Cover Story
Caravans of Gold: Fragments in Time
A Block Museum exhibition reveals the glory of Africa’s medieval past.
Spring 2019
Features
One of the greatest caravans to ever cross the Sahara was led by Mansa Musa, the legendary ruler of the vast West African empire of Mali. In 1324 Musa embarked on a hajj, a religious pilgrimage to Mecca, traveling with an entourage that included 8,000 courtiers, 12,000 servants and 100 camel loads of pure gold.
Members of the Chicago-area Native American community and representatives of Sand Creek Massacre descendants gathered on campus to share reflections at a bonfire and a panel discussion.
Anthony Gaines celebrates an emphatic dunk during the Wildcats’ exhibition opener in the debut of the new Welsh-Ryan Arena. The Northwestern facility received $110 million in upgrades.
Voices
As the mother of an adopted Guatemalan teenager who fled kidnapping threats in his home country and who lost his parents to gang violence, I am grateful to Uzoamaka and all the immigration attorneys like her who are fighting for these young asylum seekers. Through their unwavering commitment to and compassion for these young adults, they are saving — and transforming — lives.
Now, perhaps more than ever, it is critical that we continue the LGBTQ movement’s fight for recognition and representation. The health of our community depends on it.
Three Northwestern professors break down the most important factors in the rise of China’s global influence and the implications for the United States and its standing in the world.
Nyree Zerega, who studies evolution, genetic diversity, origins and pollination biology of plants, finds inspiration in her colleagues — people who are passionate about getting outdoors to learn about ecosystems around the world.
Discovery
Your brain, says neuroscientist Ken Paller, is not like a laptop, shutting down when you close the lid. Instead, when you close your lids at night, your brain remains hard at work, consolidating information you’ve learned that day — and the days before.
Innovation
Kristen Sanders built People6, a digital marketing agency that employs college students to create and execute holistic marketing solutions and research for businesses and entrepreneurs. People6 has hired more than 30 students to complete nearly 20 projects, ranging from research for New Founders PAC to a new website design and branding plan for Roycemore School, near the Evanston campus.
A team of McCormick School of Engineering sophomores created the Alligator Tail, a device that is placed on the axle of a wheelchair and is used prevent the user from falling while learning to do a stationary wheelie. It allows users to practice wheelies with minimal assistance.
News
“People have tried to classify personality types since Hippocrates’ time, but previous scientific literature has found that to be nonsense,” says William Revelle, professor of psychology and a self-proclaimed skeptic when it comes to personality types. So when his Northwestern colleagues Luís Amaral of the McCormick School of Engineering and Martin Gerlach, a postdoctoral fellow in Amaral’s lab, proposed a study to outline new personality types, Revelle, who specializes in personality measurement, theory and research, balked.
Five Northwestern students share their adventures from a summer abroad, including Shakespeare in marionettes, food culture in Italy, the effects of habitat degradation on Madagascar’s lemurs and assessing stress among Tsimané, an Indigenous group in lowland Bolivia.
It started off as just another hazy post-graduation idea: Two Northwestern alumni traveling in Amsterdam decided to quit their jobs in the U.S. and move to the Netherlands to start an improv group.
As they near the completion of their doctorates, Jennifer Ferrer and Arianne Rodriguez have faced their fair share of challenges. Lab work is rarely glamorous, and responding to carefully planned experiments gone awry can be difficult.
The year Irving Rein first taught his now-famous course Persuasive Images: Rhetoric of Contemporary Culture, the nation was engrossed in Woodstock, the first moon landing and the first draft lottery for the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, Rein is still teaching the course.
Alumni
Since returning home to China seven years ago, Bozhong Xue has revitalized the NU Club of Beijing, interviewed prospective students as a member of the Alumni Admission Council, recruited high school students to volunteer for the Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra concert last spring and supported international student scholarships at the Bienen School of Music. For his efforts, Xue received the inaugural Northwestern Alumni Association President’s Award in September.
Billed as an opportunity to get “a real taste of the intellectual brew that is stimulating the campus,” the Alumni-Faculty Seminar launched on April 11, 1970. About 500 alumni filled classrooms in the Technological Institute to hear faculty lecture on the changing standards of masculinity and femininity, an account of the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial and other national and international issues, the arts and sciences and news from the University.
My Northwestern Direction
My Northwestern Direction
On Becoming a Teacher — and a Poet
One of the most transformative experiences I had in the Master of Science in Education program was being asked to develop a personal philosophy of education — what I value most about teaching and learning. When professor Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon read an early draft, she pointed out its strengths but kindly noted how little it showcased my voice.
Impact
Northwestern dedicated the striking new Welsh-Ryan Arena in November, opening the doors of a world-class facility built to be the most accessible in college athletics. The renovated facility is now a modern home for men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball and wrestling.
Northwestern strives to attract and nurture faculty who are leaders in fields ranging from global health to the humanities. Enter the Ryan Family Chair Challenge, which is spurring the creation of new endowed professorships, or chairs, in strategic areas across the University.
Members of Northwestern’s NU Loyal giving society — which recognizes alumni, parents and friends who make annual gifts of any size to the University for three or more consecutive years — hail from around the world and span generations. Since We Will.
People
John Stroup, CEO of the global manufacturing company Belden, helped launch a first-of-its-kind program to help job applicants break the cycle of substance abuse and find employment. A mechanical engineering student at Northwestern, Stroup says the University's emphasis on the humanities helped him become a more well-rounded person.
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.
When Matt Eliason ’11, the all-time leading scorer for Northwestern men’s soccer, buried a bicycle kick during a July 2013 charity match with soccer star Lionel Messi, the highlight earned the No. 1 spot on SportsCenter’s “Top 10 Plays” and changed the trajectory of his life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When Jody Reeme ’01 MS purchased her first classic car, a 1939 Ford De Luxe Fordor Sedan, she expected it to be a one-off. Sure, she had always been interested in classic cars — Reeme grew up in Detroit, shares a birthday with Henry Ford and loved playing with slot cars as a kid — but she didn’t expect to wind up with a collection of almost a dozen vehicles.
