People & Profiles
During graduation weekend for Northwestern’s Class of 2025, President Michael Schill sat down with Commencement speaker Steve Carell ’25 H, parent of both a recent alum and a current student. Schill’s test sparked a novel rendition of the Northwestern fight song and a discussion of the challenges of improvising Chekhov and featured a spoiler-heavy recap of Carell’s recent TV roles.
Tiffany Chen ’18 MS, who worked at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, shares her thoughts on the elimination of public health communications departments at a time when she believes trusted voices in public health are needed most.
Meet a few representatives of the great Class of 2025 who are leaving Northwestern, degrees in hand, to do great things in the world.
President Michael H. Schill reflects on his belief in and commitment to the mission of higher education.
Barry Joseph ’91 has a long-running fascination with fizzy drinks, particularly seltzer, and he wants others to learn all about its effervescent history. In summer 2024 Joseph launched the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum, a partnership with the oldest seltzer factory in New York City.
At just 28, Selina Fillinger became one of the youngest woman playwrights in Broadway history, and her 2022 show, POTUS, received three Tony Award nominations and has since been produced in theaters across the nation and internationally. Fillinger ’16 came to Northwestern to pursue acting, but a playwriting class with theater professor of instruction Laura Schellhardt ’97 changed her trajectory.
Veteran Lauren Wright Kimball ’05, ’05 MS says it’s been the “privilege of a lifetime” to help create the Military and Family Helpline, a new resource for military veterans and active-duty personnel who live in Nebraska and Iowa. Kimball, who is chief strategy officer at United Way of the Midlands, helped establish the support line in collaboration with the Nebraska Department of Veterans Affairs and Offutt Air Force Base.
By day, Amanda Dunlap edits film trailers for Disney, but by night, she’s a true-crime junkie. Dunlap ’06 took inspiration for her debut novel from stories of real-life “resurrection men,” grave robbers who sold stolen corpses to medical schools in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the early 19th century.
Uncover more about Dunlap’s novel and the history of body-snatching.
Melissa Harris ’02 had just joined the Chicago Tribune as a columnist in 2009 when a colleague recommended she read the 1967 Division Street: America, a book which contains oral histories from 71 Chicagoans interviewed in the late ’60s. Years later, when Harris learned that the audio tapes of the original interviews were being digitized by the Library of Congress, she reached out to Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mary Schmich, and after some consideration they decided to make a podcast.
The first in his family to go to college, Adam Karr ’93 gained a foundation in behavioral economics at Northwestern and now serves as president and portfolio manager at Orbis Investments and vice chairman of the Northwestern Board of Trustees. He shares why empowering young minds is one of the best investments for the future.
