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A triumphant homecoming for Alumni Award winners

Michael Bronner (SMG’82)

While an undergraduate at BU, Michael Bronner came up with the idea of a coupon book for students that could be distributed, free, through campus mailboxes. Soon he was producing one for businesses as well, and attracting such clients as American Express and AT&T. Bronner left BU when his company, Eastern Exclusives, became too successful to manage only on the side, and went on to found the Internet professional services firm that became Digitas, whose billings now exceed $1.3 billion. But he has kept close ties to the University. Last year, in partnership with SMG, he created the Michael Bronner e-Business Center and Hatchery, a project designed to help BU students pursue their plans for electronically enabled businesses while remaining in school.

Bronner is now chairman emeritus of Digitas and chairman and CEO of UPromise, a college savings network he founded in December 1999 to increase the accessibility and affordability of a college education. He has also established the UPromise Education Foundation, intended to help those from lower-income families afford to go to college. He has pledged the majority of his equity in UPromise to the foundation.

Bronner is chairman of the Boston Walk Committee for the March of Dimes and serves on the boards of the Boys and Girls Clubs, Children’s Hospital Trust, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Boston Public Library Foundation, and the New England Aquarium. Last year, he received the Torch of Liberty Award from the Anti-Defamation League.

Irwin Chafetz (CAS’58)

Irwin Chafetz has over 30 years of experience in the travel, hospitality, and trade show industries.

He is a director of Interface-Group-Massachusetts, Inc., a privately held company that owns and operates GWV International, New England’s largest charter tour operator. He is also a member of the board of directors of U.S. Franchise Systems, Inc., a new hotel franchise company listed on the NASDAQ exchange.

Chafetz has been president of Five Star Airlines, a charter air carrier, and an owner of two major properties in Las Vegas, the Sands Hotel Casino and the adjacent Sands Expo and Convention Center, the largest privately owned facility of its kind in the United States. Until April of 1995, the Interface Group also owned and operated the largest American trade show, COMDEX, and other successful information technology events in the United States and around the world.

A well-known philanthropist, Chafetz is a board member of the Wellness Community of Greater Boston, Hebrew College, Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly, Albert A. List College of Jewish Studies, and the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged. With SMG alumnus Leonard Florence, he has made a $2.5 million commitment for the eventual creation of the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House at BU.

Jhumpa Lahiri (GRS’93, UNI’95,’97)

While earning her four graduate degrees at BU, Jhumpa Lahiri was also writing several of the short stories that would end up in her Pulitzer Prize—winning debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). She published them first in such magazines as The New Yorker, Agni, Epoch, and Story Quarterly, and has seen two of them reprinted in the 1999 and 2000 editions of The Best American Short Stories. Along with the Pulitzer, the book garnered the PEN/Hemingway Award, The New Yorker Book Award for Best Debut of 1999, and the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Lahiri, whose parents are Bengali, was born in London in 1967 and raised in Rhode Island. She received a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College. After completing master’s degrees in English, creative writing, and comparative studies in literature and the arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies at BU, she received a prestigious fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In addition to short stories, she has published nonfiction in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, Food & Wine, Boston Magazine, Mirabella, Salon, and Feed. She lives in New York City and is currently working on a novel.

Michael Lee (GSM’86)

Michael Lee is cofounder of two highly successful international management companies: Lloyd George Management, which manages assets of $1.5 billion, and Asia Strategic Investment Management Limited, which provides services to high-net-worth individuals and institutional clients around the world. He is also director of Hysan Development Company Limited, a local property company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Lee earned a B.A. from Bowdoin in 1984 and an M.B.A. from BU in 1986. He joined Indosuez Asia Investment Services Limited in 1987 as an investment manager, and was appointed director in 1990.

He is also chairman of the executive committee of the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children, the largest child-care services provider for the needy children of Hong Kong, and an executive committee member of Helping Hand, a charity that provides room, board, nursing care, and rehabilitative services to the homeless and needy elderly of Hong Kong.

Like his late father, Wing-Tat Lee (SMG’54), Michael has been an active alumnus. He received an Alumni Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession from SMG in 1996.

2 March 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations