Recently in Tiger of the Week

Tiger of the Week: Dan Kelly ’03

Dr. Dan Kelly ’03 was still as student at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 2006 when he set up a feeding center for malnourished children in Sierra Leone. Later, he worked with Sierra Leonean doctor Mohamed Bailor Barrie to start a medical clinic and a nongovernmental relief group for amputees who had lost limbs in a decade-long civil war that ended in 2002. Kelly, who has started the first year of a residency program in Houston, continues to use his free time to promote global health.

Kelly’s extraordinary service and selflessness earned him recognition as one of five “Points of Light” at Yeshiva’s Hanukkah dinner in December. He also received the Albert S. Kuperman Award for Field Work in Global Health at his medical school graduation in June. His work will be featured in an upcoming documentary, “Pride of Lions,” and on Feb. 9, he will speak at Princeton, sharing his story with a campus audience.

The people Kelly met during a 2006 fellowship in Sierra Leone inspired him to act, he told PAW’s Katherine Federici Greenwood in an interview for a February 2008 feature story. “You can’t stand there and stare,” he said. “You want to do something.”

(Photo courtesy Dan Kelly ’03)

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.

Tiger of the Week: Darroll Powe ’07

The last time most Princeton hockey fans saw Darroll Powe ’07, he was skating for the Tigers in a 4-3 win over Brown in the ECAC Hockey playoffs at Baker Rink. Powe assisted on a goal against the Bears in that game, his last home contest at Princeton. He was a stalwart in four seasons on the ice, helping to start the turnaround that has propelled the men’s hockey team into the nation’s top 10.

Powe is still skating, still wearing orange and black, and still working to change the fortunes of his team. He’s now a backup center for the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers, who went on a five-game winning streak shortly after Powe was promoted from the minor leagues Dec. 4.

Powe scored his first NHL goal during that streak in a win against the New York Islanders Dec. 9. He cleaned up a rebound after teammate Mike Richards fired a shot at the goalie. “It bounced off the pad and it came right to me,” Powe told the Philadelphia Daily News. “It was good to get that first one out of the way and hopefully lots more to come.”

(Photo courtesy Princeton Athletic Communications)

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.

Tiger of the Week: Tina deVaron ’78

For more than a decade, jazz singer and piano player Tina deVaron ’78 has been writing songs about motherhood and performing them for appreciative audiences of parents and kids. This week, just in time for the holidays, she released a new song about the magic of cookies — entitled “When is a cookie?” — along with a music video that shows deVaron doing her best Betty Crocker impersonation.

While she admits the story in the video is a bit “off-the-wall,” deVaron says there is an underlying statement “about joy, togetherness, and chocolate.” In a Web post about making the video, she wrote, “I have rarely had more fun in my life.” (The fun shines through — check out the full video below and read about the project on deVaron’s blog.)

When she’s not baking up new tunes, deVaron plays weekly jazz shows for kids, called Madeline’s Tea, on Saturdays and Sundays at the Carlyle in New York City’s Bemelmans Bar. Her most recent album is Water Over Stones.

Tiger of the Week: Sean Gregory ’98

Dressed in a T-shirt, basketball shorts, and a pair of boxing gloves he’d bought at a New York sporting goods store, Time magazine reporter Sean Gregory ’98 climbed into the ring with Oscar De La Hoya at the boxing champion’s Big Bear Lake, Calif., training camp last week.

Fortunately for Gregory, the encounter was a boxing lesson, recorded for Time.com, and not a revival of George Plimpton’s participatory journalism. Viewers learned about a few of the sport’s finer points, and the writer emerged without a scratch — a win-win for Gregory, our Tiger of the Week. (De La Hoya was not as fortunate in his most recent fight; he lost a Dec. 6 bout to Manny Pacquiao.)

