while others survive only a few hours?

Another mystery intrigued her, too. Some plants have coexisting, functioning genes for both male and female development. Could these combined-gender plants, known as hermaphrodites, reveal keys to the evolution of separate male and female development?

Not long after arriving at Pitt in 1994, Ashman began searching for a plant species in which the evolution into separate sexes was not yet complete. She found a contender at the University’s Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology in Crawford County, where she discovered wild strawberry plants growing alongside railroad tracks. The plants were F. virginiana, and they had an interesting ratio of far more hermaphrodites and females than males. Soon, she and her research team, with help from several hundred Pitt undergraduates, were growing the plants on campus at Langley Hall and examining their propagation.

Ashman discovered that this species of strawberry sits at an opportune time in evolutionary history—smack in the middle of transitioning from hermaphrodites into the separate male and female sexes. Hermaphroditic plants, with both male and female genetics, are self-breeding.

Significantly, Ashman’s research has revealed that F. virginiana sometimes sprouts “neuter” plants, which are unable to propagate sexually, as well as male plants that never produce fruit. It turns out that F. virginiana hermaphrodites have two interesting gene positions on a single sex chromosome: One gene location controls male sterility and fertility while the other controls female sterility and fertility. Through the process of genetic propagation, offspring might inherit both fertility types and become hermaphrodites, or inherit one fertility and one sterility type to become either male or female, or inherit both sterility types to become completely sterile and unable to reproduce. The fully sterile plants die out.

Ashman’s work shows that, through the confluence of genetics and evolution, the frequency of single-sex offspring increases: Male and female plants become more abundant, and hermaphrodites recede. Further, her findings elucidate how evolution—Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” principle—favors separate-sex divergence. Two separate plants, male and female, result in better plant efficiency, says Ashman, because a single plant doesn’t need to develop both reproductive organs (pistils and anthers). Also, the existence of separate male and female plants improves healthy genetic diversity. Separate-sex characteristics allow more plants to take better advantage of different soils and environments, favoring more abundant reproduction. Meanwhile, a self-breeding hermaphroditic plant is more likely to produce offspring expressing detrimental mutations, leading to reproductive inefficiencies.

By studying the progeny of key plants, Ashman is gaining a better understanding of genetic characteristics and how separate sexes evolve from hermaphroditism. She also is comparing F. virginiana’s development to other plants farther along the evolutionary cycle and gleaning new insights into sex chromosome development.

Soon her 200 plants will multiply to 600 inside Langley Hall, where each is providing new evidence to advance her studies. She’s using computer analysis to track genetic makeup and to create a detailed genetic map of the offspring produced by her throne room full of  F. virginiana.

A few years ago, Ashman published related research in the prestigious journal Science, noting that animals and flowering plants use similar strategies to increase successful propagation. Yet, many questions remain.  What else affects or favors the biology of male and female divergence? Harsh climates, as Darwin suggested in his theory of evolution? What about the effects of pathogens or the destruction of certain pollinators? Or the ratio of the sexes in a given location? What role might a habitat change play? What causes genetic mutations that affect sexual morphing?

Ashman’s greenhouse kingdom is sprouting fresh evidence in the ongoing quest to understand gender divergence and diversity.

On a Saturday morning, a dozen Pitt students gather around as a guide recites her cell phone number—“in case you get lost or need help,” she explains. The students, all hailing from thousands of miles away, are getting ready for fall classes. They dutifully punch her number into their cell phones before grabbing red shopping carts and setting out. They’re in the Target store at the Waterfront shopping center several miles from campus. Pitt’s Office of International Services has chauffeured them here— in two yellow school buses—as part of an orientation to help international students adjust to their new surroundings.

In the laundry detergent aisle, freshman Yolandi Van Der Merwe from South Africa considers the options. “We brought clothes and now we’re buying everything else,” she says, echoing a common strategy for international students. Despite enduring a 24-hour flight from Cape Town to Pittsburgh, Van Der Merwe, who plans to study bioengineering, seems in good spirits as she sizes up the differences between powder and liquid detergents.

Over in the electronics section, freshman Echo Lee enlists the help of a pair of Target employees to hunt down a very special item: a tripod for her camera. “I love to take photos,” she says, “and I forgot to bring mine from Hong Kong.” Lee, a sociology major, will use the tripod to take photos of herself and her friends, and she’s planning ahead: “I think I will travel to other cities like New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., during my stay here.”

Meanwhile, freshman Howard Wang from China stands in the sporting goods section, looking perplexed. He’s trying to decide on a water bottle for class from a full rack of choices. “I want to find a bottle that’s convenient, holds a lot of water, and is cheap,” says Wang, who plans to study chemical engineering. He picks up a bottle and fiddles with its lid, frowning before putting it back on the shelf. The bottles come in a vast array of sizes, colors, and designs. There’s almost too much variety—Wang looks stumped trying to decide.

Yet, over the course of nearly an hour, the students’ shopping carts fill up. Detergent. Hangers. Pillows. Tissue. Camera film. A water bottle. The beginnings of a new life in Pittsburgh sprout from the carts.

Later, when the buses return to campus, the students grab their packages, file off, and slowly drift away together, their red-and-white plastic bags marking progress, as they find their way home.

Patrick Manning

The young scholar stirs awake just after dawn, as a warm ocean breeze billows into his room in Porto-Novo, West Africa. In the early morning stillness, he leaves his spare quarters at the Hotel of the Deputies and walks downstairs to a large dining hall, mostly empty except for the quiet wait staff. He selects a table, where he takes his instant coffee and bread. He eats, accompanied only by the music that plays from an old radio set in a corner. After breakfast, he walks through the hotel doors to stroll along the streets, awash in sunlight, in this petite capital, a coastal city wedged between green hills, overlooking a palm-lined lagoon.

Graduate student Patrick Manning is in the Republic of Dahomey conducting research to complete his PhD dissertation. It’s his first visit to Africa, and the experience is stunning.

On his daily walks, the dirt streets of Porto-Novo glow with a rainbow of bright fabrics as statuesque women carry on their heads baskets filled with oranges, tomatoes, and other produce. The narrow avenues are a carnival of markets and merchants who sell everything from drums to masks to salts, cigarettes, and sardines.  Everybody, it seems, wants to shake hands. Manning gives coins to a beggar gnawed by leprosy. He’s awed by the steward at the jumbled transit station who, each day, remembers the faces of hundreds of people and matches them with the bicycles left in his charge.

All of this chaotic beauty is tinged with remnants of empires past. Youngsters call him “yovo,” a friendly label for a foreigner that Westerners often mistranslate to mean White. On the street, an elderly woman salutes him, signaling hello. But the salute also raises the specter of the French colonial past, when indigenous people were treated by colonizers as subservient or invisible. The incident dazes the yovo, who instantly feels a mix of emotions. He nods quickly to the woman and moves along.

Manning, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has come to this West African republic for a few months to gather data on the country’s economic history from 1880 to 1914. Day after day, the tall, thin American in the dark-rimmed glasses travels on foot to the Archives Nationales. In time, he becomes weak with malaria and worn down by the intense research, but there’s something seductive about rummaging through dusty papers in a faraway land, watching your work come to life.

Even more so, for Manning, there’s something deeply provocative about the vibrant open-air humanity that thrives here, in a land once known as the Slave Coast. This is where his enduring affair with Africa truly begins. This is the fountainhead of his quest to explore and decipher something much bigger—the history of the world.

Today, Manning is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History and director of the newly established World History Center at Pitt.

From the center’s lens, the world is a vast multitude of regions, long-ago periods, and a menagerie of peoples, cultures, and ideas that are forever colliding with and changing one other. For Manning and others linked to the World History Center, their mission is to go into the world and discover these connections across space, topics, and time—and to share what they find.

“World historians,” says Manning, “want to see what is happening on the planet. We want to talk about the history of Africa, the history of Latin America, Europe, Asia. But we want a discussion across the regions, too.”

The center exists as a place where scholars and students can delve into the interconnections of human history. Through research, teaching, and global collaborations, those affiliated with the center are gathering knowledge about wide-ranging global policies and practices—industrialization, globalization, urbanization. They’re seeking potential solutions to the great dramas of the human panorama—privilege and poverty, pride and prejudice, war and peace.

Specifically, among the center’s goals are expanding the horizons of historical study, including the use of large-scale analysis; creating a global community of scholars to explore the human past; and pursuing transregional, interdisciplinary, and interactive approaches to the study of human history.

For at least a century, world history has been incorporated into high school studies, but most universities have preferred to focus on specific regions or topics in history to enable in-depth study. In the past few decades, however, interest in world history as a university discipline has grown significantly. History scholars are beginning to encourage the study of patterns of change and continuity as a way to help students grapple with how climate, migration, agriculture, disease, water, and technology influence the world, not just a discrete region.

At Pitt, the Department of History in the School of Arts and Sciences has forged a national reputation for its graduate studies of Atlantic history, spanning continents. Now, the department’s World History Center is poised to go farther.

Professor Marcus Rediker, the department’s chair, first met Manning in the late 1990s. They began conversing at a conference on maritime history, and they shared common intellectual concerns, including the Black Atlantic, both believing that more attention should be paid to Africa. Rediker was impressed with Manning’s vision to expand scholarship to transnational histories, as well as his thoughts on moving graduate programs toward a more global perspective. At the time, Manning was a professor at Northeastern University, where he ultimately taught for 22 years and created the nonprofit World History Network, Inc., which fosters research in global history. An expert on the economic history of Africa, Manning also conducts research on the African slave trade and demographic history, African social and cultural history, the African diaspora as part of a global history of humans, and world history in general.

When the opportunity arose, Rediker recruited the Northeastern scholar to bring his expertise to Pitt. Manning arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006. Since then, he has taught a variety of classes (including a team-taught class with Rediker), mentored graduate students, collaborated with professors across departments, constructed links with scholars around the globe, and, a year ago, opened the University’s World History Center.

Tucked into a corner of  Posvar Hall’s third floor, the center is an intellectual niche, a space where faculty, students, visiting scholars, and interns work together. It is filling with colorful objects of global art and culture, as well as ideas for groundbreaking research. Center scholars, for instance, are developing a geographic database, conducting world history workshops, and building a research registry on historical processes.

Loosely modeled on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, the center aims to lay the foundation for a global academy, using a toolbox that draws from natural science, social science, and the humanities to support graduate study, multidisciplinary research, teacher outreach, and worldwide collaboration.

“We knew we had a builder, a creator,” says Rediker, explaining the confluence of interpersonal, organizational, and scholarship skills that Manning has brought to Pitt. A graduate program in world history will be launched within two years, but students are already attracted to the energy of Manning and the center.

“To many students, Professor Manning is an encourager, a visionary, someone who helps them think about their place in the world, the possibilities, and then helps them to get there,” says Deborah Smith Johnston, who began her career as a high school history teacher, then attended Northeastern as a doctoral student in world history. Manning was her advisor. The two scholars have collaborated on projects such as providing world history teaching techniques to high school teachers and designing a

curriculum for world history as an advanced class in high school.

In his own classes, Manning is calm-spoken, his words carefully chosen. Quick to smile, he sits encircled by students. A composed, self-contained figure, the professor is a blend of California casual and East Coast cool, prone to wearing cardigans and gentle earth tones. In warm weather, he sometimes wears a dashiki, a colorful African shirt. He remains silent when his students wrestle with class content, working their way through their thoughts. When they’re done, he’ll push for more: “Can you dig into that a little more deeply?”

About 8,000 miles separate West Africa’s Porto-Novo and Manning’s birthplace, Orange County, Calif., a land of canyons, beaches, and sky. But much in his early biography foreshadows his adult journey. The son of a laborer and an artist, he received an early education in the world beyond the canyons. His mother, Marian Curtis, was a realist painter of portraits and still lifes. She once poured her talents into African sculpture. “Perhaps,” says Manning, “an omen of my later life.”

His dad, John, was a factory union worker and an internationalist. Both parents were interested in the wider world. The rhythms of music from Latin America, the Caribbean, Central Asia, and Europe played often inside their house. At home, the young Manning read the Hispanic press and the L.A. Tribune, a Black newspaper that posted stories on visiting African dignitaries, linking their lives to Black Americans.

In the summer of 1960, a year after he graduated from high school, Manning was riding to work with his father. They were digging ditches for a new tunnel into Los Angeles. That summer, the teen became intrigued by the powerful speeches of Congo freedom leader Patrice Lumumba as they flowed from international news reports on his dad’s car radio. Manning, a first-year college student, became fascinated by the drama of independence unfolding in a far-away place called the Congo.

A top student in high school and president of the student body, Manning turned down a fellowship at Stanford to attend California Institute of Technology, where he majored in chemistry and minored in history. At Caltech, he discovered his passion for history, especially after one of his teachers invited foreign journalists to share their adventures covering the world.

He earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry, but when he entered graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was ready to explore the world of history, especially the vast mysteries of Africa.

That’s how, eventually, he spent time living in Porto-Novo in the Republic of Dahomey—now called Benin. Although his doctoral research focused on economics—leading to master’s degrees in both economics and history—his research also delved into African migration and other aspects of the continent’s impact on world history. He says the African diaspora is a quilt of cultural interactions that moved across oceans, giving shape to global identities, communities, and family and economic conditions that have shaped Black lives for centuries.

Today, Manning is the author or coauthor of 12 books and dozens of other publications and commentaries. His latest book, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (Columbia University Press), explores this phenomenon. With more than 300 pages of lucid prose and scholarship that trace the movement of captive Africans across the Atlantic, the book explores linkages between regions of Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas and examines the transformations brought by social struggles and the representation of the Black experience in song, literature, family life, and spiritual expression.

African history is a portal to world history, says Manning. There are a billion people of African descent on Earth.How their ancestors worked, lived, struggled, and moved around the globe dramatically influenced world history, as well as their connections to one other—it changed economic systems and brought cultural innovations. Slavery and its aftermath redirected global identities and political processes for centuries. The African diaspora even gave rise to a significant share of modernity.

“I wrote the book because studies of Africa have been so myopic. I see with world history that Africa is one big chunk of humanity; the African diaspora is a bigger chunk … and there has been little linkage between them.” Until now.

Back in his own office in Posvar Hall, Manning sits dwarfed by a wall of books. Behind him, there is a “Free Mandela” poster and a flier on a Black history festival. He muses silently as he looks into the distance across the leafy campus, probing more deeply into his own thoughts about why he studies Africa. A question that once irritated him, he now relishes.

After a minute, he offers: “It is the idea of thinking of Africa as part of the world, of looking across boundaries. I wanted to understand African perspectives, and I’m finding there is so much to it …. There will never be a time when I would have the sophistication to not be surprised at what we can discover there.”

On a shelf nearby sits a large black- and-white photograph. In it, a tall, young scholar stands in a white, short-sleeved shirt. He is surrounded by four men in local dress. One is clutching a small boy. The young scholar is Manning,

surrounded by new friends, in Porto- Novo all those years ago. The grainy image remains special to him. His African journey had just begun; it was an early experience of dipping deep into the well of other cultures.

Decades have passed since that first visit to West Africa, yet still for Manning each discovery, each connection across the human panorama is like stepping out into the sunshine of a new world.

Dan Handley

In an underground studio in downtown Pittsburgh, a film director listens to an actor who’s reading a script aloud. The actor is perched in a separate sound booth, wearing headphones and speaking into a jumbo microphone. The director, Dan Handley, is stationed at a table with a copy of the script. He’s following each word with a pen as the actor reads about the planet Saturn: “In 1610, Galileo became the very first person to observe Saturn’s rings. Since then, astronomers had speculated on the nature of those rings. Were they solid disks, as they appear to be?
Or were they …”

“Can we pick that up again?” Handley interrupts. He looks at the actor through the sound-booth window and explains that there wasn’t enough of a pause after the words “rings” and “disks.” So the Hollywood actor, David Conrad, backs up and reads the passage again.

Handley, a Pitt alumnus, listens intently to each syllable. With a brown mustache and blond, California surfer hair, he has the subtle look of a film director. He also sports rectangular glasses and the essential apparel of a Casual Day professional: black button-down shirt and jeans. Most people would never guess that he spends the bulk of his time in science laboratories rather than in film studios.

The second reading goes smoothly, so Conrad continues reciting the script, which explains that Pitt astronomer James Keeler discovered that Saturn’s rings were not solid, but made up of individual particles. Keeler made the discovery at the University of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Observatory back in 1895.

The astronomer’s achievement is one of many long-ago accomplishments that will soon be thrust back into the national spotlight in a new movie about Pitt’s Allegheny Observatory. Handley and his film crew are recounting the drama—both on Earth and in outer space—that has long been part of the observatory’s history.

In the winter of 2007, Handley was driving along Bascom Avenue on Pittsburgh’s North Side when he saw something in the distance he’d never seen before: three white domes on top of a hill. Instantly, he knew it must be the building that had given his neighborhood, Observatory Hill, its name.

