GS Class of 1982
Dr. Reena Karani ’93 and Patricia King ’82 PhD have been elected as chair and member-at-large respectively of the National Board of Medical Examiners. The first woman of color ever elected as chair of the organization, Dr. Karani is director of the Institute for Medical Education and professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. Dr. King is a primary care internal medicine physician at the University of Vermont Medical Center and professor at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont.
Susan M. Schneider ’82 ScM did a podcast on community interventions for climate action for the Union of Concerned Scientists and contributed to a new guidebook on the subject, Making Shift Happen. She is now living in Michigan.
Obituaries
Bryan D. Goodwin ’82 MAT, of South Hadley, Mass.; Sept. 22, from brain cancer. He was a reference librarian at Mount Holyoke College for 34 years. He was an avid reader, especially interested in the Civil War and World War II. He enjoyed the outdoors and was scuba certified. He is survived by his wife, Joan; a stepdaughter; a brother; and several nieces and nephews.
Christina Crosby ’82 PhD, of Middletown, Conn.; Jan. 5, of pancreatic cancer. As an undergraduate she attended Swarthmore College, wrote a column called The Feminist Slant for the student newspaper and helped found Swarthmore Gay Liberation. At Brown, she was part of a socialist feminist caucus that focused on such issues as domestic violence. She and the caucus established a hotline for battered women and in 1976 founded Sojourner House, a domestic violence agency based in Providence. She worked in Wesleyan University’s English department and became a central part of the University’s women’s studies program, which she helped establish as a major and later helped redesign as feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. She received Wesleyan’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1994 and in 2003 the University faculty elected her chair of the department. She published the novel The Ends of History: Victorians and “the Woman Question” (Routledge, 1990) and after a 2003 bicycle accident that left her paralyzed, she published A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain (NYU Press, 2016). Her BAM essay, “Others Stop Looking,” appeared in November/December 2016. She is survived by her partner Janet Jakobsen.
Barbara L. Nason ’82 MAT, of Northampton, Mass., formerly of Springfield, Mass., and Simsbury, Conn.; May 7, from a fall. She had a long career with Disability Management Services in Springfield. She wrote poetry, painted watercolors, sang in church choirs, knitted, and did needlepoint. She also enjoyed camping, kayaking, swimming, and hiking. She is survived by a sister and brother-in-law, a brother and sister-in-law, and a nephew.
Robert C. DeBlois ’82 AM, of Seekonk, Mass.; Jan. 31. After completing his degree at UNH, he began teaching English at Bishop Keough High School in Pawtucket, R.I. and working at Upward Bound, a college prep program for first generation college students. He developed a relationship with Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, and created programs to serve urban kids at risk of dropping out of school. In 1984 he founded SPIRIT, from which grew two schools, Blackstone Academy and UCAP. He served on many local boards and received numerous recognitions including the National Caring Award, the 2000 Rhode Island Middle School Principal of the Year, The Martin Luther King, Jr., Hall of Fame Award, and the 2018 Murray Family Prize. He was a lifelong activist, writer, and student of history and politics. Before his accident (he broke his neck diving into a river, leaving him a quadriplegic), he enjoyed hiking and skiing in the White Mountains, and watching his children develop the same appreciation for skiing, hiking, and nature that he had. He is survived by his wife, Bonnie; a daughter; two sons; a daughter-in-law; three brothers; three sisters-in-law, including Paula Pillsbury DeBlois ’89; and several nieces and nephews.
Warren Meck ’82 PhD, of Durham, N.C.; Jan. 21. He joined the faculty at Duke University as an associate professor in 1994 and was made full professor in 2001. He authored more than 200 academic articles and two books, Functional and Neural Mechanisms of Interval Timing and Introduction: The Persistence of Time, both published in 2003. He was recognized for research on subjective time perception in humans and how time influences human and animal behavior. He is survived by his wife, Christina Williams.
Steven J. Keable ’82 MAT, of Dover, N.H.; Oct. 27. He taught in Salzburg, Austria, and toured Europe before returning to the U.S. to attend law school. He began his law career working as a prosecutor at Rockingham County in Exeter, N.H., and was later promoted to Deputy County Attorney. After working as a prosecutor for 20 years, he founded an independent law practice and worked until his retirement in July 2018. He was a fan of the New England Patriots and the Boston Celtics. He is survived by his wife, Kathleen; a son; his mother; a sister; a brother; a sister-in-law; a brother-in-law; and nieces and nephews.
Send us your news!
Help us keep your class updated.
Send us an obituary
Help us memorialize your departed classmates