Terriers of 2020: BU alumni & friends making news this year

The strength of the Terrier community has shined through in this unprecedented year. Terries have found innovative solutions during challenging times such as building an app to combat food insecurity or creating a student-led public health campaign. To finish up the year, we are taking time to highlight some of the outstanding members of our community who make us #ProudtoBU.

After a hockey accident that left him a quadriplegic, Travis Roy dedicated his life to helping others with spinal cord injuries and funding research. The Travis Roy Foundation, established in 1996, has helped more than 2,100 quadriplegics and paraplegics, and awarded nearly $5 million in grants toward spinal cord research, according to its website. Travis Roy died on October 29 in a hospital outside Burlington. His legacy is etched into the minds and hearts of thousands of people. Read on.

On July 7, Boston University Athletics unveiled its Social Justice and Inclusion Committee, designed to spread awareness and knowledge about social justice issues through sports. “I’m really pleased at the start that we’ve made here and the commitment of not only the Athletics Department, but the University as a whole,” says women’s basketball coach Marisa Moseley. In addition to helping lead the charge at BU, Moseley was one of the founding members of the Patriot League Anti-Racism Commission, which was announced the day before BU’s committee was unveiled. Read on.

Fred Milgrim is an emergency-medicine resident physician in New York City, currently working at Elmhurst Hospital. Milgrim details his experiences as a healthcare professional during the COVID-19 Pandemic in a POV for the Atlantic. Milgrim writes about the overwhelmed healthcare system and believes the rest of the country can learn from the mistakes of New York. Read on to hear his story.

The Boston Business Journal chose five BU alumni, two professors, and the CEO of Boston Medical Center for its annual list of the city’s 50 most influential power players. Below is a list of the BU honorees, with excerpts from the Journal citations.

Marylou Sudders (CAS’76, SSW’78) was “one of two people tapped to set up the 1,000-bed field hospital at Boston Convention and Exposition Center to prevent COVID-19 cases from overrunning city hospitals.” Sudders also received a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2018 for her commitment to accessible healthcare.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research “spoke before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee about the disproportionate impact COVID-19 is having on Black communities.” In recognition of his achievements as a historian, author, and his role as a public intellectual helping to reframe the conversation on racism in America, Kendi was also awarded the University’s Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. The endowed Mellon Professorship is one of BU’s highest honors, held by only one other person in the University’s history: Elie Wiesel (Hon.’74), the late Holocaust survivor and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Kate Bernard (Questrom’85) “helped drive a public-private partnership that brings a much-needed new resource to the city and a new building for Horizons to help serve 30% more children…will bring some 400 new jobs to Jackson Square.”

Lori Cashman (Questrom’95) is a co-founder and managing partner of Victress Capital. The firm“ only funds start-ups that have at least one woman on their team…as Cashman and Norris recognized that female founders receive disproportionately low funding.”

Paul Francisco (CGS’91, CAS‘93) is “one of 19 local executives of color who founded the New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund.” He also “helped to organize a protest near Faneuil Hall shortly after George Floyd’s death, in which dozens of Black executives and professionals stood together in near-total silence, wearing suits and holding signs with the names of Black men and women killed by police.”

Catherine Klapperich, Director of the BU Precision Diagnostics Center at the College of Engineering, “got to work with her team building a robust COVID-19 testing program with the capacity to test BU’s roughly 35,000 students every three days throughout the semester.”

Kate Walsh, President and CEO of Boston Medical Center and a School of Public Health adjunct clinical associate professor, led the BMC when “as many as 70% of its patients were stricken” with COVID-19. Walsh’s “work has not only benefited the thousands of patients that walk through the hospital’s doors, but the health care sector at large.”

Learn more about the accomplishments of these Terriers.

Throughout Election Night and the five days that followed, the MSNBC political reporter and College of Communication alumnus stayed steadfast as he commanded the cable channel’s “big board.” Reeling off the latest electoral returns, he was fueled by Diet Cokes and survived on little sleep. Twitter took notice and #TrackingKornacki and #ChartThrob went viral with a corresponding emoji and celebrities like Chrissy Teigan showing concern over how hard he was working. The Groton, Mass., native studied film and television at BU and first emerged as a network star during the 2016 presidential election. Read on.

Lizy Flagg created an app for a local nonprofit rescuing and delivering food to households in need. After COVID-19 sent her back to her parents’ Framingham, Mass., home last March she worried about how the pandemic would worsen the existing economic disparities in Boston and searched for a safe, hands-on way to support the communities most affected by the crisis. She was drawn to the work of Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC), a nonprofit that combats food waste and food insecurity in more than 15 US cities. Read on.

When the NBA took its final regular season and playoff games to “the bubble” in Orlando, Fla., in July—isolating 22 teams to keep them safe and able to play during the COVID-19 pandemic—one of the big challenges was making the games sound as live and real as possible. But how do you do that without the stands full of actual fans? Enter Carlton Myers, Vice President of live production and entertainment at NBA Entertainment, who leads the production team in charge of those stimulated crowd sounds, as well as the “virtual fans” whose video-screen avatars watch gameplay in real-time on their home devices and from giant, LED screens in the arena. Read on.

At first, it was the unorthodox name of F*ck It Won’t Cut It that was generating all the buzz. The title of the BU student-led COVID-19 public health campaign plays off the stereotype that young people often say “F*ck it” to responsible behavior, an attitude that can wind up being deadly during a pandemic. Launched in August, the campaign has communicated a crucial message: that students must take social distancing, masking up, and other COVID-19 preventive measures seriously if they want to stay safe, and on campus, during the pandemic. Now public health leaders across the country have taken notice. Last month, the American Marketing Association asked the team to lead a virtual Audience Engagement session at its 2020 Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. Hailey McKee, PRLab account director and PR manager, and Hannah Schweitzer, president of AdLab and F*ck It’s project manager and account executive, presented at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webinar for university administrators and health staff. Read on.

Lord Aamer Safraz of Kensington was appointed to the House of Lords this year and will remain a life-long member of Parliament. “I was always fascinated by politics,” Lord Aamer Sarfraz of Kensington tells Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. “I didn’t watch football or cricket or ice hockey or anything. For me, the contact sport of choice was politics.” Watch this exclusive interview.

Annissa Essaibi-George, a Boston city councilor at-large, kept busy by stitching masks for the BU police, Boston’s mayor, constituents, and customers. It certainly isn’t a condition of her city council employment, but the masks filled a vital need. It takes Annissa Essaibi-George two minutes to stitch up a face mask at her Singer sewing machine, her foot pushing the pedal gingerly. “For me, it’s something I can do,” she says on a recent afternoon surrounded by swatches of brightly colored fabric. Sewing is a hobby she learned as a girl from her mother, a Polish immigrant to Boston. (Her father was from Tunisia and worked as a security guard at BU.) “It makes me a little sad that I have to sew them,” she says, “but I’m just grateful I can.” Read on.

BU engineering student Santiago Gomez was so perturbed when he encountered the terminology “master/slave” in a textbook that he wrote to its publisher, Pearson, calling for the language to be changed. For decades, engineering textbooks have described electronic circuits called flip-flops as “master” and “slave,” referring to the way that one device controls the other. Although attempts have been made to change the racist language—which commonly appears, since flip-flops are fundamental to computing technology—success has not been universal. The actions of one Boston University engineering student are finally helping to change that. His letter has prompted Pearson to stop distributing the book until the text can be revised. Read on.

Long before the #MeToo movement, the Oscar winner, BU alumna, and recent GLOW star founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. In the early 2000s, Davis had noticed that her daughter, then a toddler, watched TV shows that featured few, if any, female characters. In 2004, Davis set out to collect data about the portrayal of girls in media. One of the institute’s earliest studies found that of the more than 4,000 characters across 400 G-rated, PG, PG-13, and R-rated movies surveyed, women were more than five times as likely as males to be shown in sexually revealing clothing (25% for women, versus 8% for men). Davis was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for her work to end gender inequality in film and television. Read on.

Nine BU alumni made the 2020 Forbes “30 Under 30” List. “The list features 600 trailblazers in 20 industries,” Forbes notes. “Choosing these honorees among thousands of nominees is long and daunting, a three-layer process that relies on the knowledge and authority of our wide-reaching community, skilled reporters, and expert judges.”

Amber Vittoria (CFA’12) turned her side gig into a full-time career, and today she’s a sought-after illustrator working with clients like Google and Warby Parker.

Business partners Will Denslow (Questrom’17) and Brian Zitin (CAS’17) appear in the Forbes enterprise technology category thanks to their start-up Reggora, which they began when they were roommates senior year.

In finance, Karen Reichgott Fishman (CAS’12, GRS’12), a Goldman Sachs vice president and a senior economist in its global macro research group, and Jesse Reinherz (CAS’12), a portfolio manager at global investment firm Millennium Management, whose team trades in the areas of consumer and technology.

In healthcare, Bryan Nicholas Patenaude (GRS’14, Pardee’14), a Johns Hopkins University assistant professor of international health and a healthcare economist who has researched sustainable economic interventions for the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa

In Hollywood and entertainment, Ben Levine (CGS’10, CAS’12, Pardee’12), an agent at Creative Artists Agency, who represents many LGBTQ clients, such as Tituss Burgess.

In media, Daniella Pierson (CGS’15, Questrom’17), founder of Newsette, an online female-centric news website

In energy, Alexandra Harbour (CAS’16), an associate at Powerhouse Ventures, a firm for clean energy entrepreneurs and investors in the Bay Area.

Read on to celebrate the achievements of these Terries.