Class Notes

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