Campus News - WAA News

New award and publication honor outstanding young alumni.

They are innovators in business, champions for education, and dedicated international volunteers — and they’re not yet forty years old.

In recognition of their remarkable work, twenty-three young University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates have been honored with the new “Forward under 40” Award from the Wisconsin Alumni Association. These outstanding graduates, according to Paula Bonner MS’78, WAA president and CEO, “live the Wisconsin Idea” — the 104-year-old guiding philosophy behind UW outreach efforts to aid people in Wisconsin and throughout the world.

“These young Badgers are among the world’s best and brightest innovators and citizens,” Bonner says. “They have quickly used what they learned at UW-Madison to make broad, positive contributions for people and communities here in Wisconsin and around the world.”

The award winners are featured in Forward under 40, a publication distributed in March 2008 to more than one hundred thousand UW-Madison alumni. Interactive profiles of the award winners are available at forwardunder40.com. The 2008 recipients are:

• Josh Bycel ’93, Los Angeles — president of OneKid OneWorld, an international education and sports-based grassroots organization.
• Lisa Peyton-Caire ’96, MA’99, and Kaleem Caire ’00, Bowie, Maryland — founders, Next Generation Education Foundation, a nonprofit committed to increasing school participation by adolescent males of color.
• Anand Chhatpar ’05, Madison — CEO and founder of BrainReactions, a company that taps into the creativity of college students to brainstorm innovative ideas for companies.
• Ryan Christianson ’96, Edgar, Wisconsin — associate principal of Lincoln High School, and co-creator of Digital Time Travelers, a tech-based learning tool.
• Kenny Dichter ’90, Livingston, New Jersey — founder and CEO of MarquisJet in New York.
• Leslie Goldman ’98, Chicago — author and speaker about women and body image issues.
• Claire Herrick MD’07, San Francisco — health advocate in Tanzania and areas affected by Hurricane Katrina.
• Adam ’00 and Chrissy ’99 Jeske, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa — international development volunteers, writers, and teachers.
• Ben-Tzion Karsh ’93, MS’96, PhD’99, Madison — associate professor of industrial engineering at UW-Madison, where his research focuses on preventing medical errors.
• James Kass ’91, San Francisco — founder of Youth Speaks, the nation’s leading presenter of spoken-word performance.

• Paula Kluth ’92, PhD’98, Chicago — author and independent consultant in the field of autism education.
• José Lerma MA’01, MFA’02, Brooklyn, New York — internationally recognized artist and professor of art.
• Marc Lewis ’94, Boston — middle-school teacher who provides training for staff and students in school districts throughout Massachusetts on GLBT and other diversity issues.
• Timothy Miller ’06, Milton, Wisconsin — former teacher of physics for girls in Rwanda, Africa; he will return to the UW for graduate school this fall.
• Janet Olson ’92, New Brighton, Minnesota — veterinarian and founder of Basic Animal Rescue Training (BART) to provide first-response care for companion animals.
• Neil Peters-Michaud ’93, Madison — founder, president, and CEO of Cascade Asset Management, a computer-recycling firm.
• Amanda Rockman ’01, JD’05, Black River Falls, Wisconsin — associate trial judge for the Ho Chunk Nation.
• Mary Rohlich ’03 and Lesley Feinstein ’03, Los Angeles — founders of the Hollywood Badgers, which helps alumni living in the L.A. area and UW students get a start in the entertainment industry.
• Ben Schumaker ’03, MA’06, Madison — founder of The Memory Project, a nonprofit program that has provided more than fifteen thousand hand-painted portraits for orphaned children around the world.
• Eric Wilson ’98, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — administrative officer for the Peace Corps, training volunteers to provide HIV/AIDS relief in rural villages.

— Kate Dixon ’01, MA’07and Karen Roach ’82

When Benjamin Lang x’11 enrolled in a WAA online course last spring, he learned about more than Russian history — he learned about himself. Lang was so moved by Russian Civilization: The Revolutionary Movement to the Cold War and the archived lectures of UW historian Michael Petrovich, that he changed the course of his academic career.

At the time, Lang was carving out an academic path that included his two passions: music and Russian culture. He was also taking two courses and working as a research assistant for a music historian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he was responsible for searching through Soviet newspapers at the time of Stalin’s death in the mid-1950s. “My eyes were opened to political and social dialogue through musical composition,” he says. “Music does not have to be segregated from other academic areas.”

Lang transferred to UW-Madison and plans to enroll in the School of Music. His primary instrument is the bayan, a Russian instrument that looks like an accordion. Eventually, he’d like to go to Moscow for graduate studies at the Gnesin State Musical College.

A new resident of Adams Hall, Lang believes that online courses can create deeper learning than traditional classes. “The course influenced my raison d’être,” he says. “And that type of change simply cannot be evaluated by a grading scale.”

— Karen Roach ’82

Alumni keep a friend’s memory alive through scholarships.

The legacy of John Jung ’01 floods campus every April. Jung was a member of the Wisconsin Alumni Student Board (WASB), a WAA student affiliate group, where he was the animating spirit behind All-Campus Party, a series of free, alcohol-alternative events to help students celebrate spring. First held in 2001, the party has since become an annual tradition.

But Jung’s friends hope to create a more profound campus legacy for Jung, who died in 2006. They hope to make his name synonymous with a new generation of student leaders.

The John W. Jung Scholarship Foundation offers a semester’s tuition — approximately $3,400 — to a Wisconsin high school graduate who attends UW-Madison and shows leadership and initiative. Created by a group of Jung’s friends, including former members of WASB and Homecoming, the foundation granted its first scholarship this academic year.

“This was our way to deal with losing [Jung],” says Matt Kopac ’01, who helped create the foundation. “We want to identify and support people who would impact the world in the way John would have.”

Jung’s death followed a long battle with substance abuse, and that struggle factors into the way the foundation assesses scholarship applicants.

“Our scholarship program fosters the education of young adults who have the same passion, the same excitement for life, and the desire to make the people around them happier, just as John did,” says Melissa Wollering ’03, another member of the foundation. “[Applicants] don’t have to be perfect, and many of them have overcome major struggles with alcohol abuse in their families or physical challenges or academic challenges.”

The connection to substance abuse is one of the things that caught the attention of the 2007–08 recipient, Eileen Malloy-Wolzberg x’11. “My dad faced alcoholism issues and died when I was six months old,” she says. “He’d been working to get over it, just like John, but in the end was unable to. So I felt a connection with John and with this program.”

According to Kopac, WAA’s support has been important to the foundation because of the important place WASB held in Jung’s life.

“When word went around that John had passed away,” Kopac says, “the individuals [at WAA] were so helpful and willing to do what was needed. They pushed us forward and helped us get larger, institutional support.”

The Jung Foundation will select the 2008–09 scholarship recipient this summer. For more information about the foundation and its scholarship, or to contribute, visit its Web site, www.johnwjungmemorial.org.

— John Allen