The University of Vermont Magazine - Summer 2020

Vermont THE UNIVERSITY OF

IN THESE TIMES Class of 2020 Resilience Students to Graduates to Nurses

Dr. Lynn Black ’74, Mass General Hospital

General Todd Semonite G’88, Army Corps of Engineers Invention: The Vermontilator

S U M M E R 2020

Vermont Quarterly SUMMER 2020

Kathryn Calisti ’20, pictured on campus in April, and all of her fellow UVM nursing seniors opted for early graduation on May 1. The university initiative helped fast-track nursing career launches at this time of pressing need. Calisti began work at the UVM Medical Center in June. Photo by Joshua Brown.

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IN THESE TIMES DEPARTMENTS

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FEATURES

President's Perspective The Green

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Catamount Sports

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On Course Alumni Voices & Visions

Six first-person alumni perspectives— three in words, three in pictures— document these times. | BY HALLEH AKBARNIA MD’98, ANDY DUBACK ’03, LESLÉA NEWMAN ’77, ALEX EDELMAN ’13, MEGAN O’BRIEN ’01 G’08 ’17, IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST ’09

40, UVM Strong

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Many people, many approaches—alumni, faculty, staff, and students work to address the global crisis and ease its impact.

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AMPLIFYING OUR IMPACT

A strategic imperatives document, endorsed by the UVM Board of Trustees in May, focuses strengths and charts course for future.

FINDING THEIR WAY

The Class of 2020 worked through uncommon adversity in their final semester. Six graduate stories trace paths to diplomas defined by perseverance and boosted by the support of many. | BY KAITIE CATANIA

THE VERMONTILATOR

As the need for inexpensive, quickly produced ventilators became a key piece in the Covid-19 treatment puzzle, a team of UVM professors, engineers, and doctors swiftly set to work on a solution. | BY JOSHUA BROWN

CLOSE TO HOME

As a volunteer relief worker, Dr. Lynn Black ’74 has helped to meet the Ebola crisis in Liberia and cholera in Haiti. During the pandemic, she’s helping lead efforts in hometown Boston. | BY AMY SUTHERLAND

COVER PHOTO: Carl Silver, engineer at the university’s IMF Labs, is part of the design/build team behind the Vermontilator emergency ventilator.

Photo by Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist ’09.

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UVM Strong the simple word “strong” has taken on a particular meaning across the past decade, becoming a cultural shorthand in times of adversity—Vermont Strong as our home state recovered from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, Boston Strong in the wake of the 2013 marathon bombing. In that same vein, UVM Strong speaks to what we are experiencing as the University of Vermont community in the midst of a world-altering pandemic and how we have responded. It defines strength, of course— the particular strength of resilience—but more. It also

For the latest updates on plans for academic year 2020-2021: see uvm.edu, emails from the university, and our social media channels. speaks to choosing paths other than despair when faced with difficulty—paths of action, invention, and unity.

This issue of Vermont Quarterly shares many stories of such strength during the Covid-19 pandemic. You will read about how the expertise and innovation of faculty and staff is addressing the crisis; how alumni are working daily as healthcare workers on the front lines of hospitals and in leadership roles nationwide; and how students are contributing their time, energy, and imagination to the many needs at hand. The lens of these challenging times heightens the focus on our mission as a land grant university, bringing our assets to bear upon the community.

As I write in early June, we move forward in a time of continuing uncertainty and rapid change. Across the University of Vermont, and across much of American higher education, we prepare in full hope and anticipation that we will be in session on campus as academic year 2020-21 opens. As we go forward, the members of the UVMStrong—Fall 2020 Advisory Committee are playing a critical role in developing strategies and protocols for a safe return to on-campus operations. They

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have been guided by their focus on the health and safety of the entire university and surrounding communities, and the ongoing education and preparation of our students. They also are drawing heavily on the expertise of our faculty in public health and medicine, and interface with the Vermont Department of Health, Governor Phil Scott and the Vermont Legislature, and Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger.

This work will create a robust framework of options that will enable us to meet multiple evolving scenarios and needs. The committee’s first report is expected June 15, as this issue goes to press. As our plans for fall are further defined, we will share them promptly and widely via email, our homepage, and social media.

I am confident that we will emerge from the public health and economic challenges of the pandemic as a strong institution, ever-resilient, as the University of Vermont has been since 1791. Charting our way forward, we will be guided by a sharp focus on our strengths, outlined in the “Amplifying Our Impact” strategic imperatives endorsed by the UVM Board of Trustees in May. The framework is online and shared in this issue. I encourage you to read it and learn more about our commitment to ensuring student success, investing in areas of distinctive research strength, and fulfilling our land grant mission.

My best wishes go out for the health and well-being of our entire UVM extended family. And, again, I extend sincere congratulations to the Class of 2020. I look forward to joining you all one day soon as we gather together on campus for a true University of Vermont Commencement.

Suresh V. Garimella

ANDY DUBACK

CONGRATULATIONS

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TWILIGHT INDUCTION FALL 2016

TIME TO MAKE THIS HOUSE YOUR HOME. We couldn’t be more proud of the resilient Class of 2020. We’re thrilled to welcome you to our UVM Alumni family. A diverse group of 119,000, we will always be a part of UVM. You have graduated under extraordinary circumstances and exemplify #UVMStrong. We’re here for you now, tomorrow, and in the future.

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2020 strat egic imper at ives

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Our distinctive strengths align with the most pressing needs of our time: the health of our societies and the health of our environment.

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President Suresh Garimella and leaders across campus have worked over recent months to establish a strategic framework for the University of Vermont’s future success.

Grounded by the university’s distinctive strengths and reflecting broad feedback from the UVM community, “Amplifying Our Impact” received unanimous endorsement from the Board of Trustees at their May 2020 meeting.

amplifying our impact The University of Vermont is poised and ready to build upon our reputation as a premier research institution focused on sustainable solutions with local, national, and global applications and impact. Our distinctive strengths align with the most pressing needs of our time: the health of our societies and the health of our environment. And we pursue these interconnected issues through the cross-disciplinary research and collaboration that comes more easily at a public research university of our size and scale. Our setting in the state of Vermont, with its deep-seated commitment to the interplay between education and a healthy democracy, enables us to be nimble while still providing the depth of analysis that contemporary challenges demand.

To more fully realize our significant potential, we must view all our endeavors through the lens of enhancing student success—on campus and beyond—while drawing upon our unique strengths as one of the nation’s first land grant universities. This will require steadfast focus, discipline, and the pragmatism for which Vermont is known. The approach will be three-pronged, but the efforts will be interrelated, working in concert with one another.

UVM SPATIAL ANALYSIS LAB

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ensuring student success UVM has historically served its students extremely well. We have a culture of strong faculty mentorship, and staff dedicated to our students’ growth. The connection between health and well-being and academic achievement is promoted holistically.

We must continue to build on that legacy by making their success and that of our alumni a core measure of all we do. This means offering a vibrant educational experience, ensuring that UVM is affordable and accessible for a broad and diverse population, and providing support and meaningful opportunity well beyond graduation day.

To ensure that we extend UVM’s appeal to a wide cross-section of talented students, while enhancing the quality of education offered and safeguarding our financial stability and sustainability, we must:

• Provide an unparalleled educational experience for

our students by continually enhancing course offerings through rigorous evaluation and evolution, and alignment with a liberal arts foundation and societal demands. Exposure to the humanities—and the critical thought this engenders—will position our graduates for success in the broadest range of pursuits.

• Carefully evaluate expenses to minimize costs

and make a UVM education more affordable and accessible.

• Grow corporate, foundation, federal, and philan-

thropic partnerships to develop new internship, research, study-abroad, and service-learning opportunities, while enhancing existing programs.

• Enhance online offerings and programs that promote efficient course and degree completion with targeted support for first-generation and non-traditional learners.

• Attract a larger cohort of graduate students by

enhancing their academic experience and research opportunities.

“To more fully realize our significant potential, we must view all our endeavors through the lens of enhancing student success—on campus and beyond—while drawing upon our unique strengths as one of the nation’s first land grant universities.”

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• Accelerate our success in recruiting students from areas beyond the Northeast, as well as internationally.

• Provide an environment that fosters diversity of all kinds, including diversity of thought.

• Envision programming that leverages campus assets

on a year-round basis to increase and strengthen connections to UVM while building financial resources.

• Welcome non-traditional students to new professional, certificate, and online programs.

Top: Doctoral students at work on research in the Discovery Hall lab of Professor Madalina Furis, director of UVM’s Materials Science Program, photograph by Joshua Brown. Bottom: Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources faculty member Gary Hawley with students on the Aiken Building’s experimental green roof, photograph by Glenn Russell.

investing in our distinctive research strengths

fulfilling our land grant mission

UVM benefits from the powerful combination of a liberal arts core and the comprehensive academic resources of a major research institution. This dual nature has also positioned our faculty as leaders across multiple disciplines that support investigation and discovery in areas key to the university’s reach and reputation.

In particular, UVM has built distinctive research strengths that align with the urgent—and interdependent—need to support the health of our environment and our societies: • Healthy Societies: Our cross-disciplinary work is strengthened by collaboration and research in areas ranging from immunobiology and microbiology, to data mining, mapping, and analysis, to ethics, historical context, and communication. This will drive actions with broad application including substance abuse prevention and rehabilitation, and immunobiology, microbiology, infectious disease treatment, vaccine testing, and public health campaigns .

• Healthy Environment: Faculty, researchers, and practitioners from throughout UVM collaborate to create new knowledge and establish best practice in areas related to sustainable farming, food systems, and business solutions, and the protection of water systems. Leveraging our strength in engineering, machine learning, and complex systems will provide pathways for the development of scalable solutions.

Strategic investment of available resources will accelerate and enhance these distinctive strengths, positioning us as the preeminent institution for innovative and sustainability-focused solutions. At the same time, the intersections between these areas provide opportunity for investigation, innovation, and impactful discovery in areas dedicated to the associated economic, ethical, and policy considerations. Targeted support will create research opportunities that span disciplines and foster pathways for collaboration.

Our students will be among the greatest beneficiaries of this focused investment.

Cultivating these areas of research strength will leverage the unique characteristics of the state of Vermont. As one of the smallest states in the nation, with a thriving participatory democracy, Vermont offers a microcosm for national programs to be piloted at manageable scale.

Articulation of distinctive strengths will also grow corporate, philanthropic, foundation, and federal partnerships to enhance UVM’s research portfolio, impact and recognition, and make enriching new opportunities available to faculty and students.

As one of the nation’s first land grant institutions, the University of Vermont’s alignment with the state is fitting. We are nationally acclaimed for helping Vermonters tackle everything from farm viability to complex environmental issues to business growth. We support commercialization and job creation initiatives in the state, and our partnerships with large corporations enable the possibility of attracting satellite operations, jobs, and a talented workforce to the state.

UVM’s partnership with the state includes more than 200 programs designed to help Vermont and Vermonters. For example, the Rural Center of Excellence on Substance Use Disorders confronts the opioid epidemic with innovative new approaches, while Vermont EPSCoR and the Vermont Biomedical Research Network attract millions in federal funding and make sophisticated technology and learning opportunities available throughout the state. But to better realize the vision of the LandGrant Act’s author Vermont Senator Justin Morrill, we must create a more streamlined gateway for Vermonters to learn about and access the many resources UVM offers. Efforts to set up that front door—inviting the community to engage more fully with UVM—are underway.

Engaging with the state not only helps Vermont, but also benefits the university by strengthening its connection to entrepreneurship, hands-on learning, problem-solving, and critical thinking, all ideals championed by alumnus, educator, and noted philosopher John Dewey. This enriches the educational experience of our students and broadens our faculty’s research portfolios.

summary The University of Vermont’s future success will be assured by following these three strategic imperatives: student success and experience; focusing on and expanding upon our distinctive research strengths; and better-realizing our land-grant mission by partnering with our communities, businesses, and state. Doing so effectively will require insightful leadership, unprecedented collaboration, and our decisive collective action. This commitment to explore without reservation while working as one, resonates with our state motto, “freedom and unity.” And it will enable us to amplify our impact for years to come.

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In mid-March, with the need to ready surge facilities for Covid-19 patients, state and hospital officials approached the university with an official request to use the athletic complex in preparing for the pandemic. In short order, Patrick Gymnasium was transformed from a basketball arena poised to host another America East Championship game to an emergency field hospital, through a team effort among UVM Medical Center staff, UVM staff across multiple units, local tradespeople and contractors, and the Vermont National Guard. Fortunately, the need for the surge facility did not arise and it was dismantled in June. Pictured: Peter Bero, UVM Medical Center project manager, and Vermont National Guard Sergeant Chris Belanger ’94.

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THE GREEN YOU SHOULD KNOW “ We don’sme to do the perfect solution. We’ve got to determine what is mission essential. I tell my guys, ‘You don’t have all the time in the world to build this. You have three weeks, that’s what the curve of that city is, get it done on time.’”

Lieutenant General Todd Semonite G’88, chief of engineers and commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to CNN’s Jake Tapper. The master’s degree alumnus in civil engineering led the Corps of Engineers’ work converting public spaces into field hospitals during the pandemic. See page 48.

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The Grossman School of Business continues to earn high marks for teaching sustainability and social responsibility, the latest ranking announced at this year’s World Economic Forum. Read more: go.uvm.edu/gsb

SUSTAINABILITY THREEPEAT For the third consecutive year, and with its highest score yet, UVM earned a Gold rating from the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System.

Read more: go.uvm.edu/gold

PEACE CORPS TRADITION UVM alumni and the Peace Corps have long been a close fit, and this year the university earned its highest mark ever for producing volunteers, fourth among mid-size schools. Sheila McGinley Cornish ’61 was the first Catamount to join the Peace Corps.

Winnipeg Jets. Calgary Flames. Washington Capitals. Minnesota Wild.

Los Angeles Kings. New men’s hockey head coach Todd Woodcroft joins the Catamounts with a deep resume as an assistant coach and scout in the NHL. See page 23.

FULBRIGHTEST Mongolia to Malawi, a record-breaking nine Class of 2020 alumni and recent grads are set to span the globe as Fulbright U.S. Student Award winners. See page 16.

JOSHUA BROWN

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Ellen and Ryan McGinnis, research team and married couple, harness cell phone technology as aid in panic attacks.

An App in Moments of Panic PSYCHOLOGY/ENGINEERING | For panic attack sufferers, which includes nearly thirty-six million Americans, traditional tools for dealing with the condition can be problematic. Medication is minimally effective and has side effects. Cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t work for nearly two-thirds of panic sufferers. And biofeedback, which has shown promise, is cumbersome and impractical to use outside a laboratory or clinical setting.

PanicMechanic, a new app developed by UVM faculty members, may be part of a solution, when used as a supplement to professional clinical care. The app adapts biofeedback-like monitoring, so it can be used on a mobile phone at any time, in any location—the first technology to do so for panic.

“The challenge with panic attacks is that they’re episodic,” says one of the app’s developers, Ellen McGinnis, an assistant professor at UVM’s Center for Children, Youth and Families and a trained clinical psychologist.

“That means they’re not only difficult to treat in a traditional therapy setting, because a panic attack is hard to induce, but also that the one intervention that does seem to work for people—biofeedback—isn’t available when it’s needed.”

PanicMechanic uses the camera on a cell phone to measure the body’s panic response. “Activating the app, then holding your finger against the flash can give you an objective measure of your reaction to stress,” says Ryan McGinnis, assistant professor of electrical and biomedi-

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cal engineering, and a co-developer of the app.

The concept for the app is grounded both in decades of research showing that enabling panic sufferers to observe their body’s reaction to stress reduces panic, and in the clinical practice of Ellen McGinnis. “I’ve used a low-tech version of this technique with a dozen patients,” she says.

“The panic attack sufferer used just a pen, paper, and timer to take their own heart rate and plot it on paper during the panic attack. It was very effective in helping patients manage, take control of, and overcome their panic.”

The explanation? Intervening with objective information targets a driving dynamic of panic, she says. By showing someone their patterns of physiological arousal, it helps them gain a sense of mastery over their panic response.

The app also works because it simply gives the panic sufferer something to do during an episode, avoiding one of the worst aspects of a panic attack—the feeling of helplessness. In addition to displaying an objective measure of the body’s panic response, the app also asks, in a sequence of screens, questions that help document the sufferer’s recent sleep, exercise, diet, and drug or alcohol consumption. The screens both occupy the panic sufferer and collect data on behaviors and triggers associated with the attack that could be avoided in the future.

The UVM duo joined with Steve DiCristofaro of Synbrix Software, LLC., in developing the PanicMechanic, available in the Apple App Store.

SALLY MCCAY

What Would Henry Think?

POLITICAL SCIENCE | “I had never intended to be a Thoreau scholar—it just seemed to happen that way,” says Bob Pepperman Taylor, professor of political science. His latest journey into Thoreau’s thought is Walden: Thoreau and the Crisis of American Democracy (University of Notre Dame Press).

For a scholar who specializes in political theory, the history of American political thought, and environmental ethics, perhaps it’s not surprising that Taylor’s scholarship often leads back to Thoreau, one of America’s original environmentalists and political thinkers. His previous books include The Routledge Guidebook to Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and America’s Bachelor Uncle: Henry Thoreau and the American Polity.

The theme for his new book developed during a sabbatical several years ago. “One of things I’m interested in is how democratic thinkers propose to protect democracy from its own vices,” Taylor says.

“My proposal was to write a book on nature, religion, education, and populism, and how all of these have been promoted in various ways in the American tradition as protections from democracy’s pathologies.

When I wrote the first chapter, it became its own book about the lessons Walden gives us, the way these lessons resonate through present time in the United States and whether or not those lessons are useful.”

The book addresses two crises that have become especially urgent in the Trump era: threats to democratic norms and political institutions, and dangers to the environment driven by climate change.

Taylor grapples with a particular problem of democracy dating as far back as antiquity. Plato was concerned that citizens in a democracy wouldn’t have the knowledge or character for responsible selfgovernment. The American founding fathers, Taylor COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

says, shared the fear of the “mischief of factions.”

“Their solution was to form a republic, so no one branch of government could take over,” Taylor explains. “The language of the founders portrayed a political machine that would ‘go of itself’—they were animated by the idea that we can’t reform human beings, so we need to design a political machine to correct human imperfections.”

What would Thoreau say about the latest rise of populism and threats to the environment? Taylor notes that Thoreau, the ultimate individualist who was always distrustful of political movements and parties, wouldn’t be the loudest voice in the room.

“One of the points I make is that Walden doesn’t provide prescriptions for political crisis,” the professor says. “Thoreau isn’t really good for helping us think about crisis management. His contribution helps us think beyond the immediate crisis, to how we can each live as more responsible citizens.”

Bob Taylor is the university’s Elliott A. Brown Green and Gold Professor of Law, Politics and Political Behavior and received the Alumni Association’s George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award in 2016.

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COMING TOGETHER As this issue went to press, marches of protest, calls for action and deep societal change, were taking place worldwide in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Wanda HeadingGrant, vice president for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, shared her thoughts, on a personal level and in her professional role, in a message to the university community.

“I know we cannot take on everything, but we can have an impact at UVM, and in the communities where we serve that will branch out to advance critical social and cultural efforts everywhere,” wrote Heading-Grant ’87 G’03. “We must use our educational platform to share and enhance knowledge, understanding, ideas and solutions that not only address issues of prejudice and discrimination, but also transform lives for generations to come.”

On June 10, the UVM community was invited to come together for an online event “to reflect, remember, and call the names of those who have recently lost their lives to racial injustices,” the first in a series of teach-ins.

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Prof’s Project Earns Carnegie Fellowship Support ENGLISH | Professor Emily Bernard has been named a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Bernard won for a proposal titled “Unfinished Women,” a collection of eight narrative nonfiction essays about black women artists and public figures. A meditation on the notion of success itself, the book will explore the experiences of black women whose lives don’t conform to the triumphalism that characterizes typical American success narratives, Bernard says.

Recognized as one of the highest honors for faculty in the humanities and social sciences, the Carnegie Fellowship awards $200,000 to scholars to support research that addresses important and enduring issues confronting society. Winners in the competitive selections process were chosen based on the originality and potential impact of proposals they submitted, as well as by the scholar’s capacity to communicate the findings to a broad audience. Bernard is one of twenty-seven fellows selected from this year’s 322 nominations.

