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Michael Hanko '86 (Photo: Courtesy Michael Hanko)

Since leaving the U.S. Army and becoming a classical singer and actor, Michael Hanko ’86 had not spent much time dwelling on his unhappy years as a gay lieutenant (and ROTC cadet) at a time when gays were barred from military service. But last year, while working on a translation of a piece of German lieder music, Hanko decided to experiment with writing his own lyrics. He began thinking about his Army days. “I guess somewhere, deep in my psyche, there was this unaddressed emotion,” he says.

The German lieder form — expressive poetic compositions, typically for one singer with piano accompaniment, composed by the likes of Schubert and Mozart — helped Hanko to capture an emotionally charged story that included both deep pain and humor. Working with colleagues Byron Sean and Stephanie Fittro, he developed an hourlong cabaret show, Platoon Lieder. Hanko will perform the show at Reunions May 31. The event is sponsored by the Fund for Reunion/Princeton Bisexual, Transgendered, Gay and Lesbian Alumni (FFR/BTGALA).

The themes of Platoon Lieder, Hanko says, speak to a wide range of audiences, not just those who are gay or who have served in the military. The story examines common problems — feeling like an outsider, choosing the wrong path — as well as positive outcomes. While stationed in Germany, Hanko began taking the voice lessons that helped him to find a new career in music.

Hanko, a baritone who lives and works in New York City, will be coming back to Princeton for the first time since he graduated with an A.B. in music 27 years ago. He recently found his class beer jacket in his parents’ attic. Tucked inside the pocket was a registration form for FFR/BTGALA.

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Robert Musslewhite '92 (Photo: Courtesy the Advisory Board Company)

As CEO of the Advisory Board Company, a leading consulting firm for hospitals and health systems, Robert Musslewhite ’92 has plenty of business experience to draw upon. But in his recent contribution to The New York Times’ “The Boss” column, Musslewhite cited a key lesson from an earlier experience: swimming at Princeton.

An injury to one of the Tigers’ top swimmers forced Musslewhite into the lineup as the anchor of the 200-yard medley relay team at the NCAA Championships in 1989, his freshman year. Teammates Mike Ross ’90, Ty Nelson ’91, and Rich Korhammer ’89 handed a lead to Musslewhite, and he managed to hold off his opponents in a tight finish, winning the national title. Musslewhite wrote that the race “showed me how discipline and hard work could put you in a position to be lucky.”

Musslewhite’s path after Princeton included earning a law degree from Harvard, clerking for a Federal District Court judge, and working in management consulting. He joined the Advisory Board Company in 2003 and became CEO five years later. In 2012, he was among Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year honorees for the Washington, D.C., area, and earlier this year, Modern Healthcare named him as one of 300 nominees for its list of the most influential people in health care.

Like many of our Tiger of the Week honorees, Robert Musslewhite ’92 was nominated by a PAW reader. Do you have an idea for a future Tiger of the Week profile? Let us know.

Mark Nelson '77, right, with Ari Brand in My Name is Asher Lev. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Mark Nelson ’77’s starring role in the off-Broadway play My Name is Asher Lev is more than a job — it represents what was for Nelson an adolescent validation. The play, which is based on a Chaim Potok novel of the same name, tells the story of a Hasidic Jewish youth whose artistic inclinations do not align with the religious undercurrents of his community. After reading the story at age 16, Nelson came to an understanding from its narrative that “there were lots of ways to be a good Jew.”

Nelson needed to hear that “sometimes parents don’t get it — that one’s particular nature needs to be honored sometimes at difficult cost,” he said, describing the challenges he encountered in reconciling his drive to make art with his family’s ideas about worthwhile pursuits. In working on the play, Nelson has found numerous people on whom the novel My Name is Asher Lev also had profound influence. “A lot of people need that affirmation that sometimes it’s more important to be happy than to be normal,” he noted.

Though Nelson struggled with his family’s views, he soon found a support system in Princeton friends and teachers — many of whom were involved in theater. Theater Intime was “a community of like-minded spirits,” and Nelson found a mentor in the late Daniel Seltzer ’54. Selzer taught modern drama and English; Nelson took every class the professor taught.

“The idea that someone could be a great scholar and actor at the same time was very inspiring to me,” Nelson said.