Handley had moved to the community several months before, when the trees still had their leaves, and he had asked his neighbors about the history behind the Observatory Hill name. There was an observatory somewhere nearby, they said, but few seemed to know much about it. Then winter came, the trees shed the last of their leaves, and Handley found himself driving off-course in an attempt to get closer to the mysterious white domes that were suddenly visible without all the vegetation. At the time, he was pursuing his PhD degree in human genetics in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health. He also was producing a television series called Pittsburgh Genius, which showcased scientific research in Pittsburgh on the local PCTV-21 station.

Although Handley got lost trying to find the Allegheny Observatory that day, he eventually found it on another drive. A sign taped to the front door advertised the observatory’s free weekly tours.Handley signed up for one. Once inside, he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the building’s marble and wood and its signature stained-glass window of Urania, the Greek goddess of astronomy. The giant telescopes, one dating to the Civil War and the year of the observatory’s founding, were even more impressive.

He also was stunned by everything he learned on the visit. He didn’t know that the nature of Saturn’s rings had been discovered—here! He didn’t know that clocks to standardize time for all U.S. railroads were once set—here! He didn’t know that pre-Wright Brothers flying machines had been developed—here! He didn’t know that astrophysics had its start—here! He didn’t know that astronomers still conducted research—here!

“Not many people think of Pittsburgh when they think of astrophysics, but this is where it all started,” he reflected later. “Many observatories are lone ‘Quonset huts’ on the top of a hill, and they’re meant to be fully utilitarian. This one is crafted with a love—a love for astronomy. Not all cities have something like this—something of historical and scientific importance where the

public can view the night sky.”

Allegheny Observatory is among the world’s major astronomical research institutions, even today. Handley couldn’t believe he had been living in Pittsburgh for seven years and had only now discovered this scientific, historical, and architectural wonder. He also couldn’t believe that his neighbors didn’t know much about it. Everyone in Pittsburgh—everyone in the whole country—should know about this remarkable urban observatory, he thought.

He considered filming a Pittsburgh Genius episode about it, but a half-hour show seemed inadequate to tell the story of the place. No, Pitt’s observatory deserved a professional, feature-length documentary. He thought it would be fun to write and produce, but he wasn’t sure whether he could pull it off. He was still new to the art of filmmaking.

Although Handley has a variety of interests, he has always considered himself to be, first and foremost, a scientist. As a boy growing up in Ohio, he didn’t just read a schoolbook summary of Charles Darwin’s research. He read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle. The books made him want to live like the famous biologist. He, too, wanted to travel to interesting locales and explore science.

In his adult years, Handley has done just that. First he moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in biophysics while taking elective playwriting classes. Then he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked his way up to manager in a neurology laboratory at the UCLA School of Medicine. He enjoyed being an oddball scientist in the middle of L.A. film culture. Next he took a job as a researcher with the Procter & Gamble pharmaceutical company in Cincinnati, Ohio. On nights and weekends, he read psychology and philosophy texts, an interest that led him to apply to graduate school in philosophy.

In 2000, Handley came to Pittsburgh to enroll in the logic and computation philosophy program at Carnegie Mellon University. That same year, George W. Bush was elected president of the country. One of the president’s first actions in office was to ban human cloning, a move that caused a grand, national debate. Over the next few years—in between earning his master’s degree in philosophy and enrolling in the PhD human genetics program at Pitt—Handley followed the cloning controversy in newspapers, on cable news, and with colleagues. He came to the conclusion that people on all political sides weren’t using enough valid, scientific evidence to support their claims. He felt strongly that the public wasn’t getting enough good, in-depth information about science in general, and he wanted to do something about it.

So he began taking filmmaking classes at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, a nonprofit organization that promotes the visual arts. He had decided television would be the best medium for teaching masses of people about science. He also applied for, and received, a grant to produce the Pittsburgh Genius television series. The episodes gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look at how Pittsburgh scientists study stem cells, cancer, Mars, and more.

A year later, Handley made his memorable tour of the Allegheny Observatory. Soon afterward, he signed up for a documentary film course at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. He focused his class project on the observatory. When Mark Knobil, an Emmy-nominated cinematographer, came to class as a guest expert, Handley proposed his film idea. Knobil, a Pittsburgh native, thought it was fantastic. He still remembered his own initial encounter with the observatory.  “I first went there as a teenager and was captivated by the Victorian mystery, whimsy, and majesty of the place,” Knobil says. “It is somewhere Jules Verne would set a story.” He thought it was a movie just waiting to be made. He offered to help Handley transform his idea from a class project into reality. Once Handley knew that he had the support of a professional cinematographer, he decided he really would produce and direct a movie about the Allegheny Observatory. This would be his greatest opportunity yet to educate the public about science.

So in the spring of 2008, Handley hurled himself into the film project. There was much to do: Conduct historical research on the observatory, including the enticing tale of how a lens was once stolen from a telescope and held ransom. Write a script. Hire a crew. Make a list of experts to interview. Hunt for old photographs of astronomers in libraries and on eBay. Build a Web site. Find a helicopter service so Knobil could shoot aerial footage of the observatory. Make a list of objects that could be useful for illustrating scientific concepts: a Victrola record player to show the hypothesized motion of Saturn’s rings, a heat lamp to demonstrate the principles of infrared light.

During this period, Handley also earned his PhD and transitioned to a postdoctoral fellowship in fetal genomics at the Magee-Womens Research Institute near the Oakland campus. He put in nine hours a day at the lab, then several more hours on the film every night, and even more on weekends. Knobil describes him as someone with “boundless energy, tenacity, and focus.” Over the summer, Handley even took a working vacation, which he characterizes as “one of the best times of my life.” He took a week off from the laboratory and traveled to Washington, D.C.;New York City; and Ontario, Canada, with three crewmembers to interview historians about the national importance of the Allegheny Observatory and the astronomers who’ve worked there. The trip was supported by grants won by Handley.

From the start, he conceived the film as an altruistic venture to benefit the public and as a way to celebrate astronomers. Still, he needed financial support to hire well-qualified actors, computer animators, lighting gurus, sound technicians, graphic artists, and other film experts to create a final product that would be both dynamic and polished.

Through networking, he connected with Pittsburgh city councilman Bill Peduto, who’s now the movie’s executive producer. In this role, Peduto has been rallying foundations to support the project. “The observatory is a major part of the mosaic that is Pittsburgh,” Peduto tells them. “Its reach goes around the world.” So far, he has helped Handley connect with the Senator John Heinz History Center, The Pittsburgh Foundation, The Buhl Foundation, and the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh, among others. The foundations have responded with finances, some of which will make the film available on DVD at no cost to local schools. Peduto has also helped Handley to connect with PBS, as well as the Smithsonian Institute, to promote screenings in science museums around the country.

Fortunately, many of the crewmembers—who either already had awestruck experiences at Pitt’s observatory or were surprised and impressed when Handley told them about the hidden jewel—have been voluntarily working for reduced rates. One of them is David Conrad, the accomplished Hollywood actor and native Pittsburgher who currently stars in the CBS series, Ghost Whisperer. Conrad is narrating the film pro bono, which is how Handley ended up working with him at the sound studio this fall.

The film is still in production, but Handley and his team have made a lot of progress. The documentary has a working title: The Story of the Allegheny Observatory. It chronicles the observatory’s surprising history, from its founding in 1859, through the “Gilded Age” of the late 19th century, to modern day. It’s scheduled to be released in 2010.

Meanwhile, life at the observatory hums along. Pitt undergraduates conduct basic astronomy experiments on Monday and Thursday nights. Tour groups ooh and ahh on Fridays. Louis Coban, the observatory’s administrator and senior technician, maintains the equipment, which involves everything from steadying an air conditioner on the roof so it doesn’t cause the seismograph in the basement to vibrate too much, to washing the lens of a giant telescope by tipping it into a kiddie pool filled with water and a few droplets of soap. Most clear nights, Pitt staff, students, and/or faculty are using the telescopes.

In September, Handley spent an entire night filming a Pitt graduate student while she worked. The student, Melanie Good, was collecting data on the movement of a planet named HD80606 b, which orbits a star in the constellation of Ursa Major. Researchers at eight other observatories around the country were also observing the planet and communicating with each other in an all-night videoconference.

In one of the observatory’s domes, Handley adjusted the angle of his camera while Good hunched over a control center. Her face was lit with the glow of computer screens. Part of the dome’s roof was open to allow the telescope to peer into outer space. In the darkness, Handley glanced at the open sky through the slit in the dome. Then he looked at the computer screen that showed the telescope’s view. There, 190 million light years away, a star was shining. It was a movie in the making.

Along These Rivers

Recalling the scent of steel and “the sweet smell of our father’s labors,” the “blackish green” of the Monongahela, and other aspects of Pittsburgh’s story, Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant Publishing) is a compilation of written and visual images from Pittsburgh artists created in honor of the city’s 250th anniversary. Editors Judith R. Robinson (CGS ’80) and Michael Wurster gathered works to reflect the city’s creativity, flavor, and diverse attributes. The book has been nominated for an Independent Publishers (IPPY) award.
—Laura Powers

Arab on Radar
Reflecting upon her emotions as an Arab-American post-9/11, Angele Ellis uses verse to explore family memories and life experiences, both personal and political, in Arab on Radar (Six Gallery Press). Dedicated to her family, including those who have become “family” throughout her life, Ellis (A&S ’79) offers a mixture of poetry about her past, including images of her grandfather (pictured on the cover), meditations on love and loss, and her own political views, which have been influenced by her work with the peace and justice community.  —LP

Cloud Banner
A lily pushes to bloom, already piercing through the green of the bud with its vibrant red petals. A poet sits seemingly asleep with his latest work in front of him. Two canaries remain caged without a keeper. Images like these create the misty tone in author Annabelle Clippinger’s book of poetry Cloud Banner (Potes & Poets Press). A Pitt English instructor and director of the PITT ARTS program, Clippinger writes about nature, life, and art, using verse and philosophical reflection to connect the reader to the “beauty of idea.”
—LP

Ghost Songs
The poet William Pettit (A&S ’94) reflects on the struggles and changes he experienced after moving from Brooklyn, N.Y., to the Italian countryside in Ghost Songs (Casagrande Press). His collection exposes the heartfelt emotion of leaving behind friends and loved ones, the pleasures and challenges of nature, and the whims of language and communication in a foreign country. Through his verse, Pettit beholds and reflects upon these observations as he conjures the “ghosts” of the past while away from home.
—LP

A father’s story offers lasting lessons about the Holocaust

The auditorium is full of antsy schoolchildren, squirming in their seats. They fidget and shift. Then, a modest, gray-haired man with a quiet voice steps slowly to the microphone. In spectacles and a light sports coat, he has a grandfatherly air. His voice retains a slight European accent as he takes the students back 60 years to his own childhood, one darkened by the horrors of the Holocaust. The children sit quietly in their seats.

An estimated six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed during the Nazi genocide of the 1940s. Jack Sittsamer—the man at the microphone—survived.

He tells his story. Nazi soldiers stormed his small Polish town when he was a boy. He watched them shoot and kill his father, a wounded war veteran unable to keep pace with the crowd as it was ordered to keep moving. He spent sweltering days trapped in cattle cars without food. He toiled behind the electric fences of concentration camps.

When he finishes recounting his memories, the youngsters in the auditorium throw their hands in the air, wanting to know more. There isn’t enough time to answer all the questions.

Emotional reflections wash over Sittsamer’s daughter, Paula Riemer, as she recalls the first time she saw her father speak publicly. From her seat in an auditorium, she marveled at his ability to relate to schoolchildren.

“He started out by saying, ‘When I was your age, I had a life just like you do, and then one day, everything changed,’” says Riemer.

Before his death last October at the age of 83, Jack Sittsamer told his story to more than 100,000 people.

Despite his openness with audiences, Sittsamer’s experience was painful for him to recount. Born in Mielec, Poland, in 1924, Sittsamer knew anti-Semitism even before 1939, when Nazis stormed his hometown, barricaded and burned its three synagogues, and killed the Jews who were praying inside.

Initially, the Nazis forced Sittsamer into a day labor camp. He built roads, bridges, and dams. His family—his father, mother, two brothers, and two sisters—remained in their home until soldiers kicked down their door in March 1942 and forced the entire family, including young Jack, to march with other Jews seven miles to an airplane hangar. When Sittsamer’s father couldn’t keep up, he was shot to death while the family looked on. His father was one of 300 killed during the march.

That was the last time Jack Sittsamer saw his family. They were separated, sent to camps, and slain. The next years he spent in deprivation, working grueling labor jobs in several concentration camps. In a stone quarry in Mauthausen, one of the worst camps, he carried heavy rocks, one on each shoulder, up and down 186 steps for 12 hours a day.

“My survival is luck,” he once told a group of listeners, “plain luck.”

Pitt’s Barbara Burstin with Jack Sittsamer. Photo by Stan Franzos

When Sittsamer was liberated by American soldiers on May 5, 1945, he weighed 72 pounds. He took refuge in Eggenfelden, Germany, until 1949, when the United Jewish Federation helped him move to the United States. He settled in Pittsburgh and learned English in night school. For 36 years, he was employed as a sheet metal worker for Tyson Metal Products. When he retired, Barbara Burstin—a Pitt history instructor and Holocaust educator who also is affiliated with the University’s Jewish Studies Program—convinced him to recount his tragic experiences in classrooms and auditoriums, believing that a survivor’s story could shed light on the dangers of unbridled hatred.

Now, Paula Riemer and her brother, Murray Sittsamer, are honoring—and continuing—their father’s legacy. With contributions from family, friends, and students, the two have established the Sittsamer Fund for Holocaust Studies, which will advance Holocaust education at Pitt. The fund will help to bring other aging survivors into University classrooms so that students can hear and preserve these personal stories for future generations. The fund also will support students involved in related educational projects in future years, as survivors become increasingly scarce.

Jack Sittsamer’s ties to Pitt were strong. During his lifetime, he shared his story with thousands of Pitt students. His former wife, Maxine, worked for 19 years with the University’s facilities management department. His children are alumni: Paula Riemer (A&S ’77) works as the business administrator for Pitt’s economics department, and Murray Sittsamer (ENGR ’81) is president of a management consulting firm in Michigan.

“He didn’t want people to forget,” says his son. “He was determined to make sure the next generation knew the lessons of the Holocaust, not just the horrors.”

When he could no longer make classroom appearances, the elder Sittsamer invited students into his apartment, where they would gather around him to listen. In a class assignment in 2007, one student described a meeting with him as “one of the most impactful and valuable experiences I have ever had during my college education.” Another wrote: “I learned more than I could have imagined about one man’s story during the Holocaust …. This interview will stay with me forever.”

Thanks to the generous endowed gift from his children, the voice of a man once reluctant to share his past will endure. The story he lived to tell will teach and inspire others for years to come.

Lee

For Jeff Kepner, the journey began on a Monday morning with a fever and chills—no signs of anything more serious than a mild case of the flu. The Air Force veteran and father of three stayed at home, in bed, waiting to feel better. But the bacterium Streptococcus had a different plan.

A few days passed. Instead of feeling better, he felt worse. He didn’t know it yet, but his body was afflicted with a particularly virulent strain of the bacteria. The invasive microbes set up breeding grounds in his liver, where they began multiplying and dumping their deadly progeny into his bloodstream.

On Saturday, he began struggling to breathe. His wife, Valarie, rushed him to an emergency room near the family’s home in Augusta, Ga. The battle was under way to save Kepner’s life as a deluge of bacteria ravaged his liver and kidneys, sending him into toxic shock. His immune system was thrust into overdrive, leading to severe inflammation that shut down his vital organs and triggered blood clotting in his limbs.

His doctors induced a coma so that Kepner could use every reserve to heal. When the patient regained consciousness weeks later, his hands and feet were black. His body had diverted blood from his extremities—his hands, arms, legs, and feet—to sustain his vital organs.

“I knew they were going to be taken off, that they couldn’t save them,” he recalls matter-of-factly. “I pretty much accepted it right then and there.” He was right. Doctors had to amputate Kepner’s hands and legs, and his life was forever altered by the challenges to come.

That trauma in the Kepner family occurred 10 years ago, about the same time that physician W.P. Andrew Lee was named chief of hand surgery service in the Department of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. In Boston, the young surgeon’s promising career was right on track, in line with his parents’ high expectations.

Lee’s parents came from the Canton and Szechuan regions of China. His father had flown a bomber for the Republic of China Air Force alongside the American Flying Tigers to fight the Japanese invasion in World War II. During the Communist Revolution, the family escaped to Taiwan, where Lee was born. When he reached age 15, his parents sent him to join his brother and three sisters, who were already in the United States. They wanted to give him every opportunity to succeed.

Even so, it was a rocky adolescence as Lee bounced from sibling to sibling, attending three high schools in three years while adjusting to a new language and culture. With little to do but study, he earned top grades and was accepted to Harvard College, an early achievement that spotlights his enduring work ethic and intense ability to focus.