Gregory, a Woodrow Wilson School major who graduated from Columbia University’s journalism school in 2002, may be a familiar face for Princeton basketball fans. He was a reserve guard for the Tigers during a memorable run of Ivy championship seasons from 1996 to 1998. But an athletic background did not make Gregory a quick study in the boxing gym. His fumbling attempt to find his tempo on the speed bag offered a stark contrast to the mesmerizing rhythm of De La Hoya’s punches. That part was not scripted, Gregory said: “I actually was trying.”

Watch the complete video, which includes a cameo by former middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins:

Tigers of the Week: Scott Moore ’08 and Timothy Nunan ’08

Two alumni share Tiger of the Week honors this week, and that’s not all they have in common: Scott Moore, left, and Timothy Nunan are both recent graduates (Class of 2008); both are Fulbright Fellows this year (Moore in China, Nunan in Germany); and both were named Rhodes Scholars last week, joining Princeton undergraduate Stephen Hammer ’09 on the list of 32 American students chosen for the prestigious scholarships to Oxford University.

Moore, a Woodrow Wilson School major, plans to study environmental policy at Oxford and pursue a career “enhancing and building upon the idea of international environmental cooperation, through work in the government, academic, and NGO sectors.” Nunan, a German major who won his department’s senior thesis prize, plans to pursue a career in history. “Historians are society’s gadflies, teaching not to forget, but also not to mystify,” he wrote in his Rhodes application. “There’s no quicker way to forget the past than to worship it.”

Since 1904, more than 190 Princetonians have been named Rhodes Scholars. This is the second consecutive year in which Princeton had three recipients.

Photos: Courtesy the Moore family (Moore) and Brian Wilson, Office of Communications, Princeton University (Nunan)

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.

Tiger of the Week: Reginald Gibbons ’69

When Tiger of the Week Reginald Gibbons ’69 was named one of five finalists for the 2008 National Book Award in poetry for his new collection, Creatures of a Day (LSU Press, 2008), he understood the significance of the honor. “It’s very exciting, very gratifying, and it makes me feel that my work is very present at this moment in the U.S.,” Gibbons told interviewer Craig Morgan Teicher. “The country is so huge and so many thousands of books are published, that it’s not often enough that a writer can feel that a book is present — you can publish it but it still remains absent from the culture.”

Gibbons, a professor of English, classics, and Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, did not win the poetry award (Mark Doty received the prize Nov. 19), but he was right to believe that his work is “present”: His hometown newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, published one of his poems, “These Sideways Leaps, Remembering.” Nov. 22.

(Photo by Marc Hauser, courtesy LSU Press)

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.

Tiger of the Week: Jeff Bezos ’86

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ’86 has changed the world of online shopping and pioneered high-tech advances like the Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader. But we’ve chosen him as Tiger of the Week for his leadership on a relatively low-tech issue. Bezos is working to eliminate hard-to-open packaging, including the “clamshell” plastic cases in which many electronic devices are sold. “I shouldn’t have to start each Christmas morning with a needle nose pliers and wire cutters,” he told The New York Times. “But that is what I do, I arm myself, and it still takes me 10 minutes to open each package.” Amen!

While the change could save time and preserve parents’ patience, the move toward “frustration-free” containers also may have a real — albeit small — public health benefit: According to the Times story, the Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that each year, 6,000 Americans are treated at emergency rooms for injuries incurred while prying, stabbing, or cutting through packaging.

(Photo courtesy Niall Kennedy/Flickr)

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.

Tiger of the Week: Chris Lu ’88

President-elect Barack Obama’s transition Web site counts down the days until inauguration — 69, as of Nov. 12 — and in that time, the new White House will name 15 cabinet-level secretaries and members of more than a dozen councils or offices, such as the Office of Management and Budget and the Council of Economic Advisers. As executive director of the transition team, alumnus Chris Lu ’88 will help to manage that list of key appointments. “My job is basically to keep the trains running on time,” Lu told The Daily Princetonian last week.

