2024 Alumni Awards

Alumni Awards WISCONSIN ALUMNI ASSOCIATION®

2024

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Chief Alumni Officer and Executive Director, Wisconsin Alumni Association: Sarah Schutt

Managing Director of Communications: Jessica Arp ’04

Chief Marketing Officer: Jim Kennedy

Senior Editor: Niki Denison

Designer: Katie Sandheinrich ’15

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Writer: Sandra Knisely Barnidge ’09, MA’13

Alumni Address Changes: 888-WIS-ALUM(947-2586), alumnichanges@uwalumni.com, or uwalumni.com/update

Cover photo by David Nevala; photo of Sarah Schutt by C&N Photography

Wisconsin Alumni Association 650 N. Lake Street Madison, WI 53706-1476 608-262-2551 or 888-947-2586 Email: WAA@uwalumni.com Website: uwalumni.com

© 2024 Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association

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Contents

Letter from Sarah Schutt

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Distinguished Service Award John ’55 and Tashia ’55 Morgridge

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Distinguished Alumni Award Susan Engeleiter ’74, JD’81 Patrick Hanrahan ’77, PhD’85 Gary Wendt ’65

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Luminary Award Melissa Amundson ’99

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Victor Barnett ’82 Ross Freedman ’97 Amed Khan ’91 Robin Wall Kimmerer MS’78, PhD’83 Liz Lefkofsky ’91 Petar Ostojic MS’05 Forward Award Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois ’10, MA’13 Adelaide Davis ’13 Jarell Skinner-Roy ’11 Jeffrey Vinokur ’12 Tara Yang ’13 Abby Kursel ’14 and Maggie Brickerman ’08 Alumni Chapter Awards Lifetime Achievement Award Presidents’ Circle of Excellence Award Badger of the Year Award

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David Nevala

A Letter from Sarah Schutt Each year, the Wisconsin Alumni Association® is proud to bring you news about remarkable UW–Madison alumni and supporters who are making a positive impact. Our annual awards program is designed to recognize Badgers who are living the Wisconsin Idea and to share the pride we all experience by association. Our 2024 recipients are inspiring and unique in the ways they have leveraged their UW– Madison education and supported the mission of the university.

The Forward Award recognizes alumni within 15 years of graduation who exemplify the Wisconsin Idea by demonstrating the ideals of progress, service, and discovery.

The Luminary Award honors mid-career alumni who serve as aspirational examples through accomplishments in their professions and/or service or philanthropy.

The Distinguished Alumni Award is the most long-standing award offered by the Wisconsin Alumni Association. It honors lifetime achievement by alumni in their professional fields, in service to their alma mater, or in contributions to their communities and the world. This year, we are especially excited to announce the inaugural recipients of the Distinguished Service Award, which is presented by the chancellor’s office with support from the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association. This award honors individuals or couples whose unparalleled contributions to the university have significantly transformed UW–Madison’s ability to carry out its mission. Our 2024 recipients, John ’55 and Tashia ’55 Morgridge, epitomize the essence of the Distinguished Service Award. They have made invaluable contributions not only through their service and wise counsel for various university endeavors, but by making the largest individual philanthropic gifts in UW–Madison’s history. John and Tashia have positively transformed every aspect of campus, from the Morgridge Institute for Research to the university’s ability to provide scholarships and retain world-class professors; from the Morgridge Center for Public Service to the new School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences. We will be forever grateful for their visionary, unprecedented giving and their love for the university.

In these pages, we also celebrate alumni who have been recognized by fellow Badgers for career success, community service, or contributions to their local alumni chapters.

If you know of fellow alumni deserving of recognition, we encourage you to nominate them for one of next year’s awards at uwalumni.com/awards.

On, Wisconsin!

Sarah Schutt Chief Alumni Engagement Officer and Executive Director Wisconsin Alumni Association

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Distinguished Service Award

The Distinguished Service Award acknowledges people who have had an unparalleled impact on UW–Madison. While many have contributed to the university in ways great and small, the Distinguished Service Award was created to honor those whose impact has been truly transformational. Distinguished Service Award honorees are chosen by the UW–Madison Office of the Chancellor, and the award is given in partnership with the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association.

