Amanda Bassett Director
Megan Dodge
Associate Director
Annette Achilles Assistant Director
Bridget Connolly
Project Coordinator
Annette Achilles
Annette Achilles Amanda Bassett
Katherine Blackman
Duane Compton
Bridget Connolly
Joanne Conroy
Ashley Festa Dana Cook Grossman
Catherine Meno
Marilyn Ndukwe
Lauren Seidman
Class Secretaries
Lars Blackmore
Kata Sasvari
Rob Strong
Mark Washburn
Linnea Spelman
Copyright Dartmouth College Fall 2022 (Vol. 27, No. 1)
Office of Alumni Engagement (HB7070) Medical & Healthcare Advancement One Medical Center Drive, Lebanon, NH 03756 Tel: 603-646-5297
Geisel.Alumni.Relations@dartmouth.edu D-H.Alumni.Relations@hitchcock.org www.geiselalumni.org http://geiselmed.dartmouth.edu
Dear Alumni and Friends,
I joined the Geisel alumni engagement team in late 2019—weeks before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This summer, I had the privilege of attending my first in-person Class Day, White Coat Ceremony, and reunions. After two years of nearly all virtual experiences, it was an absolute joy to reincorporate these timeless traditions. The Dartmouth energy among our students, their families, and the alumni community is truly inspiring.
We’ve spent the summer preparing this redesigned issue of Alumni News & Notes, which I’m excited to share with you now. Its theme—Together: Building The Next Generation of Healthcare Leaders —is an ideal that’s championed by Duane A. Compton, PhD, dean of the Geisel School of Medicine, and Joanne M. Conroy, MD, CEO and president of Dartmouth Health, whose message appears on the following page. In aligning their strategic priorities, Compton and Conroy continue to advance Dartmouth’s academic medical community.
In these pages we celebrate some of the people and programs that exemplify this shared vision. In an update on the Call to Lead campaign, you’ll meet Dartmouth College graduate Dick Levy, whose gift to our community is supporting research that has the potential to change healthcare delivery. You’ll also get to know Rebecca Evans, MD, HS’13, and Linton Evans MED’10, HS’17, who met as residents at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, stayed here to practice medicine, and are now educating and mentoring the next generation of Dartmouth-trained physicians. You’ll read about our interdisciplinary pediatric critical care crisis training program, or “PICU boot camp.” And you’ll hear from a few of our student leaders who are working with Alumni Council President John Houde MED’92, HS’93, to engage with you, our alumni, and build upon the legacy of those who came before them.
These highlights are just a few examples of how, together, the Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth Health are positively impacting healthcare delivery, providing the best patient care where it matters most, fostering a culture of innovation and research, and building a new generation of medically excellent, highly compassionate, and culturally sensitive healthcare leaders.
As always, I hope you enjoy this issue of Alumni News & Notes —and I want to thank you for your continued service on the front lines, to our academic medical community, and to our students.
Amanda Bassett Director of Alumni Engagement and Strategic Events Medical & Healthcare AdvancementAmong the many great stories in this issue of Alumni News & Notes, we were particularly drawn to the profile of Becca Evans, MD, HS’13, and Linton Evans MED’10, HS’17 (see p. 10). Linton attended medical school at Dartmouth and went on to do his residency at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), where he and Becca met. They fell in love with each other and with our academic medical community. Today, they’re dedicated to giving Geisel medical students and DHMC residents the same opportunities they had when they were learners here.
Building the next generation of healthcare leaders is a joint priority of the medical school and the academic medical center. We are equally committed to providing physiciansin-training and other leaders in healthcare with the mentorship, experience, and support they need to thrive in their careers. Their education is at the core of our shared vision to improve lives locally, regionally, and globally.
This year, alumni and friends like you showed your commitment to our vision with philanthropic gifts totaling $92 million for the 12 months ending June 30—an all-time high for our academic medical community. We wouldn’t have achieved these new heights without close collaboration between Geisel, Dartmouth Health, and Dartmouth College, a strong and engaged fundraising team, and generous donors. Your gifts are supporting our students, advancing research, powering innovation in healthcare delivery, and so much more.
In January we announced the landmark $25 million gift from Dorothy Byrne that established the Byrne Family Cancer Research Institute at Dartmouth Cancer Center—a joint venture between our institutions to fast-track world-class scientific discoveries from the laboratory to the bedside to benefit cancer patients in the region and around the world. Following that announcement, we welcomed three new outstanding faculty members to our
medical community: Linda T. Vahdat, MD, MBA, the Milham Professor and a professor of medicine, and deputy Cancer Center director, chief of the section of medical oncology and interim chief of hematology; Tyler J. Curiel, MD, MPH, the Victoria Hall Gmelich 1991 and Justin G. Gmelich Professor in Cancer Immunotherapy; and Charles R. Thomas, Jr., MD, D’79, a professor of medicine, associate director for diversity, equity and inclusion at Dartmouth Cancer Center, and chief of the section of radiation oncology.
With the establishment of the Byrne Family Cancer Research Institute came additional opportunities for learners to engage in cutting-edge research. Knowing that students spend a lot of their time at DHMC, we’ve recently created dedicated spaces for them, including student lounges, a gym, mock exam rooms, and group and individual study space. Whether they’re in the medical school or the academic medical center, we want our learners to feel at home.
In their profile, Becca Evans notes that she has a medical student or resident by her side during at least half of her clinic schedule, and Linton Evans mentions his love of talking with trainees about his research into fluorescentguided surgery. They exemplify the commitment shared by faculty throughout Geisel and DHMC—a commitment shared by us as well.
During nearly 50 years of working on the business side of healthcare, Dick Levy D’60 lamented the system’s inefficiency and waste—of both time and money—and his dismay motivated him to help fix those problems.
“Healthcare is organized around specialty silos,” says Levy, retired CEO and chairman of Varian, a medical systems manufacturer. “People don’t work together as a team. I learned in business that teams work better to solve specific problems.”
With that in mind, Levy and his wife, Susan, have contributed $3 million to the Susan and Richard Levy Health Care Delivery Incubator. As a collaborative venture between The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth Health, the Incubator supports multidisciplinary teams working on rapid-cycle development and testing of innovative ways to deliver efficient, timely, convenient, and less costly patient-centered care.
Over the past three years, the Incubator has funded 10 projects—from redesigning the care of stable pre-term infants to improving the experience of elderly surgical
“We have proven that team-approach interventions work. The next step is to figure out how to make these interventions the routine way the organization operates.” Dick Levy
patients—that were piloted at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC). Levy hopes the Incubator will begin to scale the solutions for larger population.
“We have proven that team-approach interventions work. The next step is to figure out how to make these interventions the routine way the organization operates,” Levy says. “You can do it for 20 patients in a pilot program, but how do you do it for 200 people? That’s nothing new in profit-making business, but it is new to healthcare.”
Levy views the collaboration between The Dartmouth Institute and Dartmouth Health as the bridge between the development of more effective processes and the routine use of those processes. He says DHMC is the perfect place for the Incubator because of its small size—both the number of employees and patient capacity. There are other reasons, too.
“The doctors aren’t on a fee-for-service system. They aren’t incentivized by doing more things; they’re incentivized by doing the right things,” Levy says. And as part of an academic medical system that publishes research, DHMC can motivate other organizations to begin similar programs.
“I don’t see this staying only at Dartmouth,” Levy said. “Dartmouth can influence the whole world.”
If you’d like to learn more about supporting the Health Care Delivery Incubator, please contact Robert Holley at Robert.D.Holley@hitchcock.org or call him at 603-369-1129
For more than three decades, Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center—two separate but closely aligned organizations—have shared a single development office. But never before have we seen the potential of that model realized as much as in the last couple of years.
Dick and Susan Levy’s gifts in support of the Health Care Delivery Incubator exemplify the impact of philanthropy in supporting initiatives that cross institutional boundaries. Likewise, the landmark gift to Dartmouth Health and Geisel from Dorothy Byrne earlier this year established the Byrne Family Cancer Research Institute at Dartmouth Cancer Center will spur collaboration between the clinical enterprise and Dartmouth scientists like never before. Partnerships such as these—and the visionary donors who support them—enable Geisel and Dartmouth Health to come together to craft bigger and bolder visions for solving problems in healthcare.
