Alumni Accomplishments

Meredith Horton Braz ’77 has been appointed registrar at Dartmouth College. She had been administrative dean for academic systems and registrar at Bates College. She has a Master of Arts in Teaching from Smith College, and before joining the Bates staff was a teacher in Massachusetts and Vermont schools. She also worked in the Sophia Smith Collection, a women's history archive at Smith College, at Williston-Northampton School and at the Yarmouth Historical Society. Braz was a member of an American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers task force to study the impact of outsourcing in registrars’ and admissions offices. She is a national expert on topics such as implementing Web registration, course proposal and class schedule creation strategies and online course evaluation.

Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY) recently honored Executive Director Varick Chittenden ’63 with the organization’s Evergreen Award. He is shown being congratulated by TAUNY Board President Peg Kelsey Cornwell ’79 on the surprise presentation last fall.  The award recognizes “continuing interest in and generous support of traditional cultures, arts, and artists of the North Country, and programs that increase public understanding and appreciation of them.” Chittenden is the founder and leader of the 20-year-old TAUNY.

As TAUNY Program Director Jill Breit ’86 explained in her remarks at the awards presentation, Chittenden believes that “local, traditional folk culture is just as important as more elite forms of culture, (and) that everyday life, and the relationship between people and the landscape in which they live, should not be taken for granted.”  Today, New York State is regarded as one of the leading states in the country for folk arts programming, and according to Breit, “That is directly attributable to people like Varick, who doggedly persists in striking up the band for North Country folklife.” 

Two More Honors for Professor Ewing
Andrew Ewing ’79, holder of the J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Natural Sciences, professor of chemistry and professor of neural and behavioral sciences at Penn State University, has been honored with the American Chemical Society (ACS) Analytical Division Award in Chemical Instrumentation.  Sponsored by the Dow Chemical Foundation, this award recognizes Ewing's work in the development of nanoscale methods based on electrochemical techniques, separation techniques and mass-spectrometry imaging for the analysis of volume-limited samples, such as single nerve cells and the brains of fruit flies.

Ewing also has received the Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS) Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Fields of Analytical Chemistry.  The premier award bestowed by the EAS, it is presented to an individual who has demonstrated significant achievements in the multidisciplinary areas of analytical chemistry.

Ewing is one of the world's foremost leaders in developing nanoscale techniques and tools for understanding fundamental processes within the brain's individual cells.  His techniques for measuring chemicals in the brain have enabled scientists to study the excretion of single neurotransmitter molecules from single nerve cells, as well as the chemicals that make up the cell membrane during the excretion process.  “The importance of this work is that it provides a means to examine fundamental mechanisms underlying normal and abnormal neuronal function and how this function relates to illness, learning and memory, tolerance and addiction, as well as the basic functioning of neuronal circuits,” Ewing explains. His research has resulted in three major methods for monitoring nerve cells during their communications with each other. He received an Alumni Citation from St. Lawrence in 2001.

Kennedy Elected Colorado State Treasurer
Cary Kennedy ’90 has been elected Colorado's state treasurer, becoming the first Democrat to hold the office since 1986. She had worked in Colorado's state planning and budgeting and as a fiscal analyst for the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing. In 1999-2000, Kennedy led a bipartisan coalition to increase funding for Colorado's public schools, called Amendment 23, which was approved by voters in 2000. From 2000 to2002, she worked for Educare Colorado (now Qualistar) to bring increased federal funding into Colorado to support early education and school readiness. Kennedy later joined the Colorado Children's Campaign, working on a statewide initiative to increase the tax on tobacco products in order to expand health insurance for low-income children and to fund cancer research. In 2004-2005, Kennedy was policy director for the  Speaker of the state House of Representatives.

An English major at St. Lawrence, Kennedy was a University communications intern and a member of Tri-Delta sorority. She earned a master's degree in public administration from Columbia in 1993 and a law degree from the University of Denver College of Law in 1995. She and her husband, Dr. Saurabh Mangalik, live in Denver.

Lekuton Elected to Kenya’s Parliament
Joseph Lekuton ’91, M’94 has been elected to a seat in the Kenyan Parliament. An article in the September 29, 2006, Washington Post notes that the popular former teacher at the Langley School in Virginia “led families on summer trips to Kenya to visit schools without running water and help dig latrines. Students whose families pay about $22,000 in tuition each year experienced life in a country in which the annual per capita income is $530, the World Bank estimates,” according to the article. It goes on to explain that Lekuton was born into the nomadic Maasai tribe and “was a boy when government officials came to his village and demanded that each family send one son to a missionary school. He (later) came to the United States with a full scholarship to St. Lawrence University. The education was free, but the plane ticket wasn't. His countrymen sold goats and cows to pay the fare. “Taking that from real poor people was huge,” Lekuton told the newspaper. “After I was elected, people reminded me of that: ‘I gave you that black cow.’”

