Class Notes

Robin Short Verstraete (Col ’05 CM) and her husband, Aaron, welcomed their second child, Holden Robert, on Feb. 1, 2022. He joins big brother Graham, age 3. The family lives in New Albany, Ohio, where Ms. Verstraete is a Vice President of Merchandising for Bath and Body Works and Mr. Verstraete is the head of strategy and partnerships for tech start-up UnitQ.

Katie Esteves (Col ’97) has been named Director/Owner of Truity Partners. Late last year, Katie and seven others participated in a management buy-out of Baker Tilly Search and Staffing. Truity Partners LLC is an award-winning staffing and recruiting agency with finance, accounting and human resources as their specialties. Their 60 professionals maintain extensive candidate networks in Chicagoland, the Twin Cities and Wisconsin. They offer temporary staffing and consulting as well as directing hire solutions in their local geography along with executive search on a nationwide basis. Visit https://truitypartners.com/ for more information.

Richard F. McGonegal (Grad ’75 CM) has published the novel Ghoul Duty with Cave Hollow Press.

The mystery is the second in the Sheriff Francis Hood series, which began with publication of Sense of Grace in 2020.

McGonegal is a 1975 graduate of the University of Virginia, where he received a master’s degree in English Language and Literature. While attending UVA, he studied creative writing with Peter Taylor, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

“Ghoul Duty” is the unofficial moniker for the task of recovering corpses unearthed by Missouri River flooding. After the sheriff and his chief deputy retrieve a body, they learn it did not come from the cemetery.

The revelation begins the process of determining who the man is and how he died. Complicating Hood’s efforts are his early recovery from alcoholism; his separation from his wife and daughter; a new twist on a relationship from his past; and the puzzling behavior of an ex-convict, whose father was killed by Hood in a shootout.

McGonegal is also a 1973 graduate of Rutgers University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature.

He retired in 2017 after a 41-year journalism career at the Jefferson City News Tribune, a daily newspaper in Missouri’s capital city. McGonegal and his wife, Kristie, live in Jefferson City, Missouri, where their two adult daughters, Heather and Jane, also reside.

Print and Kindle versions of his books are available online at Amazon.com.

Ann Hewitt (Nurs ’79 CM) married Jon Gordon on New Year’s Day, 2020, on a shockingly warm and sunny Chicago day. The celebration took place in the historic landmark Chicago Athletic Association overlooking Lake Michigan, and the clouds over the lake turned pink as the sun set and the couple made their vows. A dinner reception featuring an 18-piece big band inspired nonstop dancing, led by the many ’Hoos in attendance. Guests included Allyson Wells Bakewell (Nurs ’81 CM), Barbara Cherney Andrukonis (Col ’79 CM), Beth Rasin (Col ’79 CM), Cindy Richardson Milton (Com ’79 CM), Don Havermann (Com ’76, Law ’80 CM), Geri Wright Miner (Com ’79 CM), Hughes Bakewell (Com ’81 CM), Kathy Simmons Neel (Com ’79 CM), Kit Kammerer Schumaker (Nurs ’80 CM), Martha Weaver Preston (Com ’79 CM), Tracy Hyde Havermann (Educ ’79 CM) and Vicki Vasta Healy (Nurs ’81 CM). Ann and Jon live in Winnetka, Illinois. Ann works for STERIS Corporation and Jon is retired.

Adam Ambrogi (Col ’98 CM) recently took the job as Senior Director for Voting and Elections with the League of Women Voters. Ambrogi joins the League’s growing team and will expand the organization’s impact on voting rights and election administration.

“I am thrilled to have Adam join the League at a pivotal moment in our country when voting rights are under attack,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, CEO of the League of Women Voters. “Adam brings to the League a wealth of experience in voting and elections advocacy as well as philanthropy and strategy. We’re excited to have him join us as we continue our fight to expand voting rights for all Americans.”

Prior to joining the League, Ambrogi served for several years as Director of the Elections and Voting Program at the Democracy Fund. In that role, he led efforts in grantmaking, strategy, research and advocacy to improve the quality of elections and voting. Ambrogi has previous experience at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and on Capitol Hill as Chief Counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, addressing a wide range of issues related to rules of the Senate, election law and policy.

“I am excited to join the League of Women Voters in this new role as we expand our presence in the local, state and federal space,” said Ambrogi. “The potential to create impact with LWV’s ability to combine grassroots and organizing relationships of over 800 Leagues with national insight and strategy can be transformational to protect and promote the vote. I can’t wait to help build that vision, look for new areas of growth and expand our partnerships throughout the country.”

Erin Mattingly (Educ ’03 CM) was awarded the Department of the Army’s Public Service Commendation Medal for her leadership of medical operations at Camp Atterbury, Indiana. Camp Atterbury was one of eight Operation Allies Welcome sites supporting Afghan evacuees following the Taliban assuming control of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021 and became the interim home for 7,201 guests.