Earlier this year, Bernard won the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose in the Los Angeles Times 2020 Book Prizes competition for her 2019 book, Black Is the Body, the most recent of many honors the book has received. She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the university.

LEFT: JOSHUA BROWN; ABOVE: ANDY DUBACK

Getting Their Feet Wet Donors give students a leg up on career readiness STUDENT SUCCESS | The Bolton Potholes swimming hole is a hot-summer-day escape for many. But for Emma Heffner ’20, the stretch of Winooski River was her home for a summer 2019 internship critical to her education and future career prospects. Working with the Vermont River Conservancy (VRC), she was a site steward at the potholes, with responsibilities that included encouraging visitors to take part in the care and preservation of the area by packing out their trash and recycling single-use plastics and glass. “It was my first experience working a job directly related to my field of interest,” says Heffner. “It was a fantastic stepping stone into my future in the environmental field.”

Heffner’s internship was made possible by the Crowley Family Internship Fund, established in 2015 to benefit students in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. The Crowley family, with five UVM graduates among them, owns and operates two multi-generational family businesses. The Wachusett Mountain Ski Area in Westminster, Massachusetts, recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and their second venture, Polar Beverages, has been continuously run by the family since 1882. The family’s experience operating these two distinctly different businesses made them acutely aware of the importance of skillsbased learning and the value of hands-on experiences augmenting a student’s coursework.

According to Pamela K. Gardner, director of the UVM Career Center, research indicates that students who participate in internships receive job offers earlier, are offered higher starting salaries, and stay in their first post-college job longer

than those who do not. The most recent National Survey of Student Engagement (2017) reports that 67 percent of UVM seniors participated in a practicum, clinical, internship, co-op, or field experience. Gardner would like to see that number increase, but she notes that the unpaid nature of many internships poses an obstacle. “For a student who must work to pay for college, these experiences can be completely out of reach. We depend on generous donors to open up these opportunities to some amazingly talented and hard-working students,” Gardner says.

Donor-funded internship programs across campus are making experiential learning opportunities possible for students who may otherwise be worried about making ends meet. For Heffner, the Crowley Family Fund covered her living expenses so she could focus solely on her work with VRC. “I was excited to finally be able to partake in a job experience that would have a direct, positive impact on the community and environment, and be able to simultaneously make enough money to live in Burlington during that time,” she says.

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Sustaining Our Northern Forest ENVIRONMENT | In February, Senator Patrick Leahy, vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, announced new federal funding for research on our region’s forest ecosystem and economy.

The Northeastern States Research Cooperative (NSRC), first created by Leahy in the 1998 Farm Bill, received $2 million in the fiscal year 2020 appropriations bill for research on the Northern Forest and its twenty-six million acres of working landscape.

Since its creation, the NSRC has supported cross-disciplinary, collaborative research among the U.S. Forest Service and universities across the Northern Forest states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and New York. Focusing on the ecological, economic, and cultural challenges facing the forest, NSRC has awarded more than three hundred competitive research grants totaling more than $23 million.

The revitalized program, which had a pause in federal funding from 2016 until this new appropriation, will seek input from business, industry, agency, and community leaders to define a research agenda that will support and improve the health of the Northern Forest environment and economy.

SALLY MCCAY

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Top Year for Student Fulbrights ACADEMICS | Nine members of the Class of 2020 and other recent graduating classes received Fulbright U.S. Student Awards this year, the highest total ever for the university. One of the most prestigious international exchange programs in the world, Fulbrights foster international partnership by supporting teaching and research in more than 125 countries.

“It’s an amazing opportunity and it still feels a little unreal,” says middle level education major Camilla Thomassen-Tai ’20 of her Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award to Taiwan. Her mother is a first-generation American “ It’s an amazing opportunity originally from Taiwan, and Thomassen-Tai has extended family still livand it still feels a little unreal.” ing there. “I feel like it’s a part of my identity that I’ve never really had the opportunity to explore. I’d love to learn more intimately and first—Camilla Thomassen-Tai ’20 (above) hand about Taiwanese culture and traditions as I bring my experiences, qualifications, and perspectives to a new classroom and community abroad,” she says.

She believes the experience abroad will help her become a better teacher and a more empathetic global citizen. “Changing the world for the better begins with teachers who strive to create lifelong learners with a passion and a sense of responsibility for their communities, both large and small,” she says.

Read about other Fulbright recipients: go.uvm.edu/fulbright9

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BRIAN JENKINS

MISSING THE MARBLE COURT? The Fleming Museum locked its doors when much of Vermont and the nation did the same midMarch. But, near or far, during the global crisis or in better days ahead, much of the Fleming’s art and artifacts can be viewed online via a new searchable database.

Browse the collection: go.uvm.edu/museum

Let’s Talk, Let’s Learn KIDDER AWARD | The philosophy that guides the teaching of Todd Pritchard—“Dr. Todd” to his enthusiastic students and advisees—makes it clear why he would be chosen as this year’s George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award winner. The annual UVM Alumni Association award honors teaching that motivates students in their time at UVM and beyond, along with a dedication to student advising. Pritchard is highly regarded for his authentic and effective work in both domains.

“First and most important, teaching should be fun,” exclaims Pritchard, senior lecturer in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences.

“I love the energy of the back and forth—bouncing ideas off of students, seeing what they know, expanding their knowledge. I tell students to learn the material as best you can, and when you no longer understand it, let’s talk. Because that’s when you’re on the cusp of learning.”

Students will quickly tell you that there is no opportunity for passive learning in Pritchard’s classes. Colleagues describe their admiration for his creative and engaging teaching style—the deft way he augments presentations with direct questions for his students, pulling on their experience beyond the topic at hand to build connections that lead to insight; the collaborative, peerbased projects he develops for maximal input TASLIM SIDI URNEK

from his students; the way he assesses the level of knowledge on a subject and alters the pace when a topic needs further explanation.

Todd Pritchard ’85, PhD ’89 earned his bachelor’s in agricultural biochemistry and his graduate degrees in food microbiology. The morning after receiving his bachelor’s degree from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences he began working in a CALS lab. When the opportunity to teach arose while pursuing his doctorate, he enthusiastically accepted, and in the thirty-three years since he has never looked back.

Pritchard’s engaging teaching style is as present in introductory survey courses as in his required upper-level class for all food microbiology majors. His capstone course is an applied learning challenge where students develop a food product and all of the manufacturing and quality control programs to make it a success.

Many who have taken that class now work in the specialty food industry and credit Pritchard with preparing them for the “real world” in food production.

A popular advisor, Pritchard will fill his schedule to capacity and then some, always ready to guide and encourage students in a field that has given him so much pleasure. As one alumna put it, “Dr. Todd works diligently to understand the needs of his students and has mastered the subtle art of lending a helping hand.”

#75 from 101 Views of Edo: Dyers’ Street, Kanda (1857) Hando Hiroshige, 1797-1858 Woodblock print Gift of Thomas Brown Memorial Collection of Graphic Arts Object number: 1957.1.14

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April 20, 2020 4:55 p.m.

Photograph by Sally McCay

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Shades of Difference SOCIOLOGY | The seeds for Nikki Khanna’s new book, Whiter: Asian American Women on Skin Color and Colorism (NYU Press), were planted when the sociology professor was a child growing up in suburban Atlanta. On Saturday mornings, Khanna, the daughter of an Indian father and white mother, would often shop with her parents at the local Indian grocer. At her eye level were boxes upon boxes of whitening creams with light-skinned Indian models promising “total fairness” and “complete whitening.”

Khanna’s early scholarship focused on mixed-race identity, particularly among black-white biracial Americans, but she always knew she wanted to return to the topic of colorism within her own community, in part because of her childhood memories but also because the subject was so little explored.

Though colorism—defined as prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a darker skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group—affects just about every part of the non-white world, Khanna says.

Most research, including her own, has focused on African Americans and Latinos, with very few studies on Asian Americans. The issue has stayed under the radar, Khanna says, because of reluctance to talk about it in Asian American communities.

Khanna knew she wanted to bring this issue out into the open by giving a voice to Asian Americans who had been affected by colorism, but how she would do it was unclear,

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especially since she hoped for representation from many different Asian ethnic groups. Leveraging social media, the professor went looking for personal stories around this question. She posted to relevant Facebook groups, promoted the book among her colleagues, many of whom also posted to their networks, and used word of mouth to reach people who might not have seen the queries.

Soon, essays began pouring in, united by a commonality of shared experience. With an eye to diversity, Khanna selected thirty essays for publication in Whiter. Ranging in age from their twenties to their sixties, the writers come from many countries—Pakistan to Cambodia to Japan to Vietnam.

The essays naturally grouped themselves into six themes, Khanna found, from those that examined the often-unwanted privilege light skin confers, to writings on “aspirational whiteness,” to essays that focused on the anti-black attitudes common in many Asian American communities. Khanna wrote the collection’s introductory essay and prefaced each of the book’s six sections.

“I want to contribute academically with this research since this topic is rarely explored,” she says. “But even more, my hope is that the book sparks conversation about skin color. I don’t think this is something Asians and Asian Americans often talk openly about. I also hope that many women read the book and see themselves in it. They aren’t alone.”

ANDY DUBACK

M E D I A

Family Politics Meg Little Reilly’s third novel, The Misfortunes of Family, published this spring by Mira Books, unspools the lives of Massachusetts politician John Bright and family, as the retired senator considers another run for office while world events and longburied personal secrets thicken the plot.

The story is grounded across several summer weeks at the Brights’ lakeside retreat in the Berkshires, an idyllic, burnished setting—maybe a little too burnished—like the family themselves.

Reilly puts her narrative in the hands of the partners of the Brights’ four sons, “the extras,” as they refer to themselves, living in the shadow of the blood Brights’ out-sized regard for themselves. “It’s really a story about how families create these distinct codes and habits—what it looks like to come in from outside,” the author says. “There’s something kind of unknowable about families in this way.” A married mother of two daughters, Reilly says she believes these are questions common to the stage of life she’s in: “Who are you now?

What is your adult identity? What are the habits that you want to perpetuate and the ones you want to let fall behind?” she asks.

While themes of family are universal, the rarified world of national politics and media is informed by years Reilly spent working in Washington, DC, where she was on the communications staff in the White House Office of Management and Budget during the Obama Administration. Reilly recalls the sense of mission, reverence for the work that drove twelvehour days at the Executive Office Building adjacent to the West Wing. Absorbing that atmosphere was a key impetus as she began to explore her own writing. “I was seeing people around me taking big risks, even failing, and realizing that it doesn’t break you,” Reilly says.

She decided it was time to act on longheld dreams to write novels. Reilly started setting her alarm for 5 a.m., writing for an hour each morning before getting on the White House communications call.

“I caught a little hubris,” she says with a

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laugh, “and I’m grateful for it.”

Reilly, a native of Brattleboro, and her husband, Daniel, relocated to northern Vermont in 2017. Today, she juggles family, a full-time job writing for the president of Bennington College, and writing fiction and essays. She generally tries to abide by her DC habits of writing fiction early in the day. But even when other aspects of her life might crowd out a long stretch for writing, she’s religious about getting down some words daily. “To me that is super important; there is a kind of propulsive energy to it that I need to sustain,” she says.

Looking back at her UVM years, Reilly says she was initially drawn to the spirit of activism on campus—“it felt like students there were truly engaged with the world.”

She found a mentor in the late geography professor Glen Elder, explored creative writing in a first-year program in Living/ Learning, and sampled courses broadly in the liberal arts. She says she became a much better reader at UVM, the first step to becoming a better writer. Reilly went on to earn a master’s in media and public affairs from George Washington University.

As a novelist, Reilly says that reading the work of others for a couple of hours most evenings is both a reward and a challenge. “I read aspirationally. I always try to read people who just make me want to be better at this. If you’re reading books where you think, ’I could do this,’ then you’re not reading the right books.”

Benjamin Dangl, lecturer in Public Communications, connects the dots across five hundred years of history and resistance by Bolivia’s large Indigenous population in his timely book, The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia, published by AK Press. In the wake of former president Evo Morales’s ousting, Dangl offers insight into the ways oral storytelling sustained the marginalized population’s history throughout centuries, informed how they organized for control and sovereignty over their lands and natural resources, and ultimately paved the way for the rise of the country’s first Indigenous president.

Douglas Smith ’85 unveils the gripping history behind the biggest humanitarian effort you’ve probably never heard about in his latest nonfiction book, The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The celebrated Russian historian brings to life the experiences of four American men who participated in a United States relief effort to save an estimated thirty million Soviets from starvation and famine in the early 1920s.

The work of artist Grace Weaver ’11 is the focus of a new monograph from Kerber Verlag, Germany-based publisher of art books. It features color and black and white illustrations of her paintings and drawings, photographs of her work process, and essays in German and English by several commentators and critics.

A collector’s edition, with a limitededition print of a recent painting, is also available. Weaver has exhibitions opening this summer at James Cohan Gallery’s two New York City locations.

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| C ATA M O U N T S P O R T S

The Last Champ BY | JOSHUA BROWN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY | BRETT WILHELM

Nordic skier Ben Ogden also excels in the classroom, earning the outstanding sophomore award in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences.

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The end was near.

On March 12, over the first lap of the NCAA National Championship ten-kilometer freestyle race, Ben Ogden ’22 rocketed to a ninesecond lead on the other skiers, including his chief rival, Sam Hendry from the University of Utah. But Ogden often takes it out dangerously hard, and now, on the final lap—heading toward one last brutal hill, high in the thin air above Bozeman, Montana—he wondered if he had enough strength left to get to the line.

Ogden’s coach, Patrick Weaver, looked at a hand-held computer, tracking the times of other skiers in this stagger-start race—and shouted at him that his lead had melted to

two seconds. Ogden began the final climb through “a tunnel of Catamounts,” FasterSkier magazine reports, teammates and fans screaming on both sides of the trail.

“My sister was right there shouting: ‘show ’em what you’re made of,’” Ogden recalls.

“I saw a video later and my technique was horrible, but I was just getting up the hill any way I could.” He reached the crest and flung himself across the finish. “I heard on the announcer that I was leading, but I had to wait a few—long—minutes for Sam to finish,” Ogden says. “It was the hardest I’ve ever gone in any race.” He had won by three seconds, securing the national title in 23:50—and putting UVM in good position

UVMATHLETICS.COM | THE LATEST NEWS

for a team win over the remaining races in the upcoming days.

Those races never happened. “I was still in my race uniform,” Ogden says, when he and the rest of the team got a message that the Covid-19 pandemic had caught up with their sport. “The NCAA called off the whole championship, shut down one-hundred percent, right then and there,” he says. “It was such a strange feeling. I was superstoked and bummed.” Ogden’s win, it turned out, was the final individual championship title given by the NCAA, which cancelled all winter and spring competition thirty minutes after he (and teammate Karl Schulz in, fifth) had ascended the podium.

Ogden had flown in from Germany to Montana a few days earlier, straight off a gold-medal win for the United States in the relay at Junior Cross-Country World Championships. “On the trip I was, like, washing hands a lot, and we were hearing the news, but I wasn’t worried about it,” Ogden says.

“It seemed like such a far-away thing.”

Then, “in the three days in Bozeman, it went exponential,” Ogden recalls. “That was the moment when I realized the gravity of the situation. I thought: ‘We can’t sit here and feel sorry for ourselves because our ski race was cancelled,’” Ogden says. “Yes, sports are super-important—and they’re not important at all. When they cancelled the races, I knew I had to go home.”

Ben Ogden grew up in the village of Landgrove, Vermont, population 154. His father skied for Middlebury College where his younger sister, Charlotte, is now a nationally competitive Nordic skier; his older sister Katharine is a three-time NCAA national champion in Nordic skiing for Dartmouth College. “We’re a big ski family, for sure,” Ogden says. And since getting home, Ogden has been training with his cousins and uncle, including a fifty-mile expedition on bicycles with telemark skis on their backs— to skin up and ski down the slopes at BromCOURTNEY ADAMS

ley, Stratton, and Magic Mountain.

But Trapp Family Lodge may be his favorite place to ski. “Even though I have lived in Vermont my entire life, I always love seeing the sap buckets on the trees and all the maples in the woods,” Ogden says. “And the racing there is great—up and down with old-school, tight fast corners on the downhill, which keeps everybody on their toes.” Next year’s NCAA championship will return to Vermont, at Middlebury’s Rikert Outdoor Center, “and there will be a lot resting on that one,” he says.

And after college? “I do want to take a crack at professional skiing,” says Ogden, who credits UVM Head Coach Patrick Weaver—two-time national champion and former Olympian—with helping him to build a strong training plan and to dream big. “The Olympics are coming up in two years. That’s the dream,” Ogden says. And then he seems to correct himself.

“That’s the reach goal,” he says.

And beyond that? Ogden is not sure. A mechanical engineering major, in May he was (remotely) awarded the outstanding sophomore award by the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. His skis are made by Madshus and he knows another young skier, who studied engineering, that the company hired to work on new skate ski designs. “That’s the type of thing that I would love to do—really get my hands dirty and design things,” Ogden says.

During an engineering course he took this spring, the Mechanics of Solids, Ogden found himself thinking about his skis. “I can’t help but to think how they’re made.

I know a lot about the construction of skis, especially skate skis,” he says, and it was “great to have a class about how different materials deform under pressure.” If Ben Ogden reaches his goals, he’ll have a lot of chances ahead to test his skills in the mechanics of skis and what happens under pressure.

VQ

BRIEFS Before the season’s sudden cancellation, the men’s basketball team was bound for the America East Championship game and another possible NCAA Tournament berth. In a year of many highlights, Senior Night was particularly memorable as Josh Speidel ’20 took the court for the first time as a Catamount. Playing in the starting line-up, Speidel scored the game’s first basket after teammate and longtime friend Everett Duncan ’20 fed him for a layup. The Patrick Gym faithful roared as fellow Catamounts and the UAlbany squad congratulated Speidel, who has fought back from a severe brain injury suffered in a 2015 car accident to keep his place on the basketball team roster and earn his UVM bachelor’s degree. Read The New York Times report: go.uvm.edu/ speidel The men’s hockey team is set to take the ice under new leadership next fall with the appointment of Todd Woodcroft as head coach. Woodcroft comes to the Catamounts from the National Hockey League’s Winnipeg Jets, where he spent the past four seasons as an assistant coach. Over the last twenty years he has built an extensive resume in coaching and management in the NHL and international hockey. Look for more on Coach Woodcroft in the next issue.

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| ON COURSE

Going Remote BY | BY JANET FRANZ, RACHEL LESLIE, RICHARD WATTS, JEFFREY WAKEFIELD As the nationwide higher-education landscape shifted to remote learning in March, UVM faculty, supported by staff in multiple units, rapidly pivoted to this reality of life during pandemic times. A kitchen table with a laptop became the new lectern; a seat on the couch became the new seat in a classroom; those were the easy parts. Shifting syllabi, teaching methods, and mediums on the fly, that’s where the challenge rested.

In meeting that challenge, faculty drew on expertise from units such as the Center for Teaching and Learning, Continuing and Distance Education, and Enterprise Technology Services. In some cases, professors not only adapted course material but tailored it to the singular moment we are living through. Here’s a window on some of that work.

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IT BEGINS WITH BIRDS A week-long unit on birding is a staple of Brendan Fisher’s Introduction to Environmental Studies course. For the associate professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and fellow in the Gund Institute, it runs a good deal deeper than learning to distinguish between a nuthatch and a treecreeper. “I’m convinced that birding is the gateway drug to environmental action, conservation science, and sustainability,” he says.

Fisher’s faculty colleague Trish O’Kane, a passionate birder who teaches a course called Birding to Change the World, leads the birding unit in his introductory course, and she led the charge in finding a way to make this key part of the course still viable for all 222 students scattered across twenty-seven states. Drawing on her contacts with the National Audubon Society, O’Kane quickly had a network of hardcore birders nationwide to learn from—local mentors knowledgeable in regional species and their habitats—for every student in the class. Mentors connected with the students on the phone or online.