Lee completed his undergraduate degree in physics, graduating from Harvard with honors in 1979. But at the urging of his older brother—a physicist at Princeton—he abandoned his studies of matter and energy for medical school at Johns Hopkins University and embraced plastic surgery following a general surgical residency at Hopkins. He became particularly fascinated by the challenges of hand surgery, where the outcome requires both form and function.

The hand consists of scores of intricate parts—bones, joints, ligaments, tendons, muscles, nerves, skin, and blood vessels—which must connect together perfectly for proper function. It also bestows the ability to touch and feel the physical world and to communicate human emotions.

Perhaps no one understands this better than Jeff Kepner, the Georgia resident who lost his hands to a pervasive strep infection. He has spent a decade adapting to life with prosthetic arms equipped with hooks to do everything from brushing his teeth to driving his daughter Jordan, now 14, to school. “Most of all,” he says, “I would love to hold my daughter’s hand, my wife’s hand, and actually feel something again.”

Transplant recipient Jeff Kepner spends many hours each week in active hand therapy.

Plastic surgery has made huge strides in reconstructing tissue damaged by trauma, illness, or congenital anomalies. But there is a limit to what can be done for extremity amputation, says Lee, who is now chief of the Division of Plastic Surgery and professor of surgery in the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine. “There is just no way to build a new arm with the body’s own tissue,” he explains. “It is too complex.”

That doesn’t mean scientists aren’t taking steps in that direction, says colleague Stephen Badylak, a professor in Pitt’s surgery department and director of tissue engineering at the Pitt-UPMC McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where Lee also is affiliated.

At the McGowan Institute, tissue engineering experts are studying how to grow nerves, muscle, and blood vessels with the aim of bringing these components together as whole body parts. Stem cell and developmental biologists also are trying to recapitulate the genetic and chemical signals in the womb that instruct a fetus to grow a limb or digit, for example.

The work is of special interest to the military. Because of improved body armor and better-equipped medics, soldiers today are surviving casualties that once meant certain death. But these advances also mean that hundreds of soldiers have undergone amputations since the start of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a Texas military base, Badylak is overseeing an experimental protocol to extend soldiers’ lost fingers. So far, the clinical trial has documented remarkable data, with growth of about a half-inch in two patients.

“We are making terrific progress in learning how to instruct the body to think of the default response following injury as something other than ‘Stop the bleeding and form scar tissue,’” Badylak says. “I firmly believe within a couple of years we will have therapeutic strategies that can change that to ‘Let’s constructively make new functional tissue.’”

But Badylak chooses the words “functional tissue” carefully, agreeing with Lee that scientists won’t ever likely learn how to regrow an entire complex body part such as a hand. The alternative to these bottom-up approaches is known as composite tissue allotransplantation, or CTA, which includes the transplantation of whole body parts, such as hands.

This composite tissue approach involves the transplantation of multiple tissues, including nerves, skin, muscles, tendons, bones, cartilage, and fat.  It’s a particularly complex challenge, requiring expertise in immunology, anatomy, stem cell development, drug pharmacology, and much more.

After medical school and his residency, Lee joined the plastic surgery faculty at his alma mater Harvard, where he became recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts in the growing field of CTA. As head of Plastic Surgery Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and later at Pitt, he has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles on CTA and secured millions of dollars in federal funding for his research on how to minimize the use of drugs to suppress the immune system following transplantation.

After undergoing CTA, patients must take powerful antirejection drugs to prevent their immune systems from attacking the multiple foreign-tissue grafts. The high doses and combinations of these medications can have toxic side effects such as diabetes, liver and kidney dysfunction, and infections—not to mention the possibility of chronic rejection that might require a patient to repeat the surgery years later.

The risk/benefit analysis of systemic immunosuppression is fairly straightforward in a lifesaving operation such as a liver or heart transplant. When it comes to a face or hand transplant, where quality of life is at stake, the ethics grow murkier. “It may not be in the patient’s best interest to replace disability from the loss of hands with the severe disability associated with antirejection medications,” says Abhinav Humar, a Pitt professor of surgery, chief of UPMC’s Division of Transplantation in the Department of Surgery, and clinical director of the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute.

That was the problem still consuming Lee when he was recruited to Pitt in 2002 to head the University’s top-flight plastic surgery program.

The hallway leading to Lee’s office in Scaife Hall is lined with portraits of every graduate in the storied 61-year history of the program, which has trained more chiefs in the highly competitive field than any other medical school in the nation. “I was very happy at Harvard and Mass General and never thought about leaving,” Lee says. “But then I realized how great the opportunities would be at Pitt, with its tradition of excellence in plastic surgery and transplantation and the willingness of the University and its medical institution to invest in the future.”

One bold vision for the future is that hand transplantation will become a routine reconstructive procedure for patients with this limb loss.

A year after coming to Pitt, Lee was named the Sterling Bunnell Traveling Fellow by the American Society for Surgery of the Hand. He spent 2003 examining and interviewing 11 of the 14 patients who had undergone hand transplants around the world.

The first-ever hand transplant was performed in Ecuador in 1964, and the patient’s immune system rejected the donor graft two weeks later. A second attempt at hand transplantation wasn’t made until September 1998 in Lyon, France. Four months later, the first American hand transplantation was performed by surgeons with the University of Louisville in Kentucky, and the graft remains successful. Additional single-hand transplants followed.

“Uniformly, these patients told me that hand transplantation had transformed their lives,” Lee says about his interviews with recipients. “It was especially touching to see how their operations had helped them to regain personal autonomy.” He returned to Pittsburgh convinced of the benefits of hand transplantation but still troubled by the risks of chronic immunosuppression.

At Pitt’s Starzl Institute, scientists and doctors have been working for decades to find ways to induce tolerance of transplanted organs without the need for antirejection drugs and to wean transplant recipients to the smallest doses possible.

In the late 1980s, Thomas Starzl himself became involved with finding new antirejection drugs, and he was the first to use tacrolimus, which was more powerful than other immunosuppressants and had fewer side effects. The drug is now used routinely in kidney and liver transplants performed at UPMC, says Humar. Doctors at UPMC also pioneered studies on whether infusing patients with the donor’s bone marrow after transplantation could coax the body into accepting the new tissue as its own.

Lee and his colleagues at the Starzl Institute decided to combine these approaches for CTA in what they called the “Pittsburgh Protocol.” It involves treating patients on the day of the transplant with a monoclonal antibody called Campath 1-H to suppress their immune systems, followed by a donor bone marrow infusion two weeks later.

Three years ago, studies in a pig model began to yield exciting results—animals that underwent limb transplantation under the Pittsburgh Protocol avoided rejection using only low doses of tacrolimus instead of the usual multidrug cocktail that can cause so much harm.

“We had finally reached the point where we had a reasonable likelihood of reducing immunosuppression for our patients, so we began to seek approval from our Institutional Review Board for this experimental procedure,” Lee says.

On March 14, 2009, Lee and a volunteer team of surgeons performed an 11-hour operation using the Pittsburgh Protocol to give 24-year-old former U.S. Marine Josh Maloney a new right hand to replace the one blown off during a military training accident.

On May 4, 2009, Lee and his team earned their place in the annals of medical history by performing the nation’s first bilateral hand transplant. The patient was from Augusta, Ga—Jeff Kepner—and he received a new pair of hands. Sixteen surgeons worked for nine hours to label and affix all of the bones, blood vessels, nerves, and muscles in the donor hands—from a 23-year-old father from DuBois, Pa., who had been killed in an accident. They connected the hands to what remained in Kepner’s forearms.

For Lee, these two operations marked the culmination of decades of intense, steadfast focus and research effort, says longtime colleague J. Peter Rubin, who was Lee’s research fellow in Boston and followed him to Pittsburgh.

“It was very gratifying for me to watch one of my key mentors achieve that level of success and also recognize that his hard work over time had come to fruition,” says Rubin, now on the plastic surgery faculty in Pitt’s School of Medicine.

Colleagues also praise Lee’s thoughtful long-term planning, which brought together the right team of experts at Pitt to tackle the surgical and scientific problems of CTA, including the significant work of immunologists, surgeons, and many other experts. “It took a lot of forethought for Dr. Lee to undertake a project of this size,” says Joseph Imbriglia, an orthopaedic surgeon who participated in both operations. “His work is keeping Pitt absolutely at the forefront of tissue transplantation throughout the world.”

Like a proud father showing off his newborn, Lee takes out his cell phone and plays a video of Josh Maloney bouncing a tiny basketball using his new right hand. Six months of intense physical therapy are beginning to pay off. Maloney can feel temperature changes and vibrations and is gaining fine motor control. The nerves in his arm are growing toward his transplanted hand at a rate of about an inch a month, and Lee is hopeful his patient will have restored sensation by next year.

About a half-dozen more people are now on the waiting list or being screened for hand transplantation at UPMC. Each operation costs more than $250,000, and the first procedures were paid for by grants from UPMC and the U.S. Department of Defense. Lee has been working with the DOD and the Department of Veterans Affairs to establish a hand-transplant center in Pittsburgh. He also wants to expand the program to other forms of CTA. A face transplant protocol is under review by the University, and abdominal wall, lower limb, and larynx transplants are just some of the future possibilities.

In his cherished free moments, Lee spends time with his wife and their three grown children. His daughter is a sophomore at Harvard and considering a career in medicine. “I tell her there are few fields that are as satisfying when it comes to helping people,” Lee says. “It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true.”

It’s especially true for people like Jeff Kepner, who is undergoing intense hand therapy as he waits for sensation and fine muscle control to develop in his new hands. Just a few months after the transplant, he can wiggle and clench his fingers and thumb, and he’s feeling hot and cold temperatures in his palms. And while it’s still too early to call the Pittsburgh Protocol a success, Kepner has shown no signs of rejection so far, even with just a low dose of tacrolimus.

His wife, Valarie, recalls the moment when she clasped her husband’s new hands for the first time during occupational therapy. “This is the first time I’ve held your hand in 10 years,” she remembers saying. Kepner smiled back at his wife and said: “It will be really nice when I’m actually able to squeeze it back.”

Meagan Dooley

The volleyball arcs over the net, meeting the joined fists of a back-row player. As a setter lofts the ball toward the net, athlete Meagan Dooley tenses. An opposing player goes up for a “kill,” or spike. Dooley and a teammate leap, forming a wall with their hands. With a thunderous pop, the ball is blocked and goes careening back into the opposing court, bouncing hard off the floor.

As usual, team captain Dooley is in the middle of things.

A middle hitter on Pitt’s varsity volleyball team, she is nearly always part of the action. “When you play middle, you are jumping for every hit,” says the Pitt senior. In her three years on the team, Dooley has consistently been among the leaders in blocks, solo blocks, and kills. Already, early in the fall season, Dooley is the team’s leader on the floor, too. With plenty of games ahead, she’s averaging a .381 hitting clip, with 106 total blocks, 298 kills, and 14 service aces. She recently moved up to second on Pitt’s list of all-time solo block and total block leaders,  distinctions that she takes in stride: “That’s what happens when I’m doing my job and helping my team win.”

At practice, while she bounces on her toes and slams balls across the net, the 6’1” student-athlete looks imposing. Yet Dooley’s on-court performance is only part of her Pitt strength. She has a 4.0 grade point average, which has helped the volleyball team win the Overall Top GPA Award three years in a row against Pitt’s other varsity teams. The team also has won the Department of Athletics’ Top Women’s Team Award for its academic success.

An education major, Dooley plans to teach special education, where she can help youngsters become their best no matter what challenges they may face. “I have always been a huge believer in the underdog, whether it’s in sports or in any other aspect of life,” she says. She knows a lot about winning. Dooley began the season collecting All Big East Preseason honors.

Back on court during practice, the players finish their scrimmage and divide into games of four-on-four. The court is wide open, and the kills come fast and furious. Dooley leaps from midcourt, fist cocked back, and pummels the ball. A diving player rescues the ball, and her teammate lofts it over the net. When the ball comes back to Dooley, she fakes another punishing kill attempt, then gently taps the ball over the net, where it falls untouched—another smart move for Meagan Dooley.

The newly minted MBA graduate takes a job working for a large commercial bank in Houston, Texas. She’s quickly bored by the mindless numbers crunching and sea of paperwork. But she’s fascinated by workplace behaviors. The bank isn’t the static environment she expected. Instead, individuals continually reshape their jobs, and the work, in turn, shapes behaviors. She’s especially intrigued by the interplay of organizational expectations and individual responses. It’s clear to her that these interactions are central to success—or failure—in the business world.

Both the tedium of the formal work and the discovery of the informal behavior “hidden in plain sight” at the bank job prompt Carrie Leana to shift from pursuing accounting and finance to a PhD degree in the then-emerging field of organizational behavior and management, initiating a careerlong interest in organizational change. What she has since observed, across many different industries and job sectors, is that individual and organizational success both depend on more than just wages, skill sets, and job openings. They depend, fundamentally, on a delicate balance between stability and change—something that is essential as the nation struggles with high unemployment rates.

Leana joined Pitt’s business faculty in 1988 during a period of devastating labor unemployment after the region’s steel industry collapsed. She came to Pitt from the University of Florida to expand her academic research on the process and effects of organizational change in settings ranging from steel mills to public schools, and child care centers to nursing homes.

“What really interests me is looking at how and why—other than a paycheck— people work. Work practice and work organization are, in a nutshell, what I study,” says Leana, who is the Katz School’s George H. Love Professor of Organizations and Management.

One of the insights she has gained is that the rules governing employment and job turnover don’t necessarily follow conventional thinking about labor supply and demand. Traditional perspectives on employment tend to focus on what economists and business scholars call “human capital”—factors that involve specific skills and job mastery. But Leana’s research points to less obvious ingredients that are also essential for business success.

Throughout her academic career, Leana has documented the toll of workplace instability. In the fallout of unemployment and high staff turnover, employers lose not only the skills and training of each worker—the human capital—but also the efficient, practiced way each group learns to work together, a concept she calls social capital. Leana describes this concept as the efficiencies on the job that workers develop about “who knows what” and who can help them learn the way things really get done—around, and sometimes in spite of, the formal organizational chart. It’s these insider shortcuts, she says, that are the hidden value of social capital. The loss of this value can be debilitating to an organization plagued by high turnover.

In recent years, Leana has begun to explore the workplace world of direct-care workers—those involved in the frontline care of children, the elderly, and the chronically ill. These positions demand personal face-to-face interactions, with a great deal of emotional and physical labor, yet the workers are typically underpaid and undervalued. The growing demand for these workers is creating an urgent need to find better ways to recruit and retain them, especially in the field of health care.

In the United States, the workforce of Certified Nursing Assistants, or CNAs, is alarmingly unstable, with an average facility turnover rate ranging from 40 percent to an astonishing 100 percent a year. Staffing shortages will worsen as Baby Boomers grow older and their health care needs increase. A 2008 report by the Institute of Medicine cited CNA shortages as a key factor in an impending crisis in elder care. While low pay contributes to these shortages, it is not the only factor. Instead, Leana sees low pay as a symptom of the larger societal tendency to undervalue care work.

Articulate and amiable, with a Let’s-get-things-done-here attitude, Leana says that a shortfall in people to fill these occupations is a predictable result of our failure as a society to reassess traditional notions about work historically done in the home by women or by low-paid servants. Such shortages, and our unwillingness to address the fundamental causes of them, have a substantial negative impact on patients and their families, as well as on workers and employers.

In summer 2008, Leana became founding director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Health and Care Work. A collaboration of the Katz School and the School of Medicine, the center conducts research to inform decision making about workforce policy and practice for direct-care workers, defined as “primary providers of paid long-term care in settings such as nursing homes, residential care facilities, and private residences.” The U.S. Bureau of Health Professions estimates the need for at least a million more of these workers in the near term, just to care for the growing elderly population.

One of the key goals of Pitt’s Center for Health and Care Work is to improve the quality, size, and stability of the direct-care workforce. This workforce is central in many of today’s crucial economic and social debates, such as national economic competitiveness, shared prosperity, the welfare of the working poor, and our values regarding how to care for the most fragile in our society.

Leana’s research approach is to decipher what exactly is happening in these jobs and workplace settings by combining the stories of individual workers into a mosaic that illuminates fundamental aspects of the work. “I try to make the invisible visible,” she says about her role as a researcher and director of the center. She tells workers’ stories not just through individual narratives but also through the aggregate numbers.

“If we see the same problems arising, not just in one facility, but across hundreds of sites and thousands of employees, then maybe—as a nation—we’ll pay attention and invest our time and energy on solving the problems.”

In direct-care work, says Leana, there are so many problems that people and organizations often find it difficult to know where to begin. To understand the experiences of the 1.4 million CNAs working in hospitals, residences, and nursing homes nationwide, she teamed up with Jules Rosen, a Pitt professor of medicine who codirects the center. He is an expert in long-term care of the elderly and is chief of geriatric psychiatry services at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He’s still very much an on-the-ground player, having made rounds in nursing homes three days a week for the past 15 years.

