50 UNDER 50
1
Robin Smalt ’08
2
Dan Castelline ’11
Education management • Nashville
Menswear entrepreneur • Greater Boston
Wants to visit all 196 countries in the world
Favorite place in New England: Concord, Massachusetts
Born into a family of teachers, a young Robin was once quoted as saying she would “never, ever, not in a million years” work in education. After graduating from Gordon, though, Robin could no longer ignore the civil rights issue of inequitable public education. She paid her Gordon education forward by joining Teach for America’s Charter Corps in Nashville, teaching elementary school for three years and earning a master’s in instructional leadership. While her school’s curriculum focused on reading and math, Robin was struck by the absence of other critical life skills in her students. So she joined EverFi, an education technology company that develops web-based programs to help teachers teach skills such as personal finance, entrepreneurship, STEM, civics, and health and wellness. In her free time, Robin can be found cooking organic vegetables, scrutinizing the New York Times “Most Emailed” articles, and traveling (30 countries down, 166 to go).
Dan Castelline (on left in photo) founded Concord Button Downs, fittingly, in the back of a New England pub. The shirt company, which involves several other Gordon alumni as fellow partners, blog editors, and other roles, has a passionate vision for providing goods made in the United States. The shirts themselves might sound familiar to the Gordon community, named after key places and people in New England: among them, the Hawthorne, the Emerson and the seasonal Estabrook (a holiday plaid). Dan says, “For many reasons Concord Button Downs has been a wonderful experience pairing my interest in textiles with my love for small business. The opportunities provided because of this brand have truly been extraordinary.”
robin.smalt@gmail.com
3
Mark Teiwes ’03
Multimedia photographer • Greater Boston Favorite artwork: Ellsworth Kelly’s The Chicago Panels
In 2011 Mark Teiwes and his wife, Becky, walked the 500-mile Way of St. James across Spain to the trail’s destination point, the city of Santiago de Compostela. Mark photographed the stark northern-Spanish landscape, and the couple blogged about their adventures along the way. Then they extended the adventure with nine months in South America, volunteering at the Bolivian orphanage Niños con Valor and documenting the student protest movement in Santiago, Chile. (In photo, Mark is at a salt lake that straddles those countries’ border.) In the U.S., he has freelanced for clients including the Kenyan Red Cross, Catholic Charities of Baton Rouge, New Horizons Foundation (Romania), and The Salem News. He currently works as a videographer and photographer at Lesley University. Mark and Becky live in Cambridge, and are expecting their first child in April. www.markteiwes.com | markbecky4.blogspot.com
dan@concordbuttondowns.com | www.concordbuttondowns.com
4
Oliver Lindhiem ’02
Psychologist • Pittsburgh Next family vacation destination: South Africa
Clinical psychologist Oliver Lindhiem spends a lot of his time with his wife, Elspeth, and their children, Caleb and Ingrid, but that hasn’t stopped him from pursuing a plethora of research projects in his post as assistant professor in the psychiatry department at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He did his doctoral research on attachment in foster infants, and is now working on research funded through a Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. His project is focused around “cognitive-behavioral skill acquisition and utilization.” Oliver explains it this way: “As a field, we know that therapy works for a lot of people, but we don’t really understand how or why it works. The angle I’m taking is to study what people actually learn while they are in therapy, and what skills they apply to their day to day lives. In other words, I’m studying what ‘sticks.’” He hopes this also will shed light on “why not everyone benefits from therapy, and how we can make therapies even better.” Oliver’s real passions, however, are statistics and methodology, so he has several side projects going, about decision support systems and Bayesian diagnostic tools in the mental health field. What drew him to psychology? In large part, Gordon. “Gordon has an outstanding psychology department!” he says. lindhiemoj@upmc.edu SPRING 2014 | STILLPOINT 33