People & Profiles
Twenty years ago, Ryan DuVal ’02 moved into his room in Bobb-McCulloch Hall a few days early. Inspired by a trip to Italy, he decided to paint three scenes from the Sistine Chapel ceiling in his dorm room — and inadvertently became a national sensation.
After three years spent dreaming about the hike, Elizabeth Weingarten decided to climb Mount Kilimanjaro the week of her 30th birthday — the perfect moment to figure out what she was doing with her life.
In fall 2018 New York Times investigative reporter Barstow and his colleagues Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner wrapped up an 18-month investigation into President Donald Trump’s personal finances.The investigative pieces earned Barstow and his colleagues the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. It is Barstow’s fourth Pulitzer.
When he was 13, Balu Natarajan ’92, ’96 MD, ’99 GME became the first child of South Asian immigrants to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling the word “milieu.” “When I was competing, I had no idea that I was representing a community,” Natarajan says. “I quickly learned that the victory was embraced by the Indian community in particular.
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.
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.
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.
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.
