Cover Story
Solutions for Troubled Waters
Discovering answers for water quality issues and climate change challenges in Great Lakes.
Summer 2019
Features
Meet the three accomplished alumnae who will receive the Northwestern Alumni Association’s highest honor, the Northwestern Alumni Medal, in October. They will join a select group of 103 alumni — from innovative entrepreneurs and Supreme Court justices to award-winning writers and a Nobel Prize recipient — who have received this award since 1932.
The Shakespeare Garden, one of Northwestern’s cherished hidden gems, is home to various trees, shrubs, flowers and herbs that were mentioned in Shakespeare’s writings, were common during his lifetime or are modern cultivars of those older plants.
The fantastical set and projection design stole the show in the Northwestern University Opera Theater adaptation of Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress. The work was inspired by a series of William Hogarth paintings and engravings that Stravinsky viewed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947.
Voices
If you drive by or stroll along the lakefront on the Evanston campus on a regular basis, you might have noticed that the color of Lake Michigan has been changing the past few years. While most of the time the water is a familiar slate blue-gray or brown-green color, there are days when it turns a Caribbean blue, almost turquoise.
When you’re the child of two Holocaust survivors, as I am, the enormity of that event stays with you forever. And yet, because it’s your own parents who suffered so greatly, you find it difficult — if not impossible — to talk to them about it.
Northwestern professors Brian Uzzi and Adam Waytz and alumnus Mark Knickrehm weigh in on the promise and peril of artificial intelligence.
Champion triathlete and medical researcher Jacquie Godbe is helping develop and improve stem cell treatments.
Discovery
South Asians account for 60% of the world’s heart disease patients, and that trend continues for the 5.4 million South Asian immigrants in the United States. South Asians — the second–fastest growing minority group in the country — have the highest death rate from heart disease compared with other ethnic groups.
Innovation
Americans throw away about 300 million pairs of shoes each year. Almost all of them end up in landfills, where they can take centuries to break down.
Brent Chase knows the pain and helplessness of watching a loved one go through a physically and emotionally damaging autistic meltdown. Chase’s younger brother, Alec, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when he was 3 years old.
News
Five Northwestern alumni and students share details on their Fulbright research, including river restoration and its impact on local fish populations in the United Kingdom, the evolutionary advances of an extinct family of giant clams in Poland and the burial practices of the ancient Aksumites in Ethiopia.
Last winter two beavers were spotted on the Evanston campus. University archivist Kevin Leonard ’77, ’82 MA says the Evanston campus has long been home to more than Wildcats, with bats, raccoons, skunks, “semi-domesticated” squirrels, foxes and coyotes living on or near campus.
Oklahoma highway patrolman Clinton Riggs was a student at the Northwestern Traffic Institute, now the Center for Public Safety, in 1939 when he created the yield sign as a class assignment. His goal was to improve public safety and determine liability in an accident.
Alumni
The Scott family tree has deep roots on Northwestern’s Evanston campus, the place where three of the last four generations met future spouses during their first year. Gordon Scott ’89, the great-grandson of former University president Walter Dill Scott, and Anne Nelson Scott ’89 found love, lifelong friends and a sense of belonging soon after arriving at Northwestern in 1985.
My Northwestern Direction
My Northwestern Direction
On Board with STEM
When tutoring, I realized that the students and I lived different lives. They did not have access to a resourced, tight-knit suburban community as I did, one whose caring adults used city parks and classrooms to provide the extracurricular opportunities that kept my friends and me busy while strengthening our ability to lead, persist, collaborate, problem solve and celebrate others’ successes.
Impact
Genetic mutations — inherited from our parents and carried from birth — can increase our risk of developing diseases from schizophrenia to cancer. But environmental factors also play a critical role in determining who develops certain maladies and who doesn’t.
“My family taught me that the purpose of life is service to others,” says Emelia Carroll ’19 JD, who recently graduated from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and will soon start her career at the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender. Carroll chose Northwestern Law for its outstanding reputation, journals and clinics, and a scholarship endowed by Kathy and Jon Newcomb ’79, ’82 JD helped make it possible for her to attend.
Many donors wish to make an impact on Northwestern not just during their lifetimes but after they have passed, leaving a lasting legacy of support for the University and helping to transform the lives of future generations of students.
The Henry and Emma Rogers Society was founded in summer 1987 to honor and recognize alumni and friends who have included Northwestern in their estate plans. Today nearly 2,000 Rogers Society members have included Northwestern in their estate plans through planned gifts, creating a lasting legacy at Northwestern.
People
Benjamin Dreyer, author of Dreyer’s English, talks about finding the voice for his best-selling book on Twitter. The Random House copy chief also discusses his writing pet peeves and reveals what he learned about editing from working on scripts.
As a James Beard Award–winning journalist for New York Magazine, Sierra Tishgart ’12 ate at some of New York City’s finest restaurants, but she wanted to cook better meals at home and realized she needed different pots and pans. Frustrated by the potential expense and unsure about what cookware she needed and why, Tishgart set out to create her own line of kitchenware, Great Jones.
When Richard Bourke became a volunteer at the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 2012, he expected to spend an outdoorsy retirement in the nonprofit’s dry, mountainous desert preserve. “I just wanted to be outside, do physical activity and learn more about the desert,” he says.
Roderick Cox, the 2018 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award winner, occupies a highly visible position in an industry not noted for its inclusiveness, and he hopes his work continues to inspire people from different backgrounds to pursue music.
Phil Sklar co-founded the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum, which opened its doors near Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward this past February. More than 6,500 bobbleheads are featured on location, a display so large that Guinness World Records may name it the largest bobblehead collection by this summer.
Lillian Hoodes ’13 MA is helping to fix a common problem for environmentally aware hikers: how to pack nutritious food when headed out on the trail. Hoodes is co-founder and CEO of TrailFork, a company dedicated to providing outdoor adventurers with sustainably packaged and healthy dehydrated food.
Dom Collins ’16 JD, MBA had been working as a media and entertainment banker on Wall Street for a year when he got the itch to leave his day job and pursue his passion. Drawing on his legal and business background, Collins formed Domarco7 Entertainment and launched an R&B career in New York City under the stage name Dom Marcell.
Lee Overtree presides over one of the best improv talent incubators around — just ask any savvy kid under 12. “Our secret is that we don’t think of it as making comedy for kids; we think of it as making comedy for each other.”
Rosanna Hertz, author of Random Families, interviewed more than 350 children, their parents and gamete donors to explore how they used cultural narratives about genes and genetics to understand their relationship to their immediate families and donor networks.
Drowning is the leading cause of accidental death for kids between the ages of 1 and 4, with more than 3,000 children drowning every year. Shocked by those statistics, mother and swim coach Michelle Lang penned a guide to teach parents simple techniques to keep their children safe in the water.
