Alumni Association honors membership

The Alumni Medal

Created in 1941, the Alumni Medal is awarded to recognize achievement of an exceptional nature in any field, vocational or voluntary, covering an entire career. It is the highest honor the Alumni Association can bestow. Because the value of the medal is defined by its recipients, it has been given sparingly. The medal is awarded to no more than one person each year and is not awarded on an annual basis.

Richard Atkinson (Ph.B., '48) graduated from Chicago during the era of the postwar Hutchins College and went on to a career of achievement and broad professional influence. As president of the University of California system, he is one of higher education's most valuable leaders. After earning his doctorate in psychology and completing his military service, Atkinson served on the faculty at Stanford University and then the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1960, he rejoined the Stanford faculty, where, in addition to serving as professor of psychology, he held academic appointments in the School of Engineering, the School of Education, Applied Mathematics and Statistics Laboratories, and the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences. Atkinson's research made significant and lasting contributions to understanding the basic processes in human learning, memory and perception.

In 1975, he was appointed deputy director of the National Science Foundation and two years later was promoted to director. At NSF, he negotiated the first ever memorandum of understanding between the United States and the People's Republic of China, an agreement for the exchange of scientists and scholars.

In 1980, Atkinson became the fifth chancellor of the University of California, San Diego. Atkinson took office as the 17th president of the University of California in October 1995.

The Alumni Service Medal

The Alumni Service Medal was established in 1983 to honor a lifetime of achievement in service to the University. It is given to no more than one person each year and is not awarded on an annual basis.

James McClure, Jr. (A.B., '42, J.D., '49) has been an active and involved member of the University community since arriving on campus in the autumn of 1938. He played Big Ten tennis and was awarded the Order of the C. When he returned to the University to enter the Law School, after serving as a commanding officer in World War II, he became a member of Order of the Coif and was selected as editor in chief of the Law Review.

McClure has served as president of the village of Oak Park, president of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission and chairman of the board of McCormick Theological Seminary. He also is a member of the American Law Institute, the Leadership Council on Metropolitan Open Communities and the Metropolitan Planning Council.

McClure was appointed to the Development Council for the Law School in 1974 and has worked to raise support for the institution for the past five decades. He also has been active in the effort to raise money for construction of the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center.

Alumni Service Citations

Created in 1988, the Alumni Service Citations are awarded for outstanding volunteer work on behalf of the University through service in alumni programs, on advisory committees and through efforts made to insure the welfare of the institution.

Thomas Berg (A.B., '72) was a founding member of the Class Agent program, which promotes giving among his classmates. In recent years he also has participated in the Career and Placement Services' annual student interviews for Metcalf Internships, an important alumni service to students in the College.

In the mid-1990s Berg became involved with the University of Chicago Club of Metropolitan Chicago, joining its board in 1997, and serving as its vice president from 1999 to 2000. He then was elected president for a three-year term. In these roles, he helped foster a connection between alumni and the University through a volunteer program and worked to streamline the board's operations. He led efforts to eliminate membership dues and transformed the group that served fewer than 2,000 members to an organization serving more than 30,000 Chicago-area alumni.

Kate Fultz Hollis (Lab, '78, A.B., '82) has an extensive record of service to the University's alumni community in Southern California. She joined the Los Angeles alumni club board in the early 1990s. After being elected vice president and program committee chair in 1998, she began designing programs to draw young alumni and families, and later developed the Young Alumni Club of Los Angeles. She revived the annual alumni gathering for the Dodgers vs. Cubs baseball game and organized an alumni career networking night, the first of its kind in Los Angeles. During her tenure as president from 1999 to 2002, participation rates increased 30 percent.

B. Robert Kreiser (A.M., '65, Ph.D., '71) is currently the club member who has provided the longest continuous service to the University of Chicago Club of Washington, D.C. Kreiser was club treasurer for 10 years, performing various detail-oriented tasks of this largely invisible role.

His most significant volunteer contributions have been as member and chairman of the club's Professional Achievement Award Committee. The Washington, D.C. alumni club is the only group in the nation that bestows an annual award for professional excellence on local alumni. For the past 15 years, Kreiser has been central to the selection of the recipient and presentation of the award, and has chaired the committee for the past nine years.

Katrina Lofgren Vidal (A.B., '78) and Eduardo Vidal (A.B., '78, J.D., '81) have provided uninterrupted service to the University as active members of the University of Chicago Club of Metropolitan Chicago. They volunteered for the Presidents' Fund, and Lofgren Vidal served as a member of the Alumni Cabinet. The Vidals were on the Class Gift committee for their 10th reunion and chaired the fund-raising efforts for their 20th reunion, which broke all records for both gift total and percent of class participation.