Matthew P. Haag Chief Development Officer, Dartmouth Health Vice President, Development and Alumni Engagement, Geisel School of Medicine
The Geisel School of Medicine surpassed its fundraising goal of $207 million in Dartmouth College’s Call to Lead campaign, reaching $208 million in April.
The generosity of thousands of donors, making gifts large and small, led to this achievement. Notable donations in this year of record-breaking support included Dorothy Byrne’s $25 million to establish the Byrne Family Cancer Research Institute at Dartmouth Cancer Center, and $1 million from John Flatley and his
wife, Kate, to fund new and more effective therapies for people with cystic fibrosis.
The campaign ends in 2023, and there’s more work to be done. With support from alumni like you, Geisel hopes to raise additional, crucial funds in six priority areas, including MD student scholarships, the Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Research Center, and the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health.
Physicians at DHMC and Geisel School of Medicine faculty created a pediatric simulation program to ensure every resident gets the advanced practice they need to handle crisis situations.
No one can know exactly what type of patient crisis may arrive in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) on any given day. Some residents may be rounding on a day when an emergency happens, but others may not get that opportunity. To ensure every resident gets the advanced practice they need to handle crisis situations, physicians at DHMC and Geisel School of Medicine faculty created a pediatric simulation program.
“We don’t see high volumes, so some residents would get a great education in the PICU, but others wouldn’t get the same level of expe rience,” says Melissa Fussell, MD, the medical director of Simulation Based Education and Research at DHMC and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Geisel. “We wanted to give everyone the same opportunity to see these cases in pediatric critical care.”
The remedy Fussell helped develop is PICU PRACTICE (Pediatric Resuscitation and Communication
Training: Intensive Core Education), an interdisciplinary pediatric crit ical care crisis training program, which she fondly calls “PICU boot camp.” The two-year interprofes sional program brings together Geisel faculty attendings, nurses, respiratory therapists, and resi dents to train twice a year on simulated pediatric resuscitation cases. The concept is rapid-cycle deliberate practice, which enables participants to repeat a scenario after identifying what they need to do better.
These small groups spend a half day going through three to five increasingly complex crisis simu lations. Not only do participants get clinical practice running codes, they also get experience working as a team. Residents have a safe space to get more comfortable with their leadership skills.
“My first simulation was really nerve-wracking, and it gives you the chance to develop a lot more confi dence,” says Julia Litzky MED’20, PhD, a third-year pediatric resident at DHMC. “The second time, I felt a lot better about my ability to figure out which algorithm we were in and to assign roles, making sure every one was on the same page and nothing was missed. That chance to be encouraged to speak up and be in that leader role was very helpful for me.”
Fussell noticed a difference, too: “At first, Julia was hesitant to command the room. After being placed in that situation in multiple cases, it was fantastic to see her ability to organize information and communicate it to the team.”
After each simulation, a facilitator—typically Geisel faculty, like Fussell—guides the team in a discussion about what went well and what improvements they could make for the next round. “It’s better to make those mistakes now and not later in real life,” Litzky says.
Geisel student-researcher provides assessment and insight
While Geisel students don’t currently participate in the PICU boot camp, Kate Miller ’25, who has a bachelor degree in nursing, has participated as a nurse. In her decade of nursing experience, she already had seen pediatric crisis situations in real life, but she notes that for residents and young nurses, these simulations may be their first encounter with a crisis event.
“Residents are forced to manage situations they aren’t as comfort able with,” Miller says of the simu lation. “It’s hard as a new physician to take control in the room, and I saw an increase in the residents’ confidence leading the situation. It was interesting to watch them think through the problems and manage the cases better and better.”
As a medical student, Miller joined a multidisciplinary team of researchers working on PICU PRACTICE research initiatives. She
Kate Miller ’25 Geisel Student-Researcheris investigating the efficacy of the DHMC simulation curriculum on improving learner outcomes for key critical care events. Her research evaluates several measurements, including basic clinical knowledge, participants’ self-reported confi dence before and after the simula tions, residents’ leadership, and the teamwork of all participants.
Similar studies have focused only on the performance of one discipline, but Miller adapted her research to evaluate how a whole team performs under simulation conditions. The study is ongoing, and Miller hopes to publish prelimi nary research soon.
“The data show the teams are improving from the first case of the day to the last, and the leaders’ scores are improving,” Miller says. “The goal of this research is to show that this is an effective way to train multidisciplinary teams, and the results so far are supporting that.”
Because Miller is also on the simulation planning committee, Fussell says her research at Geisel has provided valuable insight for DHMC. “With multiple ties in planning and design, Kate helps us adapt cases to make them more meaningful learning experiences for everyone involved.”
“ The goal of this research is to show that this is an effective way to train multidisciplinary teams, and the results so far are supporting that.”
It was a celebration three years in the making: On May 20, 2022, the Geisel School of Medicine Alumni Awards Ceremony was held in person for the first time since 2019.
Career Achievement Award recipi ent Joseph P. Lynch III MED’71 spoke of his time in medical school and the strong sense of community and inclusiveness at Geisel. “Dartmouth is a superb environment for learning medicine, and it also assures posi tive interactions with students, staff, patients, and others,” said Lynch. “I will always appreciate the relation ships nurtured at Dartmouth and the lessons learned about medicine and life.”
Lisa V. Adams MED’90, associate dean for global health and a profes sor in the Department of Medicine at Geisel, credits Geisel with helping her realize her dream to “work with all populations margin alized by inequitable systems regardless of where they live.” She said, “Support from my Dartmouth mentors and colleagues has fueled my strong desire to pay it forward. My Dartmouth students have been my other source of sustenance over the years . . . pushing me to want to be a worthy role model. So maybe this shouldn’t be an outstanding service award, but rather an ‘I’m trying to pay it forward’ award.”
John D. Bullock MED’66
Dr. John Bullock has had a distinguished career in clinical and academic ophthalmology. He has over 240 publications to his credit, and has cared for over 50,000 patients, performed over 10,000 ocular/orbital operations, documented 3 new causes of blindness, and elucidated the cause and/or description of 10 different retinal disorders.
Dr. Joseph P. Lynch III is a worldrenowned pulmonary medicine and critical care clinician and an expert in interstitial lung disease, lung transplantation, vasculitis, sarcoidosis, other rare pulmonary diseases, and pulmonary and opportunistic infections. In 2021, he established the Joseph P. Lynch III Endowed Scholarship Fund at Dartmouth (Geisel) Medical School.
Kathryn E. McGoldrick MED’68
An anesthesiologist and historian of the field, Dr. Kathryn McGoldrick achieved emeritus rank at New York Medical College, where she was professor and chair of anesthesiology, as well as advisory dean for student affairs and residency program director. Throughout her career, she has participated in the Dartmouth Medical School Alumni Council.
Dr. Ernst Schaefer has devoted his career to finding optimal ways to diagnose and treat patients with the various forms of dyslipidemia for the prevention of coronary heart disease. He has been responsible for describing two new inborn errors of metabolism, as well as defining lipoprotein metabolism before and after various dietary modifications and pharmacologic therapies, including statins.
Lisa V. Adams MED’90, faculty Since joining the Geisel faculty as an instructor in 2002, Dr. Lisa Adams has launched numerous interdisciplinary global health equity educational programs and opportunities across the institution. She currently serves as director of Geisel’s Center for Global Health Equity and as the faculty lead of Dartmouth’s Global Health Initiative at Dartmouth’s Dickey Center for International Understanding.
Alan A. Rozycki D’61, MED’63, faculty emeritus
Dr. Alan Rozycki joined the Dartmouth Medical School faculty in 1972 as an assistant professor of clinical maternal and pediatric health, and spent 18 years as a full professor before being awarded emeritus status in 2012. A longstanding alumni volunteer, he has served as the Geisel representative to the Dartmouth College Alumni Council and as secretary since 2010 for his class.
1. Outstanding Service award winners Lisa Adams ’90 and Alan Rozycki ’63;
2. Dean Compton and Award Winner John Bullock ’66;
3. Joseph Lynch III ’71 accepts his award.
4. Alumni Awards Chair Sarah Johansen ’89 and Young Alumni Award honoree Samuel Bakhoum PhD’11, MED’13;
5. Ernst Schaefer ’70 talks with guests during the reception;
6. Lisa Adams ’90 accepts her award;
7. Alan Rozycki ’63 accepts his award;
8. Kathryn McGoldrick MED’68 accepts her award.
Samuel F. Bakhoum PhD’11, MED’13 Dr. Samuel Bakhoum investigates chromosomal instability, which is present in 60–80% of all cancers and is associated with poor survival in many patients. His research— funded by the National Institutes of Health as well as private foundation awards—elucidates the role of chromosomal instabilities both in primary malignancies and in the process of metastasis.
