Class Note 2008

Thanks to those of you who sent in updates for this, my inaugural Class Notes. It was great to hear from all of you, and I hope to be an acceptable heir to the Jon Hopper throne.

First up, a few new additions to the families of the class of 2008. On August 8 Neil Willis and his wife, Lilly, welcomed their second child, Ava Grace Willis.

Three days later Megan (Strout) Maher and her husband, Ryan, welcomed their first child, Beverly “Bizzy” Anne Maher. Bizzy clocked in at an ounce under eight pounds, and Megan is already penciling her in for the class of 2039.

Jon Simpson and his wife Abby welcomed their first child Melody Rebel Emerson-Simpson on July 19th. Everyone is doing great, and Melody is reportedly snoozin’ only at the most inopportune of times.

Congratulations are also in order for Meredith (Druss) Lesser, who married Jon Lesser in May. The long list of Dartmouth attendees included Kelsey Blodget, Victoria Fener, Julia Schwartz, Leslie Shribman, Elise Waxenberg, Ling Guo, Tess Hales, Elizabeth Healy, Tom Healy, Steve Lonegan, Jess Kahn Marks, Rebekah Rombom and Dana Silberstein, among others. They dusted off “Blame it on the Boogie” and still remembered the moves 13 years after first learning them on trips. Good times!

If you’re roaming around the girdled earth, odds are you’ll bump into a classmate. In northern California you may run across Simon Trabelsi, hanging out at his brother and sister’s vegan butcher shop in Berkeley or in any random recording studio in Oakland. If he’s not in California, he’s probably in Sweden spending time with family and working on music.

And if your roamings take you east, Kiersten Hallquist and her husband recently closed on their first house in the New North End of Burlington, Vermont. The house comes complete with a guest room, so look them up if you’re ever in town!

Academically and beyond, ’08s continue to excel. Daewoong “Dillon” Lee is in Boston, enjoying an anesthesia residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. And Ani Liu graduated from MIT Media Lab with a master’s in science earlier this year. In her thesis, she developed an interface by which women can control the movement of sperm with their mind as an act of feminist protest. Since then, she’s been busy, moving back to New York to pursue a career as an artist, working on a project about labor, mechanical production and the psyche in China on a hacking manufacturing grant and opening a solo art show at the Boston Center for the Arts in October. (Read more about her on page 63.)

Matthew Siegfried is doing well and keeping details close to the chest.

That’s it for this round, friends. Stay in touch and keep doing interesting things!

—Chris Barth, 315 14th Ave. NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413; (609) 405-9153; cbarthrun@gmail.com