Nelson is now teaching at Princeton himself as a lecturer in theater at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He holds this appointment during the fall, which leaves him free to act and direct during the rest of the year. This March he received the 2013 Lunt-Fontanne Fellowship, which will allow him to participate in a weeklong master class with six-time Golden Globe winner and five-time Emmy Award winner Alan Alda.

But working with students is a huge priority, he said.

“It’s just really satisfying to help students find their own power, their own voice, their own beauty,” he said. “I’m crazy about teaching.”

Like many of our Tiger of the Week honorees, Mark Nelson ’77 was nominated by a PAW reader. Do you have an idea for a future Tiger of the Week profile? Let us know.

Last month, when geophysicist Karin Sigloch *08 and co-author Mitchell Mihalynuk published a Nature paper offering a new explanation for the formation of the North American Cordillera, the large collection of mountain chains that stretches from Alaska to Mexico, peers hailed the work as “momentous” and “a mini-revolution.”

Sigloch was grateful for the response — and she understood the reaction. She told PAW that the research gave her a “feeling of surprise and wonder” when she and Mihalynuk were combining findings from geophysics and geology to re-envision how the western part of the continent formed. “A huge archipelago of volcanic islands rose from the proto-Pacific in our mind’s eye, and we pictured North America bulldozing over it during the age of the dinosaurs,” Sigloch said in an email.

Earlier interpretations had suggested that the mountain belt was formed “by relatively insignificant events,” Sigloch said, with small pieces of oceanic crust being delivered to the west coast as if they were on a conveyor belt. But that didn’t explain the geological diversity of the crust in the region.

Sigloch and Mihalynuk assert that the mountains came from larger formations: offshore island arcs similar to modern-day Japan and the Philippines. When North America drifted westward between 150 and 50 million years ago, the continent overrode these “micro-continents” and built up the Cordillera.

Sigloch’s Ph.D. work at Princeton played a key role in the Nature paper. She had developed a method for creating 3-dimensional images of the earth’s deep interior, “using waves generated by naturally occurring earthquakes,” and tested it on data from USArray, a network of seismological sensors. In the process, she discovered that the oceanic plate sinking back into the mantle under the Pacific Northwest does not connect to deeper fragments of ancient ocean crust — a detail that did not mesh with the standard hypothesis for the formation of the western part of the continent.

Sigloch now teaches at the University of Munich and has fond memories of her graduate school experience. “The Princeton community of colleagues, mentors, and friends is very special to me,” she said. “I grew at Princeton — it’s part of me now.”

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Graham Ezzy '11 (Photos: Quincy Dein [action]; Kevin Pritchard [portrait])

Not many Princeton alumni can claim the title of “professional windsurfer.” In fact, as far as we can tell, there’s only one: Graham Ezzy ’11.

Ezzy, the son of a well-known sail designer, was raised in Maui and competed as a pro before he came to college, specializing in wave sailing, the more extreme and creative form of the sport.

While wave sailing has gained popularity in Europe and Asia, Ezzy said that the sport is not as well known in the United States, where most people seem to see windsurfing as a leisurely sailing pursuit. On the waves, it’s more like half-pipe snowboarding. Competitors use the combined power of wind and waves to make physics-defying leaps and turn breathtaking tricks. At its best, Ezzy said, it’s “almost supernatural.”

With no waves to be found on Lake Carnegie, Ezzy put the sport on hold for much of his time at Princeton. Concentrating on coursework had its perks. “Taking the time off allowed me to break bad habits,” he says, noting that he won a pro event in Cabo Verde, off the western coast of Africa, during intercession of his sophomore year.

As a student, Ezzy managed to seek out other recreation on the water, surfing with Princeton’s club team and training with the lightweight crew. Since graduation, he has competed on the American Windsurfing Tour, tested new equipment for his sponsors, and starred in action sports videos, including “Take 1” (see below), a new short by filmmaker and windsurfing champion Kevin Pritchard.

In a recent blog post, Ezzy said Pritchard’s feel for the sport helped him capture the footage used in the film. He compared the experience to “a dance to an unfamiliar song with a familiar partner.”

Read more: Graham Ezzy ’11’s blog, surf-matic.com

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Peter P. Blanchard III '74 (Photo: Courtesy Peter P. Blanchard III)

When Peter P. Blanchard III ’74 visits Greenwood Gardens, the public garden that occupies what once was his childhood home, he likes to see if it still passes the “360-degree test.” If you can stand in one spot, make a full rotation, and “not see or hear anything that reminds you of where you are” — in suburban New Jersey, not far from the train lines and highways that carry commuters to Manhattan — then the space is meeting its goal, Blanchard says.