Geisel School of Medicine Alumni Recognition Committee is now accepting nominations for the 2023 Alumni Awards.
Alumni award winners are recognized for their achievements in the fields of medicine, science, or other endeavors.
Deadline for nominations: 10/14/2022
Learn more about the Alumni Awards program and submit your nominations here: GeiselAlumni.org/AlumniAwards.
Awards will be given on May 19, 2023.
Although Becca and Linton Evans met at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC)—she was an intern; he was a medical student— they insist their relationship bore no resemblance to the popular medical television series Grey’s Anatomy
While the TV show centered around the drama of the characters’ personal lives, the Evans couple says that wasn’t the case at all for them. “No, we were really serious about our work,” Becca says, laughing.
As their love for each other grew, so did their love for Dartmouth’s academic medical community, and both decided to dedicate their careers as physicians at DHMC and as faculty at the Geisel School of Medicine.
Linton, who grew up in Vermont, found it easy to choose Dartmouth’s medical school to begin his training because of its small size, inspiring
mentors, and the opportunity to advance his research. It was the medical center’s supportive faculty and dedication to academics and evidence-based training that cinched Becca’s decision to do her residency at DHMC.
Becca is now an OB-GYN, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Geisel, and the residency program director at DHMC. Linton is a neurosurgical oncologist and an assistant professor of surgery at Geisel, and he recently became the residency program director for neurosurgery. “We are trying to give medical students and residents the same opportunities we had,” Becca says.
Along that vein, Becca supported residents in their update of the OB-GYN health equity curriculum, which aims to address access, quality, and inequity in sexual and reproductive medicine. These changes reflect the Dartmouth medical community’s objective of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the medical school and medical center. The overarching goal is to improve the healthcare setting for everyone in Dartmouth’s academic health system—patients, staff, students, residents, and physicians.
“I love working with Geisel students to get their perspective of their cultural background and the type of medical care delivered to their families prior in life,” says Becca, who adds that a medical student or resident is by her side during at least half of her clinic schedule. “It’s inspiring to work with
Rebecca and Linton Evans on a bench in the Garden of Hope at Dartmouth Cancer Center at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.a diverse group of students in an otherwise non-ethnically diverse area.”
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s vote to overturn abortion rights, Becca is deeply concerned about equity in patient care and medical education across the country. At Geisel and DHMC, medical education currently remains largely unchanged, Becca says, “but medical educators elsewhere in the nation will have to seek alternative pathways to educate learners on how to deliver this care to patients.” As part of their dedication to equity, Geisel faculty and Dartmouth Health physicians will work with national medical societies to plan ways to partner with states most affected by the Court’s decision.
Sharing their love of medicine, research, and Dartmouth Like Becca, Linton also loves working with learners, especially in the operating room.
“I talk nonstop with medical students and residents about my excitement at having the opportunity to care for patients, having them trust that someone is removing their brain tumor,” Linton says. “And it’s not just me teaching—the OR nurses and anesthesia team, all of that is such a rich learning environment.”
Linton also enjoys talking with students and trainees about his research into fluorescent-guided surgery, which helps distinguish the borders of a brain tumor and make surgery safer for patients. This
research is another reason he was drawn to the Dartmouth medical community— former neurosurgery section chief David Roberts, MD, HS’82, had already built an impressive, National Institutes of Health-funded research program studying advanced fluorescent compounds. Linton says he wanted to contribute to that research as well as branch out into related, independent projects.
“It’s exciting to create new fluorescent agents, and medical students are seeing the integration of medical practice with research,” Linton says. “It’s inspiring for medical students to see their attending’s curiosity.”
Recalling his own days as a medical student, Linton says it’s wonderful and also amusing to now call former professors—and former classmates—his colleagues. “It’s fun to hear patients talk about Dr. So-and-So, who I remember from medical school, and see how much their patients care for them.”
The couple both appreciate getting to work alongside peers and mentors from their days as learners, and also helping students and residents who may, one day, be colleagues too.
“Both Linton and I want to practice here and also participate in the medical school and the residents’ education, which continues to evolve and innovate with the times,” Becca says. “We want to help them fall in love with Dartmouth’s medical community, just like we did.”
Left: left to right: John Kanter (neurosurgery PGY7) and James Peter (ENT PGY1) work with Linton Evans MED’10, HS’17 in the Center for Surgical Innovation.
Right: Rebecca Evans HS’13, in yellow, walks OB-GYN residents Alena Tofte PGY3 (left with device), Jill Roberts PGY3 (on Becca’s right), and Elizabeth Harvey PGY4 in the white coat through a routine procedure.
Taylor Cooper ’25
Taylor grew up in a few different states, but she and her family have called Colorado home for the last 10+ years. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, where she studied public health and chemistry. While there, Taylor played on the Penn Women’s Volleyball team, serving as a team captain, and she currently serves as a board member. Before coming to Geisel, she worked for a large renal care company as a senior strategy and operations analyst. In addition to serving in Student Government, she is a member of Geisel’s Urban Health Scholars, Student National Medical Association, and she co-leads a project called Race. Culture.Obgyn. In her spare time, you can find Taylor running, hiking, practicing yoga, or listening to podcasts.
Connor Bridges ’25 Connor, originally from London, England, graduated from Princeton University in 2019 with a degree in operations research and financial engineering, and then spent two years working in D.C. for an educational non-profit that helps underserved students access and persist in college. At Geisel, Connor serves as co-chair of student and alumni engagement within Student Government, presi dent of the First-Generation Student Association, and as a member of the Admissions Committee. Outside of school, he loves playing and watching soccer and taking advan tage of the natural beauty the Upper Valley has to offer.
Taylor: From my first meetings with members of the Dartmouth community, I was touched by the kindness and genuine nature of each person I interacted with. Throughout the application cycle, I continued to feel constant support from students and administrators alike. I was also drawn to Geisel’s small class size, filled with students from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Moving to the Upper Valley from Colorado, I was drawn to Dartmouth’s accessibility to different hikes and outdoor activities in the area!
Connor: As an international student, it was important to me to find a school that truly valued and supported students like myself. I knew that Dartmouth’s medical school is one of few that is very welcoming to international students and that I would be surrounded by others with similar experiences. I would also say this reflects the medical school’s wider commitment to cultivating a class of varied experiences and nontraditional backgrounds. Another thing that also sticks in mind was how enjoyable the interview process was. I felt that my interviewers showed a genuine interest in me and what I could bring to the Dartmouth community in addition to what I could benefit from.
Taylor: I was inspired and am so excited to be in the role of co-chair of student and alumni engagement for several reasons. Firstly, I am beyond ecstatic to work with the amazing team from the Alumni Engagement Office, who demonstrate their commitment to students, alumni, and Dartmouth daily. Additionally, I believe connections and mentorship are invaluable resources, and I aim to help foster meaningful relationships between past, present, and future members of the Dartmouth and Geisel community!
Connor: Having grown up as a first-generation, low-income international student from a single-parent household, I am intimately aware of the importance and impact of mentors that have experienced similar obstacles and challenges to their mentees. Knowing how significant this support can be, I see the position of student and alumni engagement representative as an opportunity to ensure that these relationships are available to all students, allowing us all to thrive and reach our maximum potential.
Taylor: Students are looking for mentorship, support, collaboration, and a sense of connection to the alumni community. These connections can come in many forms, including formal and informal mentorship and career advice, shared meals with affinity groups and specialty-specific alumni, and notes and well wishes for career milestones!
Connor Bridges ’25 Medical StudentConnor: I would say that students are most interested in developing sustained, meaningful relationships within the alumni community. There are so many opportunities and challenges in medicine that it can be overwhelming at times to know what to do next. Having alumni who have been there, done that, and are willing to share their experiences can be incredibly reassuring. This is true of alumni at all stages of their careers, whether that be the beginning of their journey with Dartmouth or beyond retirement—we are incredibly excited and grateful for any time and insight alumni can share with us.
QWhat are you hoping to accomplish in terms of engaging students with alumni by the end of the coming academic term?
