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1957

The University of Colorado Alumni Association presented the 2014 George Norlin Award to Philip Howard Karsh (Jour). The award recognizes outstanding alumni who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence in their chosen field and a devotion to better society and the community. In 2012, Karsh was named a distinguished alumnus of CU’s former program in journalism and mass communication.

Karsh and business partner Tom Hagan founded the Denver-based Karsh/Hagan advertising agency in 1977. It remains one of Denver’s most prominent firms.

1961   

John Herzog (Jour) and his wife, Leslie (Engl’62) celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2014. John Herzog is serving his third term on the Colorado Board of Dental Examiners.

1969

Linda Shoemaker (Jour) is a member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents.

1970

Steve Hatchell (Jour) is president and chief executive officer of the National Football Foundation, which operates the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta.

1971

Sheila Hollis (Jour) was listed in the top 50 lawyers in the Washington D.C. area in 2014. She is chair of the Washington, D.C. office of Duane Morris and was founding practice group leader of the firm's Energy, Environment and Resources Practice Group. She served on the firm's executive committee for more than a decade and the partners board for 18 years.  

1973

William Blackwell (Jour) was visited by a 2-year-old brown bear at his home in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Blackwell reported that the bear was interested in his CU rain gauge. He said he told the bear it “was still too young to enroll at �鶹ӰԺ.” Go Buffs! 1971

1975

Rosette Gault (Comm) holds a PhD in ceramic art and design from the University of Sunderland., United Kingdom. Her work focused on sustainable materials. Gault has 39 publications, including four books. She has been to more than 40 countries and four continents to teach.

1978

Pamela Ruben Golum (Comm) is president, Entertainment/West Coast at The Lippin Group in Los Angeles.

1979

Thomas Walek (Jour) is president, capital markets and financial services at Peppercomm, an international public relations firm.

1981

David Halbrook (Jour) is director of communication at Patrick Henry College in northern Virginia, where he supervises planning and implementation of broad-based, integrated college communications and social media strategy. He also is editor of American Roundtable national email correspondence and coordinator of the Newsmaker Interview Series.

1982

Jenny Herring (Jour) is a senior associate at Wilshire Associates and a member of Wilshire Consulting. Building on her career in providing public relations, marketing and writing for financial services companies, Herring is part of the business development team serving institutional investors. She also served on the board of directors for the CU-�鶹ӰԺ Alumni Association.  Her 2014 article, Remembering Jamestown, was published in the Forever Buffs Insider.

1984   

Photographer and graphic artist Rob Decker (Comm) of Nederland, Colo., fell in love with the designs used by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s and 1940s. Combining his artistic abilities with his interests in national parks, he designs graphic art posters about national parks in the WPA style. He calls it the National Park Poster Project and sells on .

1985

Chris Fowler (Jour), is the play-by-play announcer for ABC’s Saturday Night Football and former host of ESPN’s College Game Day.

1986

Graham Hill (Jour) developed Wide Eyez, a bike helmet shield that protects riders against insects and other elements. The company is based in �鶹ӰԺ.

Heidi Wagner (Jour) is vice president of global government affairs for Alexion Pharmaceuticals. She is an attorney with more than 20 years of experience in health care legislative and regulatory policy issues. Wagner has led numerous federal legislative and regulatory efforts relating to, among other issues, Medicare payment policy, and HIPAA/health privacy.        

Herbalist and acupuncturist David Teitler (Jour) specializes in the treatment of respiratory conditions and is the owner of Dr. Dave’s Herbal Medicine, produced in Carbondale, Colo. His remedies are carried by more than 60 retail outlets in 15 states.

1987

Tom Costello (Jour) is a correspondent for NBC News, based in Washington D.C.

1988

Sisters Robin Beeck (Comm) and Kathy Beeck (Engl’86) founded the �鶹ӰԺ International Film Festival, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2014. The festival has become a hot spot for movie stars and film enthusiasts from around the country.

Kevin Corke (Jour’88, MJour’02) is a White House correspondent for Fox News.

1989

Former CU football head coach and player Jon Embree (Comm) is in his second year as tight ends coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He coached the Buffs in the 2011 and 2012 seasons.