Blanchard’s parents, Peter Jr. ’35 and Adelaide, a lawyer and a pediatrician, respectively, bought the Short Hills, N.J., property in 1949, looking for a retreat from city life. Proximity to bridle trails at the nearby South Mountain Reservation was part of the draw — both were fond of horses. Blanchard’s father also renovated the estate’s gardens, which had been designed by the architect William Renwick decades earlier, when Joseph P. Day owned the property.

“I wasn’t wild about the garden aspect, ironically,” says the younger Blanchard, a dedicated conservationist. “It was too formal, too fancy — too grand, I guess.” But since his father’s death in 2000, Blanchard has worked to preserve the gardens as an oasis of green in the country’s most densely populated state. That long road reaches another milestone later this month: The gates will be open three days a week from April 28 through October 29, the public garden’s first full season.

Converting the historic gardens to a center for horticultural and environmental education has been a challenging process, according to Blanchard. “We had a vague idea [of what was involved], but I don’t think we understood the complexity,” he says. An alliance with the Garden Conservancy, a national nonprofit, helped to direct the restoration. Since 2003, visitors have been coming to the gardens for scheduled tours and designated “open days,” watching the gradual conversion. Landscape Architecture Magazine called the gardens “a living preservation lab where visitors can observe the thorny trash of bringing an historic landscape back to life.”

Blanchard said he hopes the formal gardens, open meadows, and woodlands will be a space where visitors can develop a love of nature, much like he did as a child. In addition to his work at Greenwood Gardens, Blanchard is involved in safeguarding coastal lands from development pressures in Maine as a board member of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. He is the author of We Were an Island, a 2010 book about a couple that lived in seclusion on an island off the Maine coast for more than 35 years.

Read more: PAW’s 2010 interview with Blanchard about We Were an Island.

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Will Venable '05, Princeton's lone major leaguer on opening day, is approaching Moe Berg '23's career hits record for alumni. (Photo: Rick Scuteri, USA TODAY Sports)

Will Venable ’05’s day began with a home run and ended with a face full of shaving cream, courtesy of an exuberant teammate. In between, the San Diego Padres outfielder drove in four runs — including three on a bases-loaded triple — to lead his team to a 9-3 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers April 9. All things considered, it was a pretty good day. 

Venable, now in his sixth major league season, was the only Princetonian on a big-league roster on opening day last week. (Pitchers Chris Young ’02 and Ross Ohlendorf ’05 are teammates on the Triple-A Syracuse Chiefs, an affiliate of the Washington Nationals.) Though he’s not known as a home-run hitter, his 46 major-league homers are the most by any Princeton alumnus, and he’s on pace to become the University’s most prolific hitter in the next few months. Catcher and World War II spy Moe Berg ’23 had 441 hits in his 15 major-league seasons; Venable currently has 405. 

Venable grew up around baseball — his father, Max, played in the major leagues and in the Japanese pro league — but Princeton fans are more likely to remember his exploits on the basketball court, where he scored more than 1,000 career points and helped Princeton win the Ivy League title in his junior season, earning a trip to the NCAA Tournament. Venable starred in the Tigers’ opening-round loss to Texas. 

In March, Venable reflected on the NCAA Tournament experience in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune. “You realize how important it is not to just your team but to everyone around the country,” he said. “It’s really something special to be a part of.”

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Eamon Carrig '05, left, and T.J. Edwards '06 with an earlier prototype of the Robotboat. (Photo: Courtesy T.J. Edwards)

As any middle-school student can tell you, about two thirds of the Earth is covered by water — a fact that makes studying the world’s oceans a daunting task. But Princeton friends Eamon Carrig ’05 and T.J. Edwards ’06 hope to make that job a little easier by developing an autonomous sailboat (or, ideally, a fleet of them) that would make data collection less labor-intensive and more cost-effective.

Carrig and Edwards work at Autonomous Marine Systems (AMS), a boutique technology start-up in Silver Spring, Md., led by Walter Holemans, founder of the small aerospace firm Planetary Systems Corp. Two other Princetonians, Rob Atkin ’91 and James Nugen ’91, also work for AMS.

