Alumni receive awards for service and support

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

Julianne Sawyier Migely (A.B.,’91, A.M.,’02) has been a consistent and engaged volunteer for the University ever since her graduation. She has served on the College Dean’s Executive Committee, co-chaired both the fifth and tenth reunions for the Class of 1991, helped lead Chicago’s Young Alumni Task Force, and volunteered with students for the University’s Career and Placement Services.

She has maintained her volunteer commitment outside of reunion years, working both to engage young alumni in the life of the University and to help choose students for the University’s growing number of Jeff Metcalf internships. She consistently promotes the University in the outside world—both in the business and the philanthropic communities.

The 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.

John Phelps Davey (A.B.,’61, J.D.,’62) has been instrumental in building support and sustaining alumni interest in athletics at the University. Davey, who won the Stagg Medal in 1961 for his star performance on the University’s basketball team, served from 1996 to 2003 as President of the Graduate Order of the C. During his tenure, he initiated a number of successful new programs that have invigorated the group and benefited the athletics program, including a careers night for student athletes.

Davey helped establish the Athletics Hall of Fame, inaugurated in May 2003 with the opening of the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center. During a three-year effort, he served on the guidelines committee and then chaired the committee that selected the first Hall of Fame inductees. Davey also has served on the Visiting Committee to the College and has been a volunteer for his College reunion planning committee.

Elaine Spiesberger Frank (A.B.,’38) began adding to the cultural life on campus as an undergraduate when, beginning in her first year and for seven years thereafter, she sang in the Rockefeller Chapel Choir. An alumna of the Hutchins College era, Frank has served on the Visiting Committee for the School of Social Service Administration for more than 20 years and has been an active member of the University’s Women’s Board since 1981.

During the early 1990s, Frank was a leading volunteer for the University’s Centennial Campaign, contacting alumni from her era and urging them to support the campaign.

With her son Jim Frank she funds the Frank Scholars, a program that provides scholarships for students in the University’s M.D./Ph.D. program, enabling exceptional students to acquire doctoral training while becoming physicians. For more than four decades, Frank has been an energetic and creative volunteer for the University.

Leah Lehrer (Ph.D.,’68) has been a dedicated volunteer who has led the New York alumni club for a quarter century. Lehrer served as club treasurer for more than two decades and has maintained an almost perfect record of attendance at the monthly club meetings. Lehrer prepared financial reports for every meeting and encouraged efficient pricing of events and programs.

She has attended the annual Phoenixphest for young alumni to welcome and assist the newest generation of alumni to the New York area. In addition, she has sponsored and organized many events herself over the years, such as special dinners in the New York area, which have drawn a segment of the alumni population in New York who do not generally attend other events offered by the club.

Kenneth Levin (A.B.,’68, M.B.A.,’74) has contributed his talent to a variety of volunteer roles as a fundraiser and alumni program volunteer for the Graduate School of Business. He was the GSB’s delegate to the University’s Executive Council (forerunner of the Alumni Board of Governors) and devised strategies for improving attendance at College reunions. In the early 1990s, Levin served as president of the Chicago area alumni club and helped it grow while creating a popular array of programs for alumni. He also laid the groundwork for better program planning and financial stability. He was a member of both the Visiting Committee to the Social Sciences Division and the Alumni Board of Governors.

Levin led the reunion planning for the College Class of 1968, chairing the program committee for his 20th reunion and co-chairing the committees for the 30th and the 35th. For the most recent reunion, he helped to oversee the planning of a well-attended class dinner, organized a comprehensive committee networking effort and developed fund-raising tactics with the reunion gift chairs.

