Mean Green Pride

born at 12:01 a.m. New Year’s Day. The couple, who have been together for 17 years, knew each other before they came to UNT, but began dating while students here. Clif is a Mean Green football season ticket holder. “I think half his

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2010 SHAINA PHERIGO (’12 M.B.A.), Houston, launched the public relations agency Bramble Creative. She previously worked as director of public relations for TBG Partners, a landscape architecture and design frm; public relations manager of the Gensler design frm’s Texas ofces; and newspaper reporter at the Houston Business Journal, Dallas Business Journal and The Dallas Morning News.

2011 ADRIAN GABRIEL CADAR, Nashville, Tennessee, graduated with his M.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in May 2021. He will be completing his internal medicine residency training at Vanderbilt University Medical Center this June and starting his fellowship in cardiovascular medicine in July. He aspires to become a physicianscientist in the feld of cardiovascular medicine with the goal of running a basic science lab focused on inherited cardiomyopathies.

2011 TERESA GARZA (’11 M.S.), Dallas, was named partner of tax services at Weaver, a public accounting and advisory frm. She serves on the board of directors for the Council of Petroleum Accountants Societies, the Texas Energy Council and the Women’s Energy Network.

2011 MICHAEL M. MILLER (M.A., ’17 Ph.D.), The Colony, is the author of XIT: A Story of Land, Cattle, and Capital in Texas and Montana (University of Oklahoma Press), which explores Gilded Age business and politics within the American cattle industry. He wrote about the XIT Ranch for his dissertation at UNT. He currently serves as an adjunct professor at Tarrant County College’s Northeast

Aging With Care

As a graduate student at UNT, Amy Blakely Laine (’99 M.S.) was juggling her classes with the duty of being a caregiver for her grandmother who was several states away.

Laine couldn’t turn a blind eye to the idea of other families experiencing the same challenges that her family faced, so she created SandwYch, an online service that aids families in taking on the difcult role of a caregiver for their loved ones. The name SandwYch refects the territory of being sandwiched between taking care of parents and raising a family during the prime of one’s career.

“The work feeds my interest in social family dynamics and nurtures my enthusiasm for technology and health care,” she says. “Our work, while difcult, is perfectly placed in the emerging longevity economy.”

— Erikah Woodworth

Read the full story. northtexan. unt.edu/amy-blakely-laine

Campus and Dallas College’s Brookhaven Campus.

2012 DAMIN SPRITZER, Norman, Oklahoma, was granted tenure and promoted to associate professor at the University of Oklahoma. She was appointed to the faculty at OU in 2015 and named area chair of the Organ Department in 2020. She has recorded fve CDs for Raven Recordings and performed in concerts around the world.

2013 JAMES BAILEY

BLACKSHEAR (Ph.D.), Mesquite, cowrote Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands, which looks at what drew both Texas cattlemen and Comancheros to the border between Texas and New Mexico in the 1860s and 1870s.

2013 FRANKY D. GONZALEZ, Los Angeles, California, has been awarded the 2021 Judith Royer Award for Excellence in Playwriting from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Franky also served as a staf writer for the fourth season of the Netfix show 13 Reasons Why and has been a fnalist at a variety of conferences. He also has been named the 4 Seasons Resident Playwright, a Sony Pictures Television Diverse Writers Program Fellow and a Core Writer with the Playwrights’ Center.

2013 KATE LATTIMORE NORRIS (M.B.A.), Fort Worth, was promoted to vice president of Pavlik and Associates, a public relations and communications frm based in Fort Worth. Kate has been working with the frm for 12 years, most recently as the director of community engagement.

2013 ARTHUR PICHON, Dallas, is following his passion of selling vintage clothing as the CEO of his company, Back to Life Vintage, which he established in January 2020. A marketing major who always wanted to run his own company, he used his interests in clothing, nostalgia and sustainability to start the business that specializes in selling clothing from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

2013 RACHEL MAY SMITH

(Ph.D.), Los Angeles, California, was appointed director of Summer Arts for the California State University Chancellor’s Ofce. She will lead a program that provides intensive arts classes taught by world-renowned guest artists to students from across CSU’s 23 campuses.

2015 ANGELICA PORTILLO, Dallas, is the inaugural director of advocacy and workforce initiatives for the National AfterSchool Association (NAA), the voice of the after-school profession and lead organization for the advancement of after-school professionals and leaders. She previously served as director of advocacy at Dallas Afterschool.

2015 LATOYA ROWELL, Plano, was promoted to vice president, community afairs manager at Comerica. She started her career 15 years ago as an administrative assistant, and has had various positions within its business afairs, charitable contributions and external afairs departments.