Tag: 2002

Happy summer 2024 everyone! Onto the notes!

Congratulations to Sarabeth Broder-Fingert for her recent marriage to Melissa Courtemanche ’03. Sarabeth is the vice chair for clinical research in pediatrics and the associate director for research at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center at the UMass Chan Medical School.

Ben Goldstein was promoted to professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at Duke University. He also serves as the director of data science for Duke AI Health and the associate chief data scientist for the Duke University Health System. He’s enjoying his 10th year in Durham with his wife, Cheng, and sons, Malcolm (10) and Noah (6). He gets excited when he sees the stray Wesleyan bumper sticker or baseball hat!

Miles Gerson relocated to Boston with his wife, Claire, at the height of COVID in August 2020 for his new role with Takeda Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. This March he was promoted to global head and president of Takeda Ventures, managing the investment team and advising on strategic transactions.

Miles and Claire are loving Boston life, particularly because they get to spend more time with their many East Coast friends, including Wes alums Camden Fisher ’01, Jon Gates, and Kelly Knee PhD ’07, who all attended their COVID-delayed wedding celebrations in Colorado in 2022—both Camden and Jon graciously stood as groomsmen in the wedding party.

After graduating in 2002, Sallome Hralima moved to NYC for grad school and never left. She writes, “Miraculously (no really it was a lot of hard work, inheritance, and prayer), after 21 years in New York, my husband and I were able to purchase a home in Brooklyn. I had 15-plus years in youth development and social entrepreneurship before taking the leap into filmmaking. Since 2018 I have been producing events and short films with my freshman X-House roommate, Krysten Hayes. I have been working on a number of film/television projects with Umi NiiLampti ’99 and Markell Parker ’98. A documentary I co-produced, It Was All a Dream, premiered in the Tribeca Film Festival June 2024 in New York City. Here’s to career changes in your 40s!”

And Paul Smaldino wrote a book—Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution—which is a comprehensive introduction to mathematical and agent-based modeling of social behavior. You can order a copy from Princeton University Press.

As for myself, I was recently an executive producer of Ninety-Five Senses, an animated short film directed by the Napoleon Dynamite duo Jared and Jerusha Hess, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short. I also produced a series with the Olympics—Playing Fields—which not only won a Webby Award but also has been nominated for a Sports Emmy. Additionally, another film I produced about the tragic death of Indy car driver Dan Wheldon and the legacy he left for his sons—The Lionheart—recently premiered on HBO. I also have two films at festivals currently: Diane Warren: Relentless,about the Oscar-nominated songwriter that premiered at SXSW, and Bad Actor, a true-con doc about a $650 million Hollywood Ponzi scheme that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. Lastly, I executive produced a true- crime series—Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order—coming to Hulu this summer, about a group of extraordinary women who use data to solve serial predation patterns amongst missing and murdered women.

We were light on notes, so please keep the updates coming!

 Please write to your class secretary. 

Here’s this edition’s notes from our classmates!

Paul Smaldino, who lives in Sacramento, wrote: “In my academic career, I published a book—a graduate-level textbook on modeling social behavior, out this fall. I also have a band, The Small Dinosaurs, and we just put out an album called Dad Songs [released in August]—a garage/art rock album about the milieu of fatherhood. I have two kids and a wife.”

Jenny He sent along this news: “The exhibition John Waters: Pope of Trash, curated by Jenny He and Dara Jaffe ’09, MA ’12, is on view at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles from September 17, 2023, through August 4, 2024. It is accompanied by a 256-page catalog edited with text by Jenny and Dara. The book includes an essay by Jeanine Basinger and the exhibition features loans from the John Waters Archive housed in the Ogden and Mary Louise Reid Cinema Archives at the Jeanine Basinger Center for Film Studies.”

No Accident, a film Michelle Rabinowitz Carney produced for HBO Documentary Films, premiered on MAX October 10. It follows the civil suit against the organizers of 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and features fellow Wes alum Michael Bloch ’00, who represented the plaintiffs.

Jed Rosenbaum and his wife, Jillian, welcomed baby Zachary to the family in March. They live in Lexington, Massachusetts. Four-year-old Wesley keeps asking when he will get to see the tennis team play again—he attended last fall’s Alumni Pro-Am and a match at Tufts and very much enjoys the “Go Wes” cheers.

Steve Scribner is still living in Denver, co-principal of Shape Architecture Studio. His partner in crime, Morgan Law, is married to Kathleen Jones ’03. Morgan and Kathleen live in Leadville, the highest elevation town in the country, and have two kids and a husky and several bikes, as you do in a mountain town.

Steve wrote, “We’re heading to the East Coast tomorrow, and on the way to see my folks in Maine, will visit Dina Levi in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is a diversity and inclusion director at Amherst College. She has an awesome wife and two amazing kids, one of whom can play the violin better than you, dear reader. If we’re lucky we may also see Josh Blumenstock and Annie Youngerman ’03 AND Marcel Paret ’00 and Jessie Mandle, who all may just happen to also be visiting Massachusetts. Josh and Annie are living the dream in Berkeley—he’s a professor and she’s a landscape architect. Marcel and Jessie are living the dream in Salt Lake City—he’s also a professor and she’s program director for the Healthy School’s campaign. They have two kids and a sweet old house and a really organized woodshop.”

