Class Note 1990
With just more than seven months ’til our 30th reunion (June 18-21), I encourage all of you to return to Hanover for this milestone weekend. I was surprised at how meaningful it was to attend our 25th, and I sense that our future Dartmouth reunions will follow suit. Take a leap and register!
Recently I asked ’90s, “What is your best memory (from your Dartmouth career) of something that took place outside of Hanover?” Here is Part I. Andrew Backer: “During Sophomore Summer Mike Sullivan led Psi U brethren on field trips to various New England locales. One trip, we headed to the coast of New Hampshire, where we went to a…water park. Among the fleet of cars was Dave Yaccino’s silver 1970s-era boat of a Cadillac sedan which, miraculously, sat eight on its leather bench seating. Afterwards a few brothers decided that, being on the coast and so close to Maine, we should go in search of lobster. (Several young men from land-locked states had never had a lobster.) Our idea was to purchase lobsters, then transport them back to Hanover and cook them there. I called my grandparents, who lived close by, and when my grandmother heard the plan, she realized its stupidity and invited our whole crew over. The years obscure my memory of all participants, but in addition to Mike and Dave, Aidan O’Connell, Jimmy Yu, Jon Nordmeyer, Shailan Shah, John Burke,and I(among others) arrived on my grandparents’ doorstep, where we were greeted by my grandfather, Malcolm Tucke Curtiss, Harvard class of ’33, singing ‘Dartmouth’s in town again, run, girls, run!’ My grandfather served the still-bathing-suit-clad Dartmouth boys cocktails, then took everyone out to dinner at the local lobster shack. My grandmother, a matriarch of New England, patiently showed Yaccino, a son of Pittsburgh, how to eat his first lobster; as I recall, she recommended he eat lobster rolls in the future.” Laura Van Wie McGrory: “Sleeping under the stars on a mesa in the Samburu District of Kenya during the Environmental Studies FSP with Dartmouth friends scattered nearby, knowing (or at least imagining) that wild animals were roaming the plains below.” Scott Reed: “During our foreign study program in Berlin, John Luedke and I did 120 mph across the Autobahn in our host mother’s BMW to visit the sea lions frolicking off the island of Sylt, the northernmost point in Germany.” Kim Lewis: “Wonderful friendships forged in the special city of Siena, Italy. I returned to Siena this year with my family and walked up to the front door of my host family’s house. (Unfortunately, they were not home.)”
And in classmate news: Rachael Winfree, a professor in the department of ecology, evolution, and natural resources at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, is one of 21 female scientists in the world (out of 184 scientists total) who made the list of “the most influential scientific minds” in the field of environment and ecology for the decade 2008-18. This list identifies the scientists with the greatest number of publications in the top 1 percent of all papers in their field, based on how often their papers have been cited.
Priya (Venkatesan) Hays, who was elected to the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American College of Medical Genetics, recently published a book titled, Advancing Healthcare Through Personalized Medicine. The book, Priya’s third,provides a unique perspective on the biomedical and societal implications of personalized medicine and how it will help mitigate the healthcare crisis and rein in ever-growing expenditures.
And Emily Hill was recently appointed by Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly to the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System Board of Trustees. Emily is executive director for the Hill Group at Morgan Stanley in Lawrence, Kansas.
—Rob Crawford, 22 Black Oak Road, Weston, MA 02493; crawdaddy37@gmail.com