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Christopher M. Howard

John Morgridge ’55 Former CEO/Chair, Cisco Systems UW Major: Business

retirement, she continued to teach students with disabilities. John graduated from the Wisconsin School of Business and earned a master’s degree at Stanford University. He joined computer networking firm Cisco Systems in 1988, and under his leadership as president, CEO, and chair of the board, the company grew to become a global tech powerhouse. Almost 30 years ago, the couple funded an endowment at UW–Madison to create the Morgridge Center for Public Service, which encourages civic engagement and service learning in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea. They also supported a major renovation of the center’s first home, the historic Red Gym. “Tashia and I believe that when public service is done well, everyone benefits,” John said on the 10th anniversary of the Mordgridge Center in 2007. In the decades since, the Morgridges have made ongoing gifts to support the UW’s academic excellence, technological advancements, and educational opportunities for students from around the world. In 2004, their gifts launched the Morgridge Institute for Research — an on campus, nonprofit home for privately funded Tashia Morgridge ’55 Former Teacher, Special Education UW Major: Education

In 1950, John Morgridge and Tashia Frankfurth were high-school sweethearts in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Five years later, they were both proud graduates of the University of Wisconsin. With their worldly possessions in the back of their Ford, they took off to start their married life in California, already inspired to give back to their alma mater. “Our first check to the UW was for $5 in 1967,” John said in a 2005 commencement address. “In recent years, we’ve added a few zeros. We are blessed people. It is our need and our duty to help.” In the 67 years since graduation, John and Tashia Morgridge have made philanthropic gifts to UW–Madison on an unprecedented scale. Through their visionary giving, the Morgridges have positively transformed every corner of the UW–Madison campus, supporting new facilities and creating enduring opportunities for discovery, teaching, and public service. Tashia, who earned her bachelor’s degree from the UW School of Education, also earned a master’s degree from Lesley University in Massachusetts. She launched her early career as a special-education teacher, and after

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“It has allowed us to be involved with young minds, to be lifelong learners, and to share our insights and wisdom with others.”

biomedical research and public engagement, affiliated with the taxpayer-supported Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. That same year, they made a generous gift to renovate and expand the School of Education building, where Tashia has served on the board of visitors. Keeping their commitment to educational opportunity, the Morgridges also created an endowment to launch the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars (FFWS). The private, nonprofit foundation provides grants and stipends to graduates of Wisconsin public high schools who go on to attend Wisconsin public colleges and universities. Since 2007, FFWS has awarded more than $140 million to more than 28,200 students from low-income backgrounds. Some 3,500 FFWS students have graduated nearly debt-free. In 2014, the Morgridges made a gift to UW–Madison that was then the largest single contribution from individual donors in the UW’s history. “This is an investment in UW–Madison and the state of Wisconsin that will help secure their place in our shared future.” That generous gift continues to help recruit and retain world-class UW faculty through matching funds for new and enhanced professorships, chairs, and distinguished chairs. In 2020, the couple contributed another gift in matching funds to inspire other donors to support faculty recruitment and retention. And in 2021, the Morgridges stepped up to make a lead commitment of $125 million for the new School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS). Their gifts and challenge grants supported construction of state-of-the art facilities for CDIS, a high-tech hub where students and scholars work at the intersection of technology and humanity, advancing fields such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and data science. “This is an investment in UW–Madison and the state of Wisconsin that will help secure their place in our shared future,” John said. The Morgridges’ ongoing financial support for UW–Madison reflects their 2010 commitment to the Giving Pledge, signed by several prominent philanthropists who intend to share most of their wealth through giving during their lifetimes.

“We’re not leaving it to someone else to give away,” John has said. “We’re going to do it.” As the Morgridges support excellence far and wide across the UW campus — from computer sciences and literacy, to economics, geoscience, health systems innovation, pediatric nursing, and more — they also make time to celebrate their relationship with the UW and with one another. “We never talk about just John Morgridge or Tashia Morgridge,” Tashia once said. “We have been partners all the way along.” Both Tashia and John have received honorary degrees from UW–Madison. The couple even celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary with a pair of faculty chairs — they gave one another the gifts of named chairs in the UW Department of Computer Sciences and the School of Education. “I have been invigorated by the engagement both John and I have been able to have here at the university,” Tashia has said. “It has allowed us to be involved with young minds, to be lifelong learners, and to share our insights and wisdom with others.”

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Distinguished Alumni Award

The Distinguished Alumni Award is the most long-standing honor bestowed by the Wisconsin Alumni Association. Since 1936, the Wisconsin Alumni Association has been presenting the awards to the most prestigious graduates of UW–Madison for their professional achievements, contributions to society, and support of the university.