First-year student Mia Harris headed out on a birding walk along the Jersey Shore with her father tagging along in person and birding mentor Rachel Dipietro on the phone to help identify what they might find on the wing. When a huge bird flew into sight, Dipietro quickly pegged it as an osprey. The drama of seeing the raptor dive straight down to snatch a fish from the ocean’s surface made an impression on Harris, as did the quiet beauty of that particular stretch of shore. “It reminded me why I’m interested in environmental politics and policy in the first place,” she says. “It really sparked a motivation in me.”

CASE STUDY HITS HOME As Professor Alice Fothergill met with her spring semester Sociology of Disaster class for the first time on January 11, she was still in search of a real-world disaster to bring depth and connection to her lectures and reading assignments.

“Every time I teach the class,” says Fothergill, a pioneer in the field of disaster sociology and one of its leading scholars, “something happens in the world, and it becomes our case study for the semester”—a way to study risk perception, effective warning communications, disaster response and how disaster affects different socioeconomic groups unequally, in real time.

No spoiler alert needed, readers will see where this is headed. As professor and students watched the pandemic spool out worldwide and experienced it in their own ways, the classroom connection continued from afar via video lectures, readings, and Fothergill’s extensive comments on papers. And as the expert on the sociology of disaster collaborated with colleagues nationwide on new studies and contributed commentary to popular media such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, students gained from the opportunity to see the teacher/scholar model—emerging research and scholarship informing undergraduate instruction—play out in real time.

CONNECTING ON THE GRID

Farryl Bertmann, a lecturer in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences, used the online platform Flipgrid to foster connection and keep the discussion rolling in her course focused on community nutrition. Students could view a grid of each classmate’s face on their screen, which they could click on to see and hear individual responses to the week’s discussion topic.

To engage, they simply recorded their own video messages in reply and added it to the grid.

For students studying community nutrition, the pandemic became a living case study to understand complex topics like food insecurity and the epidemiology of disease. Bertmann adapted the course to center discussions around how these issues were being impacted.

Responding to a Flipgrid discussion prompt on how Covid-19 will impact food security in the United States, junior Johannah Gaitings-Harrod said, “I think

the Covid-19 outbreak is going to dramatically increase the amount of food insecure households we have in America. There are also so many more families that might be affected by healthcare costs, so that takes away from the disposable income they could spend on food before.” The dietetics, nutrition and food sciences major also pointed out the challenges with getting food to kids and families in more rural areas like in her hometown of Corinth, Maine, where she volunteered at a food distribution site.

MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER Senior capstone courses provide students with a key opportunity to integrate their academic learning with experience in their field of study. Four health sciences seniors—Stephanie O’Neill, Bryce Zicarelli, Elizabeth Tansey, and Sophie Akellian—began their spring semester capstone working with RiseVt, an organization that supports local community wellness efforts, focused on strengthening a community garden program in Milton, Vermont. The students had just begun meeting with local leaders and residents when the university moved to remote learning. A new project with a larger scope, and potentially more reach, was born.

The foursome collected resources for residents statewide to access and prepare nutritious food, stay physically active, support home-based learning, and manage anxiety. Lists and links to exercise activities, educational tools, cooking guides, meditation and mindfulness apps, music, and podcasts were posted on social media channels for anyone to use anywhere— vital wellness resources for families and individuals stuck at home.

“These students have been educated in public health—including epidemics and health promotion—which has prepared them well to understand and work to support our communities during this unprecedented time,” says course instructor Deborah Hinchey, Health Sciences program director. “They may be working remotely, but they continue to have an impact. Their work is more relevant now than ever.” VQ SUMMER 2020 |

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| ON COURSE

Frames of Reference Students in Professor Bill McDowell’s introductory photography class had just started diving into an abstract photography assignment when the move to remote education occurred. The assignment remained the same, but with a critical difference, the professor instructed students to use their particular situation during the pandemic as a frame of reference.

Above left: Shujie Chen ’21, Bubble; right: Zehui Wu ’21, Glass in Hand; far right: Patricia Bubis ’21, Disinfected Dystopia

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“I always ask students to work from an individual place or space, and I ask them to try to make work that only they can make. Under these circumstances, I feel that that’s even more important. It’s the poet, it’s the filmmaker, it’s the photographer, it’s the sculptor who shows us who we are and who reminds us who we are. And that doesn’t just happen in times of plenty. It’s all the more important that it happens in these very tumultuous, challenging times.”

—Professor Bill McDowell

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| ALUMNI VOICE

Megan O’Brien ’01 G ’08 ’17 An inpatient hospitalist nurse practitioner at Gifford Medical Center in Randolph, Vermont, Megan O’Brien is a native Vermonter and three-time UVM graduate, most recently receiving her doctorate of nursing practice in 2017. She wrote the following in March.

Despite being board certified in family practice and acute care adult gerontology, the many hats I wear are about to be exponentially magnified in the current pandemic. I’m fortunate to be employed by a dynamic organization willing to take bold action and to come together to optimize our response weeks before we’ve seen our first patient, anticipating more than doubling our volumes and work flows. I’m proud to work with a team that values nurse practitioners and to have participated in Gifford’s comprehensive strategizing of resources, training, and ethics. I will serve in many roles during this call to action as I provide complex care at the bedside, manage teams of staff who come to stand with us, as well as rely on my critical care nursing skills to support our nursing staff.

Never has there been such a struggle to balance my professional duties against those of also being a wife, mother, daughter. My husband is a first-responder. We have an eight-year-old daughter and are preparing for possibly being isolated from her amidst everything else in her life being disrupted. I also worry for my own immuno-compromised and aging family members.

The daunting reality of living and working in a small community is that our patients will be people we know—they will be our teachers, our mechanics, our own staff. We must remember how our actions have a ripple effect into the lives of others. In a time when every fiber in you is telling you to “run,” the most grounding thing for me has been to realize there is nowhere to run. We are all in this. I’ve found strength hearing stories of sacrifices to flatten the curve, seen the generosity of people donating supplies and hand-sewn masks.

What is the positive ripple we can put out there? Me? I’m going to take a deep breath, focus, and dig deep to give the best damn care I can.

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ALUMNI VISION |

Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist ’09 June 2, 2020, Underhill, Vermont A videographer and photographer in UVM’s Office of Creative Communications, Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist balanced work from home with a limited scope of on-site assignments (including the cover photo of this issue) documenting the university during the crisis. Like many couples, Jansen-Lonnquist and his wife, Adelaide Adjovu, a nurse practitioner working at a primary care practice in the Northeast Kingdom, have been sharing work-fromhome space during the pandemic. Sitting across from one another at the kitchen table, he edited video footage while she reviewed patient notes. A favorite project in recent months, Jansen-Lonnquist says, was a short video of the UVM Greenhouse in early spring: “It was nice to give people a little break, a moment of peace.”

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Finding their Way

By KAITIE CATANIA

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SALLY MCCAY

IN 2016, JUST TWO WEEKS INTO HIS

UVM Admissions just to name a few.

And that SGA Senate position? It turned into a fouryear commitment. “I absolutely loved it. The Student Government Association office is right across

PAT H T O A D I P L O M A I S S E L D O M the hall from Student Life—two hubs of activity— where I got to hear firsthand the types of things, events, and achievements that all of our clubs and organizations were up to,” he says.

But between maintaining his busy schedule, Dean’s List GPA, and financial and familial responsibilities, Gomez struggled to keep his head above water come junior year. “I needed to be vulnerable and say ‘I’m at my capacity. I need help. What are the resources, what can we do together?’” he recalls. He turned to his academic advisors Samantha Williams and Jennifer Fath—“fixed figures” in his UVM experience—and Counseling and Psychiatry Services for help getting back on track and into the right headspace to keep going.

“My degrees have more than one fingerprint on them,” he says of his BS in Business Administration and BA in Political Science. “They’re covered with finger prints from my parents, advisors, key professors, and support systems at the university.”

But not every student who walks the halls at UVM arrives as sure of what they want as Gomez. Looking back on her first semester, Amanda Locke says she sort of stumbled into nursing.

STRAIGHT

first year at the University of Vermont, Brian Gomez ’20 got a call from the Student Government Association: his peers had elected him to Student Government Association Senate. He recalls that as the first step toward his goal at college: “Say yes to everything.” Elsewhere on campus, Amanda Locke ’20 and James Whitley ’20 were just finding their footing on their new campus for the next four years, while second-year student Kia’Rae Hanron ’20 was grappling with the loss of a parent and managing her mental health. Down in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Mickenzie Zadworny ’20 was settling into her first and only year at the dance conservatory she’d been accepted to, and in the historic halls of University Row, electrical engineering student Abdoulaye Ira ’20 was carefully balancing textbooks and timesheets as both a student and full-time custodial maintenance specialist.

On May 17, 2020, these six graduates crossed the finish line to receive their share of more than three thousand degrees conferred to UVM’s Class of 2020.

This may not have been the spring send-off they anticipated—an online conferral of degrees to be followed by an in-person commencement ceremony at a date TBD—but for these six grads, this moment is a bittersweet bump in their roads, well-traveled with courage, grit, and the support of many. During these unparalleled times, their journeys remind us that while no two paths to a diploma are ever quite the same, no one makes it there alone.

For Gomez, a leap of faith taken by his parents years ago set the wheels in motion for his success when they immigrated to White Plains, New York, from the Dominican Republic. “They came here for me, to improve my life. My degrees are a result of their tenacity and love,” says the business administration and political science double major and incoming brand analyst at Ben & Jerry’s.

A first-generation college student, he arrived on campus with ambitions to get as involved as possible. His long list of leadership roles, jobs, and accolades include being a Grossman Scholar, a Presidential Scholar, a peer mentor and teaching assistant in the business school, an advisor on multiple university committees, a tour guide, and an AdvoCat for

This page, top, Brian Gomez; bottom, Amanda Locke

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“HARD CANNOT STOP ME.” 32 |

“I have always been really interested in helping people. That was always what I wanted to do, even when I was a kid.

But I couldn’t identify how I wanted to do that for a really long time. I struggled to find what was defining me in my college career,” she admits. It wasn’t until she found UVM Rescue, an on-campus emergency medical services (EMS) ambulance staffed and run by students, that she finally figured it out. Serious business, but she recalls the day she spent shadowing UVM Rescue was the hardest she had ever laughed at school before. “I felt like I was with a group of people I really connected with and who were interested in a lot of the same things.”

Now, Locke has graduated with the privilege of guiding UVM Rescue through its response to Covid19 as the director of operations her senior year. (Yes, even during pandemics the student org’s services remain operational twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.) She was among the few crew members who volunteered to stay in Burlington during Stay Safe, Stay Home to respond to calls. “I couldn’t see it

and fundraising for “the kiddos” at the UVM Children’s Hospital and is currently in the process of sitting for his Medical College Admission Test to attend medical school. But first, the Vermont native is headed to Taiwan, where he will work with children as a Fulbright English teaching assistant. Whitley is among nine graduates and alumni this spring who earned Fulbrights—the most ever in UVM’s history—to teach English and research abroad. He’s scheduled to leave in January and is looking forward to focusing on his teaching and communications skills, which he views as essential for doctors.

“Teaching is a very important part of medicine— whether its teaching your patients about their diagnoses or lifestyle changes, or teaching other doctors—there are all these two-way interactions occurring where being able to facilitate information is important,” he says.

Having struggled in the classroom as a student before becoming an art instructor herself, Kia’Rae Hanron shares Whitley’s values for individualized and effective communication. For years, her struggles with depression and anxiety were compounded by undiagnosed ADHD, making it nearly impossible for her to string sentences together on some days.

All of that came to a head after her father passed away following her first year at UVM. Hanron knew that in order to stay the course at the university, she needed an ally and advocate on campus. And she found that in an unexpected place: Student Accessibility Services (SAS). “That has been

“MY DEGREES HAVE MORE THAN ONE FINGERPRINT ON THEM.” any other way. I spent most of my collegiate career, three years, dedicated to this organization, and it’s what gave me my start in medicine and healthcare.

It’s everything I can do to give back to this organization and this community and the people who built me into who I am now,” she says, having graduated early alongside nearly one-hundred other professional nursing students and with a nursing position secured at UVM Medical Center this fall.

Locke’s passion for healthcare services and personal connection to the field is echoed by James Whitley, a biological sciences major and chemistry and statistics double minor. During his sophomore year, his brother was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and Whitley spent a significant time in and out of UVMMC. “That’s where I saw pediatricians work with my brother. Without the doctors at the Medical Center, he would not be able to live the life normal life he does,” says the aspiring pediatrician.

He spent the next two years volunteering with

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an absolute game changer for me. I was hesitant at first because I had a lot of stigma attached to mental illness and disability, I didn’t understand that depression and anxiety were disabilities, I still had a lot to learn at that point,” she says. SAS helped Hanron take a medical leave of absence and progress through the remainder of her degree at a pace appropriate for her learning style, all while retaining her scholarship award.

More focused than ever on her studies, Hanron says one of the most important things she learned in the classroom is the power of kindness and “the effect that it can have, even in its most minute forms.” For example, like the supportive note she received from a classmate in response to a writing assignment she shared about her father. She kept the note from the student, who related to her grief.

“I have looked at that nearly every single day for the last four or five years since I got that note. That sums up to me the power of kindness.” For Hanron

it’s been a long journey—and one that she says she couldn’t have completed without her mother, Karen—but on the day she submitted her final college assignment from her apartment in Burlington, she quietly closed her laptop, tossed her head back, and shouted to no one but herself: “I’m done!” She graduated with her bachelor’s in art education and with a full-time position at Clemmons Family Farm—a nonprofit that fosters a deeper understanding and appreciation for African and African-American history, arts, and culture—as an art instructor.

And approaching complex issues—like race, for example—through art is critical to our understanding of those issues more fully, says dance and English graduate Mickenzie Zadworny. “In our political climate right now and this Covid time we’re living

insights from her kitchen in Burlington, just north in Colchester, electrical engineering student Abdoulaye Ira tinkered away designing a drone that could collect, analyze, and share water samples from Lake Champlain with a lab nearby.

It was the last assignment that stood between the Burkina Faso native and his dream of a degree, years in the making.

He won the visa lottery in 2010 to come to Vermont from West Africa, where he had excelled academically. When he arrived in the United States, however, he was surprised to find his diplomas weren’t recognized as sufficient for jobs in his new

Left top, Mickenzie Zadworny; left below, Abdoulaye Ira. This page, top, James Whitley; bottom, Kia’Rae Hanron.

“IT’S EVERYTHING I CAN DO TO GIVE BACK TO THIS ORGANIZATION AND THIS COMMUNITY AND THE PEOPLE WHO BUILT ME INTO WHO I AM NOW.” in, art is a way to connect us and ground us and remind us of the humanity that might be lacking.”

“For me, I best understand things about myself and about the world through movement and through art,” she says. But when she enrolled in a dance conservatory after high school, she soon learned that her talent in the studio was best paired with rigorous academics in the classroom, which the Pittsburgh conservatory lacked. Zadworny transferred to UVM her sophomore year, before the possibility opened up for her to both dance and study English. The degree program in dance was unveiled her junior year, and she quickly switched her minor into a double major. She graduated this spring as one of the first to earn the degree, and with an apprenticeship at a Burlington dance company waiting for her.

Her flexibility and openness served her well this spring when the thesis performance she had choreographed at the Fleming Museum was cancelled due to the pandemic. She made the most of the restraints of quarantine and documented her and a colleague’s responses to daily dance prompts.

From their separate cities, they improvised together in confined spaces, outside, and in new places, and then reflected on the experience. “That helped me understand this time a bit better, and that’s why art is so important to me, to help me synthesize things in a new way and realize truths of our world that I hadn’t yet realized,” she says.

And while Zadworny danced her way to new

life. Having to start over, his visa sponsor suggested he look into tuition remission benefits of UVM employees, which could help offset the unanticipated costs. A few months later, Ira was hired full-time

by Custodial Services.

He started with a few certificatelevel English courses before enrolling in the electrical engineering program. Not only could he use his degree to explore solar energy options that might be more reliable and affordable than West Africa’s current electric services, but the field is based in numbers—not mastery of the English language—which he says didn’t hurt.

Ira picked up and took off with his academic performance. “I didn’t know I was going to be coming or working or cleaning, so when I knew I needed to go back to school to better my life, that was the goal. I wasn’t messing around,” he says.

His bachelor’s in electrical engineering now in hand, along with a few accolades including the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences’ Atwater-Kent Award and Senior Student of Color Award, both earned this year, he plans to move on to his next goal: his master’s degree.

“My philosophy is if I’m going to do something, I’m going to be the best at it,” Ira says. “Hard cannot stop me. It’s either possible or it’s not.”

VQ SUMMER 2020 |

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| ALUMNI VOICE

Lesléa Newman ’77 Lesléa Newman has created seventy-five books for readers of all ages including the poetry collections October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard and I Carry My Mother. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. Her newest poetry collection, I Wish My Father, will be published in 2021.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT LIFE BEFORE THE VIRUS I. I remember shaking hands: damp sweaty hands and dry scratchy hands, bone-crushing handshakes and dead-fish handshakes, two-handed handshakes, my hand sandwiched between a pair of big beefy palms.

I remember hairy hands and freckled hands, young smooth hands and old wrinkled hands, red-polished fingernails and bitten-jagged fingernails, stained hands of hairdressers who had spent all day dyeing, dirty hands of gardeners who dug down deep into the good earth.

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VI. I remember the elegant turn of shiny brass doorknobs cool to the touch.

VII. I remember my mother’s hands tied to the railings of her hospital bed and how I untied them when the nurse wasn’t looking and held them in my lap.

VIII. I remember holding my father’s hand how the big college ring he wore rubbed against my birthstone ring and irritated my pinky but I never pulled away.

IX. I remember the joy of offering my index finger to a new baby who wrapped it in her fist as we gazed at each other in wonder.

II. Thousands of years ago, a man stuck out his right hand to show a stranger he had no weapon.

The stranger took his hand and shook it to make sure he had nothing up his sleeve.

And that is how it began.

X. I remember tapping a stranger on the shoulder and saying, “Your tag is showing.

Do you mind if I tuck it in?”

She didn’t mind. I tucked it in.

III. I remember sharing a bucket of greasy popcorn with a boy at the movies (though I no longer remember the boy or the movie) the thrill of our hands accidentally on purpose brushing each other in the dark.

XI. I remember salad bars and hot bars.

I remember saying, “Want a bite?” and offering a forkful of food from my plate.

I remember asking, “Can I have a sip?” and placing my lips on the edge of your cold frosty glass.

IV. I remember my best girlfriend and I facing each other to play a hand-clapping game, shrieking “Miss Mary...Mack! Mack! Mack!” and the loud satisfying smack! as our four palms slapped.

XII. I remember passing around the kiddush cup, each of us taking a small sip of wine.

I remember passing around the challah, each of us ripping off a big yeasty hunk.

I remember picking up a serving spoon someone had just put down without giving it a second thought.

V. I remember high fives and how we’d laugh when we missed and then do a do-over.

XIII. I remember sitting with a mourner at a funeral, not saying a word, simply taking her hand.

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

COPYRIGHT © 2020 BY LESLÉA NEWMAN. FIRST APPEARED IN NEW VERSE NEWS. USED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR.

ALUMNI VISION |

Andy Duback ’03 April 14, 2020, Williston, Vermont Photographer Andy Duback continued shooting editorial assignments during the crisis and also developed a project taking family portraits of neighbors in Williston. “This set of photographs is my attempt to show one component of the pandemic: families at home,” Duback writes on his website. “I chose the low camera angle to put these families in a heroic position. I chose black-and-white because, in many ways, these are austere times. I didn’t really choose the socially distanced curbside perspective, but this limiting factor did bring some visual continuity to the photographs. Limitations aren’t always bad. In the end, I look at these photographs as a portrait of a community, my community, in a historically important time.” Pictured: The Smith Family—Rachel ’06, Adam ’03, Porter, and Macy. View the gallery: andyduback.com/documenting-covid SUMMER 2020 |

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| ALUMNI VOICE

Halleh Akbarnia md’98 Halleh Akbarnia practices emergency medicine in a Chicago suburb. The following is adapted from her original Facebook post, which was published in the Los Angeles Times on April 11, 2020.

