Robert Grondine ’74 has earned the 2010 Boston University School of Law’s Silver Shingle Alumni Award for Service to the Profession. Grondine, a partner with White & Case based in Tokyo, is considered a global expert in asset finance, especially aircraft finance.

Bruce Pfaff ’76, a principal with Chicago-based Pfaff & Gill, Ltd., has been named the 2011 Chicago Product Liability Lawyer of the Year by Best Lawyers rating service and one of Illinois’ Top Ten Lawyers for 2011 by Superlawyers, another rating service.

Y. Ute Bowman Otley ’90, the 1986-87 Ivy League Rookie of the Year and Dartmouth record-holder for assists in a season (148), has been named to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame 2011 Silver Anniversary Team for her accomplishments as a Valparaiso High School senior (she graduated as the school’s all-time leading scorer). She currently lives with her husband, Brian ’89, in Charlotte, Vermont, where she teaches AP government and coaches high school girls basketball.

Monica Miller ’92, an associate professor of English at Barnard, has earned the Modern Language Association of America’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an outstanding scholarly study of African-American culture for Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Duke University Press, 2009).

Nicole Vanatko ’01, an associate attorney at the firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, earned a 2010 Above & Beyond Pro Bono Achievement Award from the N.Y.C.-based Sanctuary for Families for vigorously defending a client in a complicated custody proceeding.

Frank Gilroy ’50 of Monroe, New York, has received the Writers Guild of America East’s Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Writing. Gilroy’s work spans television, film, theater and print and includes his play The Subject Was Roses, which earned him the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1965.

Wallace Darneille ’73, president and CEO of Plains Cotton Cooperative Association based in Lubbock, Texas, has received the U.S. State Department’s 2010 Award for Corporate Excellence for association subsidiary Denimatrix, a denim apparel production company.

Brigid Pasulka ’94, who teaches literature and composition at Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago, won the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for her debut novel about old and new Poland, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True.

Frida Polli ’94 has been named a 2010 Kaplan Life Sciences Fellow, given to first-year Harvard Business School M.B.A. students with life sciences backgrounds who are planning careers in science-related fields. Polli recently worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the brain and cognitive sciences department at MIT and did her dissertation work studying cognitive functioning in health, schizophrenia and autism at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Russell D’Souza ’07 and Jack Groetzinger ’07, cofounders of New York City-based SeatGeek (seatgeek.com), have been named to BusinessWeek’s list of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs 2010. The pair, who as undergrads founded EvolvingVox to help students furnish their dorm rooms, developed the website to help users find sports and concert tickets.