With the expertise of Leana and Rosen, the center has initiated a first-of-its-kind CNA study, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry. Through phone interviews and focus groups, the Pitt research team is tracking 1,400 nursing assistants and aides across Pennsylvania over three years. Among the key issues: What motivates some direct-care workers to leave their jobs while others choose to stay? The answers aren’t so simple.

The center’s preliminary findings have produced some unexpected results, recently published in the journal The Gerontologist. Leana and Rosen organized CNA study participants into two groups: the “leavers,” who move on to other jobs, and the “stayers,” who continue working in the same facility. Interestingly, says Leana, the people who stay with their jobs are motivated by a different set of factors than the people who leave—something that surprised researchers.

When those who leave are asked why they quit, money is a factor, but it’s not the factor. The data show that most leave for another CNA job that often pays no more but that improves the worker’s quality of life—better mentoring and training, a more accommodating schedule, more positive staff-to-patient ratios, among other reasons. The main factors for leaving are lack of respect, dissatisfaction with management, conflicts in balancing family and work, and the job’s difficulty.

While those who stay might agree that these factors exist, the “stayers” remain in their jobs for other reasons. The two main factors are personal relationships with patients and a sense of vocation as part of their job. “What we found,” says Leana, “is that people with more stable work histories in this profession were people who, on their own, imbued their jobs with more meaning.”

The stayers feel “called” to the work. They consider themselves to be patient advocates, with a strong sense of obligation to patients and their families. “It’s poignant,” says Leana. “You see minimum wage workers going out and spending their own money buying knick-knacks to spruce up a patient’s room.” So far, the research suggests that this sense of calling may derive from a deeply held
spirituality or religious belief that also tends to be characteristic of stayers.

The insights derived from Leana’s evidence-based research will help policymakers and employers create more effective recruitment and retention strategies.  New efforts could appeal to stayers by addressing factors identified as important to them, while other efforts might separately tackle factors that cause leavers to job-hop.

Economists predict that jobs for direct-care workers who provide face-to-face, personal interaction will grow increasingly important in the years to come—they are, after all, the jobs that can never be sent offshore. In fact, CNA and other care-worker occupations may become a key link in the backbone of a new U.S. economy. For that to occur, however, Leana warns that care jobs must be dramatically overhauled, beginning with enhanced pay and benefits to attract and keep a critical core of “caregivers who care.”

In the end, Leana says, we neglect the problems of direct-care workers to our own detriment. Their circumstances raise larger questions about societal values.  Why, for instance, is a direct-care worker—who takes care of our elderly parents or the chronically ill—paid far less than, say, a financial advisor, who takes care of our money? On the practical side, too, these occupations hold key lessons about the negative effects of  instability in the U.S. workforce.

In the introduction to Relational Wealth: The Advantages of Stability in a Changing Economy (Oxford University Press), Leana and coeditor Denise Rousseau of Carnegie Mellon University  make the case that business relationships are a form of wealth, akin to money, equipment, and the skills of workers.Relationships build trust, which is a necessary condition for effective collaboration, say the two scholars. The emergence of the global economy—accompanied by once rare but now common practices like outsourcing, downsizing, and contract-based work—have shifted the employment landscape to a system of shorter-term economic transactions instead of longer-term, trustbuilding relationships that generate social capital, not simply portable human capital.

Leana’s scholarly work seems to ask: What have we lost in this move toward employment-as-transaction, and how might we restore the full value?

Her large-scale field research on the unemployed and working poor has spanned decades and won accolades. Notably, she received the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Pioneer Award for Academic Leadership in 2007-08. The prestigious honor recognizes leading-edge scholarship with a social-impact focus. She’s an award-winning author, and her articles have been featured in, for instance, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.

An undergraduate English literature major, former Texas bartender, and self-described “odd duck” among business scholars, she loves working with people well outside her own discipline. “One of the things I really like about my work is being able to learn from so many smart people,” Leana has said in discussing her career. She routinely works across disciplines and with colleagues internationally. She also teaches graduate students and executives, here and abroad.  A few years ago, she developed the Katz School’s MBA Essentials executive program, and she directs the UPMC-Katz Physician Leadership Program. “I’ve learned so much by partnering with people whose background and academic training are different from mine,” she says.

That experience includes not only her colleagues and students, but also the people she observes in her work—bankers, mill workers, teachers, managers, and health care aides, among others.

The study of CNAs by Leana and colleagues is now in its third and final year of data collection, with much in-depth analysis yet to come. As center researchers complete their findings and publish more insights into these issues, they hope to develop better solutions for a stronger direct-care workforce.

Moving forward, she says, it’s up to each of us to start placing more value on the care part of health care. But first we must be able to see it. So, Leana will continue in her research to make the invisible visible.

Bohince

The poem’s writing begins in a New York City apartment, where the newly married graduate student, far from the rural setting of her youth, blocks out the everyday roar of noisy city life and reimagines what happened, what might have happened. In this suspended space, she uses time, memories, and the inspiration of single words to revisit her father’s unexpected death. She thinks the writing might somehow allow her to continue their conversations together. In the apartment, the poet Paula Bohince creates a prayer of sorts:

I’ve kept our appointment in the barn, board after board of pine hewn by us

She meditates on evocative words. She considers poetic patterns guided by rhythms, striking images, and echoes of the past.

Our saddles, oiled on thick nails, gleam from the walls like 3-D portraits. Something must be wrong or else you would answer—my father in heaven who speaks to me when no one else will speak to me.

There is something wrong, as imagined by the poet in her lyrical book: The “speaker” in the poems struggles to come to terms with her father’s murder in the family’s rural Pennsylvania farmhouse, an event that remains shrouded in mystery. Her childhood, too, is a brew of emotions and events that need to be sorted and reckoned. Again and again, poem by poem, Bohince repeats the creative process of unraveling the past, of deciphering the mystery of the father’s death.

The resulting collection of poems, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (Sarabande Books), is an elegiac journey into the past and—as the poet Yeats would say—the “terrible beauty” that exists there. The reader is given glimpses into the realities of life in a poor, defeated, and “masculine” land—the muddied world of a daughter who is looking for answers, searching for her own parcel of deliverance.

Others have called this debut collection “remarkable,” “inventive,” and “redemptive.” In describing Bohince’s work, the poet Jane Mead has said: “Hers is a clear-sighted tenderness born of living fully and deeply in our complex, worn, and beautiful world.”

Bohince’s poems have been featured in publications such as Ploughshares, Slate, and The Yale Review. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and New York University, Bohince (A&S ’98) has taught at NYU, where she earned an MFA degree, and at Seton Hill University and The New School. From her current home near Pittsburgh, she is writing a second book and focusing on the themes of Appalachia, loneliness, and “brideliness.” Once again, the poet is preparing to walk across a fearsome landscape, to hike into a thicket of memory that is murky and deep, searching for that tight knot of her own truth.

A Pitt alumnus lives and learns by example

As the holidays approach, a busy consultant juggles hectic job demands while also relocating back to her hometown near Harrisburg, Pa. She dashes out, between appointments and house chores, to finish her Christmas shopping. She wants to hold fast to this season, to reminisce, to remember well.

The holiday season always reminds Valerie Corbin Ketchen of how much her parents sacrificed for her and her siblings. Somehow, the couple always found ways to stretch a salesman’s paycheck beyond its practical limits. Under the sparkling tree, there were always plenty of gifts for all five children. And that was just one tangible example of everything the Corbins did to help their children thrive.

So, Ketchen was particularly determined to show her gratitude. That season, her mother, Jacqueline Corbin, was battling fibrocystic sarcoma, a type of cancer.

“It made a world of difference to me that I could give back to her,” says Ketchen about her return home to be near family during her mother’s illness.

On one of her shopping trips, Ketchen and her siblings purchased a beautiful coat as a gift for their mother—something to keep her warm during central Pennsylvania’s blustery winters; one practical way to say “thank you” for all those years of sacrifice.

Those years included encouragement and financial support so that Ketchen could attend the University of Pittsburgh. She had dreams of working in government policy. Hailing from Steelton, a small town south of Harrisburg along the Susquehanna River, she longed for an urban campus different from anything she’d known. A clarinetist and avid football fan, she also hoped to play in a marching band for a bowl game—a goal she realized as a member of the Pitt Band.

The first time she saw the Pitt campus, Ketchen recalls, she was driving into Oakland with her mother, laying eyes on buildings she had previously seen only in pictures. “It was evening, the Cathedral was lit up, and she was so excited for me,” says Ketchen, her voice catching at the memory. “She made some big sacrifices for me to be at Pitt, and she was so happy when we drove up.”

A few years later, Ketchen earned a bachelor’s degree in urban studies, which launched her career in government affairs. Early on, she worked for the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington, D.C., crunching numbers and learning about the effects of public policy on business. Later, she worked as a consultant for the association, initially commuting between Washington and Harrisburg, spending time with her parents and extended family during the weekends. Then she relocated permanently when her mother became seriously ill.

It was the winter of 1984 when the Ketchen siblings bought the new coat as a Christmas gift for their mother. But the coat would never be worn by Jacqueline Corbin; she died that December, with the unwrapped gifts still under the tree.

So, Ketchen vowed to bestow another gift: She promised that she would look after the Corbin siblings. Ever since that December season, she finds herself guided by her parents’ example of sacrifice and love.

As a new member of the Pitt Alumni Association’s Board of Directors, Ketchen intends to help students launch their careers from the Pitt campus, just as her parents supported her own aspirations. She wants to recruit talented students, especially those who could use help in addressing the costs of a university education.

“With a lot of kids, their parents simply may not have the tools to address tuition costs because they didn’t go to college,” she says.

Ketchen (A&S ’81) wants to help students realize that scholarships and other forms of financial aid are available, that college tuition is an investment, and that “there are people who are willing to help them reach their lifelong goals.”

For nearly two decades, Ketchen has worked as a senior government affairs representative for what is now Highmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield. In her current role, she interacts with government policymakers on issues that concern the health and well-being of all Pennsylvanians.

Today, she and her husband, Carlton Ketchen—a fellow Pitt alumnus—live about 15 minutes from her hometown of Steelton, where she and her siblings remain close. She still remembers how excited her mother was about her daughter’s future that first day on the Pittsburgh campus. She knows the value of that kind of support and advocacy. She’s looking forward to another season of giving.

A conversation with Lindsay Hilton Retchless (UPB ’98), the director of alumni relations for the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. At UPB, she majored in business management. While pursuing her degree, Retchless was busy academically and socially: She joined a sorority, was a cheerleader for the basketball team, served as a resident advisor, and worked a few summers as a freshman orientation counselor. Even then, she recalls, UPB was a tight-knit campus, where students, teachers, and staff joined together for beneficial outcomes. Her current work with the alumni association and as advisor to the undergraduate Blue and Gold Society also keep her connected to her alma mater, where three of her nieces have enrolled as well.

Interview by Dan Majors
What I know for sure  . . . Be yourself. I’ve never scored any points or accomplished anything great by trying to be anyone different.  When I look in the mirror at the end of the day, I want to know the person looking back at me, and I want to really like her a lot.  I’m glad to say that I do!

Three things that best describe me . . . I was stumped about this, so I asked my three closest friends to each provide one word, and here’s what they came up with:  Vivacious. Passionate. Loyal. With the exception of loyal, I almost sound like a great perfume.

I wish I’d kept . . . more photos from my college days. They always had me hanging with friends and having fun. And I had big hair.

I still have . . . T-shirts from Greek Week sorority functions and student activities, like Air Band. The funny thing is that I still wear them. They’re good conversation pieces at the gym, and they’re still in good shape. They’ve held up really well, and I’m sentimentally attached to them.

The most important thing about being a good alumni director . . . is listening. I want to know what our alumni interests and needs are, and I need to listen to everyone at the University, so I can work toward our mission and work for our students.

Most people think my job . . . is all about planning parties. Even my grandmother. I try to dissuade them of that, but I do put together a lot of social events. It’s for a good reason—where do you think all that listening is going on?

In school, my favorite Saturday morning activity . . . was probably sleeping in. But once I woke up, I always enjoyed looking out the window and watching the fog lifting off the hillside. Our campus is so beautiful.

Janera Solomon

At the restored Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, an audience claps and whoops in response to a show that’s being held onstage. Rappers and spoken-word artists spin a colorful game-wheel that’s labeled with challenges to test who has the best “skillz.” The show’s concept was invented in Pittsburgh, and the local community has come out to support and enjoy the entertainment.

Janera Solomon (A&S ’98) sits in the audience, enjoying the scene. She’s the theater’s executive director, and her goal is to bring the community into the theater—into its seats and into its programming, too.

Solomon joined the Kelly-Strayhorn in 2008 after flourishing in a variety of arts management jobs with Lord Cultural Resources in Toronto, the Museum of African American Music in Newark,N.J., and the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, among other venues. Her arts-management education began in childhood, when she helped her father with his Solomon Steelpan Company by selling and promoting steelpan instruments and music in the Pittsburgh region. “A performance should make the audience stop what they’re doing—even if it’s not exactly to their taste,” he always told her. Today, she’s still involved in the local company.

Onstage at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, one of the game-show players is challenged to rap about “Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch.” While he freestyles, Solomon looks on with approval. She knows that the audience is completely engaged. Tonight, for a few hours, they’ve stopped whatever else they were doing to enjoy the show.

The runner positions herself on the starting line. To build confidence, she thinks: A hundred meters. Easy. But it has been 20 years since she ran competitively.

The gun pops, and she takes off. Seventy meters in, her hamstring kinks, sending jolts of pain down her leg. She pulls up, unable to finish. It’s an echo of her days as a Pitt sprinter, when she was plagued by injuries. Somehow, though, she knows the next race will be different.

Renee Henderson-Shepherd won several championships during her University years. “But,” she says, “I was more known for having my foot stuck in a cast.” She put away her running shoes when she graduated from Pitt in 1985.

She earned a law degree, moved to New Jersey to practice civil law, and started a family with her husband, Darryl Shepherd, who attended the College of General Studies and played basketball at Pitt. Decades passed. Occasionally, she watched track events on TV, and something nagged at her: “I didn’t get the chance to run as well as I thought I could have in college.”

That was before she discovered Masters Track for athletes older than 35. Last year, she twice won gold at the World Masters Indoor Track and Field Championships in France, setting two new American records. This year, she swept the 100-, 200-, and 400-meter races at the national championships, then set two records and twice won gold at the world championships in Finland. Recently, she was named New Jersey’s Masters Athlete of the Year for the second consecutive year. At age 45, she’s not looking back.

The object is survival. That’s what the pitcher says to himself as he winds up and throws the ball.

The pitcher is Shawn Felty, and he’s playing in an alumni softball tournament in metro Washington, D.C. Surprisingly, five weeks before this game, Felty (A&S ’93) was in risky surgery to remove cancerous tumors. Recovery was supposed to take at least six weeks.

But Felty wanted to pitch for his Pitt team in the upcoming series. So, within three weeks of the surgery he was walking laps from his kitchen to his living room. A week later he was walking outside and, before long, jogging. His surgeon cleared him to play in the tournament, where all of his Pitt teammates wore gold arm bands to honor someone extraordinary—their pitcher, Shawn Felty. Out of 70 teams in the 2008 tournament, the Pitt team finished in the top three. There were hugs and tears.

Only a year before, at age 37, Felty—who works in computer science at the U.S. Department of Defense—had been diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer and given an 11 percent chance of survival. Then the cancer spread to his liver. An oncologist pronounced the 13 tumors inoperable, but when a surgeon proposed an experimental operation, Felty sprang at the chance.

Now, he’s involved with the Colon Club, an organization that educates people about colon cancer. Recently, he modeled for the group’s 2010 calendar, called the “Colondar,” bearing both a smile and the scars left behind by surgery.

Felty, though, continues to battle. Late this summer, the cancer recurred, and he is blogging about his situation at http://allittakesisguts.blogspot.com. Day by day, his motto helps him rally: “We have one more game.”

Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg (right) greets Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on the Pittsburgh campus.

President Medvedev was in Pittsburgh for the G-20 economic summit in September. He visited a class in Pitt’s Russian Nationality Room and then moved to the Commons Room, where he took questions from students who were in the larger audience of several hundred Pitt students, faculty, staff, trustees, and alumni. News media worldwide covered the event.

Among his comments to students was:  “I have had all sorts of experiences in my life: I was a graduate student, a teacher, a lawyer. I worked in business, became a civil servant, worked in the government. Now I am president of a large country, but I can tell you that those years when I was a law student were the happiest years of my life. It [your time in college] is an important foundation for your future lives and should motivate you to seek learning every single day. So, my advice to you is to treasure this time. I envy you.”

Write to us at: pittmag@pitt.edu

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Pitt Magazine
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A Pitt alumnus helps today’s students appreciate the stakes

Epstein

Having just seen his daughter, Margo, graduate from law school in Harrisburg, Pa., attorney Arnold Epstein found himself in the family car zooming along the highway toward Washington, D.C. Sitting beside him, his sister was panicking: “We’ll never get there.”