Taylor: I hope students feel that they are part of the broader Geisel and Dartmouth Health community. Moreover, I aim for students to have many opportunities to connect and form meaningful relationships with alumni throughout the academic year. I hope to facilitate the feeling of community through events and programs in partnership with the broader Alumni Engagement Office.
Connor: One of our biggest goals across this academic year is to develop and strengthen robust connections between alumni and student affinity and interest groups. We plan to host mixers focusing on different specialties or affinities to facilitate mentorship between students and alumni, and integrate alumni affinity groups in the welcoming process of newly accepted students. Ideally, these relationships would be cemented within student and alumni engagement and therefore be less susceptible to the annual turbulence of student group leadership turnover.
Q What are students looking for most when it comes to engaging with the alumni community?
“I would say that students are most interested in developing sustained, meaningful relationships within the alumni community.”
It’s an exciting time at Geisel with the recent rollout of a five-year strategic plan. Initiatives to promote community building among students, faculty, staff, and the broader Upper Valley community are a highlight of the plan. These initiatives focus on cultivating a valuedriven culture while maintaining academic excellence and producing leaders in research and healthcare.
We recognize that, as student advocates, the Geisel Student Government (SG) plays a critical role in the success of the initiatives set forth. Therefore, this summer, the SG executive board hosted an inaugural mini retreat with senior leadership and deans across Geisel. We shared our goals and ideas for the school year and brainstormed areas where we could collaborate and align our goals.
This academic year, we will center our efforts on collaboration and engagement, communication,
transparency, and (rebuilding) trust. We’ll work with the greater Dartmouth academic medical community—including our colleagues within Dartmouth Health, students in the PhD program at Guarini, and alumni—to expand community service research projects, advocacy work, and professional development and networking opportunities. Leveraging resources from various groups will diversify input, prevent duplication of efforts, and build a stronger community for us all. In addition, we all acknowledged that by streamlining the dissemination of information across campus, we could improve communication and transparency between students and the administration.
The student leaders are energized and enthusiastic about putting Geisel’s upcoming blueprint into action. By joining students with leadership, Dartmouth Health colleagues, and you, the alumni community, we can foster collaboration and strengthen our community.
52Sadly, Jim Cavanagh, the class’s longtime, dedicated class secretary, and the organizer of its well-attended “better now than never” reunions in recent years, died of cancer on May 7, 2022, at the age of 92. He was in Hanover most recently in September 2021 for his class’s 69th reunion and had hoped to attend this fall’s reunion as well.
Jim spent many years in private practice as a surgeon, beloved by his patients (he never turned away anyone who couldn’t pay), then from 2000 through 2021 taught anatomy to over 2,000 students at Florida State University Medical School; his remarks on the compassionate practice of medicine at Florida State’s annual white coat ceremony routinely got a standing ovation. He was also an Eagle Scout, a devoted amateur ornithologist, on the board of Planned Parenthood of Florida, and a volunteer at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti. He will be much missed.
(To submit your update, please contact the Office of Alumni Engagement at 603-646-5297 or Geisel.Alumni. Relations@dartmouth.edu.)
55Around Thanksgiving time, it will have been three years since Don Brief was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer. His situation remains stable, and, as he puts it, “the numbers are good.” But he has to put up with troublesome peripheral neuropathy, a side effect of the immunotherapy drug Keytruda. He and Dottie are getting around and about and remain in good spirits, which are further enhanced when cocktail hour rolls around.
Sarah and Ben Gilson both came down with COVID in late June but, fortunately, their symptoms were mild and soon abated. They had attended a large indoor gathering, a memorial service for Dana Low D’54 which,
ironically, had been long delayed because of COVID. It was not a welcome development for either of them, especially Ben, who had undergone a transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) in early June for his tightly stenotic aortic valve, a condition that manifested itself mainly in shortness of breath and brain fuzziness. The procedure went well, and he was home the day after the “surgery.” TAVR is a remarkable development in the treatment of aortic valvular disease; not long ago, Ben would have needed a median sternotomy for open valve replacement, followed by a week in the hospital. In recovery, Ben is now asymptomatic and clear-headed.
Helen and Ross McIntyre were on the move, as usual, with a rafting trip this past spring on the Yampa River in Colorado, accompanied by many of their extended family members. An outstanding feature of the trip was the 40-mile passage through beautiful, deep, rugged canyons in the Dinosaur National Monument. Back home, they are fully active, and, as of this writing, were preparing for their bike ride in the Prouty, the annual fundraiser for the Dartmouth Cancer Center. This event, which has become a major, steady, reliable source of income for the center, was originated by a group of nurses during Ross’s tenure as director.
The Spring issue of Dartmouth Medicine magazine contained a full-page ad featuring Mary Jo Turk, PhD, the O. Ross McIntyre Endowed Professor and co-director of the Cancer Center’s Immunotherapy Program. She is at the forefront of research on how lymphocytes are converted into cancer-fighting T cells.
Since his retirement from the Mayo Clinic in 1995, Burt Onofrio has hardly slowed down. He was invited to be a visiting professor in the neurosurgery department at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he saw patients, taught residents, and consulted on a regular
basis for seven years. At the same time, he took a part-time position in the Mayo Clinic’s newly acquired branch in La Crosse, Wis., and held it for 24 years, until he broke his hip in 2018. He was recently invited to join the Mayo Clinic Poetry Society, a group limited to the most esteemed faculty members. They meet monthly for wide-ranging discussions that seem to have little to do with poetry. Burt’s wife, Judy, an internationally known sculptor, continues to be productive and has two shows coming up. Burt’s role in connection with her projects has been making crates for some of her larger works—but he is now happily retired from that duty.
Zibby and Bob Oneal ’s lives have eased considerably since they’ve had round-the-clock live-in help, who, with the passage of time, have become virtual family members. They recently accompanied Bob and Zibby on a weeklong trip to their “cottage,” as Bob calls it, in northern Michigan. I put cottage in quotes because it’s a beautiful and spacious second home right on the lakeshore, according to Don Brief, who has visited them there. Another thing that is helping considerably in their plan to stay at home and avoid an assisted-living facility is their two chair stairlifts, one to the basement and one to the second floor. They work so well for them that plans for installing an elevator were scratched. Among other important matters covered during our recent chat was an exchange of obser vations about incontinence, 20 years after our prostatectomies.
The only good thing about my computer getting hacked recently, and a resulting request going out under my name to please do me a favor and buy gift cards for a friend in distress, was that it put me in touch with concerned family and friends from all over the country. One such was Ted Gasteyer, who recognized the scam and wanted to alert me. He is in fine fettle and after
having enjoyed a couple of months at his Florida getaway was settling into his routine back home in Oak Lawn, Ill.
—John Moran 77 Cliff Street Plymouth, MA 02360 Home: 508-746-1492 jmmoran1114@gmail.com
56Phil Mossman reports that he recently enjoyed a visit from his daughter at his Shenandoah Valley home in Virginia. Phil’s daughter and her husband live in Brittany, France. The Mossmans have made many trips to Europe, where Phil has collected a trove of genealogical information about his family. His father’s family emigrated from France and Switzerland to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1750, and his mother’s family moved to Bermuda early in the 19th century. It was in Bermuda in the early 20th century that Phil’s mother and father met and subsequently moved to Boston, where Phil and his siblings were born. After completing Dartmouth and DMS, Phil and his family moved several times, as did we all, before settling in Maine, where Phil developed a comprehensive physical medicine rehabilitation program. After he retired in 2011, he resettled near other members of his family in Virginia.
John Stanley reports that he has had a number of illnesses in the past two decades, including complications follow ing replacement of his right hip in 2001 and recent severe left hip pain; mostly recently, despite being fully immunized, he and Manel contracted COVID-19. After treatment with an antiviral agent, they have shown some improvement. We hope they feel much better soon.
May I please request that the members of the DMS Class of 1956 share information about your careers and accomplishments—and those of your families as well—with your DMS classmates? Your ideas, opinions, comments, complaints, advice to future
generations of physicians, and thoughts on anything and everything are valued and solicited. Additionally, if you wish to be nominated for a Geisel-DMS Alumni Award, designed to recognize DMS alumni for their service and/or career achievements, please send me a copy of your curriculum vitae and a few appro priately supportive comments and I will be happy to submit a nomination.
