Princeton Alumni Weekly | The Weekly Blog: Tiger of the Week Archives

February 29, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Randall T. Shepard '69

Randall T. Shepard '69 (Photo: Courtesy Indiana Supreme Court)

Randall T. Shepard ’69 was just 38 years old when he was appointed to the Indiana Supreme Court in 1985, and when he was elevated to chief justice less than two years later, he became the youngest state chief justice in the United States. As Shepard approaches retirement next week, he is now Indiana’s longest-serving chief justice, and according to supporters in the Hoosier state, the distinguished jurist will be remembered for leaving a lasting impression during his time in office.

Shepard’s assessment of his work, outlined in the State of Judiciary address delivered in January, included pride in building a collegial atmosphere among the Indiana courts. He also earned distinction for his expertise in judicial ethics, receiving the 2009 Dwight D. Opperman Award for Judicial Excellence, a national honor presented by the American Judicature Society. Under Shepard’s guidance, the Indiana courts have increased transparency, allowing media cameras and webcasts in the appellate courts and beginning a pilot project to explore cameras in trial courtrooms. (The Hoosier State Press Association praised both measures.) Away from the court, he co-chaired a statewide commission on local government reform and a recent research project called Policy Choices for Indiana’s Future.

Shepard received a fond farewell from fellow Princetonian Mitch Daniels ’71, Indiana’s Republican governor, during the State of the State address. Daniels thanked Shepard “for a quarter century of fairness, firmness, and farsightedness on our highest bench.”

The same week, as Shepard delivered his final State of the Judiciary address, The Evansville Courier reported that he “appeared emotional” as he reached a conclusion that summarized his career: “Could there be a better cause, a more worthwhile way to ‘spend and be spent’ in life, than working toward greater justice?”

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.

February 22, 2012

Tiger of the Week: John Lettow '95

John Lettow ’95 (Photo: Paul Morse/Courtesy Vorbeck Materials Corp.)

Vorbeck Materials, a Maryland-based company that has developed cutting-edge applications for graphene, was established in 2006, but two of the collaborators who launched the company have a history that began in the mid-1990s in a Princeton engineering lab.

At the time, Vorbeck president John Lettow ’95 was a chemical engineering student, and Ilhan Aksay, a Princeton professor and director for the company, was advising the senior’s thesis project. A decade later, the two started working together again, this time to bring Aksay’s research out of the lab and into the marketplace. (Read more from the June 10, 2009, issue.)

Graphene, a super-thin, super-strong, and super-conductive form of graphite, has drawn plenty of interest from materials scientists, but Vorbeck was the first to launch a commercial graphene product (a conductive ink for electronics). To expand its production and sales, the company received a reported $10 million from investors in December.

Earlier this month, Vorbeck received another boost when the Department of Energy named it one of “America’s Next Top Energy Innovators.” Three companies shared the honor; Vorbeck was credited for using technology that originated in the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to improve lithium-ion batteries — versatile, rechargeable batteries used in devices that range from laptops to electric cars.

In a news release, Energy Secretary Steven Chu congratulated the winning innovators and said that the contest was part of a larger effort to let startup companies “do what they do best: Create new products, new industries, and new jobs.”

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.

February 15, 2012

Tigers of the Week: Charles Rosen '48 51 and Teofilo Ruiz 74

Charles Rosen ’48 *51, left, and Teofilo Ruiz *74 (Photos: Don Hunstein; Courtesy UCLA)

The National Humanities Medals, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House Feb. 13, had a distinctively Princeton feel this year. Two alumni — musician and scholar Charles Rosen ’48 *51 and historian Teofilo Ruiz *74 — were among the nine recipients. The University’s faculty also was well represented, with professors Kwame Anthony Appiah (philosophy and the University Center for Human Values) and Robert Darnton (history, emeritus) receiving the honor.

The alumni honorees both took unconventional paths to their distinguished careers. Rosen, who studied French literature at Princeton, forged a remarkable reputation outside his academic field, following parallel tracks as a renowned classical pianist and a widely read author. He chronicled music history in essays and books, including The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, a 1972 National Book Award winner. Rosen’s humanities medal citation recognized “his rare ability to join artistry to the history of culture and ideas” and hailed his writings for highlighting “how music evolves and remains a vibrant, living art.”

