Alumni News
Thanks to all the alums who responded to our request for info.
Stephen Auerbach '66 received his M.A. and PhD. in Cultural Anthropology from University of Illinois-Urbana and taught at RPI in Troy, N.Y., and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then became an institutional fixed income broker for a regional brokerage company in Madison. After 10 years, he became a psychiatric social worker and worked with veterans in Milwaukee, and at an Oregon inpatient treatment center. Now he is retired and mastering the cello.
Molly Baade '05 was attending the Olympic Games in Beijing when she got word from the Peace Corps and left for Nicaragua. She is now home and looking for work in Missouri or Washington, D.C.
David Baime '80 is the Senior Vice President for Government Relations and Research at the American Association of Community Colleges in Washington, DC.
Barbara Becker '89 founded Equal Shot in 2002, to help non-profit organizations and foundations deliver their critical messages. Her communications career spanned a broad range of organizations including the U.N., Human Rights First, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. She has worked in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America on human rights, education, environment, microfinance and women's health issues. Her numerous op-eds and columns have achieved placements in outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, NPR and the Associated Press. She is an award winning producer and has worked with musician Peter Gabriel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt. She served as senior adviser to StoryCorps, Peabody Award winning nationwide project to gather oral histories for the Library of Congress. Barbara is part-time faculty at Columbia University. She holds a Master of Arts in International Administration from the School for International Training, and a Master of Arts in Media Studies from the New School.
John Bellaimey '76 went to Ghana after graduation and taught French. He then taught French and Anthropology at Friends School in Detroit and Anthropology to 5th graders at Detroit Country Day School, after doing graduate work at Harvard Divinity and Grad School of Education. He is now teaching World Religions, Ethics, and Bibical Studies as Chaplain and chair of the religion department at Breck School in Minneapolis. He chairs a human rights conference every winter to honor Martin Luther King and co-leads language trips to France every spring.
Beah Burger '06 moved back to the Philadelphia area from San Francisco in 2005. She is working for Google as a Product Operations Manager and — ever so subtly — leveraging her education in Anthropology as she works with users to uncover ways to make Google more usable, functional, and comprehensible.
Colin Cahill '07 recently finished his research as a Fulbright Fellow in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and moved to Orange County. He is currently working on his MA/PhD in Cultural Anthropology at UC Irvine, focusing on the intersection of medical discourse and embodiment.
Shasha Chen '10 is living in Manhattan and working as a research assistant at Rockefeller University in the Lab of the Biology of Addictive Diseases. She is studying for the MCAT and applying to medical schools.
David Cross '70 worked seven years in Philadelphia public schools, five as a classroom teacher in West Philadelphia. He published one article in Columbia Teacher's College Record on Sociology of Education. He attended a masters program in University of Pennsylvania School of Policy Analysis, and received a degree in Energy Management and Policy. For the last 28 years he has been a jack of all trades social scientist and data analyst for various environmental consulting companies. He also started and continues to operate a small business making affordable, easily assembled stringed instrument kits (harps, dulcimers, banjos) for music educators and beginning players.
Diem Dangers '98 is a first time mom who just finished her M.Ed in Community Arts at Lesley University.
Tray Davis '77 is a member of the National Leadership Council of Lambda Legal Defense Fund and often serves as Lambda's outside pro bone counsel. Lambda Legal is the oldest national organization pursuing high-impact litigation, public education and advocacy on behalf of equality and civil rights for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and people with HIV. He is also Trustee and Executive Committee member of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.
Elle de Moll '10 is currently in medical school at the University of Connecticut.
Richard DiCarlo '81 graduated from medical school, did a residency in internal medicine, and a fellowship in infectious diseases. He is a member of the faculty of LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans since 1993. He currently is the Assistant Dean for Medical Education and oversees the medical school curriculum and accreditation.