They have advised the Dean while serving on the Visiting Committee to the College and have interviewed at least 200 prospective students as members of the Alumni Schools Committee for Westchester, N.Y. Each year, the Vidals help organize the Summer Send-Off Party for new and returning students, and they helped launch in New York last year the University's capital campaign, the Chicago Initiative.

Public Service Citations

The Public Service Citations honor those alumni who have fulfilled the obligations of their education through creative citizenship and exemplary leadership in service that has benefited society and reflected credit on the University.

Esther Nieves-Garibay (A.M., '87) has used her training and expertise to serve the Latino community and advance immigrants' rights. As executive director of Erie Neighborhood House, she has been at the forefront of efforts to improve the lives of low-income families. Under her leadership, Erie House expanded its programs in citizenship and education for immigrants, day care and after-school care for children of working parents, and academic mentoring for high school students. Additionally, she worked to expand computer literacy and technology resources at Erie House. In 1997, Nieves-Garibay was one of 38 individuals nationwide selected for the Kellogg Foundation's National Leadership Program. Nieves-Garibay has received various awards, including the City of Chicago Department of Human Services 1997 Hispanic Award for Distinguished Service.

Hedy Ratner (A.M., '74), co-founder and co-president of the Women's Business Development Center, the nation's largest, oldest and most comprehensive women's business assistance center, has been an advocate for minority and women's entrepreneurship, and has long been involved in spearheading initiatives to enhance women's economic power. She has served on advisory councils for U.S. presidents, Illinois governors and the mayor of Chicago. The center she co-founded has served more than 35,000 women.

William Schulz (A.M., '74) is the executive director of Amnesty International USA, an organization with approximately 320,000 members. He travels the world, meeting with those whose rights have been violated, encouraging activists, challenging government leaders to understand the importance of human rights, and bringing international pressure to bear on those who consistently violate those rights.

Schulz is a gifted speaker and writer, and his essays appear regularly in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Christian Science Monitor and The Nation. In 2001, he published In Our Own Best Interests: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All, and he is currently writing a book about human rights and terrorism. From his early career as a minister and then president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations to his leadership of Amnesty International, Schulz has championed efforts to abolish the death penalty and led programs to support women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, and racial and ethnic justice.

Professional Achievement Citations

The Professional Achievement Citations were established in 1967 to recognize alumni who have brought distinction to themselves, credit to the University and benefit to their communities through their vocation.

David Auburn (A.B., '91), whose play, Proof, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best drama in 2001, was a theatrical innovator during his days in the College. An original member of the student theatrical group Off-Off Campus, Auburn also helped create UT Studio, providing an outlet for students to produce original work at University Theater. In 1997, his first full-length play, Skyscraper, was produced off-Broadway. He then wrote Proof–set in Hyde Park with a main character that is the daughter of a University math professor–which the Manhattan Theater Club selected for its 1999-2000 season. Its success resulted in a move to Broadway in October 2000, where it has become the longest-running play at the Walter Kerr Theater. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and is a founding member of the off-Broadway theater group Keen Company.

An encouraging mentor to students, Auburn has returned to Chicago to visit University Theater and Off-Off Campus groups, and he has participated several times in the University's career conference for third-years, Taking the Next Step.

Benjamin Beck (Ph.D., '67) has distinguished himself as a comparative psychologist specializing in animal cognition. His 1980 book Animal Tool Behavior dramatically affected how psychologists and ethologists viewed cognitive behavior in the animal kingdom. Work on cognitive aspects of husbandry led him to study the adaptation of captive-born animals reintroduced to the wild. Since 1983, Beck has coordinated the preparation, reintroduction and post-release monitoring of 153 golden lion tamarins in Brazil. That tamarin population has now grown to 466, about one third of the entire wild population.

As research and primate curator at Brookfield Zoo from 1970 to 1982, Beck was a principal in the design and construction of "Tropic World," one of the first large-scale, mixed-species tropical forest exhibitions. This year he was appointed senior research scientist in biology at the University of Maryland. He currently chairs the American Zoo and Aquarium Association's Reintroduction Advisory Group and advises the management groups of the Gorilla and Orangutan Species Survival Plans, the Great Ape Taxon Advisory Group and the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund.