I have been an emergency medicine physician for almost twenty years, which means I’ve worked through numerous disasters. I’m used to the daily grind of heart attacks, gunshots, strokes, flu, traumas, and more.

Yet nothing has made me feel about my work the way this pandemic has: I have a knot in my stomach each day as I head into work at Advocate Condell Medical Center in the northern suburbs of Chicago. It is a sensation relieved only by the empathetic faces and presence of my colleagues, and knowing they are experiencing the same feelings I am—that they, too, understand and accept the profound risks we take each day.

I met my patient, Mr. C., on my first real “pandemic” shift, the first day we began seeing the surge of Covid-19 cases for which we had been preparing. He was classic in his presentation: his X-ray findings, his low oxygen levels. We just knew. And he was the nicest man I had met in a long time.

Gasping for breath, he kept asking if we needed anything, and reassuring us that it would all be OK. He told us he was a teacher but that he was learning so much from us, and he told us how much he respected what we were doing. I felt the same way about him.

We had to decide how long we would try to let him work through his low oxygen state before intubating him—a procedure that involves putting a tube into his lungs to keep him breathing—but his saturation levels kept falling. Despite all our efforts, it was time to put him on the ventilator.

He told us he didn’t feel great about this, but then added, “Doc, I trust you and am putting myself in your hands.” In that moment, the uneasy feeling in my stomach grew. But he, with his teacher’s steady voice, kept me grounded, just where I needed to be. I saw his eyes looking at me, seeing the kindness in them, even as we pushed the medications to put him to sleep.

It was not an easy intubation. He nearly left us a few times during those first minutes, but he kept coming back.

We fought hard to keep him with us. The patience and strength of my team that day was truly remarkable. Once the procedure was finished, and knowing that his battle was far from over, I handed him over to my friend and colleague, Dr. Beth Ginsburg, and her team in the ICU. Her calm voice reassured me that they had it from here.

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And then, for the next twelve days, I waited and watched his progress, knowing the grim statistics, and how sick he was when he got to us.

With Mr. C., these same colleagues worked their magic and, after more than a week on the ventilator, my new friend was successfully extubated. I decided to go see him again.

Mr C. was in the Covid stepdown unit, recovering, without family. Nobody was allowed to visit him. Even worse, his wife had been home alone in isolation for the past fourteen days, too. My heart broke thinking of how that must have been for her. I cautiously went into his room, wearing my PPE, and when he saw me, he stopped for a second. A moment of recognition. I introduced myself.

“I’m Dr. Akbarnia, Mr. C. I was the last person you saw in the ER. You told me you trusted us to get you to this side. Looks like you did just fine.”

He started to cry. He said, “I remember your eyes.”

Then I started to cry. What he didn’t know is that, at that moment, I realized that the reason we do what we do is for people like him, for moments like these. His strength, his kindness, his calming words meant everything to me. At that moment, my heart (which had been beating at more than 100 bpm since this pandemic began) finally slowed down.

I sat down and we talked. I told him that while he is in the hospital, we are his family, and that he will always have a place in my heart. And whether he knows it or not, he will be my silent warrior and guide as I take care of every patient, Covid or not. He will fuel me until the day I hang up my stethoscope.

ALUMNI VISION |

Alex Edelman ’13 March 25, 2020, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC From the White House to the halls of Congress to the work of first responders, Alex Edelman covered the crisis in the nation’s capital. “It’s a particularly difficult time to be a photojournalist,” Edelman says. “Our job is to illustrate news by making photos of situations. Most of the impact of the pandemic is visual, yet the pandemic takes place behind closed doors: in people’s homes, in hospitals, in funeral homes, which are spaces that are difficult to access because of health and privacy concerns.” After contracting and recovering from Covid-19 himself, Edelman became a plasma donor and encourages others to do the same: “Donating was one of the most humbling and important things I’ve ever done.”

SUMMER 2020 |

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This winter, as Covid-19 began to spread across the United States, a team of scientists, engineers, doctors, and students at the University of Vermont wondered if the pandemic might overwhelm the state’s hospitals—and, particularly, if there would be enough ventilators.

So they set out to design and build a simple, inexpensive, emergency ventilator that could be used in Vermont—or anywhere else around the world. They’re succeeding.

by Joshua Brown

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JOSHUA BROWN

The Vermontilator in the second week of march, Jake Kittell began

to panic. The previous two springs he’d gotten sick with pneumonia, “which makes you realize how nice it is to breathe,” the UVM research engineer says. “And I’m hearing about this virus and it’s really dire.” Thousands had died in China, hospitals in Italy were seeing hundreds of Covid-19 patients in acute respiratory distress, the first cases were being reported in the United States, and some models suggested that Vermont could soon have several thousand critically ill people, many of whom would need mechanical assistance to breathe—far outstripping the state’s supply of ventilators.

The next Monday, March 16, Kittell drove from his house in Morrisville to his job at UVM’s IMF Labs, a facility that designs and fabricates custom instruments and devices for professors on campus, and for researchers and businesses across the state. “I’m thinking: there’s an awful lot of people who are going to get sick. We’re engineers. We’ve got a machine shop,” Kittell says. “The world needs ventilators—we can make them!”

Kittell’s colleague, IMF engineer and machinist Carl Silver, recalls what happened next: “Jake walked in here and said, ‘we gotta build a ventilator.’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about ventilators. He said, ‘I don’t know either.

Let’s go.’ So we start reaching out.”

On the previous Friday, on another side of campus, lung expert Jason Bates—a professor in both the Larner College of Medicine and the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences—got a text about a patient on a ventilator, seriously ill with Covid-19, in the intensive care unit at the University of Vermont Medical Center.

The text grabbed his attention because the patient was being cared for with an unusual mode of ventilation called “airway pressure release ventilation,” or APRV— and “this patient was doing rather well on it,” Bates says.

This type of ventilation applies a pattern opposite from normal breathing: the patient receives long inspirations of air that are held inflated at a constant and relatively high pressure, Bates explains. Then “at regular intervals, short expirations are allowed during which the lungs expel carbon dioxide,” he says—but never long enough

for the inner lining of the lung to collapse against itself.

Bates suspected that APRV would be particularly useful for some patients suffering with the new coranavirus.

“One of the main complications from Covid-19 is called acute respiratory distress syndrome, a disease where the lungs fill up with an inflammatory fluid,” explains Dr. Anne Dixon, director of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at the UVM Medical Center and College of Medicine. “Many of these patients end up being dependent on a ventilator for fairly prolonged periods.”

For more than fifteen years, Bates has been doing research on the damage that occurs in lung tissue during the kind of illnesses now showing up in Covid-19 patients—and he’s a world-leading expert on the many ways mechanical ventilation itself can cause further damage to the lung. How to best avoid injury induced by ventilators is controversial and murky. For many patients, intensive-care doctors set a ventilator to follow a normal breathing pattern—but with a smaller-thannormal volume of air—trying to avoid too much stretching of the lung tissue. They fear overinflation.

But Bates’s research is part of a growing body of evidence showing nearly the opposite: that a major risk to many patients comes when regions of the lung collapse.

Then, the damaged and delicate lining of the lung comes together, sticks, and then is peeled apart—over and over.

“This peeling apart process is extremely injurious to the lining itself and can damage it to the point of allowing fluid to leak into the lungs from the capillaries that course through it,” Bates says. “Once this starts happening, the damage from peeling becomes worse, causing ventilatorinduced lung injury to progress in a way that is difficult to reverse.” He’d seen how APRV could fend off this death spiral in other types of lung disease—and he expected that it would be true for Covid-19 patients too.

So when he learned that Josh Farkas—the attending physician of the patient in the UVM Medical Center— had texted “APRV is da bomb for covid” it made “perfect sense,” Bates says.

That weekend, Bates began mulling over what he could do to help against the Covid-19 storm that seemed to be heading fast toward Vermont. APRV might be a great mode of ventilation to help Covid-19 patients— but not if there weren’t enough ventilators. “I had an idea about how one might apply APRV with a short expiratory duration using a very simple system comprised of few components that could be made and assembled cheaply,” Bates recalls. He even made a sketch. “It was just an idea that I found somewhat interesting, but I could not see how it could be realized rapidly enough to serve the current crisis.”

Then, on Tuesday, March 17, he got an email from Jake Kittell. “I knew Jake from a previous project,” Bates says, so when Kittell asked him if he wanted to get involved SUMMER 2020 |

37

Professor Jason Bates’s expertise on lung function meshed with the design/build know-how of IMF Lab engineers Carl Silver and Jake Kittell, as the UVM team rapidly developed an emergency ventilator with great promise for saving lives, during the Covid-19 crisis and beyond.

in an effort to build emergency ventilators for the Covid-19 crisis, “I naturally said sure,”—and sent him his sketch. “It was an ingenious and elegant concept,” Kittell says. “Two rotating discs, each with a hole— when they cross, it vents, and when they don’t, it’s pressurized. It’s that simple.” The next morning, Carl Silver contacted Bates to say he had built a working prototype of his idea—and emailed him a video of it in action. “I was stunned,” Bates says. “I realized the expertize and facilities were at hand to make an emergency ventilator a real prospect.”

on a fine afternoon in mid-may,

the Vermontilator, generation 3.0, stands, gleaming, on black cloth, surrounded by machine tools and drill presses, in the IMF Lab. Wearing homemade masks, Jake Kittell and Carl Silver unscrew the sheet metal top, calibrate the custom regulator inside that will protect patients against excess pressure, check the eight LED alarm lights, twist a knob to select a breath period of 4.4 seconds—and then they turn it on. A mesmerizing long hiss and short puff—hiss and puff, hiss and puff—comes out of the metal box and hoses as a nearby mechanical test lung rises and falls. Five nearly assembled copies of the ventilator stand on a workbench nearby, getting ready to be sent out to doctors and other lung specialists at the UVM Medical Center for pre-clinical testing.

A lot happened in two months.

Once Jake Kittell, Carl Silver, and Jason Bates realized that their late-night thoughts and pencil

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sketches had practical legs, they’ve been running nearly non-stop. Mike Lane, the director of the IMF Labs, immediately saw the Vermontilator’s potential to save lives, and put Kittell and Silver to work on the project full time. Then he began making connections with people in Vermont’s manufacturing community who might help. With the state under a stay-at-home order, much of the work was planned on a near-daily video meeting—Kittell updating designs and testing parts from his machine shop at home, while Silver built prototypes in the IMF Labs on campus.

Bates consulted with Anne Dixon, Josh Farkas, and other critical care and pulmonary doctors—as well as respiratory therapist Emily Parent—in the medical center. He also recruited Guy Kennedy, a skilled IMF engineer in UVM’s Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, to join the team. From Williston, Tim King ’76, a consulting engineer and expert on process management, jumped in to help develop an application to the FDA for emergency use approval. Corine Farewell, Kerry Swift, and others in the UVM Innovations office, joined the team to help file patents, and plan for licensing and commercialization. They quickly engaged the Vermont Manufacturing Extension Center that, in turn, recruited a team of Vermont manufacturers—Kalow Technologies in Clarendon, Preci Manufacturing in Winooski, Dessureau Machines in Barre, GW Plastics in Royalton, and Ivek Corporation in North Springfield—to contribute expertise, build custom parts, and plan for production. Negotiations are now underway to take the Vermontilator to market once final FDA emergency use approval is secured—twenty at first, then hundreds, though “eventually, tens of thousands could be needed,” says Kittell.

A commercial ventilator can have 1,500 parts, supplied from more than a dozen countries, and cost well over $25,000. Silver built the first prototype of the Vermontilator in one day with about fifteen parts he found in his house and UVM’s IMF Lab. Over the weeks, the Vermontilator has gotten more complicated. It’s now at eighty-five core parts, Kittell says—plus some electronics for a safety system built by electrical engineer Ben Holleran. And Bates’s original guess that it could be built for “a few hundred bucks,” has come into focus with a likely ANDY DUBACK

production cost closer to $2,000—as the team has worked to meet the FDA’s requirements for alarms, pressure release valves, water resistance, and other safety features. “But the goal has always been to make it as dirt simple as possible,” Kittell says. “In a normal ventilator, the computer controls everything. Ours is mechanical.” Bates’s rotating discs with holes, driven by a simple DC motor, remains the heart of the device. “This can be fitted to run on just a car battery,” Kittell says. “We want people anywhere in the world to be able to use this.”

Sadly, far-away parts of the world may have pressing need for the Vermontilator. With the tremendous cooperation of thousands of people—social distancing, closing businesses, wearing masks, staying home—the worst-case scenario for the Covid-19 epidemic in Vermont was avoided. The emergency field hospitals erected at UVM’s Patrick Gym and Champlain Fairgrounds haven’t been needed. “It’s pretty clear now that we’re not going to be using the Vermontilator in Vermont because the surge has been suppressed to the point where everything is well within the capacity of the medical center,” says Bates. But the worst case—or, certainly, a terrible case—still looms for many places in the world where Covid-19 has yet to arrive—or rages now, but JOSHUA BROWN

without adequate health care systems.

A few weeks ago, Jason Bates was contacted about the Vermontilator by someone who works for the World Bank in the Central African Republic, a nation of five million people. “They have three ventilators for the whole country,” Bates says. A post-doctoral researcher in his lab has been opening conversations with health care experts in Brazil about the potential use of the Vermontilator in overwhelmed hospitals there. And three students in UVM’s Sustainable Innovation MBA program, including Ruchi Nadkarni, have been working with staff in UVM Innovations to build connections to other vulnerable countries with few ventilators. “Covid is just now catching countries like India and Kenya,” Nadkarni says. “I’m seeking channels for the Vermontilator to enter these frontier markets, by liasing with the World Health Organization and others.” But the swift and deadly virus that causes Covid-19 cares not one whit for the ponderous work of aligning regulations and technology transfer. “We have a lot that needs to be done—and we have to do it fast,” Nadkarni says. “In thinking about how to bring a ventilator, that may cost north of a thousand dollars, to countries where many people make less than two dollars a day—there are so many moving parts.” VQ SUMMER 2020 |

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UVM STRONG

Pomp and Circumstance

Read more on these stories and many others about UVM alumni, faculty, staff, and student efforts during the pandemic go.uvm.edu/ crisis.

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In the fight against the Covid-19 virus, many healthcare professionals worldwide have faced an additional fight to simply resource the basic personal protective equipment (PPE) that they need to keep themselves safe while doing their jobs. Nathaniel Moore G’20, a student in the Sustainable Innovation MBA Program in the Grossman School of Business, had an out-of-the-box idea for addressing this need—repurpose graduation gowns as PPE. For the past five years, Moore has been a practicing emergency medicine physician’s assistant at the UVM Medical Center, and he will begin medical school at the university’s Larner College of Medicine in the fall.

Coupled with the innovative thinking nurtured in his business graduate program, Moore brought uniquely apt experience and mindset to the moment.

“Reading countless headlines about this devastating disease, I was struck by the image of healthcare workers lacking PPE and wearing black trash bags as makeshift gowns,” Moore says. “While this news simmered in the back of my mind, I was also heartbroken for all the graduating seniors whose commencement ceremonies were being postponed or canceled to adhere to social

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

distancing guidelines. Then, it clicked that there could be a helpful connection here.”

Moore teamed with several Grossman classmates to launch Gowns4Good (gowns4good.net), an effort to get graduation gowns in the hands of healthcare providers. By mid-May, the effort had garnered approximately 6,000 donated gowns from individuals and another 1,500 from corporate partners. While Moore’s idea was the spark, he spreads the credit widely. “It was incredible to watch my friends and classmates utilize the tools from our curriculum and apply them in this real-world situation. In two days, we went from a hypothetical idea to a fully functioning organization making national headlines helping those in need.”

Indeed, a Reuters article on the effort was shared by multiple news outlets, from The New York Times to U.S. News & World Report.

As the Gowns4Good effort continues to grow, Moore is driven by knowing the difficult realities of caring for Covid-19 patients, even when well-outfitted for safety.

“I do not wish for anyone to feel unsupported through this pandemic,” he says. “It is hard on families, friends, and strangers near and far. We are all in this together.”

TARAN CATANIA

“Most of us run with that mentality that we want to help, we’re here to help. It’s kind of a second nature mindset to say, ‘Nope, we’re staying.’”

—Lanie Billings ’21, director of operations for UVM Rescue.

As the campus cleared in mid-March, the student-run volunteer squad kept their around-the-clock operation running.

ORUCASE HEADLINE

NURSING REINFORCEMENTS When the university offered senior nursing majors the option to graduate early, on May 1, so they could enter the nursing workforce and provide support to overstressed healthcare workers, all ninety-five of them accepted. UVM was among the first colleges in the country to allow nurses to graduate early.

“The timing is what is so important,” said Rosemary Dale, chair of the Department of Nursing in UVM’s College of Nursing and Health Sciences. “Healthcare workers need support as soon as we can provide it.”

UVM Nursing’s fast-forward graduation received national media coverage, including a feature on NBC News Now. Reporter Dasha Burns spoke with Kathryn Calisti ’20, who accepted a job at the UVM Medical Center to begin her career, about the particular challenge of these times for healthcare workers.

“Nurses are strong people and they’re resilient and show up when they’re called on. So, it’s a good reflection, I think, on what I am deciding what to do with my life,” Calisti said.

KEEPING SAFE DISTANCE In 2015, when an Amtrak train went off the rails in a Vermont forest, officials at the state of Vermont contacted Jarlath O’Neill-Dunne, director of UVM’s Spatial Analysis Lab. Within two hours, he and his team were flying drones overhead, sending out photos of the wreck to help with recovery. “We’ve been using drones for disaster response in Vermont for a while,” he says, from floods to wildfires. “They give us new capabilities to help people make more informed, better decisions.”

Those capabilities were put to use in another way soon JOSHUA BROWN, LEFT; UVM SPATIAL ANALYSIS LAB, RIGHT

after Vermont Governor Phil Scott ’80 issued a “stay home, stay safe,” order on March 24. O’Neill-Dunne and the Spatial Analysis team volunteered to help the City of Burlington’s parks department monitor the usage of parks during the pandemic. Their drone’s-eye views of how well social-distancing guidelines were being followed during peak-use periods joined with efforts of parks department ambassadors on the ground—an initiative that helped keep Buringtonian’s safe and their beloved parks open.

RIPPLE EFFECT ON FOOD SYSTEMS As pandemic numbers began to spike, Meredith Niles, assistant professor in Nutrition and Food Sciences, saw the implications the health and economic crisis would have on food systems. Joining with colleagues at UVM and Johns Hopkins University, she launched a survey in Vermont to gauge the impact on food insecurity for the state’s residents.

Just one core finding of the survey, conducted across two weeks in early April: food insecurity in Vermont increased by one-third during the pandemic, from 18.3 percent to 24.3 percent. The research team intends to conduct the survey in other states and nationally, and also follow up with future surveys in Vermont to assess changes.

While the researchers hope to analyze the results quickly enough so they can develop policy recommendations for the current outbreak, they are also taking a longer view. “It’s critical to obtain this information, to blunt the effects of the current pandemic but also to prepare for future disease outbreaks and other shocks to society and the food system,” Niles says.

VQ SUMMER 2020 |

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| ALUMNI VOICE

Halleh Akbarnia md’98 Halleh Akbarnia practices emergency medicine in a Chicago suburb. The following is adapted from her original Facebook post, which was published in the Los Angeles Times on April 11, 2020.

I have been an emergency medicine physician for almost twenty years, which means I’ve worked through numerous disasters. I’m used to the daily grind of heart attacks, gunshots, strokes, flu, traumas, and more.

Yet nothing has made me feel about my work the way this pandemic has: I have a knot in my stomach each day as I head into work at Advocate Condell Medical Center in the northern suburbs of Chicago. It is a sensation relieved only by the empathetic faces and presence of my colleagues, and knowing they are experiencing the same feelings I am—that they, too, understand and accept the profound risks we take each day.

I met my patient, Mr. C., on my first real “pandemic” shift, the first day we began seeing the surge of Covid-19 cases for which we had been preparing. He was classic in his presentation: his X-ray findings, his low oxygen levels. We just knew. And he was the nicest man I had met in a long time.