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won in an eight-way Republican primary and subsequently beat a 19-year-old opponent in the general election by joking that, at 22, she offered more experience than the other candidate. Her victory made her the youngest woman elected to a state legislature anywhere in the country that year, but the page-turned politician already felt right at home in the capitol. She also returned to the UW as a law student, selecting courses that fit around her legislative responsibilities. Engeleiter was elected to the state senate after her term in the assembly, and in 1984, she became the first woman to serve as its minority leader. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated her to become the first woman to lead the Small Business Administration. “I personally benefited greatly from a very fine, quality public education, kindergarten through law school. I strongly believe in public education.” In 1992, she became a vice president at Honeywell in Minneapolis and then shifted to Data Recognition Corporation, an educational testing firm that is an industry leader for pre-K–12, adult education, and multilingual- learner assessments. Engeleiter was named CEO in 2006. “I personally benefited greatly from a very fine, quality public education, kindergarten through law school,” she says. “I strongly believe in public education.” Diana Hess, former dean of the UW– Madison School of Education, says that “Susan’s commitment to education has been unwavering. She has made an enormous impact on the School of Education community, providing robust scholarship support across the arts, health, and education as well as supporting hundreds of future Wisconsin teachers.” Engeleiter has also served on the boards of various nonprofits, and currently serves on the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association board and the Eisenhower Health Board of Trustees in southern California. She also served as the national chair and in other leadership positions at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the largest organization in the country for treating substance abuse. Past board affiliations include Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota and Aurora Health Care.

Courtesy of Data Recognition Corporaation

Susan Engeleiter grew up in a family with two traditions: rooting for Wisconsin sports teams and getting involved in local politics. Her great-great grandfather had been the mayor of Milwaukee, and her family regularly volunteered on various campaigns, so walking into the state capitol and asking to become a legislative page during her freshman year at UW–Madison felt like a perfectly natural thing to do. However, the clerk in charge claimed he couldn’t hire her because he didn’t have any page uniforms designed for women. Undaunted, Engeleiter kept pestering until the clerk finally relented, and she and a friend became the first two female pages at the Wisconsin legislature. For the rest of her undergraduate days, Engeleiter spent up to 30 hours a week at the capitol. “I loved the work. It was fascinating,” she says. Engeleiter had originally planned to become a high-school speech and theater teacher after college, but during her senior year, the assemblyman from her home county decided not to seek reelection. Engeleiter jumped at the chance to run, and she spent the summer after graduation knocking on 12,000 doors across Waukesha County. In 1974, she Susan Engeleiter ’74, JD’81 President and CEO, Data Recognition Corporation UW Majors: English, Communications, Law

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says. The revelation prompted him to leave his graduate program to join a computer graphics lab at the New York Institute of Technology. He eventually returned to UW–Madison to finish his doctorate, and in 1986, he joined a fledgling company in California called Pixar. There he became the driving force behind 3D software known as RenderMan, which has since generated realistic animation used in movies such as Jurassic Park, Avatar, and Titanic. Hanrahan developed RenderMan’s shading language, which facilitated the depiction of light and shadow, and he spearheaded several related innovations while at Pixar. RenderMan is still widely used today. Hanrahan has won three Academy Awards for his work in computer rendering, along with numerous other honors. In 2019, he accepted the prestigious Turing Award, known as the “Nobel Prize of computing,” for not only transforming filmmaking but also other applications, such as computer gaming and virtual reality. Hanrahan’s other great love is teaching. He joined the computer science department at Princeton in 1989 and later moved to Stanford, where he continues to do research and has mentored more than 50 PhD students. “Every one of them has been amazingly successful,” he says, “and that’s definitely the thing I’m most proud of.” “I could have all these abstract thoughts, physics or math or biology, but now I could make [them] concrete. I could see it.” In 2003, Hanrahan cofounded Tableau, a company that made data analysis more accessible through an easy-to-use interactive visual interface. Salesforce bought the company in 2019, and its technology is widely used to analyze data in business, medical, scientific, and other settings. Hanrahan is now retired, and his many activities include public speaking, working in his home shop, and running a family foundation that he established with his wife, Delle Maxwell. The Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation focuses on making unrestricted grants to talented people working in underappreciated but important areas. As Hanrahan told the Stanford School of Engineering, “curiosity and passion determine success.” That mantra could easily sum up the remarkable life of Pat Hanrahan.

Andrew Brodhead

If you’ve seen the movies Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Up , or virtually any film that has won an Oscar for visual effects in recent decades, you can thank Pat Hanrahan. His work to bring photorealism to film animation and special effects has been a game-changer in the computer graphics industry. When he arrived at UW–Madison, an engineering dean encouraged him to enroll in the honors program, which allowed Hanrahan the flexibility to follow his interests. He started in the nuclear engineering program and then moved to chemistry, biology, and biophysics before ultimately discovering the potential of computer graphics, an industry that didn’t yet exist. “I was there right at the beginning, and that turned out to be so very lucky,” he says, adding that his eclectic background was the perfect preparation for the field. Hanrahan remembers being floored by the fact that he could feed equations into a computer, and it would draw, for instance, a sphere. “I could have all these abstract thoughts, physics or math or biology, but now I could make [them] concrete. I could see it,” he Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University | cofounder, Tableau Software UW Majors: nuclear engineering, biophysics Patrick Hanrahan ’77, PhD’85