John Dolbey '92 is CFO and VP of his family's healthcare software business which is now close to 100 years old. He recently published a children's book Sunrise Over Fire Rock Field and credits his studies in Conflict Management as a foundation for this book. In the book, three iguanodon siblings embark on a journey to find a common solution to two different sets of dire circumstances for separate plant-eating herds. The book delivers a great message about working together, not giving up, and the importance of family and friendship.
Becca Donham '86 is Senior Program Officer at the MetroWest Community Health Care Foundation, an independent health philanthropy working to address unmet health needs in a 25-town region west of Boston. She recently launched a grant program aimed at reducing bullying/cyberbulling in middle schools. She received her MPA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994.
P. Kerim Friedman '93 is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. His research explores the relationship between language, ideology and political economy in Taiwan. He is a founding member of the group anthropology blog Savage Minds and a documentary filmmaker. His latest film is Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!
Kristy Waldron Dugan '02 is an Assistant District Attorney in Columbus, GA. She prosecutes all types of felonies and is the office's Arson Special Prosecutor.
Elizabeth Durso '86 is an at-home mom. She does technical writing for an online database company and bakes allergen-free treats for kids with food allergies. She was formerly the director of customer support for a company that sold and supported electronic library systems for newspapers.
Henry J. Dvorken '49, at age 82, is still active in the real estate investment business. He goes to the office every day and has written several “how to” books on “owner carried mortgages.” He is guest speaker for real estate investment clubs and attends several seminars each year. In 2005 he was honored by the Note Worthy New Letter with the Industry Achievement Award, one of the highest honors in the business. He is a member of the Million Dollar Club issued by the American Cash Flow Association.
Gian Paolo Einaudi '98 served in the Peace Corps in El Salvador for four years, focusing on reproductive health and leadership development. Since then, he's headed Medical Mission International's efforts to create conditions for knowledge transfer, capacity-building and medical exchanges in El Salvador. In 2008, he completed an executive MBA program in El Salvador at INCAE, founded by Harvard in Central America to foster responsible leaders in the region.
Robert Eisenberg '66 is currently a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Rheumatology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Ramsey Fairborn '86 received her Masters in Architecture from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is a licensed architect and has been working in Washington, DC in this field for 14 years.
Luba Feigenberg '99 is the Director of Research and Evaluation for the Neighborhood Partnerships program at Children's Hospital in Boston.
Mark Geragos '79 is an attorney in the Los Angeles area.
Anne Hansen '85 went to medical school at Harvard. She then stayed in the Boston area for a residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in Newborn Intensive Care, and is currently the Medical Director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Children's Hospital in Boston. She has continued to use her anthropology skills by developing and implementing newborn medicine programs in resource poor settings, in Equador, the Dominican Republic, and most recently Rwanda.
John Heller '89 is working for an international development organization, Synergos Institute, that organizes partnerships between government, business, civil society and communities to collaborate on poverty-related issues. Currently he is working on child nutrition in India, agriculture systems in Ethiopia, public health and maternal mortality in Namibia, and community health among West Canadian First Nations.
Norman Hill '55 joined the staff of the Congress of Racial Equality (ORE) in 1961. As CORE's National Program Director, he coordinated the desegregation efforts of the restaurants from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. In 1967 Hill became Associate Director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), which he co-founded two years earlier with Randolph and Bayard Rustin. Hill later became APRI's Executive Director in 1975 and its President in 1980. APRI was originally conceived as a think tank for the black-labor alliance but under Hill's direction became a grassroots-based organization with over 200 APRI affiliates around the country. Hill retired from APRI but as President Emeritus remains a tireless and dedicated activist who stays involved in the Institute's activities.
Robert Hinshaw '55 received his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1968 from the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of Kansas and the University of San Carlos in Guatamala City. He served as president of Wilmington College in Ohio, chaired the Anthropology Department at Beloit College in Wisconsin, was academic dean at Bethel College in Kansas, taught at the University of Colorado in Denver and directed a six-college consortium in Kansas. He was a Washington lobbyist under the auspices of the Quakers before returning to independent academic research and consulting in Guatemala. He is living out his retirement on the shores of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, where he spent nearly half his academic career as an anthropologist.