Gasping for breath, he kept asking if we needed anything, and reassuring us that it would all be OK. He told us he was a teacher but that he was learning so much from us, and he told us how much he respected what we were doing. I felt the same way about him.

We had to decide how long we would try to let him work through his low oxygen state before intubating him—a procedure that involves putting a tube into his lungs to keep him breathing—but his saturation levels kept falling. Despite all our efforts, it was time to put him on the ventilator.

He told us he didn’t feel great about this, but then added, “Doc, I trust you and am putting myself in your hands.” In that moment, the uneasy feeling in my stomach grew. But he, with his teacher’s steady voice, kept me grounded, just where I needed to be. I saw his eyes looking at me, seeing the kindness in them, even as we pushed the medications to put him to sleep.

It was not an easy intubation. He nearly left us a few times during those first minutes, but he kept coming back.

We fought hard to keep him with us. The patience and strength of my team that day was truly remarkable. Once the procedure was finished, and knowing that his battle was far from over, I handed him over to my friend and colleague, Dr. Beth Ginsburg, and her team in the ICU. Her calm voice reassured me that they had it from here.

42 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

And then, for the next twelve days, I waited and watched his progress, knowing the grim statistics, and how sick he was when he got to us.

With Mr. C., these same colleagues worked their magic and, after more than a week on the ventilator, my new friend was successfully extubated. I decided to go see him again.

Mr C. was in the Covid stepdown unit, recovering, without family. Nobody was allowed to visit him. Even worse, his wife had been home alone in isolation for the past fourteen days, too. My heart broke thinking of how that must have been for her. I cautiously went into his room, wearing my PPE, and when he saw me, he stopped for a second. A moment of recognition. I introduced myself.

“I’m Dr. Akbarnia, Mr. C. I was the last person you saw in the ER. You told me you trusted us to get you to this side. Looks like you did just fine.”

He started to cry. He said, “I remember your eyes.”

Then I started to cry. What he didn’t know is that, at that moment, I realized that the reason we do what we do is for people like him, for moments like these. His strength, his kindness, his calming words meant everything to me. At that moment, my heart (which had been beating at more than 100 bpm since this pandemic began) finally slowed down.

I sat down and we talked. I told him that while he is in the hospital, we are his family, and that he will always have a place in my heart. And whether he knows it or not, he will be my silent warrior and guide as I take care of every patient, Covid or not. He will fuel me until the day I hang up my stethoscope.

ALUMNI VISION |

Alex Edelman ’13 March 25, 2020, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC From the White House to the halls of Congress to the work of first responders, Alex Edelman covered the crisis in the nation’s capital. “It’s a particularly difficult time to be a photojournalist,” Edelman says. “Our job is to illustrate news by making photos of situations. Most of the impact of the pandemic is visual, yet the pandemic takes place behind closed doors: in people’s homes, in hospitals, in funeral homes, which are spaces that are difficult to access because of health and privacy concerns.” After contracting and recovering from Covid-19 himself, Edelman became a plasma donor and encourages others to do the same: “Donating was one of the most humbling and important things I’ve ever done.”

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CLOSE

to

HOME

by Joshua Brown

By Amy Sutherland Photography by Faith Ninivaggi

dr. lynn black ’74 has boarded flights headed for Guam after a super typhoon, to Haiti in the wake of a massive earthquake, and to Liberia in the midst of a devastating Ebola outbreak. Each time, Black, who is the medical director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s disaster relief team, packed up her mosquito net, headlamp, and water purification tablets. But she didn’t need any of those items for the disaster she was flying toward now. As the plane dropped through the clouds, the skyline of Boston came into view. For this disaster, Black was flying home.

“I never, ever thought this would happen here,” she says.

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Dr. Lynn Black has traveled the globe as a medical relief worker; as Covid-19 cases began to rise in Boston, she helped lead preparations at Massachusetts General Hospital.

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UVM runs deep in Class of 1974 alumna Lynn Black’s family: son Ben is a 2011 grad; sister Leslie Black Sullivan is a 1977 grad; and brother-inlaw Tom Sullivan was president of the university from 2012 to 2019 and is now a professor of political science.

The veteran emergency and primary care physician had been visiting her daughter in Florida the first weekend of March as news of the rising number of cases of Covid-19 became more and more dire, especially in Boston. Black knew the city’s life, as well as her own, was about to change suddenly. The morning after her flight home, Black took charge of quickly opening and running two outpatient Covid19 respiratory illness clinics at MGH. The larger one, a former sports medicine facility a few blocks from the main hospital, was transformed in the matter of two days—walls put up and treadmills cleared away for examination tables.

Black trained a wide range of nurses and doctors on how to safely don their gowns and masks, how to evaluate respiratory distress, and how to scrupulously clean the examining rooms after every patient. And as the list of symptoms for the virus lengthened or safety protocols changed every day, that training continually evolved. The team examined more than one hundred patients a day at the larger clinic, screening for patients who needed to be admitted to the hospital immediately.

Some people arrived with bad colds or possible signs of the virus, but were well enough to be sent home. Others walked in with oxygen levels so low they had to be rushed over to the hospital. Black says, “Usually when I see people like that I’m getting ready to put them on a ventilator.”

Over the coming weeks, the number of Covid-19 cases in Boston spiked as the city with world-class hospitals and doctors devolved into one of the country’s hot spots. At MGH, Black was so busy she had trouble keeping track of which day of the week it was. She arrived at the hospital by 7 a.m. Her husband, who is also a doctor, picked her up each evening around 9 p.m. She shed her scrubs just inside the front door of their Cambridge home and dashed for the shower to rinse away any rogue bits of the virus. Late dinners were followed by mostly sleepless nights, broken by getting up to scribble notes for the next day. Rising at 5:30 a.m., starting the cycle again, Black looked forward to her beloved cup of coffee, her only one of the day, on the drive to work. No drinking coffee with a facemask on, she notes, and adds, “Do you like how focused I was on coffee? The more drastic things get, the more I focus on something tiny.”

on a blustering spring morning, Black

poses for a photo outside MGH in standard hospital attire: scrubs, white coat, black clogs and, now, a facemask. Her blonde hair blows in the breeze. Her eyes are bright over her mask. When she talks or laughs,

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the mask puckers in and out with her breath. Only when the camera is ready does she quickly remove the mask, smile, and then put it back on.

“I have to be a role model,” she says, and then hurries inside for another long shift.

Black has been working in disaster relief for nearly twenty years. In addition to her role at MGH, she is also the chief medical officer for the federal government’s Trauma and Critical Care Team.

When catastrophe strikes in some corner of the globe, chances are high Black will soon be on the ground there.

Despite this resume, the doctor never had a grand plan to work in disaster relief medicine. In fact, when the Long Island native enrolled in nursing at UVM she wanted to be a nurse to help people who were marginalized and invisible. The question was how. At one point, she switched her major to human development, which inspired her, but then returned to nursing believing she could accomplish more as a nurse.

After graduating in 1974, she worked as a nurse for a few years in Boston and then Connecticut.

Then she headed south to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she earned a master’s degree in public health as well as her MD. Still, she says, she’s never quit thinking like a nurse, which has made her the doctor she is.

“I’ve always been more focused on relieving suffering,” she says. “If a patient is cold in their room, I’ll go get them a blanket. I am not just focused on the medical treatment but on the patient.”

For years, Black worked as an emergency physician at Emerson Hospital, a community hospital west of Boston before joining MGH in 2005. There, she typically treats patients in urgent care and coordinates the hospital’s work with affiliated hospitals, in addition to her disaster relief work.

What she has learned over her many missions is that disaster relief work encompasses more than medical care. You have to learn the local laws and culture. You have to work with local leaders and government officials. Black learned all these skills on the ground as every mission has taught her something new, she says. On one of several missions to disaster-prone Haiti, she saw how good intentions could have bad results. Smaller, less organized nonprofits showed up to help. One started giving candy to the local children, she says. But people were starving, and so they began to fight over the candy. “On that mission I learned everything you do has a consequence,” she says.

In Haiti after the massive 2010 earthquake, as aftershocks rattled the traumatized country, thousands of displaced people began to camp just out-

side the hospital, which was considered the safest place, Black says. They had no food or water. The tent city was becoming a humanitarian crisis of its own. Women brought their babies in claiming they had fevers, hoping they would be admitted to the hospital only to be turned away.

“Often the most challenging thing in a disaster response is not the medical or surgical treatments,” she says.

“It’s the moral and ethical dilemmas.

You may only have room for one person in the helicopter, but there are three who need to go. Who do you pick?”

Each mission has also taught her to be flexible. Supplies don’t arrive on schedule. Planes don’t leave when planned. In Haiti for the 2010 earthquake, Black and other relief workers had to sleep on the grounds of the U.S. embassy while they waited for their medical supplies to arrive. You also have to be ready to do whatever needs to be done, she says. “You have to be ready to clean the latrines,” she says.

“You may be an orthopedic surgeon, but you may be doing nursing activities. There is not the familiar structure or roles that exist in a hospital.”

Over the years, she’s also learned how to manage her fatigue and stress.

She takes her iPad on every trip, charging it whenever she is near a power outlet, so she can read historical novels. “I have to read,” she says. “That’s very important to me. It’s the way I can transport myself.” Disaster workers have the privilege, she says, in knowing that at some point they will board a plane and leave crisis and chaos behind for the comfort of their own lives.

There, of course, has been no doing that this spring.

This disaster is our own.

Black says she coped by talking with her daughter in Florida and son in Denver whenever she could, but worried about when she could see them in person again. Then, as the number of cases began to surge in Boston, her father-in-law died of Covid19, alone, in a hospital room in New York City. “We tried to talk with him virtually, but he didn’t have his hearing aids, so he couldn’t really understand us,” she says. “It was heartbreaking.”

In Boston, as tulips bloomed and tree leaves unfurled in the late April chill, the number of Covid19 cases finally began to drop. Yet, as fewer people

came to the testing clinics with coughs and fevers, a new problem emerged. In the thick of a crisis, Black notes, disaster workers can grind away; but when the pace starts to ebb, the emotional toll often comes due. Many Boston healthcare workers were overwhelmed by all the death they had witnessed or grappled with wishing they could do more for the most severely ill isolated patients.

Black was re-assigned from running the testing clinics to coaching her fellow frontline colleagues.

She talked to them about their worries, sorrow, and troubled dreams. For some, the pandemic had upended their confidence in themselves, the hospital, even the country.

“Americans tend to feel they are a little omnipotent,” Black says. “I think coming up against this in the United States has been incredibly challenging.

It’s humbling to realize that you can have all your pieces in place and this tiny, little virus can knock it all down.”

VQ SUMMER 2020 |

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UVM STRONG

Field Hospitals in a Hurry

Read more on these stories and many others about UVM alumni, faculty, staff, and student efforts during the pandemic go.uvm.edu/ crisis.

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From New York City’s Javits Center to Detroit’s TCF Center to Chicago’s McCormick Place, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) led efforts to convert public spaces into emergency field hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic. A UVM alumnus, Lieutenant General Todd Semonite G’88, guided this vital work as Chief of Engineers and Commanding General of the USACE. A native of Bellows Falls, Vermont, Semonite earned his master’s in civil engineering from UVM, after completing his undergraduate degree in engineering at the U.S. Military Academy.

As leader, Semonite has also been the public voice and face of the Army Corps, appearing across multiple news outlets to describe the mission and how his engineers are tackling it. Though the Army Corps is 36,000 employees strong, Semonite stresses that his engineers are just one part of a team effort, working collaboratively with FEMA, the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and state and government officials.

In a Department of Defense press conference at the outset of the field hospital retrofits, Semonite, said, “This is an unbelievably complicated problem, and there’s no way we’re going to be able to do this with a

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complicated solution. We’re going to need something super simple.”

For USACE, super simple has meant standardizing function of facility, either for Covid or non-Covid patients, and type of building structure, a cavernous stadium or convention hall versus a multi-room dormitory or hotel. Starting from those parameters, the corps works with state and local officials to create the emergency space they most need.

Above all, speed is of the essence, Semonite told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “We don’t have time to do the perfect solution. We’ve got to determine what is mission essential. I tell my guys, ‘You don’t have all the time in the world to build this. You have three weeks, that’s what the curve of that city is, and get it done on time.’”

In dress uniform or in fatigues, Semonite exudes a cut-to-the-chase authenticity, every bit the engineer and military officer. It’s a rare thing to find a YouTube video with universally positive response. But a posting of Semonite’s late-March appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show was followed by high praise, much of it summed up by one viewer: “This guy is not playing around. He means business. Refreshing to hear intelligence. I salute you, sir.”

GETTY IMAGES/BLOOMBERG

“ It’s not just Pfizer; everyone is sharing what they know to work toward the same goal. Everybody is working on this as a compassion project in response to this global crisis. It’s an exciting time to be involved in this, but it’s a different way to work when there’s pressure behind it like that.”

—Estee Dilli ’15, senior associate scientist at Pfizer, on being part of the Covid-19 vaccine development team

ORUCASE HEADLINE

CYCLING GEAR TO MEDICAL MASKS The business partnership between Isaac Howe ’08 and Colin Jaskiewicz ’10 began as teammates and top riders for UVM Cycling. (Jaskiewicz won the collegiate national championship in road cycling in 2009.) Post-graduation, they founded Orucase, a manufacturer of fabric cases for air transport of bicycles and other accessories, in a garage behind their Burlington apartment. They’ve steadily grown the business, now headquartered in San Diego, earning honors such as “Gear of the Year” from Roadbike Review for their handlebar bag named after Vermont’s iconic Smuggler’s Notch.

In late March, the young alumni pivoted their operations to address critical medical supply shortages as the pandemic built toward its peak. Retooling lines with their production partner in Mexico, Orucase began making consumer-focused and medicalgrade masks. Sales of the former supported manufacturing of the latter, so masks could be donated to hospitals and in the United States and Mexico.

AN ESSENTIAL ALUMNI COUPLE Ben Katz ’02, detective with the Vermont State Police, shifted his focus this spring from crime investigation to working with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to prepare for a possible rise in deaths due to Covid-19. His wife, Megan Malgeri MD ’12, a general practitioner with the UVM Health Network, was dealing with shifts of her own—seeing patients via Zoom to maximize public safety by keeping people home whenever possible.

Together, like so many, the couple balanced their essential professional roles with keeping family life safe and sane: “Due to the difficulty of grasping the threat in full, I find we frequently dip our toes into hope, then fear, then back again,” ABOVE RIGHT: JOSHUA BROWN

Malgeri says. “One moment I negotiate with my daughter to wash her hands or put away her dinner dishes, and the next minute I contemplate who would care for our very busy young children if we both were to become ill together.” She adds, “I think we will eventually emerge from this with a profound appreciation for our community, what it has to offer, and with an enhanced safety net for those in greatest need.”

GETTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK As the nation reopens from pandemic lockdowns, governors are among leaders developing strategies to help their states’ economies rebound. Alumna Kate Ash ’10, an independent consultant working with the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, is helping shape that process.

Ash supports the center’s future of work initiative, focused on helping states develop cutting-edge solutions for getting people back to work and adapting to an increasingly automated economy.

Among the greatest challenges, Ash notes, is making sure that leaders are receiving sufficient and accurate information in the midst of the difficult circumstances. “During disaster, managing information can easily spiral into a crisis of its own,” she says.

In the aftermath of the devastating tropical storm, Ash served as Deputy Irene Recovery Officer in Vermont. “I witnessed firsthand that opportunity can emerge from disaster with the right leadership, a commitment to collaboration, and an unrelenting focus on helping the most vulnerable,” Ash says. “These are Vermont values, and it has been incredibly rewarding to bring our small state’s approach to resiliency to the forefront of my work nationwide on Covid-19.”

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We’ll miss you in person this fall.

2020 ALUMNI WEEKEND

We’re working hard to find new ways to connect.

Because your safety and health are our first priority, we ‘ve made the tough decision to cancel on-campus reunion celebrations this fall.

Please know that our staff is committed to developing new ways to celebrate your milestone reunion years. For up-to-date information visit:

alumni.uvm.edu/alumniweekend

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CLASS NOTES Life beyond graduation

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Carolyn Wyatt Long shares that Priscilla Savage Watt passed away in December 2019.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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June Hoffman Dorion sends greetings. With great sadness, she reports on the passing of Daan Zwick in November 2019. June writes, “He was an outstanding member of our class. You probably remember him as the editor of the Cynic. He was a leader at UVM and a leader in life. Daan continued to be a student all his life, taking courses into his eighties.

He was instrumental in the completion of the Long Trail. Volunteering was his joy. We are so proud to say he was a member of the class of 1943.” June shares, “I have been learning during the past two weeks how difficult times can make you or break you. Happy to report that I am still whole! Did I learn that many years ago at UVM? Forge on, and keep in touch!"

Send your news to— June Hoffman Dorion 16 Elmwood Drive, Rutland, VT 05701 junedorion@gmail.com

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Judith Ann Tarshis ’73 shares that Robert Tarshis passed away peacefully at home in Kingston, Ontario, at

age 99.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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Send your news to— Mrs. Harriet Bristol Saville Apt. 11, 1510 Williston Road South Burlington, VT 05403 hattiesaville@comcast.net

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Send your news to— Louise Jordan Harper 573 Northampton Street Holyoke, MA 01040 louisejordanharper@gmail.com

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Family and friends sadly report the passing of Cynthia Wriston Massey in Canandaigua, New York,

on October 3, 2019.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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Sandra Bennet MacDonald ’75 shares that her mother, Janet Killary Bennett, died February 28, 2020.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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Robert “Bob” Perkins moved a few miles from his three-bedroom house in Rutland City to a two-room apartment in The Gables, a Senior Living facility in Rutland Town. The Gables facility was once the College of Technology.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

51

Molly Jerger Leonard was saddened to see the name Barbara Whitney Hurtgen in the Memoriam section of Vermont Quarterly. She shares, “Barbara was in our 1951 class at the UVM Music Education Department. I remember her as a beautiful, smart, pleasant person, liked by all. She was an asset to our class and will be missed by many.”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

53

Music education major Donna Ellis Rigby passed away in March 2020.

Donna is survived by her husband, George, and sons, Bradford and Daniel. RoseMarie Steiner Tarbell-Lyman would love to hear from any of the eight five-year program nurses who graduated in 1953. She connected with Joan Friendburg Griffin. Rose works as a parish nurse and just developed a cotton face mask their food pantry crew uses. Rose writes, “A time for ingenuity and new ways has opened for us because of Covid-19, this reminds me of the old song, ‘When the Lights Go on Again, All Over the World.’”

Send your news to—

UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

54

Beatrice M. Gates Griswold passed away in August 2019. She supported the UVM Move Mountains campaign and delighted in receiving postcard updates about its success each year. Beatrice chose to return to her native Broad Brook in Vermont as her final resting place, because she cherished the experience of growing up on a farm in the Green Mountains, her early education in a one-room schoolhouse, her love of Hartford High School and UVM, and her deep Vermont roots.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

55

Geraldine Quinn Dankowski left Vermont in January to meet up with friends in Florida. She had lunch with Elaine Rohlin, Diane Jones and Dick Jones, and John Dowling ’54. Her grandson, Hugh Sheahan ’20, graduated in May from the UVM College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences.