—Allen Root 4916 Saint Croix Drive Tampa, FL 33629-4831 Home: 813-286-1333; aroot3@jhmi.edu
57I heard from several of you in response to my call for updates. From Ray Austin: “Hi, Al. No good news. In memory care unit now. Lorrie’s condition is declining. Living too long. I hope those of you still living are active. Our daughter, coincidentally, found my Cadaver Kid T-shirt yesterday. Some great memories for some of us. Regards and love, Ray.”
From Gerry Finkel: “Not much to report. We remain COVID-free (so far). We’re fairly careful but needed to get away, so we took a road trip last month—first time in two years. We went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore., and saw The Tempest in the Elizabethan open-air theater in the rain. Great trip, terrible food, but we survived. Not planning anything of interest until the fall. One doesn’t leave the great Northwest in the summer—that’s when it never (?) rains. Hope you and Diane are well.”
From Kev Ryan: “I have had a lot of medical problems in the last six months but hate to push those on classmates. But here goes: Santa Barbara has remained blessedly moderate and calm, while the rest of the country seems to be boiling or blowing away (I mean wind, not mass shootings). But speaking of the shootings, I just cannot understand our reluctance to ban the manufac ture, sale to civilians, and ownership of
AR-type rifles and ammunition. I know that half the country and more than half of Congress is nuts, but even they must really know how bad this country is on death-by-firearm metrics. We are also sorry to see the continued waxing and waning of the COVID pandemic. I guess we’re stuck with it and can expect other viruses to emerge at shorter intervals. It would sure be good to come up with a universal vaccine, although the dummies would probably refuse to use it even if we did. I know I am coming across as rather bitter, but looking back over my 88 years, I am actually rather proud of what has been accomplished ‘on our watch’— especially the advances in healthcare since 1934; they are really spectacular. Without them, none of us would still be around to grumble about the state of the nation. Cheers to you all, Kev.”
—Alan Friedman
115 Central Park West, Apt. 4B New York, NY 10023
Pref-Fax: 212-679-5580 ajfmdpc@yahoo.com
58Due to the tenacity and talent of Bob Vogel , most of the remaining members of the DMS Class of ’58 got together on Zoom on June 29, 2022. Present for the session were Bob Vogel , Tom Watt , Maury Tannenbaum, Paul Raslavicius, Nick Tschetter, Arnie Mulder, Mel Britton, and Ernest Hemingway (claiming to be Bill Gallagher). We were all hoping that Erv Philipps could make it, but he had a very good excuse: His granddaughter, who is off to the University of Texas Medical School, had gotten engaged to a ranked tennis player who will be moving to Texas with her.
Both Hemingway/Gallagher and Tschetter were late. The problem for Hemingway/Gallagher was that his car was still registered in 1961. When they were taken to the station, the officer recognized Mr. Hemingway and said, “Oh, I am sorry Mr. Hemingway.” He
www.geiselalumni.org
then allowed Hemingway/Gallagher to be forgiven. Beyond the run-in with the police, Bill then began to contribute to the discussion we had been having. We commented briefly on the fact that the person whom we had known as Nick was now called Paul and that the person we knew as Arnie was now called George. It turned out that the government didn’t want to accept their middle names, and so for all legal purposes they were Paul and George; they both were still very happy to be called Nick and Arnie!
We continued the discussion we had been having about how much we enjoyed getting together in this fashion and about our desire to have these get-togethers more frequently.
We then got into more personal remarks, including the advantages of living in our time. Maury told us about his experience of needing a chest X-ray before a small procedure and the discovery of on the X-ray of a mass in his lung. Maury was not a smoker, and the mass turned out to be a non-small cell tumor. He was fortunate to be living in the right time, because there is now a treatment directed at the enzymes that permit these types of tumors to grow. After the lesion was excised, the residual tumor in the pleura responded to chemotherapy; it appears that Maury was cured. Others of us reported various experiences with surgery but nothing as dramatic as Maury’s story. I suppose this is just the accumulation of things that occur when you get to be our age.
Nick (or Paul, as he is known to the government) was a little late in arriving to the session and was still laid up from a series of medical problems. We all knew that Nick had been having serious problems with macular degeneration, but his latest difficulty arose when he had a knee replacement. Following the replacement, he had some complica tions and then acquired a MRSA infec tion. Fortunately, Nick’s constitution
was very strong, and they found an anti biotic that cured the infection; however, as can be well imagined, this took a lot out of him. The universal feeling was that he looked to be doing very well.
The discussion next turned to the changes in medicine since we gradu ated from medical school. I believe the general conclusion was that everyone who was on the call felt they had lived through the best time to practice medicine. We particularly appreciated that most of us had some degree of time independence—that we were not continually told that we were “running behind” and that “the next patient is waiting.” We also commented on the fact that we could choose to be independent or to ally ourselves with a group. During most of our careers, the groups with which many of us were aligned were physician-run groups. As we began to retire, hospitals were buying up more and more physician practices and control was slipping from physicians themselves.
The other thing that we all appre ciate is, of course, the advances in therapeutics. When we graduated, the endocrinologists had insulin, the cardiologists had digitalis, the gastro enterologists had Pepto-Bismol, and the rheumatologists had aspirin. How different things were by the time we left the practice of medicine! Everyone had a panoply of treatments, and some specialties had transitioned from treatments to curative procedures with monoclonal antibodies.
We spent some time thinking about our medical education and the cost of it, and the information that we keep seeing in the papers about the debt load for today’s medical students. I pointed out that although 30 percent more high school grad uates now go on to college (and, presumably, to medical school) than in the 1960s, faculty numbers have increased by only 25 percent but staff numbers by 126 percent. The group
felt that expenditures for medical schools are outrageous. We felt grate ful that all of us were able, without much difficulty, to quickly retire the debt that we had accumulated.
As we talked, I couldn’t help but let my mind wander back to the time when we all sat in the U-shaped room under the watchful eye of Dr. Syvertsen. The geographic spread of the classmates on the Zoom call encompassed all of the U.S. time zones. Some of us have remained pretty close physically to Dartmouth, others of us are now “out on the coast,” and our leader, Bob, shuttles back and forth from Florida to California. I couldn’t help but think of the line in the Dartmouth song that goes “Though ’round the girdled earth they roam, her spell on them remains.”
The discussion then turned from personal anecdotes to more serious subjects. We began to discuss what is occurring in Ukraine and the implica tions of Russia’s aggression for all of the people who live in the Baltic coun tries. Paul’s native land of Lithuania has a corridor through it that remains part of Russia and ends in the port of Kalinin. Paul said that Lithuanians have closed off Russian access to that port. It was pointed out that a recent Wall Street Journal article had discussed the Russian belief that they should have hegemony over much of the Eurasian land mass, especially the Baltic nations and Poland as well as Ukraine. The implications of this Russian quest will, unfortunately, probably extend into our grandchildren’s lives.
We ended the discussion on a happier note, with the observation that we were all still participating in the world around us and that we had, in many ways, lived our lives during the best of times.
—Melvin Britton
8545 Carmel Valley Road Carmel, CA 93923 Cell: 650-483-1262 melvincbritton@aol.com
59If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Thomas Aaberg at 2391 Parrotts Pointe Road, Greensboro, GA 30642; Home: 706-4679382; or email ophttma@emory.edu
60Sadly, over the past year, we have lost three of the 24 members of the Class of 1960: Bob Liberman, Haig Kazazian, and Bill Colaiace. We are therefore now down to 10 living classmates.
But more happily, Helen and Lee Gilliatt just stopped in Hanover, where I had a very nice lunch with them and their daughter. It was the last day of their 10-day visit to New England celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary. They were married in Boston just after Lee’s Harvard graduation in 1962.
I also received a note from Tip Putnam, indicating that he has not lost his sense of humor. And Bob Di Mauro sent in a very nice picture of our class in our anatomy lab outfits.
Stu Hanson has published a very helpful new book, A Senior’s Guide for Living Well, and Dying Well: Conversations that Matter. It’s available on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble.
I am planning to attend my Cornell 60th reunion in October. Again, about half the class remains, with a couple still very active in medicine.
Please consider joining one of our D’59 virtual mini-reunions. The next is planned for November 2. Bill Boyle will send out announcements.
If you have any news or pictures for the column, please send them to me.