Lu, a Harvard Law classmate of Obama who until recently served as the senator’s legislative director, has worked in law and government for the last two decades. He also has plenty of experience meeting deadlines, faithfully filing class notes to PAW as the secretary of the Class of 1988. With the slightest hint of favoritism, we’ve chosen Lu as our Tiger of the Week. And though he probably needs no reminder, class notes for the January issue are due Nov. 25.

(Photo courtesy Chris Lu ’88)

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.

Tiger of the Week: Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ’70

In a week dominated by elections for executive and legislative offices, our Tiger of the Week comes the judicial branch. On Oct. 31, U.S. District Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ’70 made headlines by ordering the Justice Department to produce memorandums from the White House legal counsel’s office that describe and outline the legal justification for the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. (The Justice Department has argued that the memorandums are protected attorney-client communications.)

For Kennedy, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1997, this is the latest in a list of difficult cases, from the Elian Gonzalez custody dispute in 2000 to the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes last year. But Princetonians may know him better as a former University trustee and the oldest sibling in an accomplished legal family that includes brother Randall Kennedy ’77, an author and Harvard Law professor, and sister Angela Acree ’85, a D.C. lawyer.

(Photo by Beverly Rezneck/Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts)

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.

Tiger of the Week: Matt Iseman ’93

As an undergraduate, Matt Iseman ’93 pitched for the Princeton baseball team. This month, the actor and comedian returned to the world of sports to pitch jokes. He hosts Sports Soup, a new cable show that airs Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 p.m. on Versus. The show uses video clips to poke fun at athletes, coaches, and commentators from the pro and college ranks. “We’re not trying to make anyone look bad or get anyone fired,” Iseman explained in an interview with the Fort Worth Star Telegram. “But we’re giving them the rope. If they want to hang themselves, we’ll let them and we’ll let you laugh about it.”

Iseman graduated from Columbia University’s medical school, but during his residency, he decided that Hollywood was his true calling. Since then, he’s landed gigs on the Style Network (as the Goto Guy on Clean House), the Game Show Network (as the host of Casino Night), and the long-running soap General Hospital, where he had a recurring role, though not as a doctor. That’s right: He is a doctor, but he does not play one on TV. He’s also our Tiger of the Week.

(Photo courtesy mattiseman.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.

Tiger of the Week: William Lockwood Jr. ’59

William Lockwood Jr. ’59 was an undergraduate when he started booking concerts at McCarter Theatre in Princeton. In the 50 years since, he has become an indispensable part of the region’s arts and music scene, staging modern dance, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, classical music, and nearly everything in between at McCarter, Lincoln Center, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. McCarter celebrated Lockwood’s half-century in the business this week with performances by Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt Oct. 20 and pianist Lang Lang Oct. 21. PAW would like to add one more line to Lockwood’s anniversary marquee: “Tiger of the Week.”

Lockwood, a Princeton native and son of a Woodrow Wilson School professor, maintains close ties with University students. He serves as the business manager of the Triangle Club, and he has helped to connect McCarter performers with student artists. (In 2006, for instance, he arranged a master class with Lang Lang and a handful of top undergraduate pianists.) And while the 50-year celebration may seem to have a valedictory tone, Lockwood aims to keep filling the seats of his beloved theater well into the future. “I’ve been here through two-thirds of McCarter’s history,” he told The Times of Trenton last week. “They’ll have to carry me out. I have no plans to retire.”

(Photo by Frank Wojciechowski)

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.

Tiger of the Week: Mary E. Miller ’75

The Tiger of the Week is - gasp - a Yalie? Well, not entirely. But art historian Mary E. Miller ’75 made history in New Haven this week, becoming the first woman to be named dean of Yale College. She will take over the post Dec. 1.

Miller, an expert on Mayan art and architecture, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton as an art and archaeology concentrator in 1975. She earned her doctorate at Yale, joined the faculty of its art history department in 1981, and has been master of Yale’s Saybrook College since 1999. Yale president Richard Levin, in an interview with The Yale Daily News, called Miller “a magnificent scholar, a devoted teacher, and a terrific master.”

Photo courtesy Yale University Office of Public Relations

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.