Send your news to— Jane Morrison Battles 200 Eagle Road, Wayne, PA 19087 janebattles@yahoo.com Hal Lee Greenfader Apt. 1, 805 South Le Doux Road Los Angeles, CA 90035 halisco@att.net

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Thomas and Michele Paisley ’60 share that Thomas M. Aneser has been accepted to continue the Paisley tradition at UVM that started in 1952. They have five children and grandchildren that have attended UVM and are hopeful that Thomas will do the same. Carol Parker Day, a graduate of the School of Dental Hygiene, would like to hear from classmates. Carol lives at 36 Wildersburg Common, Barre, Vermont. She has seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Send your news to— Jane K. Stickney 32 Hickory Hill Road, Williston, VT 05495 stickneyjane@gmail.com SUMMER 2020 |

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| CLASS NOTES

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Ron Randall works full time at Randall House Rare Books, 835 Laguna Street, Santa Barbara, California, 93101. Classmates can email him at ron@randallhouserarebooks.com. Gail Angotti Merriam wrote during her third week of shelter-in-place in California. She and husband Alec celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in June. They live in their home of forty-eight years in Tiburon, with a view of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Weekends find them in the wine country of Sonoma. Summers they enjoy Aspen, Colorado. Their daughter and family live in Paris, where they too are staying at home. Gail looks forward to hearing from friends.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

58

Richard “Dick” Turrone still grows grapes and makes wine, but a lot less than he used to. His oldest daughter and two grandchildren live in Montpelier, so he remains connected to Vermont.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

59

Henry Shaw Jr. and his wife Judy took a “marvelous trip” this past October through southern Italy’s Puglia region. They journeyed from Naples to Bari by rail, “shot down” to Sicily through Messina, visited Siracusa, and traveled to the gorgeous city of Palermo. In Rome they visited the Vatican, Mater by the Spanish Steps, and Borghese Gallery— home to a cardinal friend of the Pope. This was not a prepackaged tour, but a trip they had put together themselves. “A real adventure, not knowing what awaited us at the next villa or the next day. Quite exciting, but I think next time, if there is a next time, we’ll take a more relaxing tour organized by the pros.” David Kallman Kanter died after a brief illness in March 2020 in Dallas, Texas.

He is survived by Dorothy DeCecio ’60 and Daniel Kanter ’89.

Send your news to— Henry Shaw, Jr. 112 Pebble Creek Rd, Columbia, SC 29223 hshaw@sc.rr.com

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Grant Corson is hunkered down with his wife, who is teaching remotely.

He's determined to use the time to finish his second book in the trilogy and find an illustrator. Susan Alenick shares, “As I entered year eighty, I had the notion that all the memorable things I could do in my life were in the past.

WRONG!” Early in the year, she published a book of poetry, Alvescot Morning. A friend set one of the poems to beautiful music, which she played on the organ at a winter recital. In May, Susan celebrated her eightieth birthday with a party for fifty old and new friends from near and far. And Governor Cuo-

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MAIL YOUR CLASS NOTES:

mo’s signing of a bill opening New York's adoption records, allowed her to finally discover her pre-adoption history. As the year ended, she was selected and interviewed by WCAX-TV as a Super Senior. Mary Ann Mooney Chaffee shares with sadness that Joanne Jones Oechsner succumbed to an incurable lung disease in August 2019 in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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Carol Overton Blanchard is “sitting out this beer virus” with her two “Kittybrats” at Sonata Vero in Vero Beach, Florida. She enjoys her independent/assisted living community where she has a unit with a garage and screen porch. She can’t go to the main building until the virus is gone and misses her friends.

Meals are delivered to her, and they are good.

Bette Dunn and Bill Hine visited recently. Carol writes, “The weather is wonderful, it’s technicolor down here.” Fran Grossman is a “happy camper” on the Banks of North Carolina with her knitting, quilting, books, and pup. She shares, “The view of the ocean is cathartic. Wish you all could be here, but the bridge is closed to all except full time residents.” John Simonds’s annual adventure in Mexico was canceled just in the nick of time. He hunkered down on the Chicago River and watches the diving ducks and the Canada geese perform their spring rituals. His next adventure is planned for October on a paddle-wheel boat on the lower Mississippi with two nights in the French Quarter of New Orleans and a sleeper car on Amtrak back to Chicago. He’s had lots of time for reading and recommends Deaths of Despair and The Future of Capitalism for a bit of serious reflection on inequality or Plaza Suite by Neil Simon for a “good hoot.”

John writes, “I am on lock-down for the duration of this crisis.” Mimi Portnoy Davis shares with great sorrow that her husband, Bob Neches, passed in March 2020, seven days before their twentyfourth anniversary. Mimi writes, “Bob was an outstanding actor, marriage and family therapist, husband, father, grandfather, and friend to many.”

Mimi is doing only phone or teletherapy with her psychotherapy clients during the Covid-19 pandemic. She’s sheltering with her daughter, Hilary, and family in Simi Valley, California. On January 4th, Jan Mashman ’61 MD’65 and his wife, Susan, celebrated their sixtieth anniversary in Charleston, South Carolina, surrounded by their children and grandchildren. They also celebrated their eightieth birthdays. They've since been in Covid-19 quarantine. Jan writes, “We hope all of our classmates are safe and well." Bill Brigham ’60 and Diane Lundry Brigham ’61 G’85 had a wonderful trip to Australia and New Zealand in December, then returned to Florida for the rest of winter. They now wonder when they can head back to Randolph, Vermont, and home. Bill writes, “At least we have our own place here in Nokomis with friends and neighbors.” Marvin Vipler’s annual two-month visit to San Miguel de Allende, Mex-

UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401

SUBMIT YOUR CLASS NOTES: alumni.uvm.edu/notes

ico, was cut short this year. After five weeks there, they returned to their home on the Upper East Side of New York City. They were afraid that Trump might close the border because of the pandemic.

Marvin writes, “We are sheltered in place in our apartment and will practice proper hand-washing and social distancing until this pandemic ends. A good chance to declutter and catch up on contacting old friends.” Chuck Tierney and his wife, Bobbi, are happy to be living in an age 55-plus gated community. He coordinates an email network for the community to share status information and other ideas. Tom Hackett writes: “To my 1961 classmates, we all grew up in an era when capitalism allowed our parents and then ourselves to work hard and prosper. We now see efforts to change the system. Could we, as a class, propose that UVM offer a class to fully and fairly explore the pros and cons of both capitalism and socialism so that the students could, for themselves, make up their minds on this important issue. Send me your thoughts, which I will summarize and then send to President Garimella, trhackett1@me.com.” Your class scribe, Steve Berry, is upset that the virus cut short his ski season. His goal of fifty days was not met when all ski areas shut down, but his fortyfour days included weeks in Zermatt, Switzerland; Courchevel, France; and Utah. “Many other days in Stowe, so I shouldn’t complain. As others have reported, we too are hunkered down—in our case in Lexington, Massachusetts, hoping it all passes without catching us.”

Send your news to— Steve Berry 8 Oakmount Circle, Lexington, MA 02420 steveberrydhs@gmail.com

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Edward Freedman has been on the West Coast many years. He’s currently in Green Valley, Arizona, where the climate is ideal for escaping housebound isolation—he hikes, birdwatches, works on his photography skills, etc. He and his partner, Henne, are both well and pleased to note that there are about ninety Vermonters there, full- or part-time. The family of Eugene (Geno) Gafletti is saddened to share his passing in February 2019. With sadness, Joyce Flesher Mills ’63 shares news of the death of her husband of fifty-six years. John H. Mills passed away on December 4, 2019.

Send your news to— Patricia Hoskiewicz Allen 14 Stony Brook Drive, Rexford, NY 12148 traileka@aol.com

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To celebrate his daughter Michelle’s fiftieth birthday, Charlie Bentley vacationed in Europe with her. Their

tour included a cruise on the Danube from Germany to Budapest. Their favorite country was Austria, especially The Sound of Music tribute in Salzburg. Charlie’s wife, Sherry, had to withdraw from the trip due to pending knee surgery.

They live in North Ridgeville, Ohio. Joan Powell Kerzner and husband Arnold Kerzner MD’63 “took the plunge” and moved to Edgewood, a retirement community in North Andover, Massachusetts. They are twenty minutes from Lowell, where they had put down real roots over the last eleven years. Joan tutors refugees and immigrants in English at the International Institute of New England, in Lowell, sings with the Westford Chorus (still a Soprano I), and is involved with the Merrimack Repertory Theatre. Arnie, a child psychiatrist, still works part-time at The Lighthouse School and at Valley Collaborative. They escape as often as they can to their home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and expect to be there all summer if anyone would like to drop in. Joan writes, “We're in the phone book. I hope you are well and enjoying these golden years.” Class secretary Toni Citarella Mullins sends greetings to classmates. She writes, “I am writing this note during the coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully, it will be a distant, shocking memory by the time you read this. Social distancing and self-quarantines are the norm. Also, the guidelines included age restrictions from sixty or seventy and up. This was the first time in my seventies that I thought of myself as old or elderly!

Because I am over sixty, as we all are, I am considered an at-risk population, even though I am healthier and more active than the average fiftyyear-olds! My plans to visit my daughter and sonin-law in Colorado for three weeks of skiing and family time didn't happen. The point of my news is that even though we may think we are still in our fifties, we need to take care of ourselves to continue to live healthy, happy lives for many more years! The next date for Class Notes Submission is August 1, 2020! Let’s hear from the Class of ’63!”

Send your news to— Toni Citarella Mullins 27 Lighthouse Point Road, Highlands, NJ 07732 tonicmullins@verizon.net

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Dr. Mark Kingston Goldstein passed away in December 2019. After a long multi-media career holding several senior executive positions, Jeff Lawenda is now writing and fulfilling both a childhood dream and a promise to Professor Betty Bandel, who taught his creative writing class. Last year Jeff's novel, White Hat, Black Hat, was published. Before that, his collection, Pathways: Novellas and Stories of New York was released. Earlier, two of his short stories were published in a literary/art publication. Learn more at: www.jefflawenda.com. Class secretary Sue Griesenbeck Barber writes, “By now, I hope we are all out of quarantine and back to our regular routines. Maybe we will have learned something from this period in time. And perhaps you have achieved completion of many long-held projects. I wish you all good health and peace.”

Send your news to—

Susan Barber 1 Oak Hill Road, P.O. Box 63, Harvard, MA 01451 suebarbersue@gmail.com

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A new memoir by Bruce Coffin, Among Familiar Shadows: Memories and Reflections, was published in April by Swallowtail Press of Philadelphia. Rose Levy Berenbaum shares that May 1 marked the launch of her twelfth book, Rose's Ice Cream Bliss. She's just putting the finishing touches on her next book, The Cookie Bible, to be published in fall of 2021. William Christie ’65 G’76 had lunch with Carl Frattini ’65 G’76, Dick Cassani ’63 G’68, Chuck Cerasoli ’79, and Bob Nicolino ’80. The group celebrated their long friendship and shared stories about growing up in Barre and playing sports in college.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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David Neumeister retired from an active dental practice in 2018. The Brattleboro, Vermont, general practitioner, had earlier served as vice-president of the American Dental Association and as a member of the ADA Strategic Planning Committee. He and Betsy Hamilton Neumeister ’67 moved to Sarasota, Florida. They now spend the fall in Lincoln, Nebraska, where David teaches communication skills to sophomore dental students at UNMC, and they attend a few sporting events.

After five wonderful years living in the South of France (Beaulieu-sur-Mer), Stephan Schulte and his wife, Jane Rossiter-Smith, returned to their home in London. Stephen writes, “All my life I told all of my friends that someday I would live in France, so this was a lifelong dream come true. We lived in a wonderful old villa, Villa Namouna, complete with a fantastic landlady who was right out of a French movie. We're now back in London and enjoying our return to the big city. We hope to get back to New York City and Burlington during the summer. Over the years, we have had visits from a number of our classmates: Zuckie, the Mirms, Big Jean, Nadine, Guano, and Daniel. We look forward to seeing more of our old friends in the years to come.”

Send your news to— Kathleen Nunan McGuckin 416 San Nicolas Way, St Augustine, FL 32080 kkmcguckin@comcast.net

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Send your news to— Jane Kleinberg Carroll 44 Halsey Street, Apt. 3 Providence, RI 02906 jane.carroll@cox.net

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Karin Schumacher ’68 received the Dr. Ronnie Leavitt Award for Leadership in the Promotion of Social Responsibility in Physical Therapy from the Health Policy and Administration Section of the Ameri-

can Physical Therapy Association. Karin founded the Cross-Cultural and International Interest PT Group in 1985, now titled the Global Health Special Interest Group, to develop resources, promote intercultural rehabilitation practice in lesser developed countries around the world and minority U.S. communities, and to encourage cultural competency teaching in professional schools of physical therapy. She is semi-retired and lives in Denver, Colorado. After six years of back-and-forth between Vero Beach, Florida, and Vermont, Mary Lou Robinson moved to the Burlington area fulltime. She shares, “Friends are everywhere, but the family is in New England and five grandkids, ages three to fifteen, are too intriguing for me not to be around.” She likes it all, except for the “slush and bother” of winter. Mary works at having good health and travels when time allows. She finds the Alumni House nice to visit, and All Souls Center in Shelburne is her favorite place to meditate and meet new people. She writes, “I closed Tootsies on College Street six years ago, but I am glad I had that store when I did, as the retail life I knew and enjoyed no longer prevails. Best to all. If inspired, please contact me: momasita99@aol.com." Jack Rosenberg’s entry was one of forty selected from 339 by show juror Margaret Adams for the MFA Focal Point exhibition. The exhibit was held this winter at Circle Gallery in Annapolis, Maryland.

Additionally, Jack’s work was chosen by this year's jury to be included in the Garrett Park Invitational 2020 Show opening March 22 in the Penn Place Gallery. (Editor’s Note: Apologies to a classmate who wrote with news of travels to the South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula. Your name was lost in the class notes collection shuffle. Please write class secretary Diane to identify yourself, and we’ll get the note in the next issue!)

Send your news to— Diane Duley Glew Unit 2, 23 Franklin Street Westerly, RI 02891 ddglew@gmail.com

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Sally (Stewart) and John Hynes escaped in early-April from their home in Punta Gorda, Florida, and headed back to their home in Stowe, Vermont.

The return flights were unusual with only five others on the flight from Fort Myers to DC, and just the two of them from DC to Burlington. They quarantined for fourteen days after returning to Vermont.

Paul Woodard and his wife, Pris, spent the month of January at their timeshare in Mexico, then part of February on a Viking cruise around the bottom of South America. This included a trip to “The End of the World”—Tierra del Fuego. Paul first learned of this interesting place and its people from a UVM classmate who wrote a freshman paper about it. He writes, “Ushuaia is still as interesting as the place I heard of almost fifty-six years ago.” They returned home to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in late February and isolated for fourteen days, during which they canceled all future trips. They look forward to time with grandkids and to getting their lives back to normal, “whenever that will be." Joanne Vallée SUMMER 2020 |

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| CLASS NOTES Seymour and husband Brian are sheltering in their home in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. They've canceled trips and venture out only occasionally for food and healthcare with masks and gloves.

Volunteer work at the whaling museum near their home is continuing via Zoom and other online services. Joanne's “silver lining” is the isolation creates time to contact friends via the internet more often. She'd love to hear from more of you about these crazy times in which we now find ourselves.

Use “UVM Notes” in your subject line. Jim Freeman ’67 shares that Peter W. Freeman passed away in January 2020. Stephen G. Booth made some of his best friends fifty-plus years ago at UVM. His partner, Allan Michaud, and he were together then.

They attended and enjoyed reunion last year. He writes, “I have a blessed life and now realize how fortunate I was during my time at UVM.” Stephen raised foster children, and now enjoys his grandchildren. He sails in Maine but also sailed to and lived on his boat in Sevilla thirteen years ago. Jim Betts ’69 MD ’73 writes: “By the time you read my message, I'm hoping that the crest of the presence of Covid-19 will have long passed. This has been a health threat to the world, unlike anything we've seen since the Spanish Flu Pandemic in 1918. At the present time (March 25), throughout California, we are under a “shelter-in-place,” as I'm sure you are, as well. During this mandate, we are strictly following all safety protocols as all of us at UCSF Children's Hospital Oakland continue to provide medical-surgical care to our pediatric patients. Transitioning to our current summer-time reading of this message, I encourage all of you to support our university with any donation you feel is possible. For those who attended our wonderful 50th Reunion, we saw that the entire university is truly transformed. There are new buildings, courses, and curriculums. The overall look and feel of the campus is renewed and invigorating. Our new Alumni House is a magnificent rebirth of our former Delta Psi fraternity house.

I also celebrated my 45th UVM College of Medicine Reunion in the fall of 2018. Many of us in that COM class of ’73 were UVM ’69 grads. I hope that all of you in both classes can return to campus whenever possible. With wishing you and your families good health and fulfillment in your lives, I'll look forward to seeing you all again in the not-too-distant future." Ralph E. Edelman is hunkered down in Mint Hill, North Carolina, where the Covid-19 stayat-home order has provided time to review pictures from our class’s 50th Reunion last October. Ralph writes, “I thoroughly enjoyed our time reconnecting. Especially with fellow Sigma Phi brother, Gary Smith, and his wife, Valerie Van Houeten Smith. I wish more classmates could/would attend. Glad to see Jim Betts’s note on Steve Kunken continuing to be our perpetual class president. Keep up the good work. A picture of the two of them at the Alumni House dinner planning our next reunion is posted on the online class notes. Wishing all to keep safe until we can drop the social distancing." Class secretary Mary Moninger-Elia shares: “It's mid-April, and in Connecticut, and we are still battling rising deaths and cases of Covid-19. Pat and I have isolated at home and plan to stay there through the

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end of the year. We cancelled annual trips to Italy, Block Island, and Jekyll Island. Hope you all are settling into the ‘new normal,’ and stay healthy and safe until this all ends. Prayers for all, especially for those on the front lines. I’m currently reading The Search for Christopher Gordon, a first novel by classmate Gordon Lawrence, who retired from Verizon and lives in Williston, Vermont. The novel is set in the “Queen City near Green Mountain University” on Lake Champlain. There are many familiar settings, events, and realistic characters. Gordon is donating profits until August 1 to an emergency food shelf, Chittenden Feeding. Visit his webpage gordonrlawrence.com for details. Gordon is now working on his next novel.

Send your news to— Mary Moninger-Elia 1 Templeton Street, West Haven, CT 06516 maryeliawh@gmail.com

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Bryant Dorsch hopes everybody is getting through the Covid-19 outbreak in good shape. He shares that Switzerland got “hit hard” because of its proximity to Italy. Judy Paulus Myers shares that her husband, Gerry, died last August from multiple health issues. She credits her UVM nursing education for helping her deal with all that he had.

Lorraine Parent Racusen G’70, MD ’75, and Richard Racusen ’70, G ’72, welcomed a new granddaughter, Alice Suri Racusen-Yi, in February 2020. The baby is thriving, with older sister Lucy, mom, and dad sheltering in place in California. Their son Darren Racusen ’11, also in California, has a business consulting firm and pursues his love of mushrooms with a regular podcast, WelcomeToMushroomHour. Class secretary Doug Arnold shares that this final note below “is the kind of correspondence I love to get.” Meg Cibulskis Lannon and Tri Delta sisters/roommates Peggie Cibulskis Lannon, Amy Kahn Greco, Liz Heyer Graham, and Patty Smith Cerniglia have been getting together at least yearly for the past many years at various venues. For this milestone year, they planned a special trip—twelve days in Israel—where they toured the entire country except for the Golan Heights. The tour included all the major historical and religious sites, a boutique winery in the Galilee, and a day in Jordan at the Petra World Heritage site. They swam in all the seas, Red, Dead, and Med. Send your news to— Douglas Arnold 11608 Quail Village Way, Naples, FL 34119 darnold@arnold-co.com

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Your class secretary Sarah Sprayregen shares, “I am writing this column on March 31, and the world has already changed for us all. By the time you read these class notes, it’s my greatest hope that we will be coming out of this pandemic. I’ve been thinking more about our connections as we isolate and find that reaching out to friends is reassuring.” Steve Ralph retired last summer after thirty-five years as CEO at the Huntington Hospital in Pasadena,

California. He continues to serve on several nonprofit boards in the Pasadena area. Steve felt it was time for the next phase of his life: enjoying grandchildren and time at his lake cabin in Minnesota.