When he first found out that his two daughters would graduate from law school and medical school on the same day, at overlapping times, in two different cities, all Epstein could do was shake his head. “I thought, ‘This is impossible,’” he recalls.

But here he was—having just e-mailed daughter Lauren a picture of her sister Margo’s graduation from Widener Law School—roaring along a highway in a furious attempt to make the end of Lauren’s medical school ceremony at George Washington University. To further complicate the trip, he made a wrong turn coming out of Harrisburg. But Epstein—a lawyer with the Pittsburgh area firm of Brennan, Robins & Daley—is not a man who is easily deterred.

“I said: ‘We’ll get there,’” he recalls, and they did, swooping in at the last minute to see Lauren walking along the aisle to pick up her degree. “I was worn out, but it was well worth it,” he adds.

One daughter is now an assistant solicitor for Allegheny County and the other a third-year medical resident in Boston. Their success is a reflection of Epstein’s passion and dedication to making the lives of young people better. From the start, he and his wife encouraged their daughters to learn, to be confident, and to never give up.

A member of the University’s Alumni Leadership Council, where he serves on the student subcommittee, Epstein (EDUC ’69) shares the same messages with the young people he meets through his alumni volunteer efforts.

He’s most proud of the University’s work to draw students into the embrace of the alumni network from day one. Arrival Survival—new students’ first week on campus—enables students to form friendships and begin to feel at home away from home. If members of the alumni council are there to bond with students, he says, we are more likely to bond with them for life. In the end, if they find friendships and have good experiences, they are more likely to come back and contribute their talents and support to the University.

Through his nearly 30-year role as an adjunct instructor in the legal studies program in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, Epstein has been able to keep in touch with students’ changing lifestyles and expectations. His voice is an important one as the alumni association’s student subcommittee shapes activities and outreach for today’s 21st-century students whose hurried rhythms of life are guided by Google, text messaging, and digital-age academics.

After he earned his Pitt undergraduate degree in education with a focus in history, Epstein taught high school for a year while he toyed with the idea of pursuing a PhD in history. Ultimately, he wound up attending law school in Ohio and became a managing partner in a small general practice firm that is a couple of traffic lights from his home in Churchill, Pa. But—since the days when he shared life lessons with his daughters—education remains a love.

“Teaching was always at the back of my mind … the satisfaction of students learning something, gaining knowledge that I’ve given to them,” he says.

The son of a truck driver and a homemaker, Epstein has always felt a special affinity for Pitt, too, which gave him opportunities he otherwise might not have had.

He appreciates the doors of advancement that Pitt opened for him. His volunteer work with the alumni association is motivated by his desire to provide every student with the same opportunity. “I want students to know that attending Pitt is an investment in yourself,” he says. “Education is like getting a ticket to a ball game. It lets you into the game.”

His dreams began at Pitt, he says, and he is deeply connected to the University. It was here that he met his wife, Barbara Appelbaum, a Pitt graduate who works on campus as director of the Health Sciences Library System. His sister and her husband are Pitt graduates, too.

With Pitt providing such linkages to the past and connections for the future, it’s easy to understand why Epstein says: “Every time I look at the Cathedral, I feel like I’m home.”

Freshman sendoff events give our alumni volunteers a chance to welcome students even before they arrive on campus.  Volunteers also get to interact with students at the Pathway to Professions Career Networking Reception that always takes place on the Thursday of Homecoming. If you’d like to volunteer, have a look at our Web site for information, www.alumni.pitt.edu.

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

Every year, the New Jersey Pitt Alumni Club hosts an event for area students who will be starting at Pitt in the fall. This  past August, more than 20 families joined alumni for this sendoff.   The New Jersey Pitt Alumni Club is one of 15 alumni groups that hosted sendoff events for Pitt students this year.

2. Pitt alumni speak with parents of new Pitt students about the University of Pittsburgh experience.

3.Students break the ice—and break bread—with each other.

4. Carlos Reisen (A&S ’70), president of Ascent Advisors, LLC, in West Chester, Ohio, and student Jacqueline McAllister (A&S Class of 2014) were a few of the more than 400 alumni and students who took part in the Pathway to Professions Networking Reception in October.

5. Edric Brooks (SIS ’98), at left, shares some insights with student Opubo Agiobenebo (ENGR Class of 2014).

1940, 1948, 1951
Three Pitt alumni were inducted into the inaugural class of Pittsburgh’s Allderdice High School Hall of Fame. Bernard Fisher A&S ’40, MED ’43, a Distinguished Service Professor of Surgery at Pitt, was honored for his pioneering accomplishments in developing treatments for breast cancer. Herbert Douglas EDUC ’48, ’50G, a Pitt trustee, was honored for his success as a sales executive with Pabst Brewing Co. and Schieffelin and Somerset Co., as well as for winning the bronze medal in the long jump in the 1948 Olympics. Myron Cope A&S ’51, inventor of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ “Terrible Towel,” was posthumously honored for his work as a sports broadcaster and writer. He died in February 2008.

1956
Charles W. Enlind A&S ’56, a retired economist for the U.S. Department of Labor, was appointed vice president of the Potomac River Jazz Club in Washington, D.C. Frank G. Helman A&S ’56 delivered a baccalaureate address at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, in May 2009. The address was titled “Learning How to Live” and focused on the importance of a spiritual quest in life. He also received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree in recognition of his work in international law and business. He currently maintains an independent legal practice in Boothbay Harbor, Me.

1959
Robert A. Honeygosky A&S ’59, ’70G is an arts critic who has traveled to Argentina, Australia, Italy, and Russia to review performing arts groups. He’s also a nominations panelist with the American Theater Hall of Fame in New York, N.Y.

1965
Richard H. Galloway LAW ’65 was elected president of the Pennsylvania Bar Institute’s board of directors. He’s a partner in the law firm Galloway Monzo in Greensburg, Pa. He’s also a member of the House of Delegates of the Pennsylvania Bar Association and a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

1967
Sibyl Masquelier A&S ’67 of Cape Elizabeth, Me., was appointed to the board of the Press Institute for Women in the Developing World, an international nonprofit organization that promotes journalism education for women. She’s president of Executive Resource Group, a recruiting firm that serves the communications and energy industries.
Joseph P. O’Donnell A&S ’67, DEN ’70 recently authored two novels, both of which were named Editor’s Choice books by the publisher, iUniverse. Fatal Gamble was released in December 2008, followed by its sequel, Deadly Codes: A Gallagher Novel in February 2009. The books are thrillers that follow the investigations of a Boston private detective.

1973
Rob Byer A&S ’73, LAW ’77 was appointed to the Appellate Court Procedural Rules Committee of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He’s head of the appellate litigation group of law firm Duane Morris in Pittsburgh. Kathleen Kappel A&S ’73, SIS ’76G was appointed by Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell to the Advisory Committee for the Blind, a panel that advises the Pennsylvania Office of Vocational Rehabilitation on important issues affecting visually impaired people. She’s director of Pittsburgh’s Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, which has won numerous awards under her leadership, including the 2007 Network Library of the Year Award from the Library of Congress.

1974
Robert A. Del Greco EDUC ’74, ’79G, ’00G was appointed head of the Department of Elementary Education at Robert Morris University in Moon Township, Pa.

1976
Robert S. Bernstein A&S ’76 spoke at the 2009 Pumper and Cleaner Environmental Expo International, an annual trade show for environmental service professionals, in Louisville, Ky. His presentation was titled “Get P.A.I.D: A Guide to Getting Paid Faster (and What to Do if You Don’t!).” He’s a partner with the Bernstein Law Firm in Pittsburgh.

1982
Kathryne King Smith SHRS ’82, at age 88, became the oldest person ever to graduate from the Community College of Allegheny County when she earned a degree in child and family studies in May 2009. She plans to continue taking classes—to learn guitar.

1984
Ronald Smutny A&S ’84, EDUC ’95G joined the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force as a development associate.

1985
John W. Beiter SIS ’85G, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist in Pittsburgh, recently developed an online communication tool, the Beiter Sexuality Preference Indicator, to help couples learn more about their sexuality.
Scott D. Rosenberg ENGR ’85 was selected as a finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award program in New Jersey. He’s the founder and CEO of Miro Consulting in Fords, N.J., which assists companies in managing software licensing.

1986
Muazu Babangida Aliyu GSPIA’86, ’89, governor of Niger State in Nigeria, was awarded the Society for Peace Studies and Practice Fellowship.
Rory G. Ritrievi A&S ’86 was appointed board member, president, and CEO of Mid Penn Bank in Millersburg, Pa. He serves on the Harrisburg Area Community College Foundation Board.

1987
David Carey A&S ’87G, ’89G received the George Ball Award for Excellence in Advising from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., where he’s an emeritus professor of philosophy. He was commended by students for teaching with the “true Socratic spirit.” Patrick A. Worms A&S ’87 was promoted to group chief information officer of Carmeuse Lime & Stone, North America, a global producer of lime. Based in the company’s Pittsburgh office, he will be responsible for Carmeuse’s worldwide information technology operations.

1988
Vincent Michael Paterra CGS ’88, ENGR ’08G, and his wife, Jennifer, announce the April 2009 birth of their third child, Milena Grace.

1990
Denis Collins KGSB ’90 wrote Essentials of Business Ethics: Creating an Organization of High Integrity and Superior Performance (John Wiley & Sons). He’s a business professor at Edgewood College in Madison, Wis. Elizabeth Galderise Sturga SIS ’90 was promoted to national director of administration with Angelica Corporation in Atlanta, which provides linen services to health care organizations.

1992
Kevin Brickner ENGR ’92, KGSB ’96 was promoted to vice president of technical services with US Airways. Thomas R. Carnahan CGS ’92 received a Master of Business Administration degree from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa.

1993
Michelle Lea Whitman CGS ’93, principal agent of the Michelle Lea Whitman Agency in Beaver Falls, Pa., achieved “On Your Side” certification from Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company.

1995
Irene Bretzin SOC WK ’95 received a master’s degree in library and information science from Pitt in August 2009. While obtaining her degree, she also studied in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. She plans to combine her experience in social work, interest in international development, and knowledge of library science to promote children’s literacy. Matthew R. Druciak ENGR ’95 joined SECO/WARWICK Corp., a manufacturer of industrial heat processing equipment, as a project sales engineer. He’s a member of the Association for Iron and Steel Technology, where he serves on the Energy and Utilities Operation Committee.

1996
Chris Fedeli A&S ’96 wrote an article, “Carpool Lanes on the Internet: Effective Network Management,” which was published in the July 2009 issue of Communications Lawyer. He’s an associate with the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine in Washington, D.C.

1997
Jacquelyn Stacey (Raphael) Hall GSPIA ’97 is director of external affairs at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M. She also serves on the board of the Monte del Sol Charter School. Andrew James Kennedy LAW ’97 and his wife, Nicole, announce the July 2009 birth of their daughter, Maureen Kelly.

1998
Richard R. Harris LAW ’98 taught a continuing legal education course for the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in June 2009 titled “Federal Grand Jury Practice: How to Effectively Respond When a Client Receives a Grand Jury Subpoena.” He’s a partner with the Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel law firm in Philadelphia. Peter Lerner KGSB ’98 wrote an academic text titled Microstructure and Noise in Financial Markets (VDM Verlag).Mark P. Rarrick DEN ’98, ’01 and Katherine M. Harbay Rarrick DEN ’01 announce the March 2009 birth of their daughter, Lauren Elizabeth.

2000
Megan J. Duryea LAW ’00 was named a “Lawyer on the Fast Track” for 2009 by The Legal Intelligencer and Pennsylvania Law Weekly. She’s a partner in the Blue Bell, Pa., office of the Fox Rothschild law firm and serves on the executive board of the Young Republican Attorneys Association of Montgomery County.

2001
Kenneth Michael Shamus CBA ’01 and his wife, Dianna, announce the 2009 birth of their daughter, Allison Claire. J. Michael Vozniak PHARM ’01 was elected secretary of the Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Association. He’s a hematology/oncology clinical pharmacy specialist with Philadelphia’s Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He’s also an active member in the Philadelphia Pitt Club.
2002
Lettie Alyse (Hampton) Gabriele A&S ’02 announces the birth of her second daughter, Anya Lynn, in June 2009. Her eldest daughter, Ava Leigh, was born in 2006.

2004
Phi Huynh Do GSPH ’04 is working at a private medical clinic in Saigon, Vietnam, after completing three years of service with the Harvard Medical School AIDS Initiative in Vietnam.

2005
Gregory P. Cofano CGS ’05 received a Doctor of Chiropractic degree in June 2009 from the Palmer College of Chiropractic in Florida, graduating cum laude. Aaron Duffey A&S ’05 coproduced and acted in Three Priests, a contemporary Western film that was released in June. He works in Portland, Me., with Gum Spirits Productions.
Carol L. S. (Sedor) Trent CGS ’05 earned a master’s degree in criminology from the University of South Florida. The title of her thesis was “State Dominance and Political Corruption: Testing the Efficacy of an Alternate Configuration of Institutional-Anomie Theory Cross-Nationality.” She’s now pursuing a PhD at Indiana University.

2006
Ashley Lee Mittelmeier A&S ’06 married Todd Mittelmeier in April 2009 at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Pittsburgh. More than nine Pitt alumni attended the wedding. She’s a communications assistant in the Office of Public Relations at Adrian College in Michigan. Her husband is director of the college’s Arrington Ice Arena.

2008
Greg Burdette A&S ’08 joined the Coalition for Christian Outreach, a nonprofit organization, through which he’s serving as director of the Graduate & Young Adult Ministry at Bellefield Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.

2009
Leanne Aurich CGS ’09 was selected to be a leadership consultant with Kappa Kappa Gamma Fraternity. She will visit 30 collegiate chapters of Kappa Kappa Gamma during the 2009-10 school year to aid in chapter organization and programming.

In Memoriam

Daphne Kamaras Black EDUC ’48 died in February 2009 at age 83. She taught math and Spanish for 33 years in the Hayward Unified School District in Oxnard, Calif.

John “Jack” Philip Brandt Sr. MED ’43, an ophthalmologist and otolaryngologist, died in April 2009 at age 90. After earning his Pitt medical degree, he served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. Then he established a medical practice in Lock Haven, Pa., where he also served as a board member of the Lock Haven YMCA and a trustee of the Great Island Presbyterian Church.

Jack E. Foley A&S ’46, a former manager of Pitt’s basketball team, died in September 2009 at age 87. His experiences as a paratrooper in World War II were chronicled in the Emmy-winning HBO series Band of Brothers. He later had a career with Pittsburgh-based aluminum producer Alcoa.

Jacques Kozub GSPIA ’64 died in May 2009 at age 77. He worked in Washington, D.C., as an official with the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank and was a longtime member of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.

Edward S. Mash ENGR ’62 died in June 2009 at age 69. He worked at the General Electric Silicones plant in Waterford, Pa., for 33 years until his retirement. He also was a member of the Corpus Christi Church in Ushers, Pa.

Mary M. Merman LAW ’53, the first female president of the Western Pennsylvania Federal Bar Association, died in July 2009. She was employed as a regional counsel with the U.S. Small Business Administration for nearly 40 years. She also served as chair of the Federal Women’s Program of the Pittsburgh Federal Executive Board.

Nestor M. Nisperos GSPIA ’70 died in April 2009 at age 80. A renowned expert on strategic and international policy, he served as a chair and professor at the University of the Philippines and as president/trustee of the National Defense College Foundation.

Heidi L. Smith A&S ’01 died in September 2009 at age 30 while backpacking in Yellowstone National Park. She was a professional ski instructor at the Jackson Hole Ski Resort in Wyoming, as well as a river guide who led rafting trips on rivers in Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Judith M. Van Horn EDUC ’67, ’70G, SIS ’78G, a former vice president of the Greater Houston Pitt Club, died in August 2009 at age 66. She worked as a research librarian with Gulf Oil and Chevron. She was a member of the American Association of University Women and the Malaysia Singapore Association.

Kurt Weil ENGR ’48 died in July 2009 at age 81. As a child, he emigrated from Germany to the United States to escape Nazi persecution. During his career as an industrial engineer, he worked in the steel, automotive, mattress, and clothing industries in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He also served three terms as president of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers, taught at Cuyahoga Community College, and was on the advisory committee of Lorain County Community College.

A cluster of children surrounds the tall businessman as he turns a key in the door to the brick library in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The youngsters are eager to get into the Martin Luther King Jr. Reading and Cultural Center. They want to open books, learn about others, and explore new worlds.

Before now, the financially strapped library had been closed for several months. The computers had been removed, and some bookshelves were empty. Then, businessman Greg Spencer (CGS ‘80) volunteered to help. He had no experience with library management, but he realized that failure wasn’t an option. The MLK center wasn’t just a library—it was a safe haven for kids who otherwise might spend their afternoons in empty houses or on the streets; it was a place where children came to dream.

