“Other” Class Notes

Elizabeth Hirko (Col ’98 CM) and David B. Hirko (Engr ’98 L/M) welcomed a son, William Andrew, on May 23, 2015. Will joins big brothers John, 8, and James, 5. The boys are the nephews of Karen E. Hirko (Com ’00 L/M). The family lives in Arlington, Virginia.

William Teale (Educ ’73, Educ ’77) has been elected president of the International Literacy Association (formerly the International Reading Association), a professional organization of 300,000 literacy educators worldwide. He is a professor of education, a University Scholar and director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

David Beers (Col ’75 CM) has been a consultant and adviser to the international directorate at the Bank of England since August 2014. In 2012-13, he was special adviser to the governor at the Bank of Canada. He worked at Standard & Poor’s in New York and London between 1990 and 2011 in various roles, most recently as global head of sovereign and international public finance ratings.

Andrew Gutowski (Arch ’75) leads the East Coast hospitality project management group for Cumming Corp., where he directs teams managing the renovation and new construction of major hotel and resort projects in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Before joining Cumming, Mr. Gutowski spent 10 years developing major urban vertical mixed-use projects in the Washington, D.C., area. Throughout the 1990s, he worked in Poland, managing real estate investment and development companies. In 1995, he and Pioneer Mutual Funds (now Pioneer Investments) founded a private real estate investment company, Pioneer Real Estate Poland, now Pioneer Polish Real Estate Fund. Before his career in real estate investment management, Mr. Gutowski, who is a member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and holds a master’s degree in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a master’s degree in real estate from MIT, was an architect with Benjamin Thompson and Associates in Massachusetts. He and his wife, Francesca Lupica Gutowski (Arch ’74), live in the Washington, D.C., area and have three daughters: Elisabeth Gutowski Munder (Col ’02 L/M), Gabriela A. Gutowski (Arch ’05 L/M) and Juliana T. Gutowski (Arch ’12 L/M).

Benjamin Brawley (Com ’11) has been promoted to associate director, senior client lead, in the Cincinnati office of dunnhumby USA. In this new role, he will be responsible for new business development among retail suppliers. Previously, he served as capability lead, responsible for supporting retail pricing and promotions.

Kelly Underwood (Col ’10) received a doctorate in veterinary medicine from the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech in May 2015 and was valedictorian of her class. Outside her studies, she was one of three founding student co-chairs of Virginia Tech Helping PAWS (Pet Assisted Wellness Service), a community program that provides stress relief and animal-assisted therapy to nursing homes, assisted-living centers, schools, libraries and other community locations. Dr. Underwood currently works at a small animal general practice in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Reedy Swanson (Col ’12, Law ’16 L/M) and George Zaras (Col ’12, Law ’16) traveled to Myanmar over winter break to research a range of human rights issues as part of the Human Rights Study Project at UVA’s School of Law. The group spent 15 days in the country studying the impact of foreign investment to health care and Myanmar’s constitution, among other issues.

James Cocola (Grad ’09) has been awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor in the department of humanities and arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. His research explores ideas of place in American poetry and poetics, the literary and cultural production of Americans and others of Mediterranean descent, and experiential and experimental forms of writing. Mr. Cocola has received a number of honors for his work, including a scholarship for the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin, and a resident scholarship at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

D. Starrett (Law ’09) has been named to Triad Business Journal’s 2015 “40 Leaders Under Forty” list, an annual listing of the region’s top young professionals. Mr. Starrett is an attorney in the Greensboro, North Carolina, office of Brooks Pierce McLendon Humphrey & Leonard, where his practice includes business litigation, corporate law, compliance and internal investigations and employment law.

Amy Azano (Educ ’09) an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s School of Education, and Carolyn Callahan, a professor in UVA’s Curry School of Education, have received a $2 million federal grant to study gifted education for rural students. Their program, Promoting PLACE, aims to increase the number of rural students in gifted programs, especially in high-poverty school districts. Ms. Azano and Ms. Callahan will work with rural school districts in Virginia to identify gifted and talented students and develop high-quality language arts units to serve those students capable of advanced work.

Lelia Otmani (Col ’08) has published The Protection of the Environment and Access to Patented Technologies: Interpreting the TRIPS Agreement in light of the human right to health, an academic book that examines the connection between human health and the environment.

Adam Duggins (Darden ’08) is managing partner of New Page Capital, a private equity firm based in Greensboro, North Carolina, that he established with Rick Ramsey (Com ’01, Darden ’07 L/M). Previously, Mr. Duggins worked as vice president of operations at Care Services and as a manager in Bain & Co.’s private equity group.