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says. “And I said, ‘Why in the world would you do that?’ I was really naive.” But he filled out applications anyway, and they yielded several acceptances to prestigious schools on both coasts, including Harvard, which Wendt ultimately chose. “It was overwhelming,” he says. “I was absolutely terrified by the whole thing. But I made it.” He then embarked on a career in financial management, starting as a senior executive at GE Capital Corporation (GECC) and becoming chairman and CEO from 1989 to 1998. During his tenure, earnings grew from 6 percent to 46 percent of GE’s total earnings, and GECC became one of the three largest financial services providers in the world. Wendt then led the restructuring of financial services company Conseco, now CNO Financial Group. And in 2007, he cofounded Deerpath Capital Management, which provided financing to defense, health care, software, and automotive companies. The firm grew to manage $5 billion in assets and deployed more than $10 billion in investments before its sale in 2023. Wendt now has more time for philanthropy, and he’s especially focused on providing opportunities to young people from econ omically disadvantaged backgrounds. He has sponsored several UW scholarships and programs, including the formation of the innovative Business for Non-Majors courses and an international leadership seminar for undergraduate engineering students, hosted in South Africa. In recent years, Wendt has split his time between Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Minocqua, Wisconsin. He was invited to become a founding trustee of Florida Polytechnic University, and he’s on the board of the Everglades Foundation. Wendt has also served on the National Board of the Boys and Girls Club of America for more than 30 years. Among his many initiatives, he provided the initial funds to launch and maintain a chapter in Hayward, Wisconsin, that serves children who live on the reservation that is home to the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. The project in Hayward opened Wendt’s eyes to some of the unique challenges faced by Native youth across the country, and he recently committed $10 million to launch a nationwide program to provide higher-education support to tribes. “I was blessed to have parents who were able to send me to college, and I think everybody ought to have that chance,” he says. “My efforts are a raindrop in a hurricane, but if I can touch a few kids’ lives and help them to make some progress, that’s good.”

Courtesy of Florida Polytechnic University

Gary Wendt grew up in Rio, Wisconsin, a town located 30 miles north of Madison. In the 1950s, the local high school was so small that Wendt was asked to play on every sports team, take up the trombone, and sing in the chorus, just to help flesh out the rosters. “Because of that, I got the impression I could do anything,” he says. One of those things was engineering, which Wendt pursued at the UW in large part to honor his father, who built a limestone-grinding business and became one of the first highway road-blasters in the state — despite having only a fourth-grade education. “There was never any question I was going to go to college, which, looking back, is a little amazing. But my father was an amazing guy,” Wendt says. Gary Wendt ’65 Cofounder, Deerpath Capital Management | Philanthropist UW Major: Civil and Environmental Engineering “My efforts are a raindrop in a hurricane, but if I can touch a few kids’ lives and help them to make some progress, that’s good.” At UW–Madison, an adviser suggested that Wendt enroll in an MBA program after finishing his engineering degree. “[The adviser] said maybe you should go out of state because your whole life has been in this 30-mile radius,” he

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Alu WISCO Mark Wallheiser Melissa Amundson ’99 Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon UW Majors: Biology and Molecular Biology After earning her undergraduate degree, Melissa Amundson enrolled in dental school, but she soon realized that she felt more drawn to surgery. She matched with a University of Miami residency program in maxillofacial surgery and was placed at a resource-limited hospital where Spanish was the predominant language, followed by Creole.

Luminary Award

The Luminary Award recognizes alumni who serve as aspirational examples for others through their accomplishments in the areas of leadership, discovery, progress,

and service. It celebrates extraordinary Badgers who

have demonstrated exceptional achievement in their professions, service or philanthropy.

“It was a totally foreign environment to me, but that prepared me for working in low-resource settings,” she says. In 2013, she joined a project in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to provide complex maxillofacial care and surgical training at the country’s only free hospital. She then joined Médecins sans Frontières/ Doctors without Borders. Her unusual specialty made her the only American doctor qualified to take on a challenging job: helping to revive a defunct hospital in Nigeria that specializes in serving children who have survived noma, a devastating form of gangrene that causes severe facial disfigurement. In 2016, Amundson performed some of the earliest surgeries at the new iteration of the hospital, and she’s returned to Nigeria almost every year since. Her contribution has shifted from personally performing surgeries to training local medical staff to handle most cases themselves. Stateside, Amundson is now based at the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. She’s the only maxillofacial surgeon within a 14-county radius and serves patients across the Deep South. “I try and counsel people who want to do humanitarian surgery abroad that it’s not easy,” she says. “There are a lot of people who need help here in the United States, and that is also very rewarding.”