So, as an unpaid executive director, Spencer collected donations, books, and computers. He used his corporate connections to rally support for the center. He encouraged community members to become a part of the library’s revival.

Enabling others to reach their potential is Spencer’s passion, inspired by his parents’ values, his struggles as a young college student, and a string of opportunities that allowed him to excel, beginning as a youth in subsidized housing to become a top-level executive with a reputation for success.

The journey wasn’t easy. In 1966, as an undergraduate on a scholarship at an Ohio university, Spencer was frustrated by a learning hardship that hindered his ability to decode written words. This early challenge caused him to leave school. He remembers feeling like a failure.

He found redemption at U.S. Steel, where he started as a laborer and ultimately became general manager of human resources. To make the ascent, he earned a degree at Pitt through night and weekend classes. When needed, his wife, Janet, helped by reading his textbooks and highlighting important information. She also quizzed him during car rides. Spencer graduated cum laude with a Pitt bachelor’s degree as a public administration major, and he later earned his master’s degree from Saint Francis University.

Between 1994 and 2003, he worked at Equitable Resources—now EQT Corporation—becoming a senior vice president there. He left to establish his own firm, Randall Enterprises, and later Randall Industries, where he is president and CEO. These ventures encompass a real estate development firm and a “green friendly” chemical manufacturing plant, both creating jobs in the region. With his businesses, one of his primary goals has been to hire people who need a second chance in life.

“People oftentimes get caught up in destructive behaviors because they don’t feel they have the opportunities,” he says. By example, Spencer shows others what’s possible. He has helped people launch their own businesses, he mentors young people, and he continues to be an active community leader, serving on multiple boards of directors and often chairing them.

On that day in 2006 when Spencer reopened the door to the Hill District’s reading center, he talked with the children about the site’s namesake, Martin Luther King Jr., whose life inspired millions and whose civil rights legacy continues to be a beacon of light worldwide. Perhaps some of the children who gathered in the center that day might also be inspired by someone nearby—a modest businessman on a daily quest to better the lives of others.

The panther slips into his Pitt jersey one paw at a time, suiting up like the other players in the locker room. Then he slinks through the hidden hallways of Heinz Field. At the end of a tunnel that leads to the football turf, he peers at the thousands of fans who have gathered for the first Pitt game of the 2009 season. Watching the crowd is difficult because he can only see through one eye of the costume at a time, but he sees enough to know that everyone is pumped for the opening match against Youngstown State.

The student inside the furry suit is an anonymous Pitt sophomore. But when the fuzzy face, whiskers, and tail are on, he is Roc, Pitt’s beloved mascot. By tradition, his identity must be kept secret, shrouding his character with mystery and appeal.

To start the game, the panther Roc leads the football players onto the field by charging forward with a Pitt flag between his claws. Fans cheer and hoot as rock music blares around the stadium and the panther’s flag ripples in the air. It’s tough to sprint 100 yards in a costume, but this panther makes it look easy. When Roc reaches the student section, he tugs at the sides of his jersey to show off his new uniform. This season, he’s wearing number 100 on his jersey to represent the number of years he has been the University’s mascot.

In fall 1909, students and alumni gathered to select a symbol for Pitt. Student George M.P. Baird made the winning suggestion—a panther—chosen, in part, because real panthers once prowled the Pittsburgh region. Today, at least one lively panther remains. Roc struts back and forth on the sidelines, keeping Pitt fans’ spirits up. Dozens of people in the stands sport pins—distributed by Pitt’s athletic department and the alumni association—that read: “Roc On: Our Beloved Panther Turns 100.” Every time Pitt scores, Roc jumps and dances in celebration.

When the game ends, Pitt tops the scoreboard, defeating Youngstown State 38-3. Roc, sweating underneath his pounds of faux fur, heads to the locker room where he’ll become, once more, an anonymous student. When he leaves Heinz Field, he blends in with the crowd.  But he knows, next game, he’ll be back as part of a century-long tradition of Panther Pride.  In time, others will follow. Roc On!

Last winter, a retired couple tuned their radio at home in Jackson Springs, N.C., to a program of holiday music. They were stunned to hear a Christmas concert by Pitt’s Heinz Chapel Choir. “We just sat there almost without breathing in our leather recliners, absolutely transfixed, wiping away tears,” recalls Beth Schettler, who was listening with her husband, Tony. The radio broadcast transported the couple back in time, to an era when their lives were metered by music and song.

Beth Klages sang alto. Tony Schettler sang bass. They were members of the University’s Heinz Chapel Choir when Franklin Roosevelt was president, a gallon of gas cost 11 cents, and World War II dominated the headlines.

She sat in front of him during afternoon choir rehearsals in a too-warm room in the Cathedral of Learning. When practices ended, everyone rode the elevator down 30 floors, still singing together the whole way. On Sundays, they all dressed in purple velvet robes for vesper services and made their processional to the altar of Heinz Memorial Chapel. Their uplifting voices brought the stone and wood and stained glass of the building to life.

The two student singers got better acquainted during a choir retreat led by Theodore “Pop” Finney, who founded the Heinz Chapel Choir in 1939. “Pop worked us really hard that week, so there was no great, stormy romance,” Beth recalls. “But I did think Tony was pretty wonderful, not to mention tall and handsome.”

Before long, Tony asked Beth to be his date for the annual Engineer’s Ball, and that cemented their courtship. Since then, the couple has spent more than five decades together. They were married shortly after Tony graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1943. In the years that followed, there was, of course, music—a grand piano in the living room, voice lessons for their girls, and season tickets to the symphony. Over time, the immediacy of their Heinz Chapel Choir experience receded, but never fully faded.

Then, the 2008 radio broadcast brought it all back. So, it’s not surprising that the couple returned to Pittsburgh this past April for the 70th anniversary reunion concert of the Heinz Chapel Choir. Alone, they drove more than 500 miles to attend the reunion, only two months after Tony underwent spine surgery. He is 88 years old; she is 85.

On campus, they gathered with several generations of choir members.

At the hallmark reunion concert, Tony made his way to the altar in Heinz Chapel with the help of a cane and Beth’s arm. They sang the hymn “Brother James’ Air” along with dozens of other singers who had joined the choir long after the couple had fallen in love on campus 67 years ago. Everyone sang joyously, their voices joining in harmony with life’s enduring rhythms.

Nordenberg (left) and Barroso

Brussels Connection

Pitt law student Amelia Mathias spent the past summer in Brussels researching legal directives passed by the European Union, but she didn’t have a chance to meet any of the lawmakers who had roles in creating those documents. Then, the G-20 Summit brought one of those lawmakers—José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission of the European Union—to a luncheon at Pitt.

In Alumni Hall, faculty, staff, students (including Mathias) and other guests joined Barroso and Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg for a European-style meal. Afterwards, the Chancellor conferred upon Barroso an honorary doctoral degree in public and international affairs.

Mathias conducted her summer research at Brussels’ Institute for European Studies with the support of Pitt’s Nordenberg Fellowship and the Center for International Legal Education. This semester she’s using that research to write a paper about the effectiveness of European legislation in dismantling the finances of terrorists.

Barroso first visited the University three years ago to tour Pitt’s European Union Center of Excellence and to deliver a lecture to a standing-room-only audience. This time, he spoke to the lunch attendees and international journalists about building bridges between Europe and the United States, particularly on issues of climate control.

At the luncheon, Mathias was given a chance to ask Barroso a question. She stood tall in her business suit and spoke into a microphone. She asked him how he felt about organizational changes that will soon be taking place in the European Union. Over the summer, she had discussed the changes with colleagues at outdoor cafés. From the podium, Barroso replied that he’s pleased because there will be more stability in the European Union. Through her research and discussions, Mathias had already come to that conclusion, and she was glad to hear the EU leader’s endorsement.

Then Barroso left to prepare for dinner with President Obama and other world leaders at Phipps Conservatory, and Mathias headed across campus with a renewed exuberance to continue her scholarly work.

Reality Show

It didn’t quite hit the city’s top aide as he watched his boss, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, exchange football banter with President Barack Obama. It wasn’t until late on the summit’s opening night, as he stood on the steps of the City-County Building with four city hall guards, that Pitt alumnus Yarone Zober finally felt the G-20 had arrived.

“There were just five of us, watching the presidential motorcade, and then the Russian motorcade, and the French motorcade …” says Zober, the mayor’s chief of staff. He’d worn that olive-green suit all day long, and he’d toiled on Grant Street on and off for a decade, but at that moment everything seemed fresh. “It suddenly became real to me that all of these folks were finally here, and each one of them had an opportunity to see, firsthand, a city they probably hadn’t heard of before.”

His city.

Perhaps no Pittsburgher endured a longer run-up to the summit than Zober (A&S ’97, LAW ’03). He was on the speakerphone in May when the White House called the mayor to say the city was short-listed to host the gathering. “Of course, we were both floored,” says Zober, who helped the mayor line up financing and manage a coalition of government, business, and nonprofit organizations that prepared the proverbial red carpet. “One of the biggest highlights of all was how this community came together to put on this event,” says Zober.

He was proud that Pittsburgh’s “turnaround city” message resonated with global media. A Middle Eastern reporter, for instance, interviewed the mayor and said he wanted to return and do a feature on Pittsburgh’s rebirth.

“Most cities never get the chance to shine in the international spotlight like this,” he says. “In Pittsburgh now, anything’s possible.”

—Rich Lord

Warhol Whirl

On the same afternoon that world leaders convened at Pittsburgh’s convention center for the G-20 Summit, their spouses gathered across the river at the Andy Warhol Museum to experience modern American art. During their visit, they unsealed one of the museum’s Warhol time capsules, learned to make screen print art, and ate lunch in a gallery that showcased some of the artist’s key works from the 1960s.

After lunch, two of the First Ladies requested a more in-depth tour of the museum—Carla Bruni-Sarkozy of France and Therese Rein of Australia. So Pitt alumnus Eric C. Shiner, the museum’s Milton Fine Curator of Art, guided the distinguished visitors through additional exhibitions.

When the group reached an enormous, oblong painting—Warhol’s version of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci—Shiner (A&S ’94) explained that it had been commissioned for a 1987 exhibition in Italy. Bruni and Rein, both well-versed in Warhol’s art and anything-goes lifestyle, were surprised that he would accept a commission for religious art. Shiner explained that despite his celebrity profile, Warhol often attended Mass on Sundays. The 1987 exhibition was Warhol’s last before he died.

“Andy is far and away the most international Pittsburgher in history,” says Shiner, who is teaching a Museum Studies Exhibition Seminar at Pitt this semester. “We’ve had exhibitions in 15 of the G-20 nations.” Next year, he and his team will be sending more exhibitions around the world. Here and abroad, Warhol still attracts.

Principal Moments

She stood in the school auditorium, youthful yet authoritative in a charcoal gray suit, her voice not betraying a whit of nerves before nearly 250 excited students. And why should she be jittery?  After all, the guests that morning were only First Lady Michelle Obama, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, country singer Trisha Yearwood, singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles and, in the balcony, the spouses of the leaders of the world’s top 20 industrialized nations. Only!

At center stage was Melissa Pearlman (A&S ’96), who heads Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts School. One of her many roles was to introduce the dignitaries who were in attendance, leading up to Mrs. Obama, which prompted an explosion of cheering from the audience of CAPA students and guests.

For Pearlman, there were many favorite moments during that day. Early on, she was trying to calm a ninth-grader who would soon present the First Lady with a gift of his artwork. “He was a little nervous,” says Pearlman, “and then this amazing, statuesque woman just walked in.” It was Mrs. Obama, and she immediately put the youngster at ease. Later, adds Pearlman, the First Lady spied the 10th-grade stage manager, embraced her, “and told her, ‘None of this would be possible without you—you make us look good, sound good.’ The student’s face lit up.”

Pearlman says she was struck by the First Lady’s tenderness and poise with the kids. “You read about how down to earth she is, how committed to improving education she is, but seeing it up close and personal is another experience entirely,” she says.

Pearlman always wanted to be a teacher: “For as long as I can remember. And I always thought there would come a time when I’d want to help kids more, and differently, than just in a classroom.” On G-20 day at CAPA, she was doing just that—and this time the world was watching.

—Mackenzie Carpenter

Russian Roomful

In the Russian Room of the Cathedral of Learning, nine students in an advanced Russian literature class discussed the merits of a story on a Thursday afternoon. While waiting for a guest speaker to arrive, they debated in Russian about the sociological underpinnings of a tale about children who were zealous about nationalism during the era of the Soviet Union.

Then, suddenly, security agents entered the classroom and closed the stained-glass windows. Moments later, the president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, strode in. He was in town for the G-20 Summit and had requested to meet with university students.

He shook hands with the instructor, Irina Anisimova, a Russian native who teaches in Pitt’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She introduced her awestruck class and explained what they were reading throughout the semester. The Russian president, a former law instructor, was impressed that the students were tackling modern literature and were majoring in fields as diverse as anthropology, economics, and computer science.

After the intimate classroom meeting, the president addressed a crowd of several hundred in the Cathedral’s Commons Room (see page 52 in this issue). For nearly an hour, students raised their hands and inquired about Medvedev’s thoughts on Russia’s relations with Georgia, on U.S. plans to close missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, and whether he could send artists to Pittsburgh to showcase Russian culture. Medvedev amply responded to each question and even offered some wisdom on college: “It is an important foundation for your future lives and should motivate you to seek learning every single day,” he said.

All in the Family

First comes the trio dressed as indigenous healers, faces painted, hair wrapped in ribbons. Then come the Buddhist monks in their cinnamon-colored robes. All around there are young adults in flip-flops carrying antiwar banners. There are horns, and tambourines, and drums—a banging, tooting family of protesters desiring to be heard.

Among them is Celeste Taylor.  She, too, has gathered for the People’s March, a peaceful rally held the closing day of the G-20 Summit. After marching about two miles from Oakland to downtown, she stands near the shadows of Pittsburgh’s City-County Building to listen to the rally’s speakers.

Taylor, a Pitt alumnus, wears her forest-green T-shirt, with the community activism slogan, “Build the Hill.” A button, “War is NOT the Answer,” is pinned to her left shoulder. On a wooden stick she holds a poster that calls for jobs for all. The cardboard sign has the face of Martin Luther King Jr.

An honored community activist, Taylor (CGS ’82) is known for her grassroots work on education, justice, and equity causes. The range of summit protesters reminds her of a reunion across the generations and of King’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, another event that drew a mosaic of articulate, passionate people united to push for positive change.

Surrounded by friends, Taylor takes in all the excitement of people speaking to the world. She has just discovered that her eldest son is marching, too. She smiles knowing he has joined the global family of those concerned about economics, the environment, and justice around the world. “It does not get any better than this,” she says, hoisting her sign high into the air.

—Ervin Dyer

Boyle

Pitt professor Jon Boyle’s ongoing investigation into the unique molecular relationship between disease-causing microorganisms and their hosts has earned him the title of 2009 Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences, an honor he shares with previous winners who are now among the nation’s top researchers, including two Nobel laureates. Boyle will receive $240,000 over four years to support his research. In 2009, he is one of 17 early-career scientists the Pew Charitable Trusts identified as “displaying outstanding promise in research relevant to the advancement of human health.” An assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Boyle is the first Pitt professor to receive the award.

Yates

When Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger endures a hard tackle during a football game, team physician Anthony Yates is always there to examine him and see whether he’s OK. In fact, Yates, an assistant clinical professor of medicine in Pitt’s School of Medicine, has been looking after the health of Pittsburgh Steelers athletes for more than 30 years. This summer, the Professional Football Athletic Trainers Society honored him with the Jerry “Hawk” Rhea Award, an annual prize recognizing the best efforts of doctors who serve NFL teams.

Torres

Problems with dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, are linked to diseases like schizophrenia, Parkinson’s, and drug addiction. Pitt scientist Gonzalo E. Torres focuses his research on learning more about the role that dopamine plays in these illnesses. This fall, his efforts were recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an accolade that he received from the President at a White House ceremony. Torres is an assistant professor of neurobiology in the School of Medicine.

Pitt researcher Sharon Hillier is dedicated to finding ways to prevent the spread of HIV in women, a line of research that often requires her to confront taboo topics. Her daughter, in fact, once told a teacher, “My mom works on the kinds of infections nobody wants to get and nobody wants to talk about.” For her groundbreaking work, Hillier received the Thomas Parran Award in July from the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association at an international conference in London, where she also delivered a lecture. She’s a professor, vice chair for faculty affairs, and director of reproductive infectious disease research in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences in the School of Medicine.

Some years ago, a teacher or two taught you how to read the words on this page and expand your vocabulary. Helping students make sense of written English is one of a teacher’s greatest challenges. For more than 40 years, Pitt Professor Emeritus of Education Rita M. Bean has been helping teachers improve their methods of reading instruction.

She has written dozens of reading textbooks and has served as president of the Pennsylvania Reading Teacher Educators, among many other accomplishments. Recently, she received the Special Service Award from the International Reading Association in recognition of her distinguished career and her service to the association.