—Barry Smith
195 Willey Hill Road PO Box 238 Norwich, VT 05055
Home: 802-649-1438
Cell: 603-748-1332 bdsmith646@earthlink.net
61Here is the latest news from our DMS ’61 classmates:
From Eric Sailer (who is probably still the most active one in our crowd): “I wish I had something exciting to tell you. My partner, Elaine, and I are doing our best to avoid assisted living, staying in our broken-down 1791 farm house in Lyme Center and skiing the Dartmouth Skiway, just five minutes down the road—my idea of a country club. We did a very special boat trip in southeastern Alaska last spring. We recently did a canoe camping trip in the Allagash Wilderness in Maine— not as easy as it used to be, but we toughed it out, including paddling in a hailstorm. Last week we ran into Chris and Don Bartlett at the Norwich Farmers’ Market. It was great to catch up with them. They are well and are living in downtown Norwich in the old Bartlett family home near Dan and Whit’s general store. We are headed to our lake house on Goose Pond for the summer and will spend the fall in Ocean City, N.J., where I grew up. Life in general is good!” That sounds quite exciting to yours truly!
Tay Weinman writes: “Hiya! Everything’s pretty much the same. I saw this great T-shirt that said ‘Don’t grow old . . . It’s a trap.’ Sure is strange to be the same age as old people!”
Conner Moore’s widow, Wendy, is staying in touch: “I have waited to write
until I had all the information I needed. I have exciting news. Our grandson Henry Moore, son of our middle son, Michael, will be a member of the Dartmouth College Class of 2026. He follows his Grandoc Conner D’60; Uncle Christopher D’88; Aunt Christine, TU’07; and maternal Uncle Bill Hengst D’61. It is my intention to have a T-shirt that says ‘Dartmouth wife, mother, m-i-l, and granny.’ We all know how very proud Conner is. I am sure Linda is taking good care of you. Give her my love.” The Moore family’s Dartmouth beat goes on!
And the Vaules family’s Dartmouth connection continues on as well. David Vaules checks in from Baseball Hall of Fame country: “Martha and I are still aging together. Her health is good, except that she has to take care of me. My orthopaedic problems have really slowed me down, and the cardiac problems have limited my efforts at physical therapy, so, as I may have mentioned before, I am not aging gracefully. We are still trying to maintain a larger-than-needed house in Cooperstown and do not do much traveling. We still enjoy singing, and Martha is still playing golf. I attend three Bible study groups a week and find that keeps my mind active. I have become a fan of the writer James Patterson, but I doubt that I will ever be able to read everything he has
L to R: Jeannie and Tay Weinman ’61, Marty ’61 and Debby Weiss, and Linda and Sol Rockenmacher ’61 at Kincaid’s Steakhouse in Redondo Beach, CA.written. I continue as a Rotarian, but many of the meetings I attend are via Zoom. It is hard to believe that our children are all in their fifties and our youngest grandchild is a sophomore in college (at Carnegie Mellon). We have four who have graduated (from Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Cornell, and Bates) and two others still in college (at Lehigh and Dartmouth).”
I recently again came across the article in last January’s Dartmouth Medicine titled “All the Difference in the World,” about Frank Virnelli and his amazing and admirable history of 33 volunteer trips to repair cleft lips and palates for hundreds of children throughout Africa and Latin America. Over the years, Frank has mentored more than 20 local surgeons and at least 20 students, including medical students active in the Center for Global Health Equity at Dartmouth College and the Geisel School of Medicine. Frank, I know that you are not looking for praise, but your class mates are very proud of you—you have made a difference.
Yours truly (Sol Rockenmacher) and my beautiful partner, Linda, just celebrated our 60th wedding anni versary. Clearly, I married well. Linda has been such wonderful support to me from time immemorial, from my days and nights in clinical practice and teaching to my days and nights as a patient. (The latest add-on diagnosis is ATTR amyloidosis, a condition that
we didn’t even know about back in our medical school days.) Linda and I enjoyed getting back to our winter Southern California visit schedule following the COVID-induced cancel lation of our 2021 venture. We got to enjoy another pleasant get-together with Debby and Marty Weiss and Jeannie and Tay Weinman, visiting and enjoying lunch at Kincaid’s Restaurant on the Redondo Beach pier (see the attached picture).
Let us keep in touch—and stay safe and be well, as much as possible!
—Sol Rockenmacher 25 Saint Andrews Drive Bedford, NH 03110-6129 Home: 603-232-3477 rockenmacher@comcast.net
62Facing 7/6/22 deadline for this column—writing in June.
Over 1,000,000 Americans dead from Covid. Who knows what this number would have been had the vaccine program started sooner and had Americans been clearly urged by the White House to get vaccinated and not rely on Ivermectin, drinking Clorox, and similar “therapies.”
The next DMS ’62 reunion will be September 16-18, 2022. We’re hoping that at least 8 of the remaining 16 classmates will be in Hanover that weekend. A chance to renew friend ships and visit old (and new) sites. For those of us there it will be FUN.
Bob Prouty moved in July 2021 to a senior housing set-up after over 42 years in their old house. Their new facility is near to their former home and has only about 60 residents. Two of their sons live nearby and often visit Bob and Maura.
Len Skerker is still down in Florida. His daughter lives in the Channel Islands and Len visited her in late 2021 after three flights from St. Petersburg. A grandson lives in Malta and Len has visited him there “many times.”
Doug Zipes ’ latest book, Ari’s Spoon, was published and is available on Amazon. A compelling story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and aftermath. For me, the best fiction or historical fiction book Doug has done and one of the best on this topic.
David Steinberg and Sharon went on an Antarctica trip in January. Unfortunately, he tested positive for Covid and had to isolate for much of the trip. With this trip the Steinbergs have made trips to ALL seven continents. They often visit four grandchildren in Hanover (two are undergrads) and another one was due to enter the world in July.
Arthur Provisor still makes Columbus, Georgia his home. He was due to fly to Indianapolis in late June for a granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. Arthur gave up formal clinical work several years ago.
Tom Ashby is still heavily involved in the music scene in the Rochester, N.Y., area and bands–in person!–are coming back. He’s playing sax and clarinet regularly. He plays in the Eastman School of Music clarinet choir among other ensembles. Tom views DMS as “the best educational experience in (his) life.”
Alan Larimer attended a 65th high school reunion the summer of 2022. He was at this school for only his senior year. Alan works on fixing up his home, garage, and “estate” doing virtually all the heavy work himself,
Douglas Zipes has been elected Councilor: Tenth Pentad for the Harvard Medical School Alumni Councilnot via hired contractors. Lots to do and he’s getting it done.
During a February Zoom conference, Dean Compton announced that there was no tuition increase in either FY22 or FY23. There were about 8300 applications for the 92 positions in the incoming class. Our school seems to be on firm footing.
May all of us work towards an improved world, however we do it.
—Ted Tapper
522 Howe Road
Merion Station, PA 19066-1107
Home: 610-664-3590 ted.tapper@live.com
63Our Dartmouth College and Medical School reunions have come and gone, and I find myself writing a Class of 1963 column with relatively little news! I do hope you and your loved ones are coping reasonably well with these tumultuous times—let me know what’s going on in your life.
I had a delightful lunch last week out on my back patio here in Norwich; our classmates George Gewirtz, Barry Levine, and Elliot Prager MED’64 were all back in the Upper Valley for the Dartmouth College Class of 1962’s 60th reunion. Remember, many of our DMS classmates had only finished their junior year at Dartmouth before they matriculated at the medical school. Spouses Ellen Levine and Phyllis Prager were also here. As you may recall, Janice Gewirtz had passed away during the past year.
We caught up on the news, laughed a great deal, and focused on the growing amount of bigotry and violence being expressed these days in the U.S. On the brighter side of things, Barry bragged a bit about his 1927 Marmon baby roadster which he’s had restored. What a beauty it indeed is! As I recall, a number of you are avid antique car collectors, including Ken Danielson, Ralph Rydell , and Frank Pauli, and, as
I recall, Russ Hardy paints old trucks. Perhaps when we have our Class of 1963 60th reunion next year (Sept. 22-24) we can assemble them and parade around the campus!
I teased Barry about his basement full of odds and ends—he considers himself a “collector,” and Ellen considers him a “hoarder.” My partner, Joan, confuses those words in reference to me as well!
Jack Babson, Roger Christian, Bill Couser, Ken Danielson, and I are planning a get-together at Seyon State Park Lodge in central Vermont in October.