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Robin Subar

Courtesy of Victor Barnett

Ross Freedman ’97 Cofounder, Origin UW Major: Information Systems

Victor Barnett ’82 Founder and CEO, Running Rebels UW Major: Communication Arts

Ross Freedman’s entrepreneurial journey started move-in weekend his freshman year at the UW, where he met his friend and long time business partner Brad Schneider ’97 in the elevator of their dorm. After graduation, Freedman began his career as a software developer for Fortune 500 companies, but it didn’t take long for him to feel the entrepreneurial pull to launch his own tech related company. In 2000, he and Schneider founded Wired Matrix, a systems integration company which merged into West Monroe, a prominent Chicago-based consultancy in 2002. Five years later, Freedman and Schneider again partnered to create Rightpoint, a consulting firm that helped clients accelerate digital transformation. Rightpoint experienced explosive growth, expanding into an inter- national firm with 12 offices and more than 800 employees before its sale to Genpact in 2019. The sale offered Freedman some time to consider his next challenge. He joined the UW’s Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship’s WAVE Advisory Board. And he became a mentor for the university’s Creative Destruction Lab, a business accelerator program. In 2023, Freedman was named CDL’s Mentor of the Year. He also created a new UW business community called Badgers in Tech to help students and alumni network across the tech industry. In 2024, Freedman cofounded Origin, a data-experience company shaping the future of analytics, AI, and automation. Origin’s goal is to augment human intelligence, rather than replace it, he says. “We will accelerate knowledge by providing the tools and infrastructure that people need to do more and to achieve more with AI.”

When he was in middle school in Milwaukee, many of Victor Barnett’s friends were incarcerated for various reasons. Barnett suspected that a large part of the problem was a lack of positive male mentors — the kind he’d known during his early childhood in rural Mississippi. “I always had older guys that influenced me, helped me steer away from trouble,” he says. As a teenager, Barnett became one of those mentors to a struggling neighborhood boy. Barnett started to regularly play basketball with him, and word spread to other boys who wanted to play. Even after Barnett began his freshman year at UW–Madison, he traveled back to Milwaukee most weekends to keep playing with the group, which eventually swelled to 100 boys. Barnett decided to form the organization Running Rebels to keep the group going. More than 40 years later, the nonprofit has become a staple resource for inner-city youth, with athletic and academic programs that serve more than 2,500 students in seven public schools, a staff of 130, and partnerships with the city court system that help keep at-risk teenagers out of juvenile detention. Barnett has won numerous accolades for his work with Milwaukee youth. But his greatest achievements, he says, are the life stories of the young men who find successful paths after participating in Running Rebels. Their alumni include NBA champion Kevon Looney, Grambling State University basketball coach Donte Jackson, and several prominent community leaders — yet Barnett says he is equally proud of the young men who have simply avoided incarceration and become healthy, dedicated parents.

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Sam Gilbert

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Amed Khan ’91 President, Amed Khan Foundation UW Majors: International Relations, Political Science

Robin Wall Kimmerer MS’78, PhD’83 Author, professor, and director, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, SUNY UW Majors: Botany and Forestry As a UW graduate student, Robin Wall Kimmerer spotted a photo in an Arboretum building of the tallest American elm tree in the United States. It was named the Louis Vieux Elm, in honor of a Potawatomi elder who was one of Kimmerer’s ancestors. Shortly after, Kimmerer was invited to a gathering to hear Native elders talk about plant wisdom. The timing of these occurrences felt connected and sparked a profound realization. “To walk the science path, I had stepped off the path of Indigenous knowledge,” she says. Kimmerer is a distinguished professor of environmental biology, best-selling author, and founding director of the SUNY Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which articulates a vision for incorporating Indigenous plant knowledge and storytelling into Western science. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide, and in 2022, Kimmerer received a MacArthur “genius grant.” Her focus as a plant ecologist is biocultural restoration, with the aim of healing human relationships with the land. She advocates beginning with a fundamental shift in perspec- tive, from viewing nature as a resource to be exploited to experiencing it as a community of kinfolk to which we belong. “People have a great longing to be in a right relationship with nature,” she says. “The way we treat land is how we treat each other. It’s the idea of kinship with each other and with other species. We can extend that idea of kinship to the land itself.”