Lekuton travels to the U.S. frequently for several speaking engagements and to work on international aid issues, and says he plans to run in 2007 for a five-year Parliamentary term. He was the recipient of St. Lawrence’s Sol Feinstone Award for Humanitarian Service in 2005.

John F. “Jack” Weet ’70 has been named Bausch & Lomb’s vice president for global regulatory affairs.  He is responsible for developing and overseeing global regulatory strategy and operations for the company’s vision care, pharmaceuticals and surgical divisions. Weet joined Bausch & Lomb in March 2006, from Biovail Technologies in Bridgewater, N.J., where he was vice president of regulatory affairs and pharmaceuticals.  He has 30 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries and held leadership positions at Novartis, Solvay, Zeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, and as a research scientist in preclinical research and development at G.D. Searle. A psychology major at St. Lawrence, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Iowa College of Medicine and earned both a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in physiology from Ohio State University.   

Laurentian Named to New York State Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission
Peter Wisbey ’86 has been appointed a member of the New York State Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.  The commission will work in conjunction with a similar federal commission to commemorate, in 2009, the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.  Wisbey is executive director of Seward House, a designated National Historic Landmark in Auburn, N.Y., that was the home of William Henry Seward (1801-1872), governor of New York, a state and U.S. senator and secretary of state to Presidents Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. He holds master’s degrees from the Cooperstown Graduate Program and from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware.  Executive director of Seward House since October 2000, he lives in Rochester, N.Y., with his wife, Sarah, and two daughters.

Brendan Hayes '04 is one of twelve 2008 George J. Mitchell Scholars named by the U.S.-Ireland Alliance. Awarded annually, the scholarships allow Americans to pursue a year of post-graduate study at any university on the island of Ireland. Hayes has spent the last year and a half living in Swaziland, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and then with the Swazi National AIDS Council, helping to run an organization that works with AIDS orphans. Through the Mitchell Scholarship, he will seek a master's degree in development studies at University College Dublin. A double major in history and biology, Hayes was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa. He was a member of the football team and participated in a Spring Break trip with Habitat for Humanity.

Noelle Richer ’98 has been named manager of employee benefits and financial services at Gilroy Kernan & Gilroy insurance agency in New Hartford, N.Y., according to a company announcement. Her responsibilities include supervising the day-to-day operations of those departments, mentoring account management team members, coordinating and servicing benefits accounts, and building and maintaining relationships with insurance carriers. An economics major, she holds a New York State life insurance license. She has been in the benefits field since graduating, having worked extensively with human resource managers in developing, implementing and servicing benefits programs. Richer joined Gilroy Kernan & Gilroy in 2004, she resides in Clinton, N.Y.

Lawdragon Magazine Honors Three Laurentians
[need last names under images:  Arquit  -  Benedict  -  Murphy]

Kevin Arquit ’75	James Benedict ’71	Sean Murphy ’91

Three St. Lawrence University alumni have been included in lists selecting the top individuals in the legal profession by the magazine Lawdragon, which covers legal news and reviews lawyers and judges. In its fall 2006 issue, Lawdragon included Kevin Arquit ’75 and James Benedict ’71 in its list of the 500 leading lawyers in America; both were listed in the spring 2006 issue among the 500 leading litigators in America. The summer 2006 issue included a list of the 500 rising stars of the legal profession and Sean Murphy ’91 was included in that ranking.

Arquit, of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York City, is “the go-to lawyer for antitrust issues,” according to Lawdragon. The magazine citation adds, “Major companies seek his advice to complete their corporate deals.”

Benedict is a partner in the litigation practice group of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy in New York City. Lawdragon's review states, “Benedict has handled more than 150 major class and shareholder derivative actions alleging violations of state and federal antitrust and securities laws. These include some of the largest class-actions in the nation.”

The summer magazine noted that Murphy, also a partner in the litigation department of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy in New York, was preparing for his second billion-dollar trial as the issue went to press, in a case that “will set the bar for the battles in the (mutual fund) industry.” He was one of seven of the 500 lawyers who were separately profiled in the magazine.