Derrick Semler (Hockey ’67, ’68) wrote in midMarch and included a news clipping. He wrote: he returned from Laos in 2008—“it was such a culture shock”, so he wrote a book. A story about Derrick entitled, Local bluesman tunes in to war-wounded in Laos—Derrick Semler, from Soulbender to humanitarian, was published in The Weekly Packet, out of Stonington, Maine in October 2019. Milo Shelly ventured east to visit his granddaughter, Kaylin O’Brien ’22, at UVM and take in some eastern skiing. Sarah had lunch with Milo and Kaylin and enjoyed learning about Kaylin’s early acceptance into the nursing program. She and Milo caught up on family news and learned lots from Kaylin about her courses and student life— she’s clearly on her way to becoming an accomplished healthcare professional! After seven years teaching at a university in Saudi Arabia, Margaret “Annie” Viets returned to Vermont two years ago. She recently volunteered to be the Burlington Ward 6 clerk for Super Tuesday’s election and was delighted to recognize classmate, Paulette Frisbie, among the day’s dedicated poll volunteers. David Lewis moved from Rutland, Vermont, to Haiku, Hawaii, on the island of Maui. He retired as a Rutland County Assistant Judge after nine years of service. Before his judgeship, he was a Vermont municipal manager for thirty-two years in the Town of Killington. John Radimer continues to swim competitively in a new age group, which you can probably figure out, setting New England records in six different events. With sadness, Heather Hitchcock Gabso ’73 shares that her husband, Gary Gabso passed away suddenly in February. He was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon, where they met at a Pi Phi/Sig Ep tea fifty years ago. Gary loved his years at UVM, and always enjoyed walking around campus when they were in Burlington. Liz Mead Foster and husband, Jim, returned from Florida and Sarah and she had great fast walk in town recently. Our other freshman roommate, Joanne Czachor Magliozzi, moved back to the Boston area full-time and is glad for it, having given Florida residency a try. Her step-grandson is a third-year student. Please stay well everyone and stay in touch.

Reach out anytime with news via email, Zoom, or letters.”

Send your news to— Sarah Wilbur Sprayregen 145 Cliff Street, Burlington, VT 05401 sarah.sprayregen@uvm.edu

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Jeffrey Lewis shares that businesses and construction sites on Nantucket Island are shut down. The island’s brand-new hospital has fourteen available beds, and islanders are “waiting for the shoe to drop.”

Monica Senatore shares that her husband, Peter Senatore passed away in November 2019.

Send your news to— Debbie Koslow Stern 198 Bluebird Drive, Colchester, VT 05446 debbie2907@gmail.com

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After a career in public and private accounting, Sally Hazen Britton is mostly retired. On a recent bike trip to Tucson, she met fellow bikers and alums Pat Smerczynski ’14 and Liz Wolfe ’11. See her photo at go.uvm.edu/alumpics. Gerard Bourcier is doing well despite “The Virus.” His younger son, Aaron, is starting to think about his wedding with his fiancé in South Africa. His older son, Adam, is working and having a good time. His wife, Cammy, continues tutoring, remotely, and Gerard is waiting for show biz to get back on its feet. He writes, “Stay at home; stay safe.” Your class secretary Deborah Layne Mesce shares, Sheila Mullen O'Brien and her husband, Tom (St. Michael's 1972), have been happily retired from their legal careers, Sheila as a capital mitigator and Tom as a prosecutor and private attorney. They live in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and are intrepid travelers. This year they took their second trip to Africa, spending a month on safari in Kenya and Tanzania during the wildebeest migration. “We ran out of superlatives after the third day! It truly is one of the wonders of the world.” Sheila volunteers with Moore County's Community Advisory Committee on nursing home conditions and sings barbershop with a women's chorus. She also has a large organic vegetable garden. She and Tom enjoy the company of their son and his two daughters as much as possible.

Send your news to— Deborah Layne Mesce 2227 Observatory Place NW

Washington, DC 20007 dmesce@icloud.com

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Send your news to— Emily Schnaper Manders 104 Walnut Street Framingham, MA 01702 esmanders@gmail.com

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Heather Logan retired from education in Utah but remains active in the Utah Education Association. She accepted the position of director of Cundy's Harbor Library in Harpswell, Maine. Heather lives in Maine and travels back and forth to the Southwest. Joseph Clement heads Wisler Pearlstine, LLP’s Cybersecurity, and Data Privacy practice. He was recently interviewed on the growing threats to area businesses on Legal Talk with Stacy Clark.

Send your news to— Dina Dwyer Child Unit 102, 26261 Devonshire Court Bonita Springs, Fl 34134 dinachild@aol.com

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Chuck Tauck writes, “You can take the boys out of the mountains, but you can’t take the mountains out of the boys.” Tim Donahue ’77, Mark Auriema, Tim Fenton, Chuck Tauck, Chris Aumock ’75, Jon Parker ’77, and Stew Yaguda ’77 converged in the Smoky Mountains from all across the coun-

try. See the photo in online class notes. Missing from photo are Bruce Peel ’75 G’80, Ted Pickering ’77, Steve Bradley, Jan Carlee, and Gary Faigen—they got lost on the trail. Richie Sobel and Greg Vautour ’75 skied at Mammoth Mountain in March. They and Michael Fitzmaurice ’75 have been reuniting at Mammoth every year since 1983.

Send your news to— Pete Beekman 2 Elm Street, Canton, NY 13617 pbeekman19@gmail.com

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Bob Wilkenfeld ’76 and Judy Freeman Wilkenfeld have retired and are enjoying every minute of it. They write, “Please stay healthy, everyone! We cannot wait for UVM Rescue's 50th Reunion!”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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Stan Przybylinski was happy to find that Chris Angell ’79, another Chittenden One resident in 1974-75, was living nearby. They've had a great time catching up over a few lunches and a dinner out with his family.

Gretchen Gyr Cantor wrote in from the island of Grenada, which was under a partial state of emergency. She and her husband spend winters in the Caribbean, sailing their Outbound 46. They made it

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They hoped to leave their boat in Grenada and fly home. As the pandemic hit, their plans had to shift several times. Finally, there was a repatriation flight from Grenada on April 6th to San Juan. They were then fortunate to get a nonstop flight to Baltimore.

Gretchen reports, “There were fewer than sixteen people on a 737-800, including crew.” In her third year of living in Colombia, South America, Tedi Conway Dickinson is “Loving it.” She went for a six- to twelve-month “senior gap year” and remained. Tedi retired early and bought a “great home” at 7000-feet in El Retiro, Antioquia, a small pueblo about an hour from Medellin. She loves hosting visitors.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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David Ward passed away in February 2020. Mike Landman is in regular contact with Kent Karns ’80, Teddy Quigley, and Rick Solie. He continues his running and racing activities as a veteran age-group athlete. Every year, Mike and his wife spend a long August weekend in Burlington, reliving his younger UVM days. From 2005-19, Alison Granucci owned Blue Flower Arts, a literary speakers agency, representing some of the top poets and writers in the country. A highlight for her was attending President Obama's second inauguration with her client, who read his poem on that day. Newly retired, she is returning to her UVM roots—pursuing volunteer work in conservation advocacy and reactivating her skills as a naturalist. Creatively, she's busy with woodland gardening, macro flower photography, and of course, she still dances! Alison lives in the Hudson Valley and is filled with gratitude for her UVM friendships that have stood the test of time: Iva Kravitz, Chelsea Harriman, Leah Krause Bourne ’80, and Lisa Hennessy Italiano ’80 G’85.

Send your news to— Beth Gamache bethgamache@burlingtontelecom.net

READ

D1 soccer scholarship. John celebrated the big sixty in March. The first three calls he got were two former baseball teammates, Dan Gasparino and Bill Currier ’84. He also heard from Jack Leggett G’81 their coach. John writes, “We had in common a great experience as baseball players for the school. We were what being a Vermont varsity athlete was all about. Three out of four of us were Vermonters, and we all went on to successful careers. Unfortunately, in 2009 with no warning, the program, along with Varsity Softball, was canceled. Vermonters no longer have a chance to play D1 baseball/softball. It’s time to bring varsity baseball and softball back to UVM now! If you agree, email me at jbartlett616@gmail. com. Be well, be safe, and be strong.” Christopher Rogers contines to work in his field of study and has a new position working for Select Horticulture in Lancaster, Massachusetts. He recently became the president of his local Model A Ford Club. Lauren-Glenn Davitian sees a lot of interest in CCTV's thirty-five-year-old Bernie Sanders archives, part of their 40,000-program collection of life in and around Burlington since 1984. Katie Kilchenstein Dunn, Suzy Forelli Aubrey, and Kathy Sexton Hines rode in the Pan Mass Challenge bike ride in honor of their dear friend and UVMer, Mary Welling Hunnewell who lost her life to cancer. The team, sMiles for Mary raised more than $30,000 to benefit Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

Send your news to— John Peter Scambos pteron@verizon.net

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Judy Tomasik Cram spent two years as a learning resource teacher at an American school in Casablanca, Morocco. She is back in North Carolina and employed as a house manager at the new Tanger Center for the Performing Arts in Greensboro. Judy is trying to reach all music majors from the class; if she has not already contacted you, please email her at judy.mclaughlin@rocketmail.com.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

With the heaviest of hearts, Robin Edelstein shares that Marc DeNuccio passed away last July. She writes, “A light has gone out in our lives, but we hope he is now at peace. My love goes out to his family. I miss you every day, Marc.” Lisa Greenwood Crozier’s oldest daughter, Caryn Alexis, graduated in December with a Doctorate of Musical Arts. She teaches at West Virginia University for her former voice professor and also teaches voice at Park Point University in Pittsburgh. She was planning to get married in May, but Covid-19 has put a damper on that. Lisa’s youngest, a veterinarian, practices in a nearby town. Her practice is down to emergency surgeries only. Lisa’s studio is closed-on-hiatus but offers private online classes and free classes to clients via Zoom and Facebook Live. She shares, “We are keeping busy weather permitting, walking, yard work, playing with our dogs, reading, and weekly grocery shopping. I am finding out what retirement may look like for me.”

Send your news to— Lisa Greenwood Crozier lcrozier@triad.rr.com

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During the Covid-19 challenge, John Bartlett and his wife, Cynthia, are blessed to have their three sons home in Southern California. Cameron is back from AUP grad school in Paris, and Jackson from Leeds Business School at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Dylan, a senior in high school, is home prepping for his first year at Santa Clara University, where he has a

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Send your news to— Abby Goldberg Kelley kelleyabbyvt@gmail.com Kelly McDonald Jasna-vt@hotmail.com Shelley Carpenter Spillane scspillane@aol.com

CLASS NOTES ONLINE

alumni.uvm.edu/notes

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Mitchell Stone is the thirty-third president of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Rich Gold and Maria Gold welcomed their first grandchild, Maya Paul Rosner, in May 2019. Rich shares, “Maya’s now a hair over nine-months-old and is about ready to follow her mom and granddad into public policy.”

Send your news to— Barbara Roth roth_barb@yahoo.com

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Send your news to— Lawrence Gorkun vtlfg@msn.com

Your Class Secretary, Sarah Reynolds writes, “Hi everyone! I hope you are all okay, healthy and have adjusted to this new, strange life we are living. It has been great to see so many of you on Facebook, Instagram, and Zoom chats. I have loved connecting more frequently with several Groovy UV pals —definitely been a perk of being stuck at home!

Please let me know how you are, and I can add to our Class Notes for the next edition.”

Send your news to— Sarah Reynolds sarahreynolds10708@gmail.com

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Andrew Nickerson still works in tech. His daughter Louisa just graduated from Cal Poly, SLO, and is headed to Cal for grad school. His son Derek is an electrical engineering freshman at UC, Santa Cruz. Jennifer Charlston relocated to South Florida and is loving it. She works for Geico in Boca Raton. Her oldest is finishing college in New York City and her middle daughter, Lexie, is a sophomore at Bucknell. Her youngest, Olivia, is in ninth grade at The Millbrook school. She sends wishes of good health to all of the UVM community. Michael Dwyer and Margaret “Penny” Dwyer ’87 are proud to announce that their daughter, Madeline, will be attending UVM as part of the class of 2024!

Send your news to— Cathy Selinka Levison crlevison@comcast.net

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Sean Lally is a full-time assistant district attorney in Columbia County, New York.

Send your news to— Maureen Kelly Gonsalves moe.dave@verizon.net

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Paul Weiss and wife are very grateful to share that their oldest son, Clay, is going to attend UVM as a freshman in the incoming 2024 class. Clay is a hard-working student-athlete and will be playing lacrosse for Coach Feifs and the Catamounts! Ann Weisflog Baker enjoyed several trips back to Burlington over the last year as she helped her son, Will Baker ’23, get settled on campus. She’s jealous he was on Redstone as a freshman.

Send your news to— Tessa Donohoe Fontaine tessafontaine@gmail.com

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Send news to— Karen Heller Lightman khlightman@gmail.com

After more than twenty years as a freelance book editor for popular fiction titles, Susannah Noel has cofounded Editorial Arts Academy, a school for aspiring freelance book editors. In addition to online teaching and designing courses, Susannah continues her freelance writing and editing career. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband and two children.

Send your news to— Lisa Kanter jslbk@mac.com

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Since 2015, Julie Croman Fagan has taught as a clinical assistant professor in nursing at Plymouth State University. She is completing her EdD. Julie had an article published in the July 2019 Journal of Nursing Education on her research on nursing student persistence. She recently connected with Maundey (Joslin) Abrahamson and would love to hear from other classmates in the Vermont/New Hampshire area.

Send your news to— Gretchen Haffermehl Brainard gretchenbrainard@gmail.com

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Send your news to— Cynthia Bohlin Abbott cyndiabbott@hotmail.com Send your news to— Valeri Susan Pappas vpappas@davisandceriani.com

Grey Lee works with the International Living Future Institute to expand the adoption of the Living Building Challenge and its other regenerative economy programs. He teaches a course on Green Buildings and Urban Resilience at Harvard Extension and sees a lot of UVMers in the Boston area. Grey skied in Vermont with Mike Crowley ’99, Darien Crimmin ’02, and Billy Craig ’02 this winter.

Send your news to— Jill Cohen Gent

jcgent@roadrunner.com Michelle Richards Peters mpeters@eagleeyes.biz

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Send your news to— Elizabeth Carstensen Genung leegenung@me.com Send news to— Ben Stockman bestockman@gmail.com

Nicole Bogdanowicz Marschilok was appointed to the position of associate in instructional services (science) by the New York State Education Department.

Send news to— Sarah Pitlak Tiber spitlak@hotmail.com

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Jenn Bronson Zimmerman lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, snowboard photographer, Tim Zimmerman, and their four-year-old daughter, Liesl. Jenn is the accounting manager for Fremont Brewing Company. She shares, “We love the Pacific Northwest. We spend our free time snowboarding, mountain biking, and camping whenever possible. We love having so many sports teams here to watch, although nothing will ever replace my love for New England teams.” Your class

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Josh “Bones” Murphy ’94 Sitting next to Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard during lunch at a 2016 1% for the Planet event in Montana, Josh “Bones” Murphy asked the legendary business leader where the company would focus its next film. Recalling Chouinard’s response—“It’s a film about the arrogance of man”—Murphy terms the statement “classic Yvon.” Digging deeper, he learned the intent was to explore man’s re-engineering of natural processes with fish farms, salmonid hatcheries, and river stocking. In short, the “unwilding” of salmon.

Murphy’s own roots as a filmmaker began with extreme telemark ski films. It’s how he first connected with Chouinard, a dedicated tele skier himself. Today, Murphy balances commercial work with his Liars & Thieves production company, based in northern California, with activist documentary films. Those film chops, combined with UVM and Humboldt State University degrees in natural resources and fisheries biology, landed him the director’s job on Artifishal.

Released in 2019, the film has shown widely on the festival circuit, earning Best Environment & Natural History documentary at the Banff Film Festival. Murphy is particularly proud that Artifishal has also reached audiences and helped motivate change in less-expected venues, such as premiering at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. Recalling someone walking up to him after a screening and saying, “That was brutal; but thank you,” Murphy adds, “That’s the win for me.”

Read more: go.uvm.edu/artifishal

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secretary Erin Wilson spent time in February in Park City, Utah, with Carol Talisse, Erica MacConnell Vessey ’01 G’06, and Sarah Laidlaw Wilde celebrating Carol’s fortieth birthday. She writes, “Always so great to be back together!” Erin still lives on Nantucket, works in real estate, and still has her brand A Salty Soul. She hopes we are all out and about again for summer!

Send your news to— Erin Wilson ewilson41@gmail.com

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Anthony Egizi sends a hello to everyone. He’s temporarily quarantined and working from home due to Covid-19: “Hopefully, when you all read this, it will be water under the bridge. Stay healthy.” On January 20, David Brand welcomed Claire Elizabeth Brand into the world!

Send your news to— Jennifer Khouri Godin jenniferkhouri@yahoo.com

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Jon Kantor graduated from the Partnership for Public Service’s Excellence in Government Fellow Program. Then, just in time for the Covid-19 pandemic, he transitioned to a position in Emergency Management. He’s staying busy on an Incident Management Team working operations and interagency engagement through this crisis. Clayton Trutor ’03 G’06 is the author of a forthcoming book titled Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta and Atlanta Remade Professional Sports. He is currently a history instructor at Norwich University. Clayton would love to hear from you on Twitter: @ClaytonTrutor. After owning her own business for five years, Leora Barry is now the president and founding member of The Achieve Collective, a nonprofit providing equine education, clinical services, and recreational programs.

She still visits with college roommates and returns to Vermont every chance she gets. Leora and her three roommates had to say goodbye to their college cat this year. “RIP Quilla, you were the best!”

Bradley Lawrence and his wife, Erica, welcomed their daughter Parker Lawrence on November 13, 2019. Jennifer Dazell Pinkowski is divorced but still alive. She’s past health issues and looking forward to a new beginning. Jennifer writes, “I miss everyone that I got to know in Burlington!”

Send your news to— Korinne Moore Berenson korinne.d.moore@gmail.com

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Send your news to— Kelly Kisiday kelly.kisiday@gmail.com

Mike Gabel and his wife, Katie, welcomed their son Owen to the family. Owen joins William, who is three.

They live in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where Mike runs True Lacrosse, a national travel lacrosse company.

Send your news to— Kristin Dobbs Schulman

kristin.schulman@gmail.com

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Rebecca Snow graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s in ecological agriculture. After graduation, she traveled, farmed around the country then re-settled in southern Vermont with her former partner and their two amazing children. Rebecca graduated with her RN in May 2020 from Vermont Tech. She hopes to pursue her master’s or doctorate in nursing and work as a family nurse practitioner. She is delighted to be back in Vermont, serving her community, supporting their health, and promoting wellness with her patients. Emily Taradash and her husband, Joseph Zabinski, moved to Woonsocket, Rhode Island to be closer to their places of work. She shares, “As it turns out, we'll be working from home for quite some time, but are enjoying settling in!” Kellie Finch is one of 28 Nurses at Yale New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, to receive a Nightingale Award for Excellence in Nursing for 2019. This award program was developed by the VNA South Central to celebrate outstanding nurses. A nurse can only be nominated once in a lifetime. She was individually recognized and invited on stage to receive a certificate of recognition, a Nightingale Insignia Lapel pin, and a commemorative gift. Kellie has been a Pediatric R.N. with Yale since she graduated from UVM. Send your news to— Katherine Murphy kateandbri@gmail.com

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Chad Dorman and the team he leads at Leonard Andrew Consulting in Branford, Connecticut, devised a fantastic way to say “Thank You” to all the health professionals on the front lines. They're offering free tutoring and remote learning guidance for the children of healthcare workers as part of their Helping Heroes at Home initiative. Chad hopes that this aid can help lessen some stress and worry about what's going on at home. He shares that many families from various states have reached out, and they're proud to help them with tutoring, teaching, and academic support. “It's the least we can do to help the cause, and we hope to assist many more!” Email info@leonardandrew.com for details, to register, and to learn how they can help your daughter or son at this time. Jesse Mallon Macomber and Douglas Clifford Cochran IV are happy to announce their engagement. Jesse is the daughter of Mary Mallon ’74. She works in clinical research in the field of immunology. Doug is a high school teacher and small business owner.