Two weeks after graduation, Amed Khan joined Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, and when Clinton won, Khan became the special assistant to the director of the Peace Corps, where his resonsibilities included serving as liaison to the White House. Almost immediately, he realized he wanted to be in the field instead. In 1995, Khan jumped at a chance to conduct a site survey in Georgia in the midst of national conflict. “The U.S. embassy was in a trailer, and there was gunfire 24/7. It was in the middle of winter, with no electricity or heat,” he says. “I loved it.” Khan shifted to the International Rescue Committee and moved to Tanzania to help refugees fleeing Rwanda. He also began to dabble in investing to generate resources to help, eventually creating an investment firm. Khan has emerged as the most prominent and effective private-aid coordinator in active conflict areas, including Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He has traveled to 185 countries and worked directly in more than 60. He personally conducts complex, high-stakes operations that include large-scale evacuations, supply runs, and refugee housing efforts. In 2021 Khan flew into Kabul during the withdrawal of U.S. forces to rescue two Afghan children of an American government employee. While there, he was contacted by dozens of Afghani women trying to leave. He reached out to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who sent in Ukrainian special forces to evacuate hundreds of female professionals, and Khan also personally chartered flights out of Kabul. Khan also cofounded Elpída Home in Thessaloniki, Greece, which houses refugees on their way to homes in the European Union.

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Frank Mensia

Neptuna Pumps Ltda.

Liz Lefkofsky ’91 President, Lefkofsky Family Foundation UW Major: Sociology In 2015, videos began to appear online of teenagers across the United States giving checks for $1,000 to people in need, courtesy of an anonymous project called VING. Eventually, the benefactor was revealed: Liz Lefkofsky. A decade and more than 1,000 gifts later, VING is still going strong — and Lefkofsky still watches every tear-jerker video of teens presenting gifts to special adults in their lives who are experiencing financial challenges. VING is only one of several core initiatives that the philanthropist leads at the Lefkofsky Family Foundation, which she established with husband Eric Lefkofsky, a tech entrepreneur, in 2006. One of their most impactful is the Success Bound program for middle-school students, which is a research-informed curriculum that prioritizes self-exploration and skills to help students build the social capital, awareness, and life goals to succeed in high school, college, and beyond. Success Bound will be fully integrated into every public middle school in Chicago after this year, and the foundation is currently piloting the curriculum in several schools nationwide. The foundation also makes medical, arts, and human-rights grants. Lefkofsky’s philanthropic vision evolved from watching her mother cofound the American Brain Tumor Association in the early 1970s, after Lefkofsky’s older sister died from a tumor in her brain stem. “Our family business was raising money for brain-tumor research,” she says, recalling that the whole family would sit at the table stuffing envelopes for mailings. And just as her mother did, Lefkofsky involves her three children in the family foundation’s efforts, in the hopes of sparking a deep passion in all of them to make a difference.

Petar Ostojic MS’05 CEO, Neptuno Pumps | Executive Director, Center of Innovation and Circular Economy UW Major: Mechanical Engineering Petar Ostojic grew up in the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world. While in college in Chile, he spotted a flyer for a scholarship sponsored by the late UW professor Eduardo Neale-Silva MA’28, PhD’35, who made it possible for science and technology students from his home country to finish their degrees at the UW. Ostojic applied, won, and moved to Madison for an immersive experience in both humidity and sustainable tech. After graduation, Ostojic returned to his hometown of Iquique to take on a leadership role in his family’s business, a pump manufacturer for the mining industry. Ostojic offered a new vision: to produce pumps refashioned from recycled industrial parts. Neptuno Pumps is now a multimillion dollar company with a global reputation for eliminating waste in every step of its processes. Neptuno’s success garnered Ostojic several invitations from other businesses and government agencies to speak about the importance of sustainable manufacturing practices. In 2017, he founded the Center of Innovation and Circular Economy — the first of its kind in the region — to advocate for policy changes and more sustainable corporate practices in Chile, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina. He also launched a podcast called Revolución Circular, which connects hundreds of sustainability-minded entrepreneurs and innovators across Latin America. “What is going on in Chile now is amazing,” he says. “We’re one of the most conscious countries in the world in terms of mixing technology and sustainability.” Ostojic is proud to play a part in that.

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Alu WISCO REDDY Photography Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois ’10, MA’13 Lead Climate Security Analyst, U.S. Department of State UW Major: Agricultural and Applied Economics, Soil Science, Languages and Cultures of Asia Chelsea Cervantes De Blois was the first woman on either side of her family to earn an undergraduate and graduate degree. She focused on Middle Eastern studies, agricultural economics, and soil science, and she hoped to gain experience in the Middle East to pursue a career in environmental-focused diplomacy. During her sophomore year, when

Forward Award

The Forward Award acknowledges rising stars in various fields who exemplify the Wisconsin Idea through an emphasis on service, discovery and progress. This award celebrates young alumni who have demonstrated exceptional early career achievement and a positive impact on their professions.