Jon Holtzman '87 is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan University.
Kate Howe '98 is an urban planner in Seattle, Washington. She is working on building a new transit system, transit-oriented communities and mixed — use developments in the Puget Sound/Metro Vancouver BC regions. She has a Masters in Urban Planning from the University of Washington.
Meagan Hume '07 as an AmeriCorps Volunteer, is a health advocate for refugees at Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia. In addition to medical escorting, she is developing a health education curriculum for the wide-ranging needs of the diverse refugee populations in Philadelphia.
Leigh James '03 is studying for a Master's in Social Welfare with a concentration in Gerontology at the University of California at Berkeley. She will graduate in May, 2011.
Rebecca Kanthor '01 moved to China in 2002 to pursue Chinese studies and get her start in journalism. She joined CBS News at their Beijing Bureau as an assistant producer in the run up to the 2008 Olympics, and then moved to Shanghai to cover the World Expo as Associated Press TV's producer/cameraperson. Currently Rebecca is an independent journalist in Shanghai, producing radio, TV and print stories for a variety of media including the Associated Press TV, BBC, Scientific American, and CNNGo. Her work can be seen at rebeccakanthor.com
Cynthia Kellam '98 lives in the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her husband and two cats, and leads Digital Customer Experience Design and Social Media at TIAA-CREF. She attended Columbia School of Arts and Sciences and is very happy in her field, which is arguably a very marketable applied anthropology profession.
Mimi Kirk '06 is working as an editor for the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She completed her M.A. in Cultural Studies at Emory in 2003 and just finished an M.A. in Creative Nonfiction Writing at John Hopkins.
Julie Kleinman '04 is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Harvard. She completed her field research and is writing her dissertation on circulation, power, labor relations and narrative in the contested public space of Paris's Gare du Nord train station.
Daniel Kuruna '88 lives in Chicago. He pursued a Masters of Design, Photography concentration, at the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology. From 1995 through 2006, he used documentary photography and video as tools for visual ethnography projects for design, market and visitor experience research all over the world. He also has had photography exhibitions and documentary video screenings of his work. He continues to do video work for education, communication, public relations and development efforts.
Chloe Levenson '09 worked for Health Corps, a non-profit that works to combat early onset diabetes. Now Chloe teaches fifth grade in Riverdale at SAR Academy.
Renanit Levy '94 went to Israel for a year on a graduate fellowship at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, worked in NYC, and then received her MSW/Certificate in Judaic Studies and Jewish Communal Leadership from the University of Michigan in 1999. She is currently Director of Institutional Advancement at Hazon, the largest American Jewish environmental organization.
Simon Linn-Gerstein '09 is currently freelancing as a cellist and teaching string instruments at the Marblehead School of Music. He is also a Public Programs Volunteer for the Peabody Essex Museum, known for its collection of Asian, Native American and Maritime art.
Christella Louis '10 is working at The American College in Bryn Mawr in the Women's Studies Department, a part of the State Farm Center for Women and Financial Services.
Josh Mankiewicz '77 is completing his 16th year at Dateline NBC, and 35th year in TV news. His college years didn't prepare him for 8 years of Michael Jackson coverage or the steady diet of murders that now fill Dateline's hours, but it has been an interesting journey, from what journalism was to what it has become.
Matt McKeever '87 received a PhD in Sociology and is doing research on inequality in the US and South Africa for the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College.
Lauren Meeker '93 received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at SUNY New Paltz. Her research is on Vietnam with a focus on music, performance, visual anthropology and cultural politics.
Andrew Millstein '84 has been with the Walt Company for 14 years and is Executive Vice President/General Manager for Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Randy Moon '06 spent his first year after graduation in Shanghai, China as a PM at a MBA program. The next four years he was in Palo Alto and San Francisco building the company Facebook, working primarily with intellectual property infringement. He is now pursuing interests in music and wine.