Ruiz, a professor at UCLA, was born in Cuba and left his homeland in the early 1960s, eventually making his way to New York City. While working in a can factory by day, he pursued undergraduate studies at City College of New York. He earned his master’s in history at New York University and came to Princeton to pursue his Ph.D. An acclaimed historian of medieval and modern Spain, Ruiz also has earned high marks for his inspirational pedagogy. His award citation recognized the breadth of his work: “His erudite studies have deepened our understanding of medieval Spain and Europe, while his late examination of how society has coped with terror has taught important lessons about the dark side of western progress.”

While the National Humanities Medal recognizes a long record of achievement, it is by no means a valediction. Rosen continues to perform and write (he contributed a review to the current New York Review of Books), while Ruiz, currently on sabbatical from UCLA, will publish his latest book, A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain, in April.

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.

February 8, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Laird Hayes '71

Laird Hayes '71, center, receives an earful from Atlanta Falcons coach Mike Smith during a 2009 game. Hayes has been an NFL official since 1995. (Photo: © Erik Lesser/ZUMAPRESS.com)

Even on the slow-motion replay, the black-and-red cleats seemed to tap the turf in a split-second blur. Did he keep both feet inbounds? Did he control the catch? The answers would go a long way toward deciding the winner of Super Bowl XLVI.

Side judge Laird Hayes ’71 immediately said “yes” to both, ruling a completed catch by New York Giants receiver Mario Manningham late in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s big game. The official video review confirmed his call, and the Giants went on to beat the New England Patriots, 21-17. (Good news for another alumnus, Giants college scouting director Marc Ross ’95, who drafted Manningham and many other New York standouts.)

Hayes’ call was an MVP performance, according to Mike Pereira, the former NFL vice president of officiating who now serves as an expert “rules analyst” for Fox Sports.

“On our biggest stage, in front of what may turn out to be the largest audience of any television program in history, Hayes faced the biggest call of his career — and he nailed it,” Pereira wrote. “When you stop and analyze it, we get replay after replay to dissect every close play. Hayes had only 1/26 of a second to make the right call. And he did.”

Hayes, a retired instructor and coach at Orange Coast College in California, has now officiated three Super Bowls in an NFL career that spans 17 seasons. In 2007, he spoke to PAW about his officiating work — and the unique pressure of being part of the nation’s largest sporting event.

“I wish I could say it’s just another game,” he said, recalling his first Super Bowl, in 2002. “Right until the ball was kicked off, that was just another game, and then all of a sudden, I don’t know what on earth happened, but it just wasn’t another game. It was pretty intense. The players aren’t any more intense, the coaches aren’t any more intense, but you just kind of realize the enormity of the whole deal and how lucky you are to be there. You just hope you don’t screw it up.”

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.

February 1, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Jessica Melore '03

(Courtesy Jessica Melore '03)

Jessica Melore ’03 was a bright, athletic high school student with a promising future when, at age 16, she suffered a massive heart attack. After waiting nine months for a heart transplant, she received a crucial, lifesaving gift from a girl not much older than her — an 18-year-old organ donor named Shannon Eckert, who had died in a car accident.

Three months later, Melore arrived on campus as a Princeton freshman. She majored in psychology and since graduation has spent most of her career working to promote organ and tissue donation, first through a project called the Workplace Partnership for Life and more recently with the New Jersey Organ & Tissue Sharing Network.

Much of her work involves education and outreach to specific groups, including New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission employees, who ask hundreds of people each day if they’d like to include the organ-donor designation on their driver’s license. Melore also has worked with student groups at local colleges to promote organ and tissue donation. “We’re trying to educate the public as much as possible,” she told PAW, “getting people to understand the power of that decision [to be a donor].”

Last month, to mark her 30th birthday, Melore recorded a short video (below) sharing her story in support of the “20 million in 2012” campaign, a national effort to register 20 million more potential donors this year. Her comments focused on how grateful she is to her donor and to her donor’s family, with whom she has corresponded for more than a decade.

“People don’t think about that side of it,” she said. “Every time their loved one’s story is shared … it’s a way for that person to live on.”

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.

January 25, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Mitch Daniels '71

(Ray Taylor/Wikipedia)

Mitch Daniels ’71 may have disappointed his supporters last May when he decided not to pursue a presidential campaign, but on Tuesday night, the Indiana governor made his mark on the 2012 election season, delivering the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address, which was viewed by many as a kickoff to Obama’s reelection bid.