The company’s latest prototype, Robotboat Mark VI, has been in the works for a few years, getting a major boost last fall when AMS raised funds using the crowd-funding site Kickstarter.com. “We weren’t quite sure we were going to be a great fit for Kickstarter,” Edwards says, noting that the site’s tech offerings are usually consumer electronics, not scientific-research vehicles. But the company’s pitch — which included catchy lines such as “never send a person to do a buoy’s job” — proved attractive. More than 1,000 donors supported the project, pushing AMS past its $80,000 goal.

Carrig, a philosophy major at Princeton with a broad background in computer programming, works on the boat’s navigation system, setting optimal rudder angles and other orientation details to help it travel from waypoint to waypoint. Edwards, a mechanical and aerospace engineer, works on design features, enabling the boat to right itself when it gets flipped and rolled in rough seas. Both are looking forward to a new round of field testing in the Chesapeake Bay this spring; they hope to demonstrate the technology for oceanographers later this year and eventually send the autonomous boat on a trans-Atlantic voyage. The boat could be used for a range of applications, from measuring pollution to surveying marine life.

Before the launch of AMS, Edwards and Carrig were co-owners in a different kind of start-up: a hostel on an island off the coast of Panama. Running the hostel was an around-the-clock job, Edwards says, with the owners doing “everything from working the desk to quieting the guests at 4 a.m.” But there was downtime, too: Using a computer-aided design program on his laptop, Edwards refined some of the elements now used in the Robotboat prototype.

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Mohsin Hamid '93 (Photo: Jillian Edelstein)

Novelist Mohsin Hamid ’93’s name seems to be popping up in the news every week. In February, he headlined the Lahore Literary Festival in his native Pakistan. In March, his new novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, hit the shelves, receiving several positive reviews. And in late April, the film adaptation of an earlier novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is scheduled to reach theaters. (Hamid helped to write the screenplay and consulted on the film).

In an interview with The New York Times India Ink blog, Hamid shrugged off his recent fame — including a Vogue story that placed his new novel among the year’s “13 things to look forward to in culture.”

“I met author Russell Banks at a literary festival,” Hamid told the Times, “and he told me that you don’t really know what your books have done until 10 years after they have been published. That means I will have to wait a decade to see if it has really had an impact.”

The novel, written in the form of a self-help book for Asians striving to get ahead, tells the tale of one man’s journey from impoverished boy to corporate tycoon.

Like many of Princeton’s alumni novelists, Hamid took courses in the University’s creative writing program (he lists Joyce Carol Oates and Tony Morrison among his influences). But the Woodrow Wilson School major took an indirect path into fiction writing, attending Harvard Law School and working in management consulting. When The Reluctant Fundamentalist, his second novel, became a bestseller, he says, “I felt like I could finally become a full-time writer.”

Read more: PAW’s April 11, 2007, feature story about Hamid, “East meets West.”

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Christopher Clark '87 (Photo: Courtesy Lambda Legal)

Attorney Christopher Clark ’87 has been active on two fronts of the effort to legalize same-sex marriage in his home state of Illinois. He helped to draft and review legislation that has passed the state Senate and now awaits a vote in the state House. He also leads the legal team for a group of 16 same-sex couples suing for the freedom to marry in the Cook County courts.

Clark is a senior staff attorney in the Midwest regional office of Lambda Legal, which pursues civil rights cases and public policy on behalf of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community. He says that each state responds differently to same-sex marriage efforts. In some cases, litigation can stall legislation; in others, it seems to encourage lawmakers to take action. “I think here it’s proven to be complementary,” Clark says.

For Clark, working on behalf of the LGBT population was part of the reason he started law school in the early 1990s, after working in advertising for five years. “I was really motivated by a much better understanding of what it was like to be openly gay in society at that point,” he says. He interned at Lambda Legal and kept in contact with the organization while working in private practice at Sachnoff & Weaver in Chicago, where he became a partner. He left to join Lambda Legal full time in 2007, seeing the move as an opportunity to fulfill the “in the nation’s service” ideal he had encountered as an undergraduate in the Woodrow Wilson School.

Clark’s region stretches from Ohio to the Dakotas, and while marriage equality often captures the headlines, he notes that Lambda Legal has broader goals, pursuing “impact litigation” that will change the world not only for the client but for others in the LGBT community.

To that end, Clark has worked on discrimination cases — including one in which a transgender student was prevented from wearing a dress to her prom — and other suits involving freedom of expression. In 2012, Clark successfully worked on behalf of a gay student in rural Ohio who was barred from wearing a “Jesus is not a homophobe” T-shirt to his high school. “It’s a remarkable experience to go through that process with a 17-year-old as your client,” he says. “It really inspired me.”