Chabon

Rescher

In the East Room of the White House, a woman reads a quote aloud: “The easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes, the more difficult it then becomes to do that person harm.” A man standing beside her reacts with surprise. “Wow, that’s really profound,” he comments. “Who said that?” “You did,” the woman quips. Oh. This dialogue was part of a humorous skit that Michael Chabon, Pitt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning alumnus, performed with his wife, author Ayelet Waldman, this spring at a communications event hosted by President Obama.

In October, Chabon (A&S ’84) was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as was Pitt’s Nicholas Rescher, a Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. Rescher is known as one of America’s most prolific and influential philosophers. His research career extends over six decades, and he has written more than 100 books. Rescher chairs Pitt’s Department of Philosophy and cochairs the University’s Center for Philosophy of Science. This is the fourth consecutive year a Pitt philosophy professor has received this eminent honor.

Fu

For decades, surgeons have fastened replacement ligaments in patients’ injured knees in the same way people hang birthday banners—with one tack on each side. However, many ligaments in the human body are naturally attached with two tacks on each side. Since 2003, Pitt surgeon Freddie H. Fu has been pioneering a surgical method called “double bundle” for attaching replacement anterior cruciate ligaments (ACLs) at two points on either side. This and other accomplishments have made him an international leader in orthopaedic surgery. Earlier this year, he was named president of the International Society of Arthroscopy, Knee Surgery, and Orthopaedic Sports Medicine. He’s the David Silver Professor and Chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery in the School of Medicine and has been the head team physician for Pitt’s Department of Athletics for more than 20 years.

The ways in which the Army markets itself to recruit female soldiers is the focus of study for Jessica Ghilani (A&S ’02, A&S ’05G), a doctoral candidate in Pitt’s Department of Communication. This year, she won a prestigious fellowship from the American Association of University Women to complete her dissertation, “Selling Soldiering to Consumers: Advertising, Media, and the All-Volunteer Army.”

Maher

University of Pittsburgh Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor James V. Maher has announced his intention to leave his administrative position and return to the faculty at the beginning of next academic year or as soon after that as his successor can be in place. The University’s chief academic officer since June 1994, Provost Maher has served with distinction and is widely credited with helping to lead Pitt through a period of unparalleled progress.

In accepting Provost Maher’s resignation, Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg said, “It is hard to imagine anyone being better at his or her job than Jim Maher has been as our provost. Among the many positive qualities that he brought to this key leadership role are his extraordinary breadth of knowledge, a well-developed ability to identify talented individuals and to anticipate academic trends, and a deep dedication to Pitt that has extended across most of his adult life. He has earned both the gratitude and respect of all of Pitt’s many constituent groups and has touched, in significant and consistently positive ways, virtually every aspect of life within our University.

“I certainly could not have had a more capable and committed professional partner than Jim Maher,” Chancellor Nordenberg continued. “I will miss working with him on a daily basis when he leaves the provost’s office. However, particularly given the knowledge and insights that Provost Maher has acquired over the past 15 years, he will remain a unique institutional asset, and we will find other ways, in addition to his contributions as a faculty member, to make use of his special talents for Pitt’s further advancement.”

In commenting on his decision, Provost Maher said, “I am very proud to have been a key member of Chancellor Nordenberg’s team during these years of dramatic progress for the University. I am optimistic that the University will continue to elevate itself among the nation’s best research universities, and I only regret that I cannot go on indefinitely in pursuit of that goal. I am deeply grateful to the Chancellor and to all of my colleagues in the University community for the teamwork and dedication to the University that have characterized our years together.”

During his years as provost, Pitt made significant strides on wide-ranging fronts—dramatically increasing applications for admission; elevating the academic credentials of admitted students and boosting enrollments; promoting instructional innovation and supporting the creative use of new teaching technologies; adding substantially to on-campus housing capacity and enriching the quality of student life; enhancing overall research strength while moving into critical new areas of inquiry and creating programs for the commercialization of technology; designing and implementing plans for the development of facilities and infrastructure that would support academic ambitions while maintaining fiscal discipline; and reaching out to alumni, donors, and other friends in markedly more effective ways.

Provost Maher earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Notre Dame and his master’s and doctoral degrees in physics from Yale University. He served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Argonne National Laboratory before joining the faculty of Pitt’s Department of Physics and Astronomy in 1970. He served as chair of that department and as director of the University’s Scaife Nuclear Physics Laboratory. He also has been a longstanding resident fellow of the University’s Center for Philosophy of Science. He is an elected fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Saluting Pitt

I recently returned from a deployment supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. My wife (Kristen Benn, CBA ’04) bought me this Pitt flag before one of my deployments. I fly KC-10 tanker aircraft and was onloading an additional 50,000 lbs. of fuel from another KC-10. I tossed the flag up in the glare shield and went to work. This was my fifth deployment, and that flag has logged more than 75 combat missions this year.

Kurt J. Lansberry
Arts and Sciences ’04
Captain, U.S. Air Force
McGuire AFB, N.J.

Update

William Strickland (A&S ’70), president and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation and its subsidiaries, noted this correction to his Bookshelf story, which appeared in the summer issue. The last sentence in the next-to-last paragraph should read: He’s not long back from Israel, where he has had conversations with Arabs and Jews to build a center in the Karmiel Misgav region of northern Israel, which shares a sister city relationship with the City of Pittsburgh. Strickland also is a Pitt trustee and 1996 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation
“genius award.”

Love to Dance

Thanks for the nice Commons Room story about our Love to Dance program (Summer 2009 issue). Three pages later, there was a story about
Michele de la Reza (EDUC ’94G), whom I encouraged to come to Pitt originally. I currently sit on Attack Theatre’s board and love what she and her husband Peter
are creating.

Susan Gillis Kruman
Education ’76G
Pittsburgh, Pa.

Nice Mix

My wife (Patricia Vozniak, A&S ’99) and I always look forward to reading Pitt Magazine. It is a nice mix of educational topics, highlights of current students, and alumni news and events.  Thank you, and we wish you continued success.

Michael Vozniak
Pharmacy ’01G
Philadelphia, Pa.

Not Just a Job

We were very pleased to see that Amy Niceswanger was featured in the Spring 2009 Pitt Magazine. Amy has gone out of her way for years to help Pitt fans like us when we were purchasing season tickets for football and for basketball. It has always been a pleasure working with her. It is clear from our dealings with her that Amy’s work with the athletics department is not a job, it is a passion and a love. I’m glad that all Pitt alumni now know it is people like Amy who help the athletics programs
to prosper.

Bob (Engineering’79) and
Debbie (Engineering ’02) Tomko
South Park, Pa.

Vibrations Continue

I have devoted my life to addressing safety issues for military personnel, and Ervin Dyer’s article “Invisible Harm” touched on my latest challenges. Vibration in the military operational environment damages our troops physically, but it also impairs their ability to perform at an optimum level. There is a lot of data showing human performance degradation in vibration environments. Just imagine what it is like flying a helicopter for seven hours and then landing it under treacherous conditions. I am currently working on unique seat-cushion materials that will lessen impact energy such as that from a mine blast and also lessen induced vibrations to improve human performance under conditions in military vehicles and aircraft.

Thomas Pavlik
Engineering ’69
Hay Market, Va.

Final Four in ’41

The Spring 2009 issue of Pitt Magazine contained an article, “Hope Dreams,” that said the first appearance of the Pitt men’s basketball team in the NCAA tournament was in spring 1974. I have a 1991 article from the Pittsburgh Press that states the 1941 men’s basketball team not only participated in the NCAA tournament but went on to be in the “Final Four.”  This article appeared,  I believe, at the time of the 50th anniversary of the event. My late husband, Paul Lohmeyer (A&S ’43), was a sophomore member of that team. It was one of his proudest memories. It would do honor to the team of 1941 to set the record straight.

Martha M. Lohmeyer
Catonsville, Md.

Editor’s Note: You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Lohmeyer. Congratulations, always, to the 1941 team and its enduring achievement.

Write Stuff

I was the assistant copy editor (with Alice Goldsmith as chief copy editor) of The Pitt News for two and one-half years in 1966-68.  I recently pulled out my stash of newspapers from 1966 to relive a few moments from my past. We worked three nights a week.  Alice and I proofread many of the articles and wrote the headlines, counting spaces, font sizes, and letters. If the headline didn’t fit, we would change the font size, font, or a word or two. We became quite good at this. No computers back then! We had a blast up in the offices.  Now that I look back on the hours and years spent fitting words into spaces, I smile and thank Pitt for the opportunity to be a part of its history.

Beth Lazerick
Education ’68
Boca Raton, Fla.

Since I am probably the oldest and newest writer to answer your call for a story, I hope to win the scratch pad, pencils, and a jaunty hat! After my college graduation (College of Wooster, Mass.), I moved to Pittsburgh with my new husband. With a degree in sociology and a teaching certificate, I preferred working with elementary school children, so I decided Pitt would be the place to work on that dream. In May 1959, I received my Pitt master’s degree in education. There followed some years of being a minister’s wife, raising three children, teaching, and completing a doctorate at Rutgers. Then, I taught at Central College in Pella, Iowa, helping other young teachers prepare for their careers. I retired in 1997. For my 75th birthday this past May, I gave myself a week at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Workshops.  Thus I declare myself, somewhat to my surprise, to be a WRITER.

Lee Joanne Collins
Education ’59
Pella, Iowa

While attending a writers conference at Pitt in 1975, I had my last and ill-fated encounter with Pitt student publications. I took the opportunity to visit the publications offices in the student union to see what my old corner office looked like and meet any student staffers who might be around. Unfortunately, The OwlThe Pitt News office.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I wanted to see whether any of the yearbook people were around. I was the editor of The Owl in 1960,” I answered.
With seeming amazement, she exclaimed, “Nineteen-six-oh?”

“Yeah. That was only 15 years ago,” I said, trying to reassure her that former Pitt publications staffers were not all dead and buried by then. Some of us actually had careers and were still writing or editing. I don’t remember what, if anything, she said as she went back to typing, but it was probably the 1975 equivalent of “Whatever.” office was locked; nearby, a young woman was typing away in

Ronald Scott
Arts and Sciences ’61
Houston, Texas

Got a chuckle over the photograph from The OwlPitt Magazine. I was on the admissions team for undergraduate study in 1969, selecting the Class of 1974. The task included the search for interesting people. published under “Now and Then” in the summer issue of

Jack Wilkins
Education ’65G, ’68G
Wilkinsburg, Pa.

Halfway up Flagstaff Hill in Schenley Park, members of Pitt’s Hindu Students Council pose for a “before” photo. They’re dressed in sweatpants and T-shirts—clothes that are old but clean.

Then the students open bags of colored powder. Shyly at first, they dab the colors on each other, streaking their friends’ hair, faces, and clothes. Soon, that shyness is gone. Within minutes, more than 20 students are darting across the hillside, hurling fistfuls of color at each other, clapping green and purple on their friends’ backs, and shrieking as they dump bags of turquoise and orange over each others’ heads.

One student stands on a concrete patio in the middle of the grass—the “safe” area—and snaps photos. It’s Shipra Kumar, a freshman majoring in economics and linguistics. She sprained her ankle and can’t run today. Still, she’s glad that she can observe Holi, a traditional Hindu harvest festival.

While her friends rush around on the grass, Kumar explains that Holi celebrates the Hindu god Vishnu killing a demon. “Because the demon died,” she says, “we’re celebrating the death of evil—with color!” Holi, she says, is a major holiday in India. When she celebrated it there, cities shut down and festivalgoers danced and sang in the streets. It involved mixing water with colored powder, making the colors much harder to remove from clothes and skin than the powder the students are using today.

While the celebration of the death of evil continues, a pair of Pitt students ambles up the hill. “Hey, how do we get involved in the color fight?” asks Sean Malloy, a sophomore majoring in math, music, and Spanish. He saw a flier advertising the festival and decided to check it out with his friend. They’d never heard of Holi before.

“Just grab a bag,” Kumar says. “The patio’s off-limits.”

It doesn’t take long for the new students to jump into action. “You look good with purple hair,” Malloy says to his companion after dumping a bag of purple powder over her head. Nearby, two girls chase down a boy, who dodges and weaves but eventually lowers his head in resignation as the girls plaster him with fistfuls of pink and turquoise.

Although Holi is a rite of spring, the day is raw and blustery. Powder blows off the students’ clothes and moves in multi-colored gusts across the hill. Students who get bits of powder in their eyes walk dazedly across the patio to douse their eyes with water.

When all of the colored powder is gone, everyone runs around to gather up the empty plastic bags that the wind has carried away. Holi is over for this year.

Before everyone drifts off, Shipra shepherds them onto the patio. They form two vibrant, speckled, multicolored rows, their faces caked with colors, and smile for their “after” photo.

That darn Internet is a handy cat. Pitt Arts sold a record 12,182 tickets through its Cheap Seats Program this year—a 20 percent increase mainly credited to new online ticketing services.

If your high school art teacher had jetted to Brazil the summer before you sat in her classroom, the lectures might have been a little more colorful. Pitt coordinated expeditions to Brazil, Egypt, and Ghana for dozens of schoolteachers this summer, thanks to grants from the Fulbright-Hays Foundation. As part of the trips, the participating art and social studies teachers developed new curricula and shared them with other American teachers when they returned stateside.

The 2008 Russian presidential election, sex chromosomes in wild strawberries, and quantum mechanics in theater were all topics of research for Pitt undergraduate students who presented at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research this spring in Wisconsin. Ten Pitt students participated in the gathering of budding scholars.

The automotive industry, financial industry, and other industries that are severely struggling in the global economic crisis have been closely studied for decades by hundreds of scholars across the country. Many scholars are eager to help and exchange ideas. To create a bridge between scholars, industry, and government officials, Pitt economics professor Frank Giarratani founded the Industry Studies Association, a multidisciplinary virtual research community, this spring. More than 1,200 people nationwide have already joined.

In the 12th century, a Spanish Jewish philosopher wrote a treatise called The Kuzari that defended Judaic tenets and practices. The text has since shaped the practice and thought of Judaism in various ways. In a new book, Pitt’s Adam Shear, an assistant professor of religious studies, traces how viewpoints of The Kuzari have changed through the centuries. Titled The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900 (Cambridge University Press), the book won a National Jewish Book Award in the scholarship     category this year.

Classy

What a joy to read Ervin Dyer’s eloquent and moving tribute, “August Wilson’s Class Act,” in the spring 2009 issue of Pitt Magazine.  I feel a strong connection to that article, a personal and visceral one. For 21 years, I have had the good fortune to review theater, the last dozen years for The Middletown Press, not too far from the area of New Haven, Conn., where I was born. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to attend Yale Repertory Theatre and experience the profoundly emotional sagas of Hill life, brought to the stage by the caring direction of Lloyd Richards. The theater world lost a giant with the passing of August Wilson, but his voice will continue to ring out every time a cast performs Fences or The Piano Lesson or any of his other gifts to the stage. Thank you, Ervin Dyer, for your wonderful tribute to this humble man of eloquent letters.

Bonnie Kleper Goldberg
Education ’64
North Haven, Conn.

Got Hope?

Thank you for including the “Hope Dreams” story about John Sikora (Spring 2009 issue). Mr. Sikora was an assistant basketball coach at my high school. When flipping through the latest issue of Pitt Magazine, I was surprised to see an article about him. Your story accurately portrays Mr. Sikora as an incredible optimist whose love for life is genuine and contagious. Throughout the 10 years I have known him, he has been an inspiration to me and to many others around our community. He is a fantastic person who always puts others’ needs before his own.

Jeremiah Huth
Business Administration ’06
Freeport, Pa.

A Home Run

I enjoyed the article by Cara Hayden called “Game 7, Again” about the Mazeroski home run (Spring 2009 issue). Forbes Field, though, was not a stadium—it was a good old ballpark in the mold of Wrigley Field and Fenway Park.

C. Ralph Verno
Arts and Sciences ’52
West Chester, Pa.

And Another!

The story about the seventh game of the 1960 World Series brought back memories of sitting in my German class with the windows open to the cheers of the crowd, while a Fräulein instructor taught us some important verbiage to use when entering a German motor coach! All other classes were cancelled, but our instructor made it very clear that we were to attend her class. I missed the middle innings of the game but saw the important final inning at Frankie Gustine’s bar. Since then, when traveling in Germany and Austria, I usually start a conversation in German and quickly revert to English upon hearing the magic words: “Perhaps we can continue this in English.” But … I can tell you everything that happened in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series.

Larry Klink
Arts and Sciences ’63
Auburn, Calif.

Inspiring

Thank you for the Alumni Hall story on Dennis Ranalli. Dr. Ranalli was one of my instructors in Pitt’s School of Dental Medicine. I remember him inspiring us to be our best. It was great to learn more about his history and about what inspired him.