Daniels, director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2003, critiqued the president’s budgetary record and argued that Obama’s speech included “efforts to divide” Americans on issues like taxation. “We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots,” he said. “We must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.” (Full text here.)

The Daniels speech drew positive reviews from conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post, who wrote that while it “lacked the soaring themes that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) sounded last year,” the speech’s tone “should serve as a model for less sober conservatives.” William Kristol of The Weekly Standard has not written specifically about Tuesday’s speech, but he has supported the bid to “draft Daniels” as a candidate for the remaining Republican primaries, calling Daniels the “winner” of Monday’s attack-filled Republican debate in Florida.

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.

January 19, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Cheryl Rowe-Rendleman '81

Cheryl Rowe-Rendleman ’81

Two years ago graduate students from Graduate Women in Science and Engineering (GWISE), a student group on campus, reached out to a focus group for women in science that Cheryl Rowe-Rendleman ’81 was involved with to discuss issues that women in science face.

Eventually, the discussions honed in on mentoring, and with Rowe-Rendleman’s help, GWISE developed a mentoring program involving alumni. They kicked off the program in September 2011. She helped GWISE reach out to alumni and think about how to make a “vertical-mentoring program” sustainable.

Continue reading Tiger of the Week: Cheryl Rowe-Rendleman '81…

January 11, 2012

Tigers of the Week: Chris Chaney '07, Caroline McCarthy '06, Christopher Rogan '06, Phillip Solomond '06, and Josh Tauberer '04

Top row: Chris Chaney '07, Caroline McCarthy '06. Second row: Christopher Rogan '06, Phillip Solomond '06. Third row: Josh Tauberer '04. (Photos courtesy Chris Chaney '07, Caroline McCarthy '06, Christopher Rogan '06, Blackstone Group, Josh Tauberer '04)

Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 lists, released in December, featured a handful of young alumni who are helping to shape their chosen fields:

Chris Chaney ’07, a sports and entertainment marketing pro who launched the Princeton Sports Symposium (now Ivy Sports Symposium), appeared on the entertainment list.

Caroline McCarthy ’06, included among the young leaders in media, has gone from social media blogger at CNET to product marketing manager at Google.

Christopher Rogan ’06, a Caltech graduate student, was spotlighted in the science section for his research in fundamental physics at the Large Hadron Collider.

Phillip Solomond ’06, an associate at Blackstone Group, made the finance list, in part because of his work launching the company’s distressed debt fund.

Josh Tauberer ’04, the chief technology officer of Popvox and government “data crusader” featured in PAW’s July 16, 2008, issue, was listed with law and policy leaders.

Other Forbes honorees with Princeton ties included MIT professor Jeremy England, a former fellow at Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, and three alumni who left the University without degrees: former graduate student Danielle Fong, co-founder of LightSail Energy; Seth Priebatsch ’11, whose company, SCVNGR, earned top prize in an undergraduate business-plan competition; and Eden Full ’13, an energy entrepreneur who received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship last May.

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.

January 4, 2012

Tigers of the Week: Jerome 'Jay' Powell '75 and Jeremy Stein '83

Jerome "Jay" Powell '75 (MarketWiki)

When President Barack Obama selected two Federal Reserve nominees last week, he purposely chose economists with different perspectives and backgrounds: one a former financial executive who served in the U.S. Treasury Department during Republican George H.W. Bush’s presidency, the other an academic who has worked in the White House and Treasury during Obama’s time in office. But the nominees, Jerome “Jay” Powell ’75 and Jeremy Stein ’83, have at least two things in common: Both are Princeton graduates, and today, they share our Tiger of the Week honor.

Powell, a politics major at Princeton, received his law degree from Georgetown in 1979 and worked as a lawyer and investment banker before becoming undersecretary of the treasury for finance. He also was a partner at The Carlyle Group, a private equity and asset management firm, from 1997 to 2005. More recently, he has served as a visiting scholar at the D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center.

Jeremy Stein '83 (Harvard University)

Stein, who studied economics and co-captained the gymnastics team as an undergraduate, received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1986. Since then, he has taught finance at Harvard and MIT. He took leave from Harvard in 2009 to advise Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and serve on the National Economic Council. He also served one year as president of the American Finance Association, in 2008.

