Film location scout Bob Craft ’76 and his team won the 2008 California On Location Award (COLA), honoring their superior work on Eagle Eye. The other nominees included the scouts with Hancock, Valkyrie, and Milk. Although the story for Eagle Eye was set in the Midwest, most of the film was shot in Los Angeles. “It took a team of location scouts to make a movie as big as Eagle Eye,” says Craft. “Each person had certain locations to find and manage. One of my locations was the boyhood home of Shia LaBeouf. It took six weeks—and looking at more than 60 homes—before we found the right location, in Long Beach.” If you saw the film but can’t remember much about this setting, there’s a reason: “Except for a small interior scene, it was cut from the movie. Such is the life of a location manager,” Craft adds.
Bob Coleman ’68 received the “Distinguished Eagle,” awarded by the national Boy Scout organization to those former Eagle Scouts who have proved exemplary in both business careers and community service. An executive director of Morgan Stanley in San Francisco, Coleman also is president of the Piedmont Boy Scout Council, president of the Piedmont Language School, as well as president of the American Fondouk Animal Hospital in Fez, Morocco, which provides free medical care to more than 20,000 animals per year. At Wesleyan, he was a College of Social Studies major; he received his MBA from Harvard.
The Massachusetts Secretary of Public Safety and State Fire Marshal, along with the Task Force on Fire and Building Safety and the Department of Fire Services honored Edward V. Colbert III ’89 as instrumental in the passage of a law they consider a landmark. A reception for Colbert last September marked the second anniversary of the Chapter 304 of the Acts of 2004, An Act Relative to Fire Safety in the Commonwealth. Called “the sprinkler law” and inspired by a horrific nightclub fire in Rhode Island that left 100 dead and more than 200 injured, this law states that nightclubs in Massachusetts with a capacity of more than 100 people must have an automatic sprinkler system installed. As an undergraduate, Colbert was a government major. He earned a Juris Doctorate degree from Suffolk University Law School in 1994.
Alwyn Cohall ’76, M.D., director of the Harlem Health Promotion Center, recently received a $4.375-million award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the impact of Web-based interactive health communication on improving health promotion in Harlem. Additionally, as director of Project STAY (Services to Assist Youth), he also received a $2.125-million award from the New York State Department of Health. “A unique component of the program is the formation of a mobile health team, who provide off-site education and screening services to youth in community sites, such as alternative high schools and alternatives-to-incarceration programs,” he notes. Affiliated with the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, he received his medical degree from the University of Medicine and Dentisty of New Jersey.
Gordon J. Coburn ’86 has been promoted to Chief Financial and Operating Officer for Cognizant Technology Solution Corporation in Teaneck, N.J. He has had over sixteen years of experience in the IT industry. After majoring in history at Wesleyan he earned his MBA from the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth and is a member of the Board of Directors of the ITC Group in the IT Services Division of the ITAA.
John H. Coatsworth ’63 was appointed dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He had joined the Columbia faculty in 2006. He is the author or editor of seven books on the history of economic development and international relations of Latin America. Previously he served as the founding director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard?now the largest center of its kind in the world. A past president of the American Historical Association, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and president-elect of the Latin American Studies Association. In 2005, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sara Donnelly ’00 was awarded the 2008 Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship in fiction, given annually to promising Maine writers seeking to develop their writing skills. Donnelly is the managing editor at Mainebiz, and was a high honors recipient for her senior thesis: a collection of short fiction titled Grace and Other Stories. She planned to attend the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon.
CEO Suzanne Delbanco ’89, a CSS major at Wesleyan, was featured in Modern Healthcare, the only heathcare business news weekly, on April 18, for her work as founder of Leapfrog Group Committed to improving healthcare by reducing the number of medical errors made in healthcare, the company has grown from 60 Fortune 500 members at its inception in November 2000 to more than 500 members who use their consumer influence to push for increased patient safety.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences welcomed Alan M. Dachs ’70, chair emeritus of the Wesleyan Board of Trustees, as one of its 2007 class of fellows. He joins this 227-year-old academy, whose current research is focused on science and global security, social policy, the humanities and culture, and education. Dachs is president and chief executive officer of the Fremont Group in San Francisco. He serves on the boards of directors of the Bechtel Group and the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, the Brookings Institution, and The Conference Board. He is a member of the Corporation Visiting Committee for the Engineering Systems Division of MIT, the Advisory Board of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and chairs Wesleyan’s development committee. At the university’s Commencement in May, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.
Amy Crawford ’05 competed this summer at the Shure/Montreux Jazz Voice Competition in Switzerland, placing third among vocalists under age 35 from around the world. A jazz pianist when she arrived at Wesleyan—where she majored in government—she recalls that she tried singing at the encouragement of Prof. Jay Hoggard. After graduation, she moved to New York to pursue a career in music. She is a member of the band DeLeon, with whom she has been touring, and she is also leading her own project, Amy Crawford & The Electric, which was preparing to release its first EP in December 2008. You can download a free mp3 from the new Amy Crawford & The Electric’s EP at www.wesleyan.edu/magazine. (See also amycrawfordmusic.com and Myspace.com/amycrawfordmusic for more info.)
