“Award/Recognition” Class Notes

Scott Kellermann (Col ’67 L/M) recently retired from the Western Sierra clinic in Grass Valley, California, a clinic that he founded in 1986. He received the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine’s Distinguished Alumni award in April of 2017. He was awarded a 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholarship to teach at the Uganda Nursing School, which he founded. He has recently taken a part-time position as an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. He resonates with the quote “the trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off.”

Christopher K. Payne (Col ’81 L/M) has been elected Chair of the Worldwide Fistula Fund (WFF) Board of Directors. An expert in female urology, Dr. Payne joined the WFF in 2012 and has provided valuable leadership as the organization expands into new regions of the developing world. Dr. Payne travels to WFF programs in Ethiopia and Niger and provides expert instruction and surgeries each year

In collaboration with Dr. Itengre Ouedraogo, WFF FIGO certified fistula surgeon in Niger, Dr. Payne recently published two papers related to programs at Danja Fistula Center–a six month follow-up study of over 300 fistula patients and a report of 10 cases in which fistulas were caused by Female Genital Mutilation.

Dr. Payne will help further the mission of WFF to protect and restore the health and dignity of the world’s most vulnerable women by preventing and treating childbirth injuries. Founded in 1995, Worldwide Fistula Fund strategically partners with local organizations and institutions to enable Africans to solve their own problems in meeting their women’s health care needs. We support girls and women to recover and build new lives after devastating childbirth injuries.

Although childbirth injuries like obstetric fistula are both preventable and treatable, an estimated one million girls and women currently suffer from this injury in the developing world. Caused by prolonged, obstructed labor, obstetric fistula leaves a woman incontinent. Watch Irene’s story. In addition to treatment, WFF provides social reintegration services and promotes prevention through doctor & community health advocacy training to improve the overall safety of childbirth. WFF also treats women with pelvic organ prolapse, another devastating childbirth injury.

Dr. Payne is also currently an elected Trustee of the International Continence Society and a member of the ICS Developing World Committee. Originally from West Virginia, Dr. Payne graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Virginia. He earned his MD at Vanderbilt University and completed his urology residency at The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Following his fellowship in Female Urology, Urodynamics, and Pelvic Reconstructive Surgery at the University of California Los Angeles, Dr. Payne joined Stanford University in 1993 to launch their program in Female Urology and NeuroUrology. He left Stanford in 2014 as Emeritus Professor having published over 100 articles and book chapters during his tenure there.

Dr. Payne co-founded Vista Urology and Pelvic Pain Partners in San Jose, CA where he continues to focus his work in female urology.

Russell Paul Cain (Engr ’81 L/M) became the twenty-seventh person to be named an Applied Physics Laboratory Master Inventor at Johns Hopkins University on May 10, 2017. He received the award in recognition for his 10 issued U.S. patents while employed at the lab, where he is principal professional staff. His patents focus on sensor integration and application in a variety of fields. Learn more about his work and the award in this video.

Craig Iffland (Col ’07) has been named a 2017 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The award recognizes doctoral candidates in the humanities and the social sciences addressing ethical and religious values. Mr. Iffland is a doctoral candidate in the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Melissa Baralt (Col ’03 L/M), Natalie Brito (Col ’05 L/M) are members of the winning team in the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Bridging the Word Gap Challenge. Along with Ashley Darcy Mahoney of George Washington University, they developed Háblame Bebé, a mobile app designed to reduce the word gap for Hispanic children that promotes Spanish-English bilingualism. The word gap is the difference between the number of words children from low-income families learn compared to children from high-income families. The goal of the challenge was the development of a tool to help parents and caregivers talk and engage more with young children and help close the word gap.

James “Jim” Strawbridge (Law ’87) was inducted into Virginia Tech’s Academy of Engineering Excellence, a group of alumni who are recognized for achieving exceptional career success. Mr. Strawbridge works as an independent consultant and serves as an advisor to a number of technology companies. He began his career practicing law with the firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he became a partner, and has held executive positions in several companies, including the biotechnology company Stemcentrx.

In May at the annual Harvard Commencement festivities, Thomas F. Pettigrew (Col ’52) received the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  The award is given in recognition of a “significant contribution to society as a result of [his] graduate education at Harvard.”  Pettigrew received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard in 1956, and taught at Harvard from 1957-1980. The Graduate School Dean Meng described Pettigrew as having “…devoted his life to confronting …racism, discrimination, and prejudice and laid the groundwork for ideas that are now fundamental to the way we think about prejudice in the United States and around the world.”

Mike Lynn (Col ’72) of commercial boutique Texas litigation firm Lynn Pinker Cox & Hurst has been named to “Best Lawyers in America” for six consecutive years. Mr. Lynn has also been recognized as a “Litigation Star” for five consecutive years and one of the “Top 100 Trial Lawyers in America” from 2015-2017 by Benchmark Litigation. Mr. Lynn has been named one of the “Top 500 Lawyers in the US” by Lawdragon in 2015 and consistently ranked in Chambers and Partners.

Mr. Lynn recently obtained a $146 million jury verdict for Mesa Petroleum (an entity controlled by T. Boone Pickens), making it the third consecutive year the firm has obtained one of the largest jury verdicts in the United States. In 2014, Mr. Lynn lead a team that recovered a jury verdict of over 900 million dollars. Lynn Pinker Cox & Hurst was recently named as one of the Top 10 Litigation Boutiques in America by Benchmark Litigation, as one of the 2017 Best Law Firms by Best Lawyers, and one of the Top 10 Commercial Litigation Firms by Chambers and Partners.

Vincent C. Ning (Col ’15 L/M) and Michael L. Paris (Engr ’15 L/M) have been accepted into the start-up incubator Y Combinator. They are the founders of Scaphold.io, an app development platform based on Facebook’s GraphQL technology.

Paul Verkuil (Law ’67) received an honorary degree from the College of William & Mary at the college’s 2017 commencement ceremony. Mr. Verkuil has practiced law in New York City and served in a number of administrative and faculty roles at the College of William & Mary, Tulane University Law School and the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University. He also served a five-year term as chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent advisory group that makes recommendations to Congress and federal agencies about the regulatory process.

Norman D. Askins (Arch ’68 L/M) has received the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art’s 2017 Board of Directors Award, one of the institute’s Arthur Ross Awards for Excellence in the Classical Tradition. Mr. Askins established his architecture practice in Atlanta in 1977. He has specialized in historic preservation, period residences, vacation cottages and plantations, as well as additions to existing homes. In 2014, he published a book about his work, Inspired by Tradition: The Architecture of Norman Davenport Askins (The Monacelli Press).

Megan Durkee (Col ’10, Law ’15) has been awarded the University of Virginia School of Law’s Powell Fellowship in Legal Services. The fellowship will support her work with the Legal Aid Justice Center’s JustChildren program in Richmond, Virginia.

David Michael Brienza (Engr ’91) won the National Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel’s 2017 Kosiak Award. The award honors contributions to the prevention or management of of pressure injuries through research, education or patient care.

Teresa Bryce Bazemore (Col ’81 L/M) received the 2017 Paradigm Award from The Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia.  The award is the most prestigious award given to one professional woman each year in the Greater Philadelphia area. 

Rebecca “Becky” Kinlein Lindahl (Col ’03 L/M, at right in photo) has been awarded the 2016 Young Professional Leadership Award by ATHENA International in Charlotte, North Carolina. The award honors emerging women leaders for exhibiting professional excellence, providing service to others and serving as role models for young women. Ms. Lindahl, the youngest female partner in the large international law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman, leads by example as a litigator, mentor and women’s advocate.