According to Washington Post reporter (and occasional PAW contributor) Zachary Goldfarb ’04, the decision to nominate a Republican and a Democrat might “break a political logjam” that has hampered recent nominees to the Fed’s governing board. Two current members also have Princeton ties: Chairman Ben Bernanke was the Class of 1926 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and a chairman of the economics department, while board member Daniel K. Tarullo was a visiting professor at the University in 2004.

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.

December 21, 2011

Year in review: Top Tigers

Each week, PAW highlights an impressive alum (or two) as our Tiger of the Week. The slide show at left features all 55 alumni who earned the honor in 2011. Click the photos to link to the matching Tiger of the Week blog post, or click here for the full Tiger of the Week archive.

A reminder to readers: If you have a nominee in mind, let us know. All alumni qualify. The Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

December 14, 2011

Tiger of the Week: Lewis Flinn '89

Lewis Flinn '89 (Curtis Holbrook)

In the new musical Lysistrata Jones, making its Broadway debut tonight, composer and lyricist Lewis Flinn ’89 and playwright Douglas Carter Beane have transported a classic Aristophanes comedy to a modern college campus. The original play featured Greek women withholding sex from their warrior husbands as an effort to end the Peloponnesian War. The modern adaptation has more modest ambitions: A cadre of newly chaste cheerleaders aims to end the losing streak of the fictional Athens University basketball team.

After a brief, well-received run at a gymnasium in Greenwich Village, Lysistrata Jones took the leap to Broadway, beginning previews last month. And according to Ben Brantley’s review in The New York Times, published last June, Flinn’s score played a key role in the musical’s appeal. In Brantley’s words, the score “channels middle-of-the-road club music and chart toppers of the past few decades and inflects them with primal percussion and Broadway pizazz.”

Continue reading Tiger of the Week: Lewis Flinn '89…

December 7, 2011

Tiger of the Week: Erez Lieberman Aiden '02

(Eliza Grinnell, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)

(This is a corrected version of an earlier post. Aiden majored in mathematics, not philosophy, at Princeton, but completed two theses: "After Truth: Philosophical and Mathematical Explorations on Language, Induction, and Meaning"; and "Sphere Packing, Generalization Graphs, and Finite Languages.")

In the Dec. 2 issue of Science, Erez Lieberman Aiden ’02 recalls seeing the film Powers of Ten as a child, in which the camera zooms out to view the universe as a whole and then zooms back in to view life at a molecular level, coming to rest inside a single proton. Aiden writes in an essay titled “Zoom” that the views were “breathtaking” and the idea inspiring: “I realized that if, one day, I could hold that magical camera — examining a phenomenon at a new scale, however briefly — I would see things that had not been seen before.”

Aiden’s essay, and his related research “creating maps that enable researchers to zoom in on the human genome and reveal features of DNA structure inside the nucleus,” has earned him the 2011 GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced Dec. 1. The international honor comes with a $25,000 prize and a trip to Stockholm, Sweden, where the award will be presented Dec. 9.

Scientific honors are nothing new for Aiden, a mathematics major at Princeton who earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard in 2010. That year, he received the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for a range of innovations in mathematics, engineering, molecular biology, and linguistics. Earlier this fall, he received $2.5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health’s New Innovator program.

While Aiden’s specific projects are impressive, his wide range of interests is even more notable. According to a June 2011 profile in Discover magazine, Aiden seeks out research in areas beyond his expertise. “The reason is that most projects fail,” he explained. “If the project you know a lot about fails, you haven’t gained anything. If a project you know relatively little about fails, you potentially have a bunch of new and better ideas.”

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.

Recently in Tiger of the Week

February 29, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Randall T. Shepard '69

February 22, 2012

Tiger of the Week: John Lettow '95

February 15, 2012

Tigers of the Week: Charles Rosen '48 51 and Teofilo Ruiz 74

February 8, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Laird Hayes '71

February 1, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Jessica Melore '03

January 25, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Mitch Daniels '71

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January 19, 2012

Tiger of the Week: Cheryl Rowe-Rendleman '81

January 11, 2012

Tigers of the Week: Chris Chaney '07, Caroline McCarthy '06, Christopher Rogan '06, Phillip Solomond '06, and Josh Tauberer '04

January 4, 2012

Tigers of the Week: Jerome 'Jay' Powell '75 and Jeremy Stein '83

December 21, 2011

Year in review: Top Tigers

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December 14, 2011

Tiger of the Week: Lewis Flinn '89

December 7, 2011

Tiger of the Week: Erez Lieberman Aiden '02

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