People
After putting on a children’s theater performance during his senior year, Jeff Semmerling ’81 became fascinated with mask-making. He spent years honing his skills in the mask, and today he’s one of the country’s best-known mask makers.
For nearly five decades, fog artist Fujiko Nakaya ’57 has presented her ethereal, shape-shifting installations of pure water vapor in an effort to connect humans to nature.
Hannah Chung ’12 hopes to make the treatment of childhood cancer a little more bearable. The co-founder of Sproutel, Chung works alongside CEO and co-founder Aaron Horowitz ’12 to design products that make a meaningful health impact on the lives of patients.
Jennifer Croft’s 2017 translation of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s book Flights, originally published in 2007, received the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Awards’ inaugural honor for translated literature last year. Croft ’13 PhD, who studied comparative literature at Northwestern, says that she felt a deep kinship to Tokarczuk and the novel’s themes and began the work of translating after meeting Tokarczuk in Krakow.
As Garry Cooper ’14 PhD prepared to throw out used equipment at a Feinberg School of Medicine lab in 2015, an idea hit him: Lightly used, expensive research equipment could be reused rather than trashed. “I kept seeing reports about the funding problems in scientific research — how really smart and innovative junior faculty members are leaving academia and going into industry because of the job and funding prospects,” says Cooper, who studied neuroscience.
Marc Schulman, president of Eli’s Cheesecake, oversees an operation that produces 20,000 desserts daily and served cheesecake for the inaugurations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ’06 H. Schulman is also an outspoken advocate for career and technical education.
Gail Becker ’88 MS managed communications for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, worked as an executive at Warner Bros., and spent more than a decade as a president at the global communications juggernaut Edelman.
Growing up in Burlingame, Calif., Rebecca Friedman ’15, ’15 CERT loved her hometown hockey team, the San Jose Sharks. The now 25-year-old says that it was her childhood dream to work for the NHL.
Miki Sawada '09 is a nomad, often spending a month or more on the road. But wherever she goes, she is never far from a piano. During three weeks in August and September 2017, Sawada crisscrossed the largest U.S.
The former viola performance major turned Broadway star won the 2018 Tony Award for best performance by an actress in a musical for “The Band’s Visit.” In this interview she shares how she transitioned from music performance to theater, how she focuses her creative energies and the life lessons she learned at Northwestern.
