“Award/Recognition” Class Notes

Col. John D. Pavlovsky (Engr ’69 CM) (ret) has been recognized by the American Volkssport Association for completing 10km walking events in each of 50 state capitals and Washington, D.C.  

Ameena Gill (Engr ’04) was promoted to senior director of quality and process excellence at Lyft. Ameena was previously the General Manager at Lyft, responsible for growing market share and profitability for the entire California region. She lives in San Francisco with her 3-year-old son, Gavin.  

Georgia Newell Merten (Col ’81) is a Florida state licensed interior designer with more than 23 years of experience providing both residential and commercial interior design. She opened her own boutique design firm, Georgia Merten interior Design, in 2011, and recently won an ASID South Florida Award for Residential Renovation. She has been published in Florida Design Magazine, SE Florida Style & Design and The Palm Beach Post.

Jason H. Silverman (Col ’74), the Ellison Capers Palmer Jr. Professor of History Emeritus at Winthrop University, has published his 12th book, When America Welcomed Immigrants: The Short and Tortured History of Abraham Lincoln’s Act to Encourage Immigration. Additionally, the Governor of South Carolina awarded him the Order of the Silver Crescent, “the state’s highest civilian award for significant contributions, leadership, volunteerism, and lifelong influence within a region or community.” Silverman retired in December 2017 after almost 40 years as a university professor. He lives with his family in Pawleys Island, South Carolina.  

Jenna Rinehart Rassif (Col ’92 L/M) was featured in the Chambers USA 2020 Guide, a publication ranking the leading lawyers and law firms across the U.S. Rassif is the managing principal of Jackson Lewis’ Miami office. She has extensive experience representing employers in virtually all areas of labor and employment law.

Marney White (Com ’91) received the 2020 Teacher of the Year award from the Yale School of Public Health. This is the second distinguished teacher award White has won since 2014. Since then, she has also launched a class through Coursera, been denied the role of “feminist Ivy League Professor” in a local community theater production, and been a back-row dancer in the viral “Fairfield Mombies” Thriller/Halloween flashmob sensation. 

Richard Margulies (Col ’76 L/M) was recently featured in the Chambers USA 2020 Guide, a publication ranking the leading lawyers and law firms across the U.S. Margulies is office managing principal of the Jacksonville, Florida, office of Jackson Lewis. He has more than 30 years of experience in counseling and representing employers in litigation matters.

Steve McLaughlin (Arch ’85 L/M) has served for more than five years as staff landscape architect for the Architectural Design Division at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, as a third party contractor, currently employed by MicroSystems Automation Group, and in that capacity was recognized during an OBO Bureau awards ceremony at the close of Fiscal Year 2019 for his contributions to the success of the U.S. Embassy campus redevelopment project at New Delhi, India, which is now under construction. The architecture and engineering team for this project was headed by the New York City-based design firm WEISS/MANFREDI, and on 13 April, 2020, the UVA School of Architecture awarded the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture to the firm’s co-founders, Marion Weiss (Arch ’79) and Michael Manfredi. 

Kathryn Blair Moore (Col ’03), an assistant professor of art at Texas State University, won Western Michigan University’s Otto Gründler Book Prize for her book The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance. The prize, which comes with a $1,000 cash award, was announced at the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies—one of the largest annual gatherings of scholars of the Middle Ages, which is held on the WMU campus.

Christopher Payne (Col ’81 L/M) was recognized as the 2019 Distinguished Philanthropist by the American College of Surgeons. The award honored Payne for his philanthropic endeavors, service to the surgical profession and long-lasting contributions to the medical community and the ACS.

David Black (Educ ’65 L/M) won first place in the 2019 Writers’ Club of Virginia annual poetry contest for his poem “On Studying an Old Photograph.”

Chris Morris (Arch ’75 L/M), who was named to Architectural Digest’s 1991 “AD–100″ list, has designed various built works across the United States, including Comerica Park, home of the Detroit Tigers; the Dolby Theater (formerly the Kodak Theater), home of the Oscars in Hollywood; Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut; the Chandelier Bar in the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas Hotel; Steelers Hall at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh; and the Meadowlands “Xanadu” shopping/entertainment complex, now the American Dream Meadowlands in New Jersey. In 2013, Morris, having contributed designs to NYC for both Ground Zero’s early development and Mayor Bloomberg’s bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, became the New York Foundation of the Arts’ first-ever Architecture/Environmental Structures Fellow.    

Alexander H. Margulies (Col ’80, Law ’84) was a member of the team that received the Transparency Team of the Year Award from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He worked on the U.S. Declassification Project on Argentina that provided the government of Argentina with 7,035 records totaling 48,379 pages of material shedding light on human rights abuses in Argentina between 1975 and 1984. This was the largest government-to-government declassification and release of records in U.S. history. 

Junius P. Fulton III (Col ’81 L/M) will receive the Harry L. Carrico Professionalism Award from the VSB Criminal Law Section on Feb. 14, 2020, at the Criminal Law Seminar in Williamsburg, Virginia. The Carrico Award was named for the former Supreme Court of Virginia chief justice who promoted the ideals of professionalism during his 42 years on the state’s highest court. Judge Fulton has served as a judge of the Norfolk Circuit Court for more than 23 years. Judge Fulton oversaw the development and implementation of both the Norfolk Drug Court and Reentry Court dockets. He claims the distinction of being the longest serving Drug Court judge in the Commonwealth, having presided over the Drug Court docket continuously from 1998 to 2018. He and his wife, Darnell Brown Fulton (Col ’81), live in Norfolk, Virginia.