Jennifer G. Robb
Dental Medicine ’92
Lorain, Ohio

Living Legacy

It was nice to read the article about Dennis Ranalli and how my father, Hollis Zwicker, influenced him. I worked in my father’s Millvale office for several summers during my late teens and into my early 20s. Dennis Ranalli worked for my father at that time. I was pleased to learn that Dennis is now senior associate dean in the School of Dental Medicine and that, yes, the legacy lives on. Thank you very much!

Sally Yarzebinski
Allison Park, Pa.

Faculty Feat

Thanks for your latest issue, and congrats on a job well done. We notice that you often highlight the life and work of notable Pitt faculty. Hugo G. Nutini, Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology, has been at Pitt for more than four decades and has just marked his first 80 years of age by completing his 16th book! As former graduate students of his, we often joke with him that those of us younger than he cannot read as fast as he can write. He continues to pour out superlative ethnographies, primarily of Mesoamerica. He joined Pitt’s faculty in 1963 with a doctorate from UCLA. A world-renowned ethnographer, Professor Nutini is now completing two volumes on Protestantism in Mesoamerica. Not only is he one of the greatest anthropologists ever at Pitt, but also nationwide, if not worldwide.

Roland Armando Alum
Arts and Sciences ’76G
North Bergen, N.J.
and
Doren Slade
Arts and Sciences ’73G
New York, N.Y.

My hairdresser Gregory just moved to West Palm Beach after nearly a decade in Pittsburgh. He had one of those spur-of-life moments, when he decided to sell everything, buy a tiny house near the beach, and become the Gregory he always wanted to be. Already I miss him, because in our appointed conversations (every six weeks), I always learned something interesting and, often, useful.

For instance, Gregory enlightened me about Black Krim tomatoes, an heirloom fruit supposedly originating on the Isle of Krim in the Black Sea. An avid gardener, he had discovered them in a Burpee catalog and, being adventurous, decided to grow them in his backyard garden. They were, he said, the best tomatoes he had ever eaten in his 40-something years of life. Ugly, yes, but exceptionally delicious, especially with a sprinkling of salt.

So the very next January, I went to Burpee online and ordered three Black Krim plants. One survived, and I ardently tended it all summer long. Watering. Weeding. Eyeing it carefully every day.  Finally, last August, I picked the first ripe yield and cut into it as though it were a

precious gift from the gods. Just as Gregory had said, the tomato’s innards looked dark and squishy, almost off-putting. But the first bite was worth it. The tomato was bursting with deep, rich flavor.

Since then, I haven’t been able to eat those bland, cardboard-tasting facsimiles of tomatoes that show up in many supermarkets. Instead, I’ve searched for heirloom varieties or locally grown versions in neighborhood markets. Happily, they’re more and more abundant—at Whole Foods, farmers markets, and even at my neighborhood grocery this summer. In fact, all kinds of fresh, local, organic foods are cropping up, so to speak, in abundance.

The cover story in this issue highlights this farm-to-table movement. An urban Pitt program is helping to improve the operations of down-home farms so that more of us can experience the benefits of local produce.

The key to Pitt’s success is an enterprising focus, which happens to reflect the essence of many of the stories in this issue, whether it’s the search to cure cancers; the quest to understand the invisible impact of vibrations; or an artist’s singular vision, explored in multiple forms.

In these feature stories and in most of the content here, there’s a spirit of adventure, a quest to explore possibilities. At Pitt, that impulse produces life-enriching benefits. I’m sure Gregory would admire that, wherever he is at the moment.

Cindy Gill
Editor in Chief

Who would you donate your money to if you were a philanthropist? More than 70 Pitt students have had a chance to answer that question—and donate real money—through the Student Philanthropy Project in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. During the spring semester, the students served as grantmakers, determining how best to invest $9,000 in local nonprofit organizations. The money was supplied by the school and a Pitt donor.

Students formed review boards, developed requests for proposals, and set criteria for the evaluation of groups that were seeking funding. Ten regional organizations—including programs that serve the homeless, mentor youth, and improve urban neighborhoods—are now using the money distributed by the student-philanthropists to improve the lives of Western Pennsylvanians.

1943
Aldo Icardi A&S ’43, LAW ’48 returned to Pitt in May 2009 for an event commemorating alumni who served during World War II. His book, Aldo Icardi, American Master Spy (Stalwart), published in 1954, recounts some of his espionage encounters during the war. He currently resides in Florida.

1957
Chris DeSalvo ENGR ’57G wrote God? (Pithy Publishing), a book in which he examines major arguments for and against the existence of a higher being. He lives in Boulder, Colo.

1962
John Malcolm Dowling A&S ’62, ’63G, ’68G, an economics lecturer at the University of Hawaii, has written several books examining economics, poverty, and public choice in Asia. They include Future Perspectives on the Economic Development of Asia and South Asia: Rising to the Challenge of Globalization (both from World Scientific Publishing). He says he spends his leisure time “practicing his freestyle stroke while observing turtles on the windward side of Oahu.”

1967
Roger L. Wise A&S ’67, LAW ’73 gave a lecture titled “Maintaining Professionalism in a Dog Eat Dog World” at a May conference in Columbus of the Ohio Association for Justice. He’s founder of Roger Wise & Associates, a law firm in Sewickley, Pa.

1969
Norman M. Shulman A&S ’69 is a psychologist who treats patients with hospital-based traumas and chronic illnesses. He resides in Lubbock, Texas.

1973
Michael D. McDowell LAW ’73 gave a presentation titled “Can a Labor Agreement Compel Employees to Arbitrate Statutory Discrimination Claims: A Discussion of the Case of 14 Penn Plaza” at a March 2009 seminar hosted by the Labor and Employment Law section of the Allegheny County Bar Association. He’s a Pittsburgh-based attorney, arbitrator, and mediator.

1974
Ronald Baillie EDUC ’74 was named codirector of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Science Center in April. He’s also a founding partner of the Pittsburgh Regional Center for Science Teachers. David Szarell DEN ’74 retired from the Pennsylvania Army National Guard at the rank of Brigadier General after 37 years of military service and 31 years with the guard, including one tour of duty in Iraq. He maintains a solo dental practice in Carmichaels, Pa.

1976
Paul Iurlano ENGR ’76, GSPIA ’80, A&S ’81, LAW ’83 was elected president of the Fox Chapel Authority Board, which regulates the municipality’s water. He’s an associate legal counsel with the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.

1978
Michael Staab A&S ’78 was named Coach of the Year at York Catholic High School in York, Pa. He also was inducted into the school’s Sports Hall of Fame. He’s a golf coach and English teacher at the school.

1979
Russ Kaufman A&S ’79, ’80 plays percussion with Abba Loco, a Baltimore-based band that performs traditional Jewish songs with some modern twists. The band recorded and released its first CD in March. Rosemary Mendel A&S ’79 was appointed vice president of business development with VELOCITY Broadcasting, a high-definition television network in Pittsburgh. She’s a board member of the Western Pennsylvania chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. William Zagorski A&S ’79, ’91G was named the “Father of the Marcellus” by the Pittsburgh Association of Petroleum Geologists. The title recognizes his accomplishments in the initiation and development of natural gas production at the Marcellus Shale resource in the Appalachian Basin. He’s vice president of geology with Range Resources in Pittsburgh.

1981
David J. Hickton LAW ’81, a founding member of the Burns, White & Hickton law firm in Pittsburgh, was named a Super Lawyer in Pennsylvania in June 2009. The honor is awarded to only five percent of attorneys practicing in the state.

1982
Rhonda Taliaferro EDUC ’82G, ’05G is managing the Culturally Responsive Arts Education program with the Pittsburgh Public Schools. She’s also a liaison to the school district’s equity advisory panel.

1984
Edward Gentilcore A&S ’84, LAW ’87 was named a fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America. He’s vice chair of the Construction Group in the Pittsburgh office of law firm Duane Morris.

1986
Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu GSPIA ’86, ’89, the first elected governor of Niger State in Nigeria, was honored with the 2008 Zik Prize for his work as a public leader. Some of the programs and policies he has implemented include mass housing strategies and free, compulsory education for all children. The award was conferred on him in Lagos, Nigeria, in May 2009. Roger N. Morris PHARM ’86, LAW ’89 was recognized by Southwest Super Lawyers magazine as among the top five percent of attorneys working in Arizona and New Mexico. He practices health care law with Quarles & Brady and lives in Scottsdale, Ariz. Anthony Sundae Panepinto A&S ’86, GSPH ’88 received the Professional Recognition for Individual Sustained Mastery (PRISM) Award from his employer, Procter & Gamble. He was honored for his “technical mastery” and for serving as a role model since he joined the manufacturer 15 years ago. He’s a global health, safety, and environment leader for chemical safety and occupational health.

1987
Sheila Beasley CGS ’87 received a Pittsburgh Progressive Woman Award from the Langston Hughes Poetry Society of Pittsburgh. She’s an outreach director for Pitt’s community-based Family Support Centers.

1991
Samuel R. Colucci Jr. ENGR ’91 is a shareholder with Integrated Project Services, an engineering firm in Conshohocken, Pa., where he also works as director of engineering and design services. Stephen C. Goldblum A&S ’91 joined the commercial and employment law departments at Semanoff, Ormsby, Greenberg & Torchia in Huntington Valley, Pa.

1992
John W. Arnold A&S ’92, an English as a Second Language teacher at Centennial High School in Ellicott City, Md., was among 15 teachers selected by the U.S. State Department to travel to Ukraine in April. There, he shared his experiences in U.S. education with teachers at a host school and learned about their teaching methods and curriculum designs. Derek Willis A&S ’92 wrote “One Who Did It Best Tells How To Pick ’Em” for a March 2009 New York Times sports blog about how he achieved the highest score in the newspaper’s 2008 NCAA college basketball bracket tournament. He works with the newspaper’s interactive news technology group.

1993
Debra Aisenstein A&S ’93 has joined three sister companies—James DeCrescenzo Reporting, Trial Technologies, and Digital Reporting Service—as vice president of client development. The companies provide technology support for legal firms. She resides in King of Prussia, Pa. Christiaan Brokaw KGSB ’93 was promoted to senior consultant at Yanni Partners, an investment advisory firm based in Pittsburgh. Carmen Robinson CGS ’93, an attorney, received a Pittsburgh Progressive Woman Award from the Langston Hughes Poetry Society of Pittsburgh. She holds a judicial clerkship with Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Dwayne D. Woodruff and serves as general counsel with the Professional Limousine and Transportation Service.

1994
Scott Kenney KGSB ’94, GSPH ’94 is chief financial officer of Nuwell Companies/Exclusive Physician Group in Ferndale, Mich.

1995
Natalie J. Lawrence CGS ’95 was elected president of the Palmetto chapter of the Society for Marketing Professional Services. She’s a regional business development director for WPC Engineering, Environmental & Construction Services in North Charleston, S.C.

1996
Melissa Pearlman A&S ’96 was appointed principal of the new Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts 6-12 School in Pittsburgh.

1999
David Clevenger A&S ’99 was recognized for the third consecutive year by Supply & Demand Chain Executive magazine as a “Pro to Know” for the supply chain management strategies he developed to adapt to the changes in the global economic climate. He serves as vice president of Corporate United in Cleveland, Ohio. Natalie A. Solomon A&S ’99, GSPH ’06, is a scholar and public health analyst with the U.S. Health Resources & Services Administration in Rockville, Md.

2001
Leonard Lloyd Hayhurst A&S ’01 received an honorable mention from the Associated Press Society of Ohio for Feature Writer of the Year for stories he’s written as a reporter with the Coshocton Tribune. He’s also a reporter with the Zanesville Times Recorder.

2002
Nicholas Greer A&S ’02, EDUC ’03G was named Teacher of the Year in Baltimore for his service with the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute’s biology department. His colleagues have credited him with the high pass rate that the school’s students have achieved on the biology state graduation exam.

Wendy L. Kunkle A&S ’02 joined the Burns, White & Hickton law firm of Pittsburgh as an associate in May 2009. She deals with legal issues arising from Medicare and workers’ compensation claims.

2003
Curt Friehs CBA ’03, SIS ’05G is a business librarian with the Kansas City, Kansas Public Library. In July, he gave a presentation at the Reference Research Forum at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Chicago. La’Tasha D. Mayes CBA ’03, A&S ’04 was awarded the Choice USA 2009 Excellence in Leadership Award. She’s the founder, director, and community organizer of New Voices Pittsburgh: Women of Color for Reproductive Justice, a human rights and social justice organization serving women of color in Pittsburgh. Amy C. McMunn A&S ’03 and Wesley Brink were married in a Williamsport, Pa., ceremony in June 2009.

2005
Aaron Duffey A&S ’05 is a coproducer and film actor with Gum Spirits Productions in Portland, Maine. He’s been involved with the company’s productions of Sundowning and Three Priests. Sally M. McCombie EDUC ’05G was named the 2009 Teacher Educator of the Year in the field of Family and Consumer Sciences by the Community of Teacher Educators in Higher Education. She’s a professor of human development and environmental studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Matt Shtrahman A&S ’05G, MED ’07 was named one of the top 50 scientists in San Diego by the San Diego Science Festival for his research on the physics of the brain. He says: “People hear ‘physics’ and they think about the Big Bang, black holes, and rarely much else. However, understanding physics provides unique insight into much of biology and medicine.” He’s a resident in the Department of Neurology at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. He’s also the founder of the Initiative for Collective Neuronal Dynamics and Epilepsy, an educational and scientific nonprofit organization.

2006
William M. Eibeck A&S ’06 earned his Pennsylvania State Teacher Certification in the field of music education. Shaun J. Palmer ENGR ’06, a geotechnical designer in the Pittsburgh office of Gannett Fleming, participated in the remodeling of a Pittsburgh home through the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition television series in October 2008. During the filming, he advised safety and coordination efforts for the project and participated in the home’s construction. The show aired in January.

2007
Johnathan M. Clow CGS ’07 graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Recruit Training Center in Cape May, N.J. The training program, lasting eight weeks, emphasized practical instruction, physical fitness, and a regimen honing the Coast Guard’s core values of honor, respect, and devotion to duty. Marla J. Harbay DEN ’07 and Andrew H. Thompson DEN ’08 are happy to announce their engagement. A 2010 wedding is planned.

2008
Travis A. Ling CGS ’08 completed U.S. Navy basic training with honors in April. The eight-week program consisted of classroom instruction, physical fitness, and a capstone boot camp course designed to develop the Navy’s core values of honor, courage, and commitment in new recruits.

In Memoriam

Richard C. Bollinger EDUC ’54, A&S ’57G, ’62G, a math professor at Pennsylvania State University for 35 years, died in March 2009 at age 77. He also was a birdwatcher and musician.

Virgil D. Cantini, a founder and chair of Pitt’s Department of Studio Arts, died in May 2009 at age 90. His distinctive metal sculptures—including the landmark Cantini man displayed on Parran Hall—remain a vital part of the campus and the city.

Donald Cefaratti Jr. A&S ’40 died in January 2009 at age 90. He was a clarinetist with the Pitt marching band and a brother of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. After serving in the navy during WWII, he earned a law degree and started his own legal firm in Washington, D.C., where he practiced for 30 years.

Margaret M. Cornelius EDUC ’73, ’74G, SIS ’81G died in September 2008 at age 65. During her career, she served as a special education teacher with Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Intermediate Unit and later as a telecommunications manager with Consol Energy. After retiring in 2003, she taught religion classes at Holy Child Parish in Bridgeville, Pa.

Chester Warren Duck Jr. ENGR ’36 died in Eden Prairie, Minn., in March 2009. He was 95. He worked as a sales engineer with Graybar Electric Co., serving at offices in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Youngstown.

Andrew N. Farley LAW ’61, GSPIA ’64 died in May 2009 in The Woodlands, Texas, at age 74. He practiced corporate and banking law for more than 30 years, often authoring articles for legal journals, including a monthly column called “You Be the Judge” for the Pittsburgh Legal Journal. He was a senior partner with the Pittsburgh law firm of Reed Smith until his retirement in 1992.

Benjamin M. Lewis DEN ’47, a longstanding member of the New River Dental Society, died in Raleigh, N.C., in March 2009 at age 88. He practiced dentistry in West Virginia until his retirement in 1984.

Cheryl Paule McCahon NURS ’69, an associate professor and director of the undergraduate nursing program at Cleveland State University, died in August 2008 at age 65. Her clinical and academic work focused on gerontological and community nursing. In 2005 she was recognized with the Memorable Educator Award for Excellence in Ohio from Ohio Magazine.

Ivan J. Novick A&S ’49, a real estate developer, died in March 2009 at age 81. He was an international leader in Jewish causes, serving as president of the Zionist Organization of America and as an advisor to former presidents Jimmy Carter and the late Ronald Reagan. In 1982, he received the Israel Knesset Medal from the Israeli government’s legislative body for his advisory efforts. He also was active in the Pitt Alumni Association and established the association’s Ivan and Mary Novick Award for Young Alumni Leadership.

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 status  $1.38 billion!