Richard Morris '65 retired from The National Association of Homebuilders in 2004 and returned to working on his novels. He published Cologne No. 10 For Men in 2007 and Well Considered in 2010. Cologne No. 10 for Men has been described as "a superb novel of the Vietnam war" (Writer's Digest) and "A funny and serviceable satire about the gross rationalizations that propel war and peace" (Kirkus Reviews). Kirkus calls Well Considered "a multilayered thriller that tackles issues of race and history in America." He moved to an apartment in Hyattsville, Maryland, just north of the D.C. border, where he is near his four grandchiIdren. He was glee club president at Haverford in 1963, and continues to sing — in a church choir and with Alzheimer patients at a continuing care retirement community. He enjoys giving driving tours of historical sites in his area.
Rahul Munshi '06 attended Temple University Beasley School of Law and graduated in 2009. He completed a federal judicial clerkship in Philadelphia, and is currently associate attorney at Console Law Offices , a small civil rights and plaintiff's employment discrimination law firm in Philadelphia.
Siobhan Feeney O'Leary '00 is currently teaching 7th grade at Nativity Mission Center in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, opened 40 years ago by the Jesuits to provide a quality education to low-income families in the neighborhood.
Laura Pacas '10 is living in Peru. She is Coordinator of Institutional Image for a British private school.
Margarita Padin '85 is working with the Philadelphia Housing Authority as a union carpenter out of Local 8, Philadelphia.
Claire Panetta '00 studied for her MA in Anthropology at Columbia University while working as a research assistant at the Center for Iranian Studies. In 2008 she returned to Egypt for a two year fellowship at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad, a language institute hosted by the American University in Cairo. She is now in the doctoral program in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and hopes to conduct research on urban restoration in Muslim Cairo.
Shana Slutzky Pellitteri '07 is completing her MAT program at Union Graduate College, to teach secondary French. Her thesis is on post-colonial French identity and immigration.
Bruce Price '89 graduated from George Washington Law School. After a few years of legal practice, he returned to school and received a Ph.D. in Law & Society from NYU. He taught at the University of Denver College of Law for 3 years and then went to the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he has tenure.
David Pyke '76 received his doctorate from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and is the dean of the School of Business Administration at the University of San Diego. Formerly he was dean at Dartmouth College. He has made major research contributions in inventory models, production planning and scheduling, and global operations and supply chair management. He has co-authored two books and published numerous academic papers. His book Inventory Management and Production Planning and Scheduling is used in numerous Ph.D. programs worldwide. He has consulted for The Rand Corporation, Accenture, Corning, DHL, Eaton, Home Depot and Markem, and serves on the Board of Directors of GW Plastics, Concepts NREC, and the Lwala Community Alliance in Kenya. He is scientific advisor for Signal Demand and is operating partner of Tuckerman Capital LLC.
Robin Christine Reineke '04 is living in Tucson, AZ and working on her doctoral degree in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her work and research are at the local medical examiner's office, where the bodies of migrants who have died crossing the U.S.-Mexican border are examined, identified, and repatriated.
Elana Resnick '05 is enrolled in the Anthropology Department at the University of Michigan and working on her dissertation. In January she started her dissertation research in Sofia, Bulgaria, and will finish by the end of 2012.
Elizabeth Rhoads '07 spent a year in Indonesia researching land tenure practices in Bali, interned in the Asia Program of the conflict-prevention non-profit International Crisis Group in New York, and spent a year in Burma. She is working on her Master's in Human Rights Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She recently began her thesis research on post-conflict reconciliation in Aceh, Indonesia and hopes to do fieldwork there.
Rachel Rubinstein '05 is living in Seattle and working at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a non-profit which provides legal services to low-income immigrants in Washington State.
Rick Rybeck '79 After a one-semester internship with Sen. Charles Mathias of MD, he moved to Washington. He worked for a firm that represented urban counties and worked on a project to address inflation in housing costs. He then wrote “Meeting America's Housing Needs,” which was published in 1982. He received his law degree and Master's Degree in real estate from The American University. While working for Hilda Howland Mason, he authored a few pieces of legislation — most notably the Clean Air compliance Fee Act of 1994. He then became Assistant Administrator for the Policy & Planning Administration in the Department of Public Works. In 2009 he formed Just Economics, LLC, a small consulting firm that advises clients how to restructures taxes, fees and regulations.