J. Douglas Richards (A.B.,’77) attended the College on Stagg, University and National Merit scholarships and graduated with honors. He made Order of the C in wrestling and football, in addition to serving as one of the famous male cheerleaders for the women’s basketball team. He was a member of the Maroon Key Society and an officer of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. Although his career has based him in New York, Richards has maintained a constant volunteer presence for Chicago. He has made significant contributions himself and also raised funds to build the new Gerald Ratner Athletics Center. A successful litigator, he has provided internships for students interested in law through the Metcalf Fellows program and is a volunteer contact in the Alumni Careers Network.

In 1999, Richards and his wife Patty (A.B.,’76, Ph.D.,’81, M.D.,’82) hosted a dinner to honor Nobel laureate Robert Lucas after he spoke to alumni in New York. Richards also co-chaired the campaign to raise the class gift for his 25th reunion in 2002.

The Alumni Service Medal
The Alumni Service Medal was established in 1983 to honor a lifetime of achievement in service to the University.

Both Robert Feitler (Lab, ’46, E.X.,’50) and Joan Feitler (A.M.,’55) have demonstrated unwavering devotion to the University and the greater Chicago community.

Mr. Feitler began first grade at the University’s Laboratory Schools in 1935 and ultimately left the College in 1948. His involvement in the Lab Schools has included helping to design and build the new Kovler Gymnasium, recruiting prospective students and serving on the planning committee for his 50th high school reunion in 1996, also the Lab Schools’ Centennial.

Mr. and Mrs. Feitler’s interests extended beyond primary and secondary education and into the arts in 1974, when the couple was instrumental in establishing the Smart Museum of Art in memory of Mrs. Feitler’s uncles, David and Alfred Smart, the founders of Esquire magazine. Mr. Feitler continues to serve on the Board of Directors at the Museum and remains very active in its governance. In 1997, the Feitlers endowed the Dana Feitler Smart Museum Directorship in memory of their daughter. The Feitlers also are members of the University’s Visiting Committee on the Visual Arts, which Mr. Feitler has chaired.

In 1991, Mr. Feitler joined the University Board of Trustees and continues to serve as a Life Trustee. As a Trustee, Mr. Feitler co-chaired the committee that developed the Campus Master Plan in 1998. Since 1992, Mr. Feitler also has been a Trustee of the University Medical Center.

Since completing her master’s degree in Sociology in 1955, Mrs. Feitler has consistently been an ardent supporter of the University as both a member of the Women’s Board Steering Committee and Chair of the Women’s Board, to which she was elected in 2000. During her tenure, the Board has raised a record-breaking $1.25 million to support projects that benefit student life, faculty research and teaching, as well as outreach programs in the Hyde Park community. She also has served on the Court Theatre Board and the Social Sciences Visiting Committee.

The 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.

Walter Kahn (M.D.,’59) has made notable contributions to the field of ophthalmology. He has performed a variety of vision restoration surgeries, including the high-tech excimer laser surgery. A pioneer of the new LASIK excimer surgery, Kahn teaches ophthalmology at Hahnemann Medical School in Pennsylvania and has held leadership roles in the Medical Society of New Jersey and the American Medical Association.

For the past 20 years, Kahn has traveled to developing countries to perform operations and share his knowledge and skill as a volunteer for ORBIS International, a not-for-profit humanitarian organization dedicated to saving sight worldwide through hands-on training for eye care professionals, public health education and technical assistance to improve access to quality ophthalmic services. Kahn’s first medical mission was in 1984 to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and since then, he has continued his work over the years with the group’s “flying eye hospital” and in local hospitals in the Philippines, West Africa, Haiti, India, Mongolia, China, Latvia and Uzbekistan. He has trained more than 1,000 local physicians, leaving behind both knowledge and the ability to continue the work of saving sight.

Rochelle Lee (A.M.,’67) is an educator, a storyteller, a librarian and a prominent not-for-profit leader. Early in her career as a teacher and librarian in Chicago’s inner-city schools, she discovered that reading was the key to every child’s learning and that children need to be surrounded by books and teachers who appreciate the power of reading. During the next three decades, she put her beliefs into practice. Her library at Oscar Meyer Elementary School served as a model for Chicago city schools.