Frances Sarrett (COL ’14 CM) and Michael Wall (COL ’12 CM) were married on November 6, 2021 in Mobile, Alabama surrounded by friends and fellow ’Hoos.  Frances is the daughter of Kemper Sarrett III (Col ’82 CM) and Bowden Overbey Sarrett (Col ’82 CM), and the granddaughter of Kemper Sarrett Jr. (Col ’52 CM).  The couple lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Justin Humphreys (Col ’01) recorded audio commentaries for the upcoming BluRay releases of the films The Naked Jungle, Conquest of Space, and The Big Mouth (all released by Imprint Films), and also for the Dr. Phibes double-feature BluRay set (from Kino Lorber Studio Classics). He will be featured hosting two documentary featurettes on the BluRay of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (Warner Archive). 

Cristina Liebolt (Col ’10 CM) married fellow Wahoo Lincoln Foran (Col ’10 CM) on Sept. 5, 2021, at St. Paul’s Memorial Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, with a reception following at Farmington Country Club. Also in attendance were matron of honor Freyan Soonawalla (Col ’10, Darden ’19) and husband Rohan Bakshi (Col ’10); bridesmaids Ashley Craddock (Res ’23) and Margaret Kelly (Law ’15); and groomsman Tyler Duke (Col ’10 CM). Cristina and Lincoln first met at UVA, but they reconnected in New York City after running into one another at the William and Wall Street subway station. They now live in the Tenleytown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. with their black lab Rugby.

David Meredith (Com ’03) has been appointed chief executive officer and board director of Boomi, the intelligent connectivity and automation leader that instantly connects everyone to everything with its cloud-native, unified, open, and intelligent platform that serves more than 18,000 customers globally.

Leading technology investors Francisco Partners and TPG spun Boomi out of Dell for $4 billion – one of largest software growth-equity deals ever. Boomi pioneered the intelligent use of data and has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant for eight consecutive years.

Meredith has nearly 30 years of experience serving in senior executive leadership and board director roles across both multi-billion-dollar public companies as well as PE-backed technology-focused firms.

Meredith ranked Top 50 in the largest company category by Comparably for Best CEO (2020) and Best CEO for Diversity (2021) and earned a CEO rating of A+, measured across 60,000+ companies. He received a distinguished Globee® Award in the Visionary category as part of The 9th Annual 2021 CEO World Awards. In 2016, The Uptime Institute recognized David’s contributions to the industry by presenting him with their Change Leader Award. Georgia Trend Magazine named him a “Top 40 under 40 – Best and Brightest Leader” in 2008.

Paul L. Gaston (Grad ’66, ’70 CM) has published Credentials, a study of the academic and employment connection, with co-author Michelle Van Noy, director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University. His other recent books include The Challenge of Bologna (2010), about European higher education reform, and Higher Education Accreditation (2014). All are published by Stylus Publishing, LLC. He is the author also of Ohio’s Craft Beers (2016) published by Kent State University press. Gaston is a former provost of Kent State and a former acting dean of Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) in Cleveland. At UVA he was elected to the Raven Society and to Phi Beta Kappa.    

The Jung Center of Houston has selected Frances Carter Stephens (Col ’74 CM) as one of the artists on their 2022 exhibition schedule. Titled Beautiful the Wild, the exhibition will present more than a dozen of her recent abstract oil paintings and one conceptual three dimensional work.  The works express untamed nature–vivid and sometimes unpredictable–as experienced along Texas’s Gulf Coast.  They explore elements of earth, sky, and weather as aspects of the abstract landscape and their dynamic impact on our world.  References to gardens and the changing seasons evoke the life cycle–birth, growth, decline, and death, and all of its fierce emotions.  Beautiful the Wild will be on view at The Jung Center of Houston, 5200 Montrose Boulevard, from February 16 through March 31, 2022.  The exhibition is free and open to the public during the Jung Center’s normal business hours.  A public reception with the artist is scheduled for Saturday, March 19 from 5 to 7 pm.

Amy Karofsky (Grad ’92, ’97) published A Case for Necessitarianism. The book provides a case for and explanation of necessitarianism—the view that absolutely nothing about the world could have been otherwise in any way whatsoever. As the first defense of necessitarianism in over 300 years, it provides the only contemporary account and support of the necessitarian position and its merits. The arguments aim towards a more realistic and scientific explanation of the universe and everything in it and have implications for many different philosophical issues and positions. She is also the primary co-author of Philosophy Through Film, 4th edition, a text book for introductory philosophy classes that uses recent, popular movies to explore philosophical problems and issues. She is in her 24th year as a philosophy professor at Hofstra University and expects to be promoted to full professor at the end of the Spring semester.

Michael Lee “Mike” Bentley (Educ ’85) received the award for Outstanding Science Teaching and Contributions to Science Education by the Virginia Association of Science Teachers at their annual meeting in November 2021. At that meeting, he delivered a paper for the first time via YouTube video because the conference went virtual due to the pandemic. In 2021, he presented programs on the climate crisis to community groups and to his city council and continued volunteer work on Plowshare Peace and Justice Center’s board, as secretary of the regional Sierra Club, Citizen’s Climate Lobby, and Virginia’s Interfaith Power and Light. At 75, he is well and doing what good he can.

Allyson E. Gold (Col ’06 CM) joined the faculty of Wake Forest University School of Law as Associate Dean of Experiential Learning and director of the university’s new Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic. 