Melibea Sarant '10 is interning at a non-profit agency that helps families of adopted children through the Department of Health Services foster care system.
David Schatz '79 is working as a software engineer at Thomson Reuters in Boston.
Zoe Schlesinger '04 has six years of professional experience in management consulting, foster care reform and design firm operations management. She is currently applying her organizational and cultural skills to MPA studies at NYU Wagner. She plans to pursue a career in change management.
Jimmy Seale-Collazo '81 spent 5 years doing community organizing in Philadelphia's Puerto Rican community after graduation. He returned to Puerto Rico in 1986 and taught high school. In 1993 he received his Master's in Education at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). In 2006 he received his Ed.D in “Learning and Teaching” from Harvard. His dissertation was an ethnography of religious education at a Puerto Rican Protestant high school and his dissertation committee were all anthropologists. He is now Assistant Professor of Education at UPR and teaches 9th grade World History at the UPR laboratory school. He is organizing a panel at the AAA in Montreal and working on an issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly.
Peter Shaw '90 is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of of Medicine. Peter does clinical work, teaches and conducts clinical research, and specializes in Adolescent and Young Adult oncology, a growing field focused on cancer patients ages 15-40.
Olivia Sparer '07 works at the US Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. Her work focuses on the development and implementation of policies and plans that address the disaster-related needs of at-risk populations. She lives in Washington DC.
Eli Sweet '05 worked as an aide in the Georgia State Legislature after graduation. He then moved to Chengdu, China, to study Chinese. He began as an English teacher and has had numerous jobs which included working as the brand ambassador for Captain Morgan rum. He is currently working for Crown Worldwide, a logistics/relocations company, as the sales and operations manager for the Chengdu branch. Eli continues to write and record his music.
Jonathan N. Tobin, Ph.D., is a board certified epidemiologist and holds the rank of Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Allen and Frances Adler Laboratory of Blood and Vascular Biology and the Center of Clinical and Translational Science at The Rockefeller University, where he serves as the Co-Director for Community-Engaged Research. He is President/CEO of Clinical Directors Network, Inc., a NYC practice-based research network (PBRN) dedicated to improving clinical outcomes for low income and medically underserved communities by creating community-academic partnerships around research, education/training and service.
Diana Tung '10 spent the summer in Berlin with Humanity in Action examining minority rights in Europe. She began working in August for the American Human Development Project of the Social Science Research Council based in Brooklyn, NY.
Miguel Vilar '97 earned a MS in Journalism from Columbia University and worked for several years as a science writer at Popular Science, and Science World, and Adam. He also worked as a grant writer for the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC. He entered SUNY Birmington in 2003 and received his MS in Biomedical Anthropology; MA in Anthropology in 2007 and PhD in Anthropology in 2010. He is currently a post-doc fellow at University of Pennsylvania where he leads various studies on human genetic diversity among Caribbean populations and works on various population genetic projects among North American and Pacific Island populations, both as an independent researcher and as a partner in the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society.
Jeremy Wallach '92 received a PhD in Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He is regarded as one of the world's foremost scholars of contemporary Indonesian popular music. He recently was at a conference in Jakarta where he was invited to present his current research on the legendary Indonesian protest singer Iwan Fals.
Sarah Waring '01 is currently living in Montpelier, Vermont. She is Director of Programs for the Farm and Wilderness Foundation, which teaches sustainable food systems education, adventure and wilderness skills for youth through summer programs and year-found retreats and events.
Skip West '77 teaches entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at George Mason University and runs a company, MAXSA Innovations, focused on solar lighting and safety products called MAXSA Innovations.
Sarah Willie-LeBreton '86 is a sociologist and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Program in Black Studies at Swarthmore College.