Lynette Romero (Jour) is an Emmy award-winning reporter and anchor at KTLA in Los Angeles.

James S. Singell (Comm) is a marketing director for Eli Lilly in Tokyo, Japan. He was worked for Lilly since 1992 in a variety of sales and marketing roles in the United States and also in Shanghai, China.

1990

Tracy Wahl (Comm) is executive producer for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, which reaches more than 13 million listeners. Wahl joined NPR in 1997 and has produced radio and multimedia pieces across around the world. She was a key player in building Morning Edition’s digital media operation.

1991

Heidi Dewell (Jour) is vice president, creative services at Williams-Sonoma Inc. in San Francisco, with responsibility for the catalog and brand packaging.

Moyra Knight (Jour) is head of corporate and employee communications at pharmaceutical company Astellas, where she is responsible for developing and leading corporate brand initiatives across North and South America. She has more than 20 years of communications experience in the healthcare and consumer industries and lives in Glenview, Ill.

1992

Claudine McDonald (Comm) is a member of the Cherry Creek school board in suburban Denver and a self-employed consultant/trainer on diversity services. She also serves as director of the office of member and family affairs at Access Management Services LLC.

1996

Sabine Kortals (Bus; Mus; MJour’96) traveled to Ghana with Project C.U.R.E. and to Uganda and Rwanda with the Wirth Chair in Sustainable Development and the Global Livingston Institute as a field reporter to support humanitarian relief efforts.

The Denver Woman’s Press Club awarded Kortals’ poem about Ghana, Stop Trying, first prize in its 2014 In-House Writers’ Contest. Kortals also has launched an eZine, Woman ChangeMAKER, about women driving social change. Find out more at womanchangemaker.net.

1995

Steve Schwankert (Jour) is the author of Poseidon: China’s Secret Salvage of Britain’s Lost Submarine, a book about a British submarine that Schwankert discovered off the Chinese coast.

1997

Kelly Keaveney Graziadei (Jour) is director of global marketing solutions at Facebook, where she helps advertisers determine how to best target their messages to the most likely buyers.

Norm Shearer (Jour) is a partner and chief creative officer at Cactus Communications Inc., a major Colorado advertising firm. The company’s clients include the Smashburger restaurant chain and mantherapy.org, a nonprofit suicide-prevention website.

Shearer, was named the 2013 distinguished alumnus of CU’s former program in journalism and mass communication. His company frequently hosts CU advertising interns.

1999

Growing up with a rough home life, Amanda Kahlow (Jour) battled through her initial stresses and developed a company called 6Sense that produced $12 million in venture funding. The company examines structured and unstructured data to identify potential customers for companies’ goods and services.  It also won the innovation showdown contest at VentureBeat’s DataBeat conference.

Katie Wilson Roberts (MJour) helped plan, write and edit The Disciplined Leader: Keeping the Focus on What Really Matters, by John Manning. The book is used by leaders, entrepreneurs and managers to help lead teams and organizations.

Brian Sandine (PhDComm) is a senior pastor for the San Leandro (Calif.) Church of Christ.

Eddie Shuai (Comm) is vice president of San Francisco-based JLL, a professional services and investment management firm. Shuai, an industrial/R&D real estate specialist, has handled transactions encompassing more than 1.2 million square feet of real estate during his career.

Ryan Thompson (Jour) is assistant general counsel and an adjunct writing professor at Niagara University. He was admitted to practice law in 2004 and previously worked at a Fifth Avenue firm where he specialized in in-court litigation. He lives in Orchard Park, New York.

2000

Jason Hoff (Jour) works at Apple Marcom in Cupertino, California. He formerly worked at Google Creative Lab, among other places. His work is inducted into the Advertising Walk of Fame on Madison Avenue in New York and is part of a permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. During his first year in advertising, Hoff and a partner wrote the famous tagline “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” for the city of Las Vegas.

Tara McClain Manthey (Jour) is communication and outreach director at the Colorado Children’s Campaign, a nonprofit that advocates for public policies to benefit the state’s children.

Kirk Siegler (Jour) is a Los Angeles-based national reporter for NPR.

Jennifer Thackaberry Ziegler (PhDComm) is dean of the graduate school and continuing education at Valparaiso University, Indiana.