When she retired in 1988, her many colleagues and the parents of students established the Rochelle Lee Fund to Make Reading a Part of Children’s Lives to carry on her work. The RLF provides intensive teacher training and creates classroom libraries. From 2002 to 2003, RLF supported 507 teachers in 187 Chicago Public Schools and reached 13,288 children, purchasing 55,428 books for CPS classrooms.

Marc Pollick (A.B.,’75) studied for his A.M. in Social Sciences at the University and then completed two additional degrees in Boston in Holocaust studies, under the direction of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. He worked in academic Holocaust studies for 17 years, founding a Holocaust Memorial Center in Miami, Fla., working on the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He also created the Elie Wiesel Institute for Humanitarian Studies as a vehicle to institutionalize Wiesel’s advocacy for human rights around the world.

Pollick formulated the idea for an organization that would utilize celebrities’ fame for the common good. In 1997 he established the Giving Back Fund to provide philanthropic management and consulting to professional athletes and entertainers. By concentrating on celebrities, Pollick sought to diversify the typical donor base to include people of color, women and young people, groups that often are underrepresented in traditional philanthropy. Pollick has enlisted the help of several University alumni to serve on the GBF board. Current programs administered by GBF include a $268 million project to cure Parkinson’s disease within five years; a program that builds bridges between future business leaders in China and the United States; and the American Philanthropy Hall of Fame, which will annually recognize and acknowledge those who dedicate their lives and resources to helping others.

Alfred Rosenbloom, Jr. (A.M.,’53) has spent more than 50 years in service to visually impaired people, as a founder of Low Vision Rehabilitation Services at the Chicago Lighthouse for People Who are Blind or Visually Impaired. At the Chicago Lighthouse, he has provided thousands of adults and children with the means to lead independent, self-sufficient lives. Those who go to the clinic for rehabilitation typically have exhausted all surgical and medical remedies. Optometrists conduct comprehensive testing to determine which of a variety of new technologies could enhance a patient’s residual vision.

Rosenbloom has fostered a close relationship between the Chicago Lighthouse and the Illinois College of Optometry, where he served terms as dean and president. This collaboration has provided the opportunity for hundreds of optometric students to rotate through the Lighthouse low vision clinic and learn the latest techniques in caring for the visually impaired. He has been a leader in establishing Low Vision Clinics throughout the United States and in many foreign countries. Rosenbloom also travels internationally through the Volunteer Optometrists Serving Humanity to provide medical care in developing countries, and he is a contributing author to several texts. He is currently editing the third edition of the noteworthy text Vision and Aging.

The 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.

Marshall Hartman (A.B.,’54, A.B.,’57, J.D.,’57) has served the indigent and disadvantaged through the public defender movement for more than four decades. He has represented clients in juvenile court, misdemeanor cases, felony cases, death penalty cases, and appellate and post-conviction cases in the Appellate and State Supreme Courts and before the United States Supreme Court. He also has served as national director of Defender Services for the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, and from 1991 to 2003, Hartman led the Capital Litigation Division of the Illinois State Appellate Defender Office. He also has evaluated and provided technical assistance to numerous public defender offices to raise their standards of representation for the poor.

An acknowledged expert on constitutional law and criminal procedure, Hartman has taught at both the University of Illinois’ Criminal Justice Department and the IIT Chicago Kent College of Law. His co-authored Constitutional Criminal Procedure Handbook has benefited both law students and practitioners across the country. Throughout his career, Hartman has used his vision, training and leadership to transform the concept of how the public defender should function.

Barbara Mertz (Ph.B.,’47, A.M.,’50, Ph.D.,’52) a best-selling author of more than 75 books, has provided her readers with an awareness of and appreciation for preserving the past. One of the first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in Egyptology, Mertz has shared her knowledge of the subject through her mystery and suspense novels, including the popular Amelia Peabody series. Archaeologists regard her mysteries with respect and gratitude for broadening a general interest in ancient Egypt, and generations of scholars were initially inspired to study Egyptology through meeting the ancient world in her novels. Her nonfiction books, such as Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs, which have never gone out of print, are a staple of introductory Egyptology courses.