J. Ross Blankenship (Col ’08 CM) published his first book, Assessing CEOs and Senior Leaders: A Primer for Consultants with the American Psychological Association in 2021. Written for graduate students, psychologists and other professionals interested in better understanding how to work with executives, the book builds on theory, research and practice to provide an overview of senior leadership assessment, the contexts in which this work takes place and the tools and methods used. It also discusses ethical issues and future directions for practice.

Laura Blasi (Educ ’02) joined the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in December as a Program Officer focused on evaluation in the National Research Council Executive Office in Washington, D.C.  More about the Academies is available online:   https://www.nationalacademies.org 

Ted Weinberg (Arch ’90) was elected to the Mercer Island, Washington City Council seat 4 on November 2, 2021 and sworn in on January 4, 2022. He previously served four years on the Mercer Island Planning Commission, most recently as vice-chair. Ted also works full-time as the Information Technology Portfolio Manager for the City of Seattle. Prior to his years of public service, Ted worked at Microsoft and Avanade as well as some early-stage companies. In his spare time, Ted loves plein air landscape painting, touring historic architecture, and volunteering for organizations that advance civil civic discourse and affordable housing.

Ted and his wife Florence live on Mercer Island and have two adult children. They also have two Siamese cats who have a penchant for getting between Ted and the video conference camera during live city council meetings. 

Bridget Mahoney (Col ’05 CM) and her husband, J.P. Nogues, have welcomed their first child, Ollivier ‘Ollie’ Daniel Nogues, on October 8, 2021. The family resides in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands where Ms. Mahoney is a psycho-therapist for the Department of Veteran Affairs and Mr. Nogues is a public defender.

Justin Lollman (Law ’14) has been named a shareholder at GableGotwals, a full-service law firm with more than 100 attorneys and more than 60 professionals with offices in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Okla. Justin has a diverse civil litigation practice, focusing on appeals, complex commercial litigation, employment law, governmental liability, and civil rights defense. Justin regularly practices before state and federal courts across Oklahoma and throughout the country. Having clerked for federal judges at both the trial and appellate levels, Justin is well-versed in federal practice and procedure and draws on that experience to counsel clients at all phases of the litigation process, from the pleadings up through appeal.

Neal Willetts (Educ ’06) is delighted to announce his engagement to Elijah Thomas Lee Akers, an IT Specialist in the US Navy currently serving on the USS George Washington.  The couple met in February 2020 when Neal was bartending an event for Eli’s ship, and as people say, the rest is history!  They are tentatively planning a spring 2023 wedding.  As Eli will have just gotten out of the Navy, the couple plans to reside in Eli’s native Columbus, Ohio after the wedding.  The couple have three cats: Augustus, Sulla and Pip.  

Andrew Levine (Engr ’13 CM) and Mary Ortiz Levine (Col ’11 CM) welcomed a daughter, Abigail Mattea Levine, on May 3, 2021 in Falls Church, Virginia.

Kyrsta Small Scully (COM ’90 CM) has been named controller of the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group in Yountville, California, which runs the French Laundry, Bouchon, Ad Hoc and other fine restaurants in multiple locations across the country. She supervises accounting and financial matters for all the restaurants and related companies. After a 25-year career in food and beverage at luxury hotels, she turned to the accounting side and earned her California CPA license in 2020 and her CMA in 2017.

Sean Scully (COL, ’89 CM) has been named Western National Editor for States Newsroom, a national nonprofit focusing on news coverage of state government. In this position, he coordinates coverage and assists editors in seven western states. Previously, he was editor and director of news content for the Napa Valley Register in California. He and his family will continue to live in the Napa Valley, where they have been for a decade.

Bryan Thomas (COL ’10 CM) married his college sweetheart, Lisa Hamilton (COL ’11, EDUC ’11 CM), on Juneteenth, June 19, 2021. The couple wed in Washington, D.C. surrounded by family and fellow ‘Hoos.

Herbert H. Slatery III (Col ’74 CM), the current attorney general for the State of Tennessee, was presented with the Kelley-Wyman Award at the recent National Association of Attorneys General Capital Forum in Washington, D.C. The Kelley-Wyman Award is an annual award given to the attorney general who has done the most to advance the objectives of the Association, and the honoree is selected by fellow attorneys general. General Slatery was completely surprised and was quick to give credit to the cooperation among the many attorneys general and to his own dedicated, hardworking staff in Tennessee.

Matthew Kelley (Col ’00 CM) has established a Hereford-Angus beef cattle operation on his farm in Madison, Virginia. The cows join his wife, three children, and career in fulfilling his lifelong goals in pursuit of happiness.

H. MacNeil “Mac” Dobbins (Col ’16 CM) has joined the Bridge Investment Group as Vice President of its Industrial Net Lease Group. He is responsible for acquisitions and asset management for the division’s Private Equity Funds. He previously served as Principal, and earlier as Senior Associate at Gladstone Commercial Corporation, a publicly traded real estate investment trust. He began his financial career and served as a Senior Credit Analyst at United Bank after graduating from UVA in 2016. His office is in Arlington, Virginia.