2001

Erica Flores (Bus, Jour) joined Skoler, Abbott & Presser, one of the leading labor and employment law firms in Springfield, Mass., after relocating from Pennsylvania, where she was an associate in the employment law practice of Morgan Lewis.

2002   

A mutual love of craft beer connects business partners Zack Fickey (Comm) and John Reardon (Bus’02). The two own and operate one of Texas’ fastest growing craft breweries.

As grants manager at CU’s BioFrontiers Institute, Meagan Balink Taylor (Jour) uses her six years of experience in grant writing and sponsored research administration to help faculty submit grant proposals, develop budgets and navigate regulations. She lives in Broomfield, Colo.

2003   

Jessica Clifton-Czarny (Jour) is senior vice president and digital group director for Edelman, a leading communications marketing firm.

Anne Knapp (Comm) is staff assistant to the ambassador at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. She previously served as chief of staff and research assistant to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University and was an assistant to Rice at the U.S. State Department.

Jordan Kaufman (Comm) joined the �鶹ӰԺ group for Quantum Real Estate Advisors as a vice president. He has arranged more than $500 million in sales in the net-lease industry. Kaufman is a member of CCIM, the U.S. Green Building Council and the LEED Institute.

Scott Pertel (Comm) is managing director of the net  leased group at Holiday Fenoglio Fowler in San Francisco where he concentrates on office and industrial transactions with a focus on sale leasebacks and net lease sales. He is a board member of NAIOP, the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, and was awarded the NAIOP developing leader of the year award in 2014. He also sits on the board of Boys Hope Girls hope, CREATE San Francisco and the Stillwater Foundation.

2004

Lilibet Snellings (Jour) wrote Box Girl: My Part-Time Job as an Art Installation, about her time sitting in a glass box creating art. The book was featured in the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly and made Harper’s Bazaar’s Hot List. 

2005

A new future buffalo! Congratulations to Lindsay Bather (Comm) and Adam Bather (Fin) on the birth of their baby boy, Theodore William. Go Buffs!

Lindsey Corsi Cottone (Comm) is director of communications and marketing at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, where she develops marketing campaigns and communication strategies and serve as a member of WRA’s executive committee. Previously, she worked as director of marketing and communication for Forest City Enterprises in Cleveland.

Lauren Glendenning (Jour) was named executive editor of The Aspen Times. She previously worked for Colorado Mountain News Media.

2006   

Valerie Castro (Jour) is a reporter at CBS 2 in New York.

Rania ElHelo (MJour) is communications officer for ANERA (American Near East Refugee Aid) an agency founded to aid Palestinians left homeless after the Arab-Israeli War. She is also a presidential scholar from Gaza.

Kinsey Hasstedt (Jour) is a public policy associate in the Guttmacher Institute’s Washington, D.C. office. She focuses on publicly funded family planning programs.

Kristen Russell Humphrey (Jour) provided marketing for Lythgoe Family Productions’ presentation of Sleeping Beauty and Her Winter Knight at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Mike Tarson (Jour) is a producer at CNNMoney, where he leads the production of digital video and distribution to multiple platforms, including website, television and social media. He lives in New York.

David Tauchen (Jour) is a corporate communications manager for DaVita HealthCare. He leads corporate communications strategy for the international operations of DaVita HealthCare Partners, a FORTUNE 300 health care provider based in Denver

2007

Michel Brown (Comm) is principal consultant at Walden Philanthropy, where she does grant research and writing, marketing and public relations, and other tasks.

2008

Jinie Kwak (Jour) is global communications manager at the J. Walter Thompson Company in New York, where she develops, executes and manages global communications strategy and public relations initiatives for J.  Walter Thompson Co. Properties.

Eric Dieter (Jour’08) and Jason Mitchell (Jour’09) founded Movement Strategy, a social marketing agency, while they were undergraduates at CU. The company was recently cited in Adweek for its success in social media for clients including Lifetime’s Project Runway.

2009

Hamilton Bean (PhDComm) is an associate professor of communication in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver, where he also serves as associate chair. He conducts critical-rhetorical studies of national security discourse and social-scientific studies of homeland security communication.

Maria Genao-Homs (MJour) is interim executive director for diversity and intercultural affairs at Northeastern Illinois University.