Annie Laurie and Jack Babson, who share time between California and northern Maine, have recently completed a tie quilt for Gene Lariviere and are presently in contact with Jean DeHaven, who is having one made in memory of Ken DeHaven, who passed away last June. Jean will be sending some of Ken’s ashes to me, and I plan to place some of them at both the medical school and the Dartmouth football stadium; some of you may recall that Ken was captain of the football team, a terrific player, and also an internation ally recognized orthopaedic surgeon.
And speaking of Jack, here’s something he wrote that I would like to share with you. Send Jack (blades65@live.com) and me your comments on it: “I am not happy with
Dartmouth College’s plan to develop a master’s program to train medical administrators. A number of years ago, someone donated a million dollars to Dartmouth to improve the delivery of healthcare. And they (Dartmouth) have taken an exact opposite (approach) and plan to train administrators! Dartmouth needs to train more generalists who can go into rural and community hospitals and do the job needed. I am unhappy with Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Medical School, who should be leaders in improving our broken healthcare system. There is no question our system is failing.” So there you have it. Thank you, Jack.
A few of you have indicated your interest in a Zoom get-together, including Mike Norman, Alan Weinberg , Paul Johnson, and Bruce Feldman. How about the rest of you? Let me know, and I’ll plan a session for early this fall.
Lastly, back to the patio luncheon: A few days after our get-together, Elliot Prager let us know that Phyllis had come down with COVID. As I write this, Elliot got in touch again to say
L to R: George Gewirtz, Barry Levine, Alan Rozycki, all ’63, and Elliot Prager ’64 with his wife Phyllis on Alan’s porch after their Dartmouth College reunion. Barry Levine ’63 in his restored 1927 Marmon baby roadster.that he’s now positive, too. Both have started Paxlovid, and their symptoms, so far, are mild. So be careful out there! Stay well. Do good and send me your thoughts.
—Alan Rozycki 56 McKenna Road Norwich, VT 05055
Home: 802-649-1578
alan.a.rozycki@dartmouth.edu
64As summer approached I, and I suspect many of you, thought COVID would be ending—but that does not seem to be the case. Masking is very variable, but around where I am, many people still wear masks indoors. But travel and going to restaurants seems to be moving back with vigor. The medical school seems to be going strong, but my information is very cursory. Medicine assumes less and less of my time, which I expect is the same for many of you. I do keep up on some things, so I am slightly knowledgeable when people ask me a question.
I heard from Abe Aranow, who lives in San Francisco, where “the climate and political needs resonate with him.” He remains in good health, but I suspect that, like many of us, he is slowing down. He states that “boredom is never an option.” His default is classi cal music and nonfiction literature. He continues to be involved with photog raphy and to make new photoprints from his decades worth of old scanned negatives. As I remember, he spent time in medical school at the Hopkins Center doing crafts. He communicates with Lynn Welchel and Judy Koehler As I recall, some years ago he tracked down Chris Simopoulos in Greece and may have visited him there. Chris is now deceased. Maybe in a few years we will do another Zoom.
—Rich Edelson
3001 Veazey Terrace NW, Apt 1602 Washington, DC 20008 redelson@gmail.com
John Zaia, chairman of the City of Hope Gene Therapy program, announced that a City of Hope patient who has been living with HIV since 1988 has experienced full remission from the disease after receiving a life-saving stem cell transplant for his leukemia. Read more here: dartgo.org/johnzaiadms66
65We are currently seeking a secretary for the class 1965. To learn more or if you have news you would like to share, please contact the Office of Alumni Engagement at 603-646-5297 or email it to Geisel.Alumni.Relations@ dartmouth.edu
66Deane Mosher has been “out east” doing extended, “long-overdue visits with family.” He has “one last graduate student to foist on the world, and then I can retire.”
Steve Sherman writes: “Having endured the pandemic, I find it nice to be traveling again. I am currently in Athens, Greece, with Gale and my grandson. The Parthenon still stands, and the gyros are as good as ever.”
John Looney reports that he retired at the end of June. “I worry whether I can be happy as an emeritus professor and nothing else. I will continue to work with the Consortium for the Study of the American College Student, a multiuniversity research project.” He is also considering a new project involving the history of Dr. Ewen Cameron, a prominent Canadian-American psychiatrist who, among other things, “was secretly paid by the CIA to develop psychiatric techniques for interrogation purposes. People came from all over the world to be treated by him but were tortured instead.”
Bob Ellsworth is “still healthy and COVID-free but concerned during this relentless pandemic about the increas ing numbers of COVID-positive friends, neighbors, and family members in recent months. Marilyn and I continue to take the ‘abundance of caution’ approach with our social activities. We have done no major domestic or inter national travel since 2019,” he says, though they do still visit family in New England. They keep busy “kayaking on local rivers, taking long walks and hikes for exercise and our nature fix, and doing a variety of community volunteer activities.” They are “looking forward to a relatively COVID-free time when we can be more comfortable in letting down our guard.”
Garth Gregory wrote that in June that he and Valerie did “a Danube River cruise and saw the Oberammergau Passion Play, which is only performed every 10 years. It was a remarkable production, broken into two two-anda-half-hour parts, with a three-hour dinner break in between. We picked up mild cases of COVID near the end of our trip but are now fully recovered. We also had a delightful four-day visit with Gale and Steve Sherman at Pebble Beach in May, getting in a couple rounds of golf while there.”
Britt and Mike Ascher were visited by their son, his wife, and their two boys, who have lived in Singapore for nine years. “This year, with COVID to deal with, they came to us in April, with a side
trip to St. Jude Hospital in Memphis for Michael’s 30-month checkup. All is well since Michael’s treatment for rhabdomyosarcoma of the middle ear.” Britt and Mike “made annual trips to Singapore over Christmas until 2020, including side trips to Perth, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Palawan, and Taiwan.” Mike comments that “if you are trying to characterize the COVID epidemic for spread and severity, how can you count an asymptomatic carrier and a death, and everything in between, each as a case. Once we missed the opportunity to collect that information, we were consigned to being in the dark for a long time to come.”
Sandy Hight wrote: “Sue and I had a month-long trip to Italy, mostly in the north—Milan, Trento, Bologna, and the lakes region. We hiked about 135 miles around the lakes, spending time in cooking classes and a few days on some beautiful streams and rivers fly-fishing for brown and marble trout, which are unique to northern Italy.”
Despite concerns about COVID testing, “it was a wonderful journey, in a relaxed civilization and environment, a very mellow time walking, sightseeing, and hiking. There is too much not to enjoy in spite of COVID. We hope you all can enjoy life in spite of the adversity that has been placed around us in our retirement years.”
In May, John Bullock “experi enced one of greatest highlights of my life,” receiving an Alumni Career Achievement Award, after being nomi nated by Kent Salisbury. See pages 8-9 for details of the event. John also shared this stirring “small world” tale:
“After the Thursday night dinner, my wife, Gretchen, was approached by Peter Wright MED’65, a retired DMS faculty member and former pediatric infectious disease fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. He told Gretchen that he’d been in Haiti with me at the Hôpital Albert Schweitzer back in 1974; I was there as part of my Yale ophthal
mology residency. When my wife told me this, I had a powerful flashback; I remembered having talked to Peter about our extremely sick 11/2-year old daughter, Katherine, who had devel oped severe vomiting and diarrhea. She had lost about a third of her body weight and had the skeletonized look of a premorbid baby with terminal cholera. He started her immediately on IV fluids, nutrient infusion therapy, and antibiot ics, and within several days she was, like Lazarus, restored to perfect health.
“After the award ceremony the next day, I reintroduced him to Katherine, now an almost-50-year-old mother of three, a graduate of Vanderbilt and the London School of Economics, and the wife of Matt Waldman, a very successful Chicago financial execu tive. Peter also met Matt and their two daughters: Margaret, a freshman at NYU, and Sophie, a sixth-grader. (Their son, Charlie, a junior at the Cushing Academy, was in the middle of finals and so was unable to attend.) As Peter and Katherine chatted, they realized that they had both been at Vanderbilt at the same time when Peter was on the faculty there for 20-some years.
“l just stood there in awe, contem plating those frightening days in Haiti and the hundreds of lives Peter has indirectly touched through ensuring Katherine’s survival.”
What a story, John—thanks so much for sharing it with us!