Their October 2020 wedding will be in Lake Placid, New York. Ethan Joseph has been a winegrower at Shelburne Vineyard since 2008 and recently became a managing partner. Ethan, Josh Stecker ’12, and CJ Buzzy ’15, manage twenty acres of grapes and release wine under the Shelburne Vineyard, Capsize, and Iapetus labels. Covid-19 has had a significant impact on their operations. Fortunately, agriculture and wine are deemed essential during the pandemic, so farming and limited retail continues. Despite that, with the closure of SUMMER 2020 |

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| CLASS NOTES the tasting room, the company has had to lay off all part-time employees and the full-time team has taken a 50 percent reduction in hours. There's a pivot to focus solely on online sales. As a manager of a steadily growing business for the past twelve years, Ethan has found it difficult and saddening to be talking to staff for the first time about downsizing, unemployment, and the potential long-lasting impacts Covid-19 may have. He believes Shelburne Vineyard, along with other local businesses, will come through it stronger and with a new set of strategies moving forward. Ethan writes, “We are grateful for all of those who continued to support us during these difficult times and look forward to being part of your social gatherings when this is over.” On a happier note, he is expecting a June baby with his wife, Jessica DeBiasio. After twelve years, Josh Malczyk left his position as brand director of LINE Skis and Full Tilt Boots and joined industry-leading partners and professional athletes to found a new snowboard and ski brand. Season Equipment is set to launch this fall. Andrew Beaupre is a research station archeologist at the Arkansas Archeological Survey. His position comes with an appointment as a research assistant professor at the University of Arkansas.

Ashley Hogan Cardarelli was included in the Class of 2020 in Medical, Marketing and Media magazine’s, 40 under 40. Kristopher Daudelin is a licensed financial advisor with Edward Jones based in South Burlington, Vermont. He can be reached at kris.daudelin@edwardjones.com Send your news to— Elizabeth Bitterman bittermane@jgua.com

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Brittany Wayne and her husband, Adam Goodman, welcomed their first child, Max Wayne Goodman, on January 24, 2020.

Send your news to— Elizabeth Bearese ebearese@gmail.com Emma Grady gradyemma@gmail.com

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David Volain ’09 G’14 shares that Caitlin Regan and her husband, Matt Doukas, welcomed a daughter, Elizabeth Ellie Grace, on Leap Day, February 29, 2020. They are doing well and reside in Medway, Massachusetts. Annie Strout and Chris Ackerman tied the knot on July 5, 2019, at the Mountain Top Inn & Resort in Chittenden, Vermont, with family and friends in attendance.

Send your news to— David Volain david.volain@gmail.com

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Having spent the last eight years in Boston, Maxwell Ukegbu is excited to continue on “this crazy journey called life.” The Covid-19 forced him to postpone his wedding on May 24th, because the safety of everyone comes first, he notes. Maxwell made lifelong

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friends at UVM and three of them will be groomsmen. Darius Ellies moved from Boston to New York. He enjoys analytics, writing, and the resurgence of Keanu Reeves movies. He left school not knowing what he wanted to do, and finds himself in the human resources field, creating a career of his passions. This year, Chrissaida Crawford became a nurse. She also graduated with her master’s in education, and her son is now ten-years-old. Isabel Burnham and her husband, Sebastian, are excited to announce the birth of their first son, Zephyr Strong Candelaria, on March 9, 2020. Will Sedlack married Maye Emlein in Falmouth, Maine, in August 2019. In attendance were Anne Sedlack ’13, Kensington Moore ’08, Aaron Bernstein, David Boyd, Elizabeth Crawford, Katy Jones, Tyler Cohen, Rachel Wood Cohen, Catherine Van Straten ’11, Allison Goldsmith ’10 G’16, and Sophie Allen.

Send your news to— Daron Raleigh raleighdaron@gmail.com

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On Pi Day, March 14, Ashleigh Allaire ’12 was married to Harrison Goldberg. It was an outdoor ceremony on a beautiful day in the Green Mountain state. Many UVM alum were in attendance! Austin Haytko was married on February 29 to Dr. Lee. Send your news to— Troy McNamara Troy.mcnamara4@gmail.com

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Travis Strickland and Kelly Movsesian Strickland celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary on May 5. They reside in Barrington, Rhode Island, with their fouryear-old, two-year-old, and one-year-old. Spencer Lovejoy and Sara Jacobson Lovejoy were married earlier this year. They successfully gathered a number of fellow Catamounts across a number of different classes for a great photo that is posted in the online class notes. The following are pictured in the photo: Jordan Lovejoy ’14, Spencer Lovejoy, Sara Jacobson Lovejoy, Kelsey Crowley, Judy Robare Manchester ’80, Laurel Ganem Duff, Alli Morse Schaft, Evan Orloff, Rem Kielman ’11, Michele Karode, Lauren Weber Winther, Soucie Upton Rollins ’81, Liza Rollins Barker ’13, Paige Schlenker Bradford ’10, Ryan Bradford ’ 09 G’10, Will Elwell ’11, Doug Manchester ’80, Alger Rollins ’80, Monty Lovejoy ’80, Alex Litwin, Gwen Carpenter, Luke Neill ’11 MD’16, Emma Cook, and Andy Feltus ’11.

Send your news to— Patrick Dowd patrickdowd2012@gmail.com

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Erin Thomson and David Aliquo ’11 are engaged to be married in October 2021.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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Sarah Lyon is currently a medical student at TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine. She is seeing firsthand that hospitals are in desperate need of blood products due to the high number of cancellations from Covid-19. To help meet the need, Sarah and a fellow medical student started a Virtual Blood Drive initiative to encourage people across the country to donate.

Send your news to— Grace Buckles Eaton glbuckles@gmail.com

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Estee Dilli swam on the varsity swim team and was a neuroscience major at UVM. Since 2016, she’s worked at Pfizer Inc. in an assay development group in their Vaccine Research department. Although she lives in the epicenter of the US outbreak, New York, her work is considered essential, and she goes in every day. Pfizer is partnering with a smaller biotech company that is currently working on a vaccine to prevent Covid-19. Estee shares, “Working in the group I do, it will just be a matter of time until these clinical samples reach my site and my lab and I will be involved in the actual development of this vaccine.

At this point, the industry is not looking to make a profit, and it’s not about developing a product, it’s about facing this global crisis.” In 2012, sophomore Torey Hill met junior Jake Ryan ’14, both UVM students. Fast forward to September of 2019, they got engaged while bouldering at Smuggler’s Notch.

Torey writes, “Thanks for introducing us, UVM!” After five years in California, Alissa Boochever moved back to Vermont in May to work full-time for the same farm she interned at as an eco-ag student. Katherine Boucher’s project Women in the Wilderness, is an adventure documentary to help save the equine spirit of the American West. She and two other women will film their jouney as they ride on a forty-day journey in Wyoming and Colorado to educate others about the wild horse issue, while filming the journey. To learn more and/or support their journey: womeninthewildernessfilm. com. Matthew Goguen G’14 joined Geosyntec Consultants as an environmental historian. He conducts historical research at places like the Library of Congress and National Archives in support of environmental litigation cases involving contamination and toxic tort from the firm’s Columbia, Maryland, branch. Alisha Quirion Clark’s work in the medical ICU during the Covid-19 pandemic is the definition of the “front lines.” Alisha graduated from the UVM nursing program, and works at UVMMC in the medical ICU. Her unit has transformed into the Covid-19 critical care unit. Alisha writes, “Though this is turning into frightening, unknown times, I have realized that our team has come together and become even closer. We all have one another’s backs, and are willing to help with and problem-solve through any scenario. I am proud to work within a team of such compassionate, intelligent individuals, and together we will make it through!” Hannah Rosen is an environmental, health and safety engineer at Tokyo Electron, Ltd. in Albany, New York.

Send your news to—

UVM Alumni Association alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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After working at an education nonprofit and being published in two books and several academic journals, Benjamin Kennedy ’16 G’18 will pursue his PhD in the education program Transforming Education in a Diverse Society at the University of California, San Diego. Once his partner, Becca, graduates with an MPH from Johns Hopkins University in May, they’ll pack up their three very spoiled cats and their special-needs dog and head west. Benjamin misses Vermont dearly and attributes much of his personal and professional success to CESS. Emily Jo Dickinson earned her master’s degree in public health policy from UVM. She moved to Denver and lives in the quiet suburb of Cherry Creek.

Emily works in clinical research at the Children’s Hospital of Colorado in Aurora.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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Alex St. John proposed to Halle Apelgren on the Burlington waterfront on February 15, 2020. The couple started dating freshman year at UVM. They are excited to move into their new house in Dedham, Massachusetts. Cheyenne Mobbs launched his own business, Dogital Financial Solutions. He serves young adults and business owners with bookkeeping and financial coaching that takes the stress out of money and inspires financial confidence. He believes in empowering people to make financial stability their first step in achieving their goals and dreams. Feel free to reach out if you would like to work with him, dogitalfinancialsolutions.com. Charlotte Fisher moved to the West Coast and works as a nutritional health coach for a national grocery chain. She’s been featured in several articles and television segments and enjoys the active lifestyle in Oregon. Darla Quijada starts graduate school at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in their cellular and molecular medicine program. She recently completed a post-baccalaureate PREP program at Yale. Her significant other, Connor Devoe, starts medical school at the University of New England after completing his master's degree at Boston University. Cheers to higher education and working hard!

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

people in a way that is both sustainable and community-based.” During the first three months of service, she will live with a host family in Myanmar to become fully immersed in the country’s language and culture. After acquiring the necessary skills, Katherine will be sworn into service and assigned to a community in Myanmar, where she will live and work for two years with the local people. Maeia Reagle moved to Seattle and is looking for alumni who want to meet up and ski.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

“Cheers, class of 2020 To the place we called home, To the people we met, And to the priceless memories we take with us, Our time here isn’t finished.

UVM will always be our home.

See you soon!”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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Student Alumni Association President Hannah Rameaka, and Vice President Max Greenberg share:

Take a virtual tour today.

360°

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Emily Bean is a UVM DPT student and loves every second of it! Alexandra Shaffer will attend the University of Illinois as a member of their veterinary school’s Class of 2024. Blake Thelander works as a legislative assistant for a Member of Congress.

Katherine Schaeberle has been accepted into the Peace Corps and will depart for Myanmar in January 2020. She will serve as a secondary education English teacher volunteer. Katherine shares, “I want to gain experience for the future, and help

See the elegance and warmth of the UVM Alumni House firsthand. uvmalumnihouse.com/virtualtour SUMMER 2020 |

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Howard E. Page Priscilla Savage Watt H. Gordon Page MD’45 Ruth Cooley Godfrey Robert Paul Tarshis Ruth White Lyon Allan Gray Attwater Betty DuBois Lofgren Lois Eimer Ryan G’49 Marion Lamson Copenhaver Cynthia Wriston Massey H. Brown Baldwin Janet Killary Bennett William A. Eddy MD’52 Warren James Field Eugene F. Morrissey Felix John Gurdak George Harry Lines Jonathan Ariel Pease Warren James Perkins Albert A. Romano MD’55 Charles Julian Wilcox William Wyman Worthen Robert Charles Barrows Edward A. Bayer Wendell Charles Cook John Murray Elliot Sven G. Johnson Elvy Hubbard Kidder Raymond A. Dana Clifford John Edgerton Ona Rufus Lyman Suzanne Richardson-Daniels John M. Sargent Millicent Lawrence Schmitt Joyce Olive Stickney Mary Anderson Corbin Richard A. Johnson G’59 William F. Miles Betty Ann Reynolds Donna Ellis Rigby Richard Charles Wolff Henry John Holzhauer, Jr. James Henry Jenney Robert Dallas Leister G’60 F. Peter Rose Howard H. Braithwaite Willard H. Breen Stanley Carleton Day Edward Okun John Ronald Williams Donald Skinner Bicknell MD’61 Mary Ann Wondolowski Lakin Theodore R. Chamberlin Emily Norris Combs John J. Duffy, Jr. G’58

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Walter J. Shinn Patricia Fee Thompson Harold R. Bell David K. Kanter Brigitta Brand Mahanna George P. Roberts Phyllis Washburn Austin George J. Baxter Mazzini Bueno MD’65 James David Loveland Joanne Jones Oechsner David H. Reissig Paul R. Salvage Richard A. Austin Susan Adams Breen Sharon Garrity Larkin G’73 William C. Richwagen William Brice Adams G’67 Marlene Ann Aldo-Benson MD’65 Jared M. Emery Alfred B. Johnson Gail Carmichael Kent Walter A. Kipp, III Morris E. Leno David L. Limric Brenda Burgess MacLean John Henry Mills Michael C. Pearo Miriam Koblenz Scott Lawrence A. Sherwin Warren F. Ellis Brenda Woodard Smith Mark Kingston Goldstein, PhD Barry J. Schieb Jon Y. Wilkinson Nancy Dixon Eckhart David Carroll French G’65 Marion Bordas Simon Allen W. Tracy Stuart Richmond Eldred Deborah Cole Worthley G’93 Marvin J. Bellovin Janet Ruth Parsons George H. Bloom G’68 Thomas H. Jacobs Peter W. Freeman Arlan W. Elwood Francis Stanley Cecot Ruth Schappert Foehring Gary Paul Gabso Candice Gerlack Guilmette Alan Walter Curler Peter Farrell Senatore Maxine Clapper Smith James Scott Bacon Alice Wendell Daniels G’73

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Robert Standish Hamilton, Jr. Scott Charles Hoyt Diane Hutchins Meyer G’73 Marjorie Rosenthal Silver Jeffrey Craig Edwards Edith Titus Harman G’74 Karen Franco Juknis James Richard Rundell, Jr. Gary Edward Senical Susan Ainsworth-Daniels Jisho Judith Leslie Fancher Pamela Anne Harman Ann Wilm Wood N. Kimber Harvey Susan Audrey MacKin Ruth Russell Painter Kathie Schmidt Weibust G’77 David Brayton Kittredge, Jr. James Thomas Lemaire G’80 Mark Walter Marusa Ida Schaper McNamara John Michael Prushko David Draycott Barash Cynthia Schlafman Brudnick Marylynn Gentry Jeffrey Thomas Payne David Corning Ward Randall Winslow Hackett, Jr. George Robert Woods Scott Anthony Campitelli Patricia Morrison Welsh Marilyn Mercia Benis Andrew J. Letourneau Marc A. DeNuccio Andrea Jackman Halnon G’83 Jane Benedict Flader Ellen Lynne Markel Wayne Edgar Hrydziusko Michael Charles Pomeroy James P. Bradley Patricia Case Moynihan G’91 Michael DuWayne Zank Bruce Carlton Gordon Michael Bennett Carson Garret Schenck, Jr. Marian R. Santos G’72, ‘95 Elaine Anne Brousseau Charlie H. Demarest Michael John Walsh Molly Elisabeth Hubbard Todd J. Cramer David S. Tapper

| UVM COMMUNITY JIM CROSS, Vermont men’s hockey coach from 1965-1984, died on May 2 from complications related to Covid-19. Widely recognized as the architect of UVM men’s hockey, Cross guided the Catamounts to three ECAC Division II championships and oversaw the program’s successful transition to Division I in 1974. “Jim Cross’s contributions to the university and our athletic program were immense,” said Director of Athletics Jeff Schulman ’89. “Jim took over a fledgling UVM hockey program and turned it into a national power that was defined by class, integrity and, competitive excellence. In doing so, he and his teams ignited a passion for UVM hockey on campus and in the community, that remains at the core of our program to this day. Jim was revered by his players and colleagues and will always be remembered among UVM’s greatest and most impactful coaches.”

MARY ANNE GUCCIARDI, affectionately known as “Mama Gooch,” passed away on March 29 at her home in South Burlington. Over the last fifty years, Mama Gooch was the Catamounts’ biggest supporter. Her presence at thousands of games, kindness to student-athletes, and passion for everything UVM was a part of a remarkable legacy. She served on the boards of numerous varsity sports booster groups and oversaw countless charity events for Athletics. Her formidable cooking skills came into play as Mama Gooch led the way on spaghetti dinners that raised more than $50,000 to develop a scholarship in memory of Kevin Roberson, a former men’s basketball student-athlete, who passed away in a car accident in 1993.

BERNIE JUSKIEWICZ, former legislator from Cambridge, Vermont, and past member of the UVM Board of Trustees, passed away on April 8 from complications arising from the coronavirus. As a trustee and as a state leader, Juskiewicz was an energetic and committed advocate for the university and its land grant mission. He was also a great fan of Catamount sports, especially men’s basketball.

JOAN L. KALKIN, stalwart UVM supporter for decades, passed away on May 16. Joan and her husband, Eugene Kalkin ’50, volunteered on behalf of the university for more than three decades, serving in a number of leadership capacities. In addition to her service on the Fleming Museum Board of Advisors since 2003, Joan Kalkin was a member of the UVM Board of Trustees, the UVM Alumni Association’s Regional Board of Greater New York City, several UVM Campaign committees, and the UVM Foundation’s Leadership Council. Joan and Eugene Kalkin received Honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from UVM in 1998 in recognition of their distinguished service and philanthropic leadership and were subsequently recognized by the UVM Foundation in 2012 with the Lifetime Philanthropy Award.

WILLIAM LIPKE, professor emeritus of art history and a past director of the Fleming Museum, passed away on February 29. After early experience teaching eighth-grade English, followed by graduate studies, then faculty posts at Cornell University and Reed College, Lipke joined the UVM community in 1970. He was an energetic lecturer, a favorite for generations of students, known for drawing inspiring connections between the past and present. His scholarly publications and teaching focused on British, American, and Canadian art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He held a special interest in New England, especially Vermont, art and architecture. Professor Lipke retired from full-time teaching as a tenured professor of art history in 2001, teaching part-time for another ten years with a special interest in first-year seminars and advising students.

VQ

EDITOR Thomas Weaver ART DIRECTOR Elise Whittemore CLASS NOTES EDITOR Kathy Erickson ’84 CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Halleh Akbarnia MD’98, Joshua Brown, Kaitlin Catania, Kevin Coburn, Christina Davenport, Susan Davidson, Andrea Estey, Janet Franz, Nich Hall, Rachel Leslie, Lesléa Newman ’77, Megan O’Brien ’01 G’08 ’17, Amy Sutherland, Jeffrey Wakefield, Richard Watts PHOTOGRAPHY Joshua Brown, Patricia Bubis ’21, Taran Catania, Shujie Chen ’21, Andy Duback ’03, Alex Edelman ’13, Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist ’09, Brian Jenkins, Ben Moon, Sally McCay, Faith Ninivaggi, Glenn Russell, Taslim Sidi Urnek, Brett Wilhelm, Zehui Wu ’21 CORRESPONDENCE Editor, Vermont Quarterly 617 Main Street Burlington, VT 05405 (802) 656-2005, tweaver@uvm.edu ADDRESS CHANGES UVM Foundation 411 Main Street Burlington, VT 05401 (802) 656-9662, alumni@uvm.edu CLASS NOTES alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes VERMONT QUARTERLY Produced by UVM Creative Communications Services Publishes March 1, July 1, November 1 PRINTED IN VERMONT Issue No. 87, July 2020 VERMONT QUARTERLY ONLINE uvm.edu/vq

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| EXTRA CREDIT

“ The teachings of this university are plain.

The hopes of its founders are clear. They are the source of all character and character is the source of revelation.

Go forward in the line of duty, small or great, under discipline, conscious that from doing comes the power to do more, firm in the faith of the fathers, seeing the enlightenment of education, surpassing the hopes of the past, ensuring liberty by accepting responsibility, that this whole nation, made like-minded with Washington and Lincoln, may continue to show forth to the world a revelation of ‘the way, the truth, and the light.’” vermont native and future president calvin coolidge , then governor of Massachusetts, speaking to 125 UVM graduates, faculty, and guests assembled for Commencement 1920 in the wake of World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic.

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this issue is dedicated to our University of Vermont alumni on the pandemic front lines as healthcare workers and first responders and scientists in search of solutions, to the members of our UVM family who lost their lives to the virus, and— with faith in the brighter days ahead— to the mutual resilience of our new students, Class of 2024, and new alumni, Class of 2020.

NON-PROFIT ORG US POSTAGE PAID BURLINGTON VT 05401

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PERMIT NO. 143

617 Main Street Burlington VT 05405

Though the in-person commencement ceremony for the Class of 2020 is still in the future, grads and their families celebrated the conferral of degrees on May 17 via the university’s online celebration and in their own individual ways. Left to right, top to bottom: Sam Schneider @sam_haley ; Jessica Cartier @jlcartier3; Xavier Campaz @xaviercampaz; Michael Saliba @ensaliba; Alexandra Hollander @farte.arte; Edward Taylor @ lqtaylor1; Eloho (EJ) Obaro-Best @ejay_best; Josh Speidel @lisa.speidel; Alyson Sarraga @alysons_wonderland