Natalie Gregarek (Comm) was named chief talent officer at National Corporate Housing, a global multi-brand corporate housing company and leader in the furnished temporary housing industry.

Jennifer Newell (Jour) was hired as the marketing representative for business programs at the University of California San Diego Extension. She says her supervisor pulled her application out from the rest of the qualified candidates partly because she noticed that Newell is a CU alum. Newell’s supervisor’s husband, Mark Zumberge (MPhys’78, PhD’81) went to CU and the two had lived in �鶹ӰԺ for several years.

2010

Jordan Steffen (Jour) joined The Denver Post as a reporter in 2011. Since then she has been heavily involved in covering major news stories including the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reports about the Aurora theater shootings, and its coverage of catastrophic wildfires in 2012 and 2013. In 2012 Steffen worked on the Post’s investigative series “Failed to Death,” which profiled more than 70 children who died of abuse and neglect while in the state’s child welfare system. In addition to using tools such as Twitter and Facebook she has worked to bring interactive storytelling to several of her stories and projects.

2011

Carey Candrian (PhDComm) wrote Communicating Care at the End of Life, a book that details the way language shapes decisions around end-of-life care. She is an assistant professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and serve as protocol specialist for the Palliative Care Research Cooperative Group (PCRC).

Matthew Davis (Jour) of San Francisco received second place for the 2013 best sports story from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for his article titled “Young Guns” in The Ark newspaper of Tiburon, Calif. He writes as a freelancer for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Adobe and various other companies.

Joey Maestas (Jour) works for the United States Olympic Committee, where he oversees Team USA's presence in social/digital media and leads the development and implementation of strategies and tactics to engage directly with athletes, fans and other stakeholders via digital media. Prior to joining the olympic committee, Maestas was social media director at Sports Illustrated/SI Swimsuit, where he oversaw the development of social and digital strategies for engagement between Sports Illustrated’s content and sports fans worldwide. He was named to the Huffington Post’s 2013 list of Rising Stars’ in Social Media and Journalism, has received an Eddie Digital Award and was awarded the Best Use of Social Media on Instagram.

2012

Angie White Davlyn (PhDComm) is development director for Access AfterSchool in Carbondale, Colo.

Kell Delaney (MComm) is a project experience designer at �鶹ӰԺ-based Conversant, a company that teaches better conversation as a means to improve leadership, productivity, relationships and other areas of life. He is primarily tasked with helping to develop products such as eLearning, worksheets and assessments in a way that considers the product experience first and foremost.

Chelsea Long (Jour) is a data strategist at Anomaly in New York.

Emily Talley (Comm) is on the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Symetra tour, where she is chasing her ultimate dream of playing on the LPGA tour. LPGA tour media coordinator Bret Lasky writes that Talley is one of their most popular and charismatic personalities. 
 

2013

Morgan Aguilar (Jour) is a news producer at KOB News in Albuquerque, N.M.

Maggie George (MComm) is associate director of class programs at Cornell University.

Dakota-Rae Westveer (Comm) works for a natural food start-up in �鶹ӰԺ called Quinn Popcorn (QP), primarily in marketing and community outreach including everything from coordinating national demos and events to working with community partners and creating content for website and social media channels. “It’s all hands on deck all the time around here, which I love,” she writes. “It means something new every day and being involved in the big picture.”

Allie Rowland (PhDComm) is on the faculty of the Department of Performance and Communication Arts at St. Lawrence University, a liberal arts institution in Canton, New York. With CU Associate Professor Pete Simonson, she also published “The Founding Mothers of Communication Research: Toward a History of a Gendered Assemblage” in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2014, 3-26, doi:10.1080/15295036.2013.849355

2014

Rob Denton (Jour) is a digital developer/producer in the newsroom at the Eugene Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore.

Tu Phan (Jour) is an art director at BBDO in San Francisco, Calif.

2015

Haley Buchner (Jour) is an art director at Johannes Leonardo in New York City.

Elizabeth Hernandez (Jour) is a reporter for The Denver Post.

Joey Prechtl (Jour) is a reporter for WAGM in Presque Isle, Maine.

Riley Walker (Jour) is a freelance visual designer at Code & Theory in New York City.