Like many of our Tiger of the Week honorees, Christopher Clark ’87 was nominated by a PAW reader. Do you have an idea for a future Tiger of the Week profile? Let us know.

Just three years into graduate school at Harvard, Courtney Dressing ’10 has helped to find an earth-sized, potentially habitable planet that may be pretty close by. In astronomical terms, “pretty close by” is still 13 light years — about 76 trillion miles — away, but this is a small distance compared to the vast expanses astrophysicists are used to dealing with.

Earth-like planets are of a certain size and distance from their host stars, Dressing explained, and may thus have surface temperatures that allow them to have the “right” amount of liquid water.

Courtney Dressing '10 (Photo: Courtesy Courtney Dressing)

In finding the possible neighbor planet, Dressing has become well-acquainted with the Kepler telescope, a NASA-launched spacecraft whose mission is to find planets similar to the Earth circling other stars. She, together with Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau, used data from the telescope to examine red-dwarf stars and 95 of their planetary companions. Red-dwarf stars are excellent candidates for planet hunting. They are about a third as large and one-thousandth as bright as the sun, which makes it easier for scientists to locate planets — one the size of the Earth, for example, would block more of the red dwarf’s light than it would the sun’s.

Dressing and Charbonneau determined that 6 percent of the red-dwarf stars had potentially Earth-like planets circling them, and 60 percent have planets smaller than Neptune. Their results will soon appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

Dressing’s study has gathered considerable public attention, receiving coverage in publications such as Scientific American and the Los Angeles Times. “I think the natural curiosity is to wonder if we’re alone in the universe or not,” Dressing said. “Just knowing that there could be another planet like the earth so close is comforting.”

This is not her first attempt at finding planets — her senior thesis featured an investigation of an imaging technique used to acquire planetary observations. Dressing said she remembers learning a great deal from her independent work in astrophysical sciences, and appreciated her department’s small size.

Like many of our Tiger of the Week honorees, Courtney Dressing ’10 was nominated by a PAW reader. Do you have an idea for a future Tiger of the Week profile? Let us know.

Varel Freeman '71 *74 *77 (Photo: Courtesy EBRD)

After studying engineering and public policy at Princeton, Varel Freeman ’71 *74 *77 expected to work in technology or consulting. But an interview with the World Bank steered him in a “totally different and unexpected” direction. Freeman followed that path and eventually became a leader in the field of emerging-market finance.

Freeman recently stepped down after two terms as first vice president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which was founded in 1991 to promote growth in the new market-oriented economies of Central and Eastern Europe. Earlier in his career, he worked on investments in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, first for the World Bank and its private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, and later with Chase Capital and Baring Private Equity Partners.

In a field where MBA grads were far more common than aeronautical engineers, Freeman said he found his engineering background to be “immensely handy.” Engineers, he said, are trained to evaluate things they don’t fully understand by simplifying them “to the point where you have some analogous experience” and then adding complexity. Freeman applied that approach when learning about new countries and new industry sectors.

At EBRD, Freeman faced new challenges in 2008-09 when the global financial crisis threatened the stability of banks in region where EBRD operates. Freeman and his colleagues pushed to ensure that rescue plans would not overlook Europe’s emerging markets, and as those local economies regained their footing, the demand for EBRD financing boomed. Backed by its shareholders, the bank expanded its efforts and widened its geographical reach to the east and south while maintaining its AAA credit rating.

EBRD President Sir Suma Chakrabarti, in a recent press release, thanked Freeman for his leadership. “With his keen instinct for sound banking, he deftly steered the EBRD’s investments as the bank sharply increased financing in response to the global economic crisis,” Chakrabarti said. The same release announced Freeman's successor at EBRD, who happens to be another Princetonian: Philip Bennett *79.

Freeman plans to return to the United States and spend more time with his family. He also hopes to have more opportunities to fly — for pleasure, not for business. A longtime pilot, he earned his commercial license before beginning his undergraduate studies at Princeton and even flew some charter flights to help pay tuition. Since then, Freeman has flown multiple trans-Atlantic flights, making memorable passes over remote areas of Greenland and Iceland.

Like many of our Tiger of the Week honorees, Varel Freeman ’71 *74 *77 was nominated by a PAW reader. Do you have an idea for a future Tiger of the Week profile? Let us know.