her funding request for a UW–sponsored undergraduate research project was denied, Cervantes De Blois was undaunted. She networked with soil scientists connected to the United Nations and was invited to the Applied University of Al-Baqqa’ in Jordan to work on a wetland irrigation project. It was the first in a long string of overseas opportunities. She received a Fulbright Fellowship in Azerbaijan, followed soon by a Boren Fellowship and State Department Title VIII fellowships, to investigate environmental vulnerability and climate variability in the Middle East and Eurasia. In between, she worked as a consulting scientist for commercial agricultural firms in Serbia and Kyrgyzstan. These experiences, combined with recruitment bid from the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Geographer and Global Issues. There, Cervantes De Blois informs climate policy and diplomacy discussions in Washington, DC. A significant part of her role is to brief diplomats and special envoys. She’s also one of a handful of experts in her field who speaks Russian, Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani. her dissertation on addressing human environmental data gaps, earned her a

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Daryl Marshke

Joy Isabelle Photo

Jarell Skinner-Roy ’11 PhD Candidate, Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, University of Michigan | Research Associate,

Adelaide Davis ’13 Senior Officer of Health Service Delivery and Operations, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) UW Major: History During a course on HIV/AIDS in the African studies department, Adelaide Davis realized she wanted to work in a health-related field. A UW study-abroad program in Cape Town focused her interest to working on the social determinants of health in Africa. At the same time, Davis was active on the Wisconsin Sailing Team. “Sailing as a sport has taught me so much,” she says. “You have to be able to adapt and stay in the moment, be very flexible, and be very analytical.” Those skills came in handy when Davis worked in various roles at the U.S. Department of State and the World Health Organization. She joined the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in 2019, and, shortly after, Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders (MSF). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Davis deployed first to Chad and later to the Democratic Republic of the Congo before security conditions deteriorated to the point that MSF was forced to pull out. Witnessing the community-wide impact of the MSF evacuation had a profound effect on Davis. She saw a significant need to strengthen community health systems to make them sustainable without being reliant on international aid. She returned to the IFRC and settled in Geneva, Switzerland, where she’s now a senior officer of health-service delivery and operations. She leads country-level efforts to grow and support networks of community health volunteers. “At the international level, we’re there to support however we’re needed, but it’s really about growing local grassroots capacity,” she says.

Campus Abolition Research Lab UW Major: French, Legal Studies

During Jarell Skinner-Roy’s first week as a UW undergraduate, a campus police officer stopped him and asked for his student ID, which hadn’t been issued yet. The officer told him that he looked suspicious and harassed him for several minutes. It was the first of many microaggressions Skinner-Roy experienced on campus as a Black man. A lifelong Badger fan who grew up in Madison, he often felt like he didn’t belong and considered dropping out. He credits his persistence to his close friends and his adviser at the Center for Academic Excellence, Linda McCarroll Stamm, who nurtured his passion for enacting institutional change. As an intern at the Dane County District Attorney’s Office, Skinner-Roy worked with young Black men caught in the carceral system. After graduation, he taught abroad in Benin, where he was deeply inspired by the collective spirit of his host community. He then worked for an education nonprofit in the Twin Cities supporting students of color while also serving on various nonprofit boards. His growing awareness of systemic racism and educational inequalities inspired him to earn a master’s degree in higher education from the University of Michigan in 2019. He’s now pursuing his PhD there, focusing on racialized policing on college campuses. “I think a lot about radical imagination, envisioning our institutions not as they are, but as they could be,” he says. “Imagining something that has never existed before is challenging, but it’s the first step toward making meaningful change.”

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Courtesy of Tara Yang

Generation Genius, Inc.

Jeffrey Vinokur ’12 CEO, Generation Genius UW Major: Biochemistry

Tara Yang ’13 Chair, Green Bay Equal Rights Commission UW Major: Life Sciences Communication As a teenager, Tara Yang watched her parents open an Asian grocery store in their Green Bay neighborhood. The store, Main Oriental Market, evolved into a de facto community center, where people could share information, opportunities, and various forms of support. Yang went on to attend UW–Madison, and after graduation, she worked at Simply Tera’s, a whey protein manufacturer, and later at Organic Valley. However, when she went home to visit, she realized that many families were still struggling with intergenerational poverty. That inspired her to pivot to work in nonprofit business development in Minneapolis, where she partnered with minority-owned “mom-and pop” businesses. By 2018, she was ready to bring those skills back to Green Bay. A year later, Eric Genrich ’02 was elected mayor of Green Bay, and Yang introduced herself. She encouraged Genrich to put the Asian-American community at the top of his agenda, and he appointed her to the city’s economic development authority committee. In 2021, Yang was appointed chair of Green Bay’s new Equal Rights Commission, making her the city’s first Asian-American commissioner. She’s involved in a wide range of initiatives, including the development of 25 acres on the city’s industrial east side into an urban farm, park, and high-quality family housing project that aims to uplift some of Green Bay’s most economically vulnerable populations. She’s also spearheading the development of an Asian American Resource Center to formalize some of the community services her family has long offered in an ad hoc way at Main Oriental Market.