Steve continued with more updates: “Ryan Huggins is still living in Durango, Colorado, and being a badass—we recently saw her in Denver after she completed yet another half Ironman (yes, she’s also finished a couple of full Ironman’s). She has a house and a huge garden and chickens and a business doing green energy consulting and makes time to enjoy the mountains. And in an incredible alignment of the stars, both Bajir Cannon and John Gordon were sighted (not by me) at the same time and in the same place in North Carolina! Bajir lives outside Kyoto and John is still living in Shanghai. They both have their own companies: if you want to learn bridge talk to Bajir, if you want to learn Chinese, talk to John. Has anyone seen Erik Dawe? He’s still living in D.C., working way too much on really interesting engineering projects.”

As for me (your class secretary), I recently earned a News and Documentary Emmy nomination for a short film I produced called The Sentence of Michael Thompson, which was co-distributed by MSNBC Films and the AVOD/FAST that I co-founded, Documentary+. Another film I produced, The Territory (Nat Geo/ Disney+), was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards and won the entire film team a Peabody Award this year, including me and our esteemed editor Carlos Rojas. Also, Gasoline Rainbow, a hybrid scripted/documentary film I produced, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, and will come out on MUBI later this year. Lastly, another film I produced, Periodical, about menstrual justice, the stigma surrounding periods, and two incredible young women fighting to repeal the tampon tax state by state, premieres theatrically in October in LA, NY, Canada, Miami, and the UK, and will premiere on MSNBC and Peacock in mid-November. It’s a great film, please support!

Keep sending notes my way!

Please write to your class secretary or send news to classnotes@wesleyan.edu.

Please write to your class secretary or send news to classnotes@wesleyan.edu.

Please write to your class secretary.

It’s reunion time! Can’t believe it’s been 20 years since we graduated. Just like college was a blink of an eye, so was the last 20 years (well . . . maybe not the last two during COVID). Looking forward to seeing you all in May on campus! Onto the notes:

Felicity Kohn was elevated to counsel at the law firm of Pryor Cashman in New York. She is in the firm’s Intellectual Property and Media + Entertainment practice group, where she handles a wide range of intellectual property and complex commercial matters. Felicity was named “One to Watch” in Intellectual Property Law by Best Lawyers in America (2021–22) and “Women in the Law: One to Watch” by Best Lawyers in America (2021).

Sallomé Hralima is partner in a New York–based archiving and media company. With Umi NiiLampti ’99, she cowrote Through the Wire, a short film about a young West African college student on the verge of making it in the music industry. In 2017, Sallomé returned to WesU to teach a course at the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship and received the Edgar Beckham Alumni Achievement Award. In 2018, she delivered a TEDxWesleyan talk, “Workplaces Suffocate Human Potential” in which she referenced Bozoma Saint John ’99. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two daughters, Dream and Legacy.

Angie Schiavoni recently started Montessori Public Works, an organization dedicated to bringing the first Montessori classrooms to public schools across New Jersey. This proud Wisconsinite (who drove her minivan to Wes full of Wisconsin beer, bratwurst, and cheese one year) still can’t believe she settled on the Jersey Shore, and thinks it must be because of the subconscious brainwashing of college roommates Alena Fiorentino (née Weller) and Cara Summit (née Smith).

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Debra Granik is set to direct a feature adaptation of Una LaMarche’s YA novel Like No Other. She and Anne Rosellini of Still Rolling Productions optioned the book, in partnership with Mad Dog Film’s Alix Madigan. Published in 2015 by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers, Like No Other is billed as a contemporary take on West Side Story. It watches as the unlikely paths of a Hasidic girl and a secular boy meet on Eastern Parkway and blossom into a forbidden romance.

Ryan Akers is a stay-at-home dad. His daughter, Isadora Eleanor Akers, was born last June.

Jenny He is the exhibitions curator for the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

Ben Allen has completed five years now as technical advisor for Microfinance Research and Learning at Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 2020, Ben has coordinated surveys in Africa and Latin America to learn how the informal savings and lending groups trained there have fared during the pandemic. Ben has also been moonlighting as an economics instructor at Loyola University–Maryland in 2020–21 and Catholic University of America (Washington, DC) this spring. His eldest daughter, Livia, is two and started preschool in December; and his youngest daughter, Norah, turned one in February.

After spending two years in Seoul, Korea, building the global security function for Coupang Inc., Eric Donelan moved back to the U.S. to be closer to family. He recently joined eBay as the senior director for Global Security and Resiliency based in the San Jose area.

Ernest Hartner is living in Miami with wife Raquel and three kids. He plans to stay in a dorm room with Nick Bazos at reunion.

Rachael Slivka and husband Joel had a baby boy, Dov, in August. Big brother Ori is excited to have a new friend.

As for myself (Justin Lacob), after spending a year during the pandemic in Vancouver with my wife Melanie and two daughters (Scarlett, now 7 and Juliette, now 4), we returned to Los Angeles in July 2021. Still working at documentary studio XTR, I recently produced the Oscar-nominated feature documentary Ascension; They Call Me Magic, a four-part documentary series on AppleTV+ about Magic Johnson; Butterfly in the Sky, a documentary about the impact of Reading Rainbow and LeVar Burton; The Territory, a Nat Geo film that premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival about an indigenous-led land defense against illegal loggers and nonnative farmers in the Amazon rainforest (edited by Carlos Rojas); art-heist documentary The Thief Collector (which premiered at SXSW); The Hobby, a documentary about the recent trading card boom; and about 15 other documentary features and series. I also am the cofounder and head of Documentary+, an ad-supported streaming platform (www.docplus.com) for passionate nonfiction fans.

See everyone on campus soon!

Those with class notes, please contact your class secretary.