GS Class of 1983
Howard Frederick Ibach ’83 AM writes: “As an adoptee, I was destined for an emotionally scarred life. Or so I was meant to believe according to The Primal Wound by psychologist Nancy Verrier. I almost bought into that story even though my lived experience bore no resemblance to her research. But something shielded me, call it my skepticism, my innate certainty, or my faith. But most of all I credit my adoptive parents’ instincts and their love, two facts I did not come to appreciate until I was in my sixties. In my debut memoir, Already Home, my journey, and the story of finding my birth mother, and then my birth siblings, is a tale of complexity and emotional upheaval filled with more than a few happy surprises. The lessons I learned about myself and about family will help make the paths of adoptees and anyone considering adoption easier to navigate.”
Herman Beavers ’83 AM, the Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has been elected second vice-president of the Modern Language Association. In 2026, he will become president of the MLA. He has taught African American Literature and Creative Writing at Penn since 1989.
Guruswami Ravichandran ’83 ScM, ’87 PhD, provost and professor of engineering at Jio Institute, has been named the recipient of the 2023 Timoshenko Medal by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
M.B. Bennett McLatchey ’83 MAT published Beginner’s Mind, an educational memoir that celebrates the teaching methods and philosophy of a remarkable teacher she had in a shipyard town in New England. The book was birthed during her graduate years at Brown while engaging with the scholarship of her professors in the MAT program. She is a widely published poet and author and has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the 2011 American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal and the 2012 Robert Frost Award. She is also an award-winning teacher at the college level, both from Harvard and Brown, as well as at her current university, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida.
At press time, these alums were appointed or awaiting appointment to the Biden administration: Jennifer Daskal ’94, deputy general counsel (cyber & technology), Department of Homeland Security; Elisabeth Donahue ’86, chief of staff, Council of Economic Advisers; Marc Etkind ’87, associate administrator for communications, NASA; Ruby Goldberg ’17, special assistant, Office of Land and Emergency Management, Environmental Protection Agency; Suzanne Goldberg ’85, deputy assistant secretary for strategic operation, U.S. Dept. of Education ; Roberta Jacobson ’82, coordinator, U.S. Southern Border, National Security Council; Jennifer Klein ’87, cochair, White House Gender Policy Council; Daniel Kohl ’87, director of government relations, AmeriCorps; Letise Houser LaFeir ’00, senior advisor, NOAA, U.S. Dept. of Commerce ; Emma Leheny ’92, principal deputy general council, U.S. Dept. of Education; Suzan Davidson LeVine ’93, interim political head, Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Dept. of Labor; Sean Manning ’18, press assistant, Office of the Secretary, U.S. Dept. of Commerce ; Ben Miller ’07, senior advisor to the chief of staff, U.S. Dept. of Education; Melanie Nakagawa ’02, senior director, climate and energy, National Security Council; Victoria Nuland ’83, undersecretary of state for political affairs, State Dept.; Daniel Parnes ’10, special assistant to the ASD for energy environment & installations, Office of the Secretary of Defense; Tanya Sehgal ’06, special advisor and senior counsel, U.S. Dept. of Personnel Management; Stefanie Tompkins ’93 ScM, ’97 PhD, director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; Christina Tsafoulias ’04, supervisory congressional liaison specialist, Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs, USAID; Janet Yellen ’67, Secretary of the Treasury; Todd Zabatkin ’10 MPP, deputy director for research (White House Communications Dept.) ; and Maria Zuber ’83 ScM, ’86 PhD, cochair, President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Marca Doeff ’83 PhD, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was part of the team behind the invention of a new solid lithium battery that eliminates the safety issue of flammability and has vastly greater capacity than graphite lithium batteries. The invention was honored with an R&D 100 Award by R&D World magazine. The lithium battery market is expected to grow from more than $37 billion in 2019 to more than $94 billion by 2025.
Anna Bobiak Nagurney ’80 ScM, ’83 PhD continues as the John F. Smith Memorial Professor of Operations Management in the Department of Operations and Information Management at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. This past January she was a keynote speaker at the science festival, Congreso Futuro, in Santiago and Valparaiso, Chile. Also on the program was the Nobel Laureate Brown Professor Michael Kosterlitz. During Anna’s final year in the applied mathematics PhD program, she had an office cubicle in a room in Barus and Holley directly across from the office of Professor Kosterlitz, who had just joined the Brown physics department. In May, Anna became a Fellow of the Network Science Society. In late June and early July, she participated in three weeks of European conferences. At the 30th European Conference on Operational Research in Dublin she presented a tutorial, “Game Theory and Variational Inequalities: From Transportation and Supply Chains to Financial Networks and the Internet,” and spoke on the “Women in Operational Research” and the “Making an Impact” panels. The following week, in Kalamata, Greece, she co-organized the fourth Dynamics of Disasters Conference. Finally, she traveled to Metz, France, where at the 6th World Congress on Global Optimization, she was awarded the Constantin Caratheodory Prize in Global Optimization and delivered the prize lecture, “Tariffs and Quotas in Global Trade: What Networks, Game Theory, and Variational Inequalities Reveal.” She is the first female to receive this prize. The trip ended with two days of vacation in Paris for her and Lad ’74 ScM, ’86 PhD.
Obituaries
Wendy M. Stein ’81, ’83 AM, ’92 MD, of San Diego; May 20. She was a geriatrician in San Diego and licensed to practice medicine in California and Massachusetts. She specialized in hospice and palliative care and is survived by her father and numerous family members.
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