Her dissertation on Egyptian queens is still considered a groundbreaking study and has been cited in all subsequent works on the subject. She has been said to transcend the genre with meticulous research and depictions of historical characters and events as the backdrop for her fiction. Proceeds from her writing have supported vital archaeological work and research throughout Egypt, and she has been a major supporter of the Oriental Institute’s Epigraphic Survey for more than a decade.

Robert Moore (M.D.,’57, Ph.D.,’62) is recognized internationally as a leading neuroscientist and clinician, and is best known for his research on the neural basis of circadian rhythms in mammals. He was the first to identify that a distinct cell group at the base of the brain is an internal clock that establishes the daily rhythms in sleep and waking, hormonal activity and many other bodily functions. His research represents a multidisciplinary study of the nervous system that uses anatomy, neurochemistry and physiology.

Moore has influenced the many institutions at which he has worked, including the University Hospitals, where he established the Section on Pediatric Neurology in the Department of Pediatrics. During his 11 years as chairman of neurology at SUNY-Stony Brook, he brought that department to national prominence. Since moving to the University of Pittsburgh, he has headed the Center for Neuroscience, the Alzheimer Disease Research Center, the Center for Functional Brain Imaging, the National Parkinson’s Foundation Center of Excellence and a Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Now the Love family professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, he is credited with fostering a renaissance of the neurosciences at that institution. Moore also has chaired the boards of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Bradley Patterson (A.B.,’42, A.M.,’43) is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the organization and functioning of the White House staff. In 1954, he helped design an executive secretariat for the White House and then joined President Dwight Eisenhower’s White House staff as Assistant Cabinet Secretary, a new position in which he served until 1961. In the Nixon administration, Patterson served as Executive Assistant to Leonard Garment and in this role worked to develop and implement a new policy of self-determination and strengthening of tribal government for Native Americans. He was a central negotiator for peaceful change during the Alcatraz, BIA building occupation and Wounded Knee crises. In the last of his 14 years on the White House staff, Patterson served as an Assistant Director of the Office of Presidential Personnel under President Gerald Ford.

Patterson has written two books about the White House staff, the most recent being The White House Staff: Inside the West Wing and Beyond, published by the Brookings Institution Press (2001).

He was appointed the Executive Secretary of the Peace Corps in 1961, and in late 1962, Patterson transferred to the Treasury Department as one of the national security affairs advisers in the Office of the Secretary. From 1977 through 1988, he was a senior staff member of the Brookings Institution. He was elected national president of the American Society for Public Administration, is a senior fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and is a member of the American Political Science Association.

Norman Phillips (S.B.,’47, S.M.,’48, Ph.D.,’51) has made significant contributions to the prediction of weather and climate using computer-based numerical models. His pioneering studies led to the first computer models of weather and climate as well as to an understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere. A theoretical meteorologist, Phillips was among the first to show that weather prediction with numerical models was feasible, and the numerical predictions that followed transformed weather forecasting from a highly individualistic effort to one in which teams of experts could develop complex computer programs.

While earning his doctorate at Chicago, he developed a two-layer computer model considered to be the first weather model that predicted changes in surface pressure. He then expanded on this, creating similar models for global climate. His research created the foundation from which organizations such as the General Circulation Research Section of the U.S. Weather Bureau and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory could be established and begin accurate weather predictions. After joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in the 1950s, Phillips became the head of MIT’s meteorology department. He then joined the U.S. Weather Service as a principal scientist in 1974 and stayed there until 1988. In 2003, The Franklin Institute recognized him for his contributions to the field of meteorology with the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Environmental Science.