Ernest Beutler (Ph.B., '46, S.B., '48, M.D., '50) is an internationally known physician and scientist whose five decades of research and teaching have greatly advanced the fields of genetics and hematology. Beutler chaired the Department of Medicine at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif. In 1978, he became chair of the Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute, a position he still holds. Beutler has taken particular interest in genetic disorders and was the first to propose that one of the two X chromosomes of women was inactive. Beutler has played a major role in developing new treatments for leukemia and developed one of the earliest and most successful marrow transplantation programs.

He is president of the American Society of Hematology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association of American Physicians.

Barbara Bowman (A.M., '52), a published author and teacher, is an advocate for the needs and rights of young children, particularly those from poor and minority communities. For more than 50 years, she has been a nationally recognized expert on early education. She has helped set national accreditation standards for child care and early education, raised the standard of professional development for teachers and child-care workers, and stressed the importance of culture and ethnicity in forming children's lives. A Chicago native, Bowman has served on numerous task forces for Chicago's public schools and on city and state commissions. She is an advisor to the National Black Child Development Institute and the Chicago Community Trust Committee on Children, Youth, and Families. A trustee of Roosevelt University, she also serves on the board of the Great Books Foundation.

A founding member of the Erikson Institute, now a pre-eminent institution for the study of early childhood development, Bowman has taught there since it was founded in 1966, and she served as its president from 1994 to 2002.

Joe Mansueto (A.B., '78, M.B.A., '80) has devoted his professional life to providing people with investment tools. Founding Morningstar Inc. in 1984, with the belief that data on investments should be widely available to individual investors, Mansueto built the firm into a pre-eminent source of investment information. The company offers many products and services, all with the same purpose in mind: the democratization of investing. Morningstar's line of Internet, software and print services offers news, data and analysis on stocks, mutual funds, closed-end funds and variable annuities.

Bernard Sarnat (S.B., '33, M.D., '37) is an internationally recognized pioneer in research on the growth and development of the face, bones and teeth. His studies have provided valuable information for the treatment of children born with facial and related malformations and deformations. Sarnat also is considered to be a founder of modern craniofacial surgery. In a career spanning more than six decades, he has served as professor and surgeon in oral and plastic surgery at Washington University School of Medicine; St. Louis University; the University of Illinois; and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Currently, he is professor of oral biology in the School of Dentistry and Plastic Surgery, University of California, Los Angeles.

Sarnat's honors include a Pioneer in Medicine Award, the International Alpha Omega Award, and both the Distinguished Service Alumni Award and the Dallas B. Phemister Professional Achievement Award from the University's Pritzker School of Medicine.

Seymour Slive (A.B., '43, Ph.D., '52) is renowned as a scholar, teacher and advocate for the arts. The first American-trained art historian specializing in the history of Netherlandian Baroque art, he is a distinguished authority in the field of 17th-century Dutch art. His dissertation, written at Chicago, was published in 1953 as Rembrandt and his Critics 1630-1730. This work opened the study of the critical reception of Rembrandt's work. Subsequently, Slive wrote the standard monographs on Frans Hals and Jacob van Ruisdael, two major 17th-century Dutch painters, as well as the standard textbook on the period in the Pelican History of Art series (first published in 1966).

After a brief time teaching at Oberlin and Pomona colleges, Slive joined Harvard University's faculty in 1954. In 1974, he became director of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, and his leadership provided the impetus that built the Sackler Museum at Harvard.

Young Alumni Service Citations

The Young Alumni Service Citations, awarded for the first time during the 1992 University Centennial, acknowledge outstanding volunteer service to the University by individuals 35 and younger.

Dereje (Reggie) Ambatchew (A.B., '88) moved to New York after his graduation and became involved in the Alumni Club of New York. In the mid-1990s, he organized Chicago's first New York City Alumni Softball Team, managed to obtain a permit to play in Central Park, and organized games against alumni from other universities. He continued to organize athletic alumni gatherings, including events that coincide with the annual Maroon men and women's basketball games against New York University, which have become traditional gatherings in New York.

Ambatchew has participated for many years on the club steering committee, and he served as president from 1999 to 2002. After his term as president, he has continued to work with the steering committee, managing existing programs and spearheading the new Podium Speaker Series.

Joan Friedman (A.M., '91) developed a commitment to the University and its alumni, taking a leadership role in two alumni clubs for the University's California-based alumni community. After earning her A.M. in 1991, Friedman moved to San Diego, where she served as president of the local alumni club for four years. She also volunteered to interview prospective students as a member of the Alumni Schools Committee.

When she relocated to the San Francisco area, she joined the board of the Bay Area alumni club as co-chair for programming. Friedman plans educational, cultural, social and service activities. She shares her professional experience and understanding of alumni perspectives with other alumni and students as a volunteer contact for the online Alumni Careers Network.