As a UW sophomore, Jeff Vinokur donned a rhinestone lab coat and broke open a glow stick, explaining on video how chemical reactions can emit light. Then he danced with glowing hands, and the “Dancing Scientist” was born. Vinokur refined the act and submitted an audition tape to the 2010 season of America’s Got Talent . He was invited to perform in Las Vegas, marking the first of many TV appearances. At the same time, Vinokur was also performing more than 100 live-science demonstrations each year for school groups and events. Though Vinokur already had his own dance channel on YouTube, he learned the ropes of science demonstrations from James Maynard, the director of the chemistry department’s Demonstration Lab, and chemistry professor Bassam Shakhashiri, who wrote a textbook on science demos for teachers. At UCLA, Vinokur won a graduate fellowship to conduct enzyme research. Yet it wasn’t long before he regretted shelving his performances just as he’d been gaining momentum. So after completing his PhD, he found a business partner with close connections to the television industry. They launched Generation Genius, a media company that produces science and math videos for elementary students. In 2018, the company received a $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Generation Genius is now one of the fastest growing ed-tech startups in the nation, and Vinokur’s videos are currently shown in 30 percent of schools in the United States. These days, the “Dancing Scientist” is known among his young fans as Dr. Jeff, who reminds them in every video to “always question, always wonder.”

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WISCONSIN ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Andy Manis

Abby Kursel ’14 Partner, gener8tor UW Major: Marketing

Maggie Brickerman ’08 Partner, gener8tor UW Major: Political Science capital investment and have created more than 11,000 jobs in various industries across the country, with a significant number in the Midwest and Deep South. For the past year, Kursel and Brickerman have been focusing their attention specifically on Wisconsin’s startup and venture-capital network, which is consistent with the regional strategy gener8tor designed to support entrepreneurs and investors committed to starting, growing, and investing in businesses in their particular state. “We’ve built gener8tor — and our careers — on the idea that Wisconsin has everything it takes to create jobs, to create wealth,” says Brickerman. “Our companies weren’t getting investment from other places, [but] we have the innovation and the genius here. We’ve proven it through fund returns, and people should not hesitate to bet on that with us.”

In 2014, fellow Badgers Troy Vosseller ’10 and Joe Kirgues ’08 hired Abby Kursel (above left) and Maggie Brickerman (above right) as the first two employees of a new startup accelerator they’d founded. The two are now equity partners at gener8tor, which has grown into one of the highest-ranked startup accelerators nationwide, with more than 75 programs, 130 employees, and a presence in 46 cities in three countries. Early on, the two women were tasked with creating and managing the company’s gBETA accelerator. They worked with clients such as two UW–Madison seniors who turned a class project into a thriving sleep-lab data company. Kursel and Brickerman then worked their way up the ladder by leading gener8tor’s primary investment accelerator program. In total, more than 1,400 participating startups have together raised more than $2.3 billion in

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Alumni around the nation are integral to many positive initiatives in their local chapters and their communities, and each year, their fellow Badgers single out the most outstanding chapter members for recognition. WAA extends congratulations and a heartfelt thank-you to these outstanding 2023–24 chapter alumni. Alumni Chapter Awards

Lifetime Achievement Award

The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes chapter leaders who have served in a role (or multiple roles) with a chapter for 10 years or more. A big thank-you for extended service goes to:

Sherry Korner ’76 St. Louis chapter

Presidents’ Circle of Excellence Award

The Presidents’ Circle of Excellence Award recognizes excellence in volunteer service to the university for alumni who have actively served in a leadership role with their local alumni chapter. With much gratitude for your support of UW– Madison, we congratulate:

Charles Kluz ’91 Bay Area Badgers chapter

John Mills ’85 Los Angeles chapter

If you would like to nominate someone for an Alumni Award, please visit uwalumni.com/awards for more information.

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WISCONSIN ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Badger of the Year Award

The Badger of the Year Award recognizes local alumni who have represented the university positively through success in their professions, community service initiatives, or volunteer activities. We extend our sincere admiration and appreciation to:

Cavalier Johnson ’09 Milwaukee chapter (Summer 2023)

Alexia Rebne ’05, MS’07, OTD’20 Fond du Lac chapter (Summer 2023)

Patricia Venner ’99 Heart of Illinois chapter (Summer 2023)

Alec Ingold ’18 Brown County chapter

Laurie Jinkins ’85, MA’87 Seattle chapter

Susan Knight MS’86, PhD’88 Lakeland chapter

Emilu Larson ’07 Chippewa Valley chapter

Craig LeCroy PhD’83 and Kerry MSW’83 Milligan Tucson chapter

Henry Schvey ’69 St. Louis chapter

Shannon Seeberan ’99 Bay Area Badgers chapter

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WISCONSIN ALUMNI ASSOCIATION