People & Profiles
With unfailing energy and laser-sharp focus on institutional improvement, Michael Schill, Northwestern’s 17th president, plans to continue the University’s “rapid and steep” ascent to become one of the nation’s top universities. And now, in addition to maintaining the University’s high academic standards, he has a clear goal: building Northwestern’s athletic department into a national model for integrity and student well-being.
Kevin Hoban ‘09 and Jordan Simkovic ‘09 make music as Captain & Cat, a musical duo producing educational songs and videos for kids. The duo recently won the 2022 John Lennon Songwriting Contest Grand Prize.
Heather Harding ’92, executive director of the Campaign for Our Shared Future, shares why she considers inclusive, high-quality K-12 public education a bedrock of modern democracy.
The 2023 Northwestern Alumni Medal recipients — Roberta Buffett Elliott ‘54, Chris Galvin ’73, ’77 MBA and Charles S. Modlin Jr. ’83, ’87 MD — are leaders in philanthropy, business and health care.
As new “widowed besties,” Annie Kuo and Matthew Becker discovered unexpected commonalities as Northwestern grads and parents of young children. They started dating in February 2022 and have been together ever since, carrying the love they have for their late spouses with the new love they’ve found.
Kyra Kyles ’98, ’98 MS is CEO of YR Media, an educational center for aspiring music producers, podcasters, journalists and multimedia content creators. Kyles opened a new YR Media regional facility in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, offering training programs, paid internships and state-of-the-art audio and video production technology to young people from Chicago, Detroit and other Midwestern cities.
On June 26, ultrarunner Jamie Aarons set a world record for scaling all 282 Munros (mountains in Scotland that are taller than 3,000 feet), traveling only by foot, bike and kayak. She compressed what many hikers set as a lifetime goal into just one month, completing the self-propelled circuit in 31 days, 10 hours and 27 minutes.
One of the first “backpack journalists,” Kevin Sites ’89 MS covered conflicts and disasters across the globe, including a yearlong endeavor to cover every conflict region in the world. Those experiences informed his debut novel, The Ocean Above Me, about an emotionally traumatized war correspondent who finds himself fighting for his own life — and confronting his past mistakes — during a harrowing shipwreck.
THE ADVOCATEBorn and raised in Los Angeles, Ramzy Issa came to Northwestern as a Posse Scholar. Issa’s family is from Palestine, and during his time on campus he served as a co-president of the Middle East and North African Student Association.
Mark Goldman, a corporate communications executive and recreational triathlete, is completing an Ironman or half-Ironman for each of the service members who were killed in Kabul, Afghanistan, in September 2021. Goldman has completed six of the 13 races for the fallen heroes, dating back to April 2022.
