Class Note 2007. Sean Garren wrote in with a report on Derrick Smith’s 40th birthday celebration. Derrick stopped through Boston to spend a few days with Sean and Will DeKrey ’08 and shared a birthday brunch with their son, Rowan, who was born on the same day 38 years later. Derrick later stopped through Maine to see Jordan Milne, Lindsay Zahradka Milne,Paul Wright, and Liz Vaughan ’08. Derrick enters this new decade making a massive impact on the medical field as the executive director of development for the National Medical Fellowships, an organization dedicated to opening up access to medical careers and improving health outcomes for everyone. He gets to work every day to make sure that no one has to say “no” to a career in healthcare because they cannot afford medical school, an experience he had himself as a Dartmouth premed. Meanwhile, Sean is learning how to balance parenthood with career. While young Rowan loves the sun, he has little interest in his father’s job using solar power to mitigate climate change and economic inequity as chief program officer at the national nonprofit Vote Solar.
Marshall Smith sent his greetings from Arlington, Texas, reporting on a great reunion of the ’07 “Manse” crew: Matt Nolan, Matt Prout, Allan C. Jackson III, Chadd Funk, and T.J. Plichta. The group met up for a ski weekend and reunion in Bozeman, Montana, in February and stayed entertained with games of pong, recalling late-night EBAs trips, and trolling Allan Jackson.
I caught up with Mike Zargham, another ’07 with a Ph.D.! Mike got his doctorate from UPenn in robotics and has used it to lead engineering organizations. He works in digital civil engineering, applying new technologies to support organizations our society relies on. For the past eight years he has led a systems engineering firm called BlockScience. He also is heavily involved in two nonprofits, Metagov, which is a community of practice focused on digitally mediated self-governance, and Numfocus, which promotes open practices in research, data, and scientific computing. Mike also has an exciting new gig in which he received a research fellowship at the European Decentralization Institute focusing on the role of coding in political, corporate, and civic life. Mike lives in the Capital Region of New York with his wife, Kristin MacLean, a master chief in the U.S. Coast Guard, and has a daughter, Conrad, who started kindergarten this fall.
Exciting developments for Clara Aranovich: “After veritably baking in the Los Angeles sun and fires, I’ve been thrilled to return to New England for a spell as a visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and an associate fellow at its film study center. While here I am researching and developing a documentary project on construction machinery and labor as well as connecting with fellow film and theater makers in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I continue working remotely as an artistic director of Public Assembly, a community theater project and playwright development program I cofounded in 2018. Cambridge in the fall has been extremely dreamy and a fun change of pace from my bread-and-butter of directing network TV (my latest episode of Watson on CBS premiered last month, you can watch it on Paramount+). Since arriving in Massachusetts, I’ve seen ’08s Olivia Gilliatt and Robin McKechnie, Ahmed Darwish, Tu’14, and harassed my usual go-to’s via text: Chris Vilaseca (recently returned from two years in Paris), Brent Butler, and Matt Cohn ’08 and have reconnected with Cammy Houser over email! I hope to make it up to Hanover before returning to L.A.”
—Sam Routhier, 543 W 122nd St., Apt. 25B, New York, NY 10027; samrouthier@gmail.com