—John Davenport 2012 Drew Avenue S Minneapolis, MN 55416 Cell: 952-237-4076 jdav0743@gmail.com
67If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Frank Sharkey at Dept. of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, UT Health - San Antonio, 7703 Floyd Curl Drive, San Antonio, TX 78229-3901; or email sharkyf@uthscsa.edu
68If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary William H. Ramsey at 49 Cranberry Lane, Cheshire, CT 06410-3504; or email williamramsey@sbcglobal.net
69If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Bill Rix at 55 Audubon Way, Auburn, NH 03032-3109; call 603-587-0248; or email rixwp@comcast.net
70We held our in-person 50th reunion, jointly with the Class of 1971, on the weekend of May 20-22. I was able to attend only the Friday night festivities, when the awards ceremony took place, but, as you can see in the attached photo, Steve Barrett , Hank Borkowski, Mark Constantian, Steve Galli, Nick Perencevich, Ted Renna , and Ernst Schaefer stayed for the weekend. In the photo, they are posing by the classroom we had earlier dedicated to two of our departed classmates, Carl Monroe and David Sigelman. On Friday evening, Ernie received the Career Achievement Award for his spectacular contributions to understanding lipid biology and its relationship to coronary heart disease.
It was great to see Ernie and Mary again, both looking hale and hearty, and to have, in spite of the shortness of my visit, a really deep and rewarding conversation with Hank. A very pleas ant surprise was to see Karen Hein MED’68, who was my resident on ward 8E at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx when I began my internship. Her welcoming words to the incoming crew—“There will be no internship depressions on this service”—still resonate. Steve Atwood, who, like Hank and me, trained at Jacobi Hospital, sent in his regrets, as he was unable to attend this year.
Mark Constantian reports, “On Saturday night, we all met at
Jesse’s for a delightful dinner, during which most in the class stood and summarized what he or she had been doing since graduation. That was the best part, because we got to know everyone’s careers in some depth. There is certainly enormous variety. On Sunday morning, we met at the Dartmouth Outing Club House near the golf course and had a wonderful final breakfast and goodbyes. We finished by 11:00, and we are already looking forward to the next reunion.” Other activities included a lunch with the dean and a tour of the school with medical students.
Mark also told me of the changes in the medical school. Kellogg Auditorium is now a classroom (another auditorium has been built), and students can take advantage of massage chairs, a meditation room, and a quiet room. Only the anatomy lab looked just as Mark remembered it. However, the videotaping of classes means that student in-person attendance is quite a bit rarer than in our day (though I remember Steve Galli, another Career Achievement
Award winner, doing extremely well without attending many classes!).
The simulation lab (see https://www. dartmouth-hitchcock.org/patient-safe ty-center), in which remarkably well-en gineered robots can display altered respiratory patterns, vital signs, and even facial expressions, was described by Mark as “fantastic.”
Nick Perencevich, our class’s Alumni Council representative, described, in an email to classmates in July, many of the substantial recent accomplishments of the medical school. If you did not receive this report, please contact me or Nick.
Please send me personal notes on achievements, retirement activities, travel, grandchildren, or anything else that you would enjoy sharing with your friends from 50 years ago. I hope in the next newsletter to catch us all up on where we are now.
—Nigel Paneth 839 Wildwood Drive East Lansing, MI 48823-3048
Home: 517-351-9538
Cell: 517-290-5062 paneth@msu.edu
71On May 20-22, we finally had a wonderful in-person 50th reunion (in our 51st year!). We were joined by members of the class of 1970. The planners— Nick Perencevich, Steve Barrett , Ernst Schaefer, Peter Lawrence, Ken Moller, and me (Joe O’Donnell)—requested that the time be spent together as a class, with no talking heads, no requests for money, etc., just time together. And that’s what we got! We did do tours of the medical school campus and the hospital and had a lunch with the dean and time with our great students. The weekend commenced with the alumni awards ceremony, where Joe Lynch and Ernst Schaefer were among the awardees. You can read more about the ceremony and the recipients on pages 8–9.
On Saturday, we met for breakfast at the old Kellogg Cafeteria; toured the school; ate lunch at the Cancer Center, where Dean Compton answered our questions; and toured the medical center after lunch. The tours were led by current students, and we got a real view of the life of current students. The highlights were our Saturday class dinner at Jesse’s Steakhouse and a class breakfast at the renovated DOC House on Sunday morning. At one of these two sessions, each of the attend ees got up before the group and told us about their lives. I was astounded by the impact each of our classmates had made, and as a member of the commit tee that helps selects the alumni awardees, I felt that every one of us from both classes could be worthy of receiving an alumni recognition award! The foundation DMS gave us was key in our successful careers, and I was very moved by the stories that came straight from the heart.
Attendees from our Class of 1971 included Debbie Shure, Joe Lynch, Peter Lawrence, Ron Fischler, Ray Hutchinson, Rab Cross, Doug Everett , Ken Moller, and me. Lucy Hann was supposed to come, but at the last
L to R: Ted Renna, Steve Barrett, Mark Constantian, Nick Perencevich, Steve Galli, Ernst Schaefer, and Hank Borkowski standing outside the DMS Class of 1970 Conference Room at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center while attending their 50th class reunion in May.Members of the classes of 1970 and 1971 returned to Hanover in May to celebrate their 50th Class Reunions.
minute she came down with COVID. You were all there in spirit, and we told many stories and had many laughs about those two very formative years in our lives.
For those of you who haven’t yet done so, I would love for you to put info and pictures about your lives into the memory book here: https://geisel. brightcrowd.com/1970-71/sign-in!
I’d also love it if anyone would be willing to add a story to the wisdom book that Dan Lucey MED’81, Sarah Johansen MED’89/’90, and I have put together each year as a gift for the graduating class. Each story is approxi mately 500 words and illustrates some thing you have learned over your career that you wish you’d known when you graduated from DMS and that you can share with the current students. Over the years, we have received and passed along some really great and really meaningful bits of “wisdom.” These stories also go up on a password-pro tected alumni website. If you’d like to do this, and I hope you will, you can send your story to me.
—Joe O’Donnell PO Box 606 Grantham, NH 03753 joseph.odonnell@dartmouth.edu
72This column includes news from the two-year class of 1972 and the three-year class of 1972-3.
What a treat to get some news from classmates—especially as our class’s upcoming 50th reunion, on Sept. 16-18, is certainly putting DMS on all of our minds!
From Michael Hull in South Carolina comes word that he has now retired from his 40 years of dermatology practice (!). With this news from the Charleston suburbs of North Charleston and Mt. Pleasant, just a reminder that in recent years, Charleston earned Travel and Leisure ’s number-one spot as the best city in America no fewer than eight times! So for those of you who may now finally have extra time for travel, you might consider enjoying Charleston’s archi tecture, proximity to the beach, culi nary delights, and, of course, annual Spoleto Arts Festival—visits for which Michael would be uniquely qualified to offer guidance.
From Dina and Dan Wing comes news from an entirely different loca tion—tiny Corinth, Vt. (population only about 1,500 people), where Dan’s big local news is that a three-day-a-
week farm store has opened a little shop in their hamlet. So comparing the surroundings of Michael and Dan, ’tis thought-provoking indeed to think of the variety of locales and life experiences they—and, indeed, all of us—have had in the decades since our DMS years!
Also from Vermont came some musical news, from Bob Arnot . We had previously heard that Bob had acquired a piano, was taking composition lessons, and thought he might even be on his way to composing a piano sonata. So what a surprise to learn that Bob has now completed a number of compositions, including two sympho nies, a double concerto for trumpet and violin, and more—a CD of which will be coming out this August! On the medical front, Bob is working with several groups, including Health Tech Without Borders, which daily provides about 1,000 telehealth consultations for patients in Ukraine! As usual, Bob is also planning to participate in several upcoming sports events, including stand-up ocean paddling in Hawaii and ski mountaineering racing in Italy.
On the purely medical front, Rick Mamelok reports from Palo Alto, Calif., that following a trip to Chicago,
New York City, and Denver, he tested positive for COVID! Fortunately, he had only mild symptoms and he has fully recovered. (I wish we could discuss coronavirus infections and vaccines over dinner with Elmer Pfefferkorn!) Rick also reports that he has recently started two blogs. One is dedicated to medical themes, though it’s geared toward nonmedical audiences, as well as interested physicians and nurses. The other blog is more general and covers a variety of topics, ranging from the arts, to cooking and wine, to various observations on current events. (Links to these two blogs will be forwarded to classmates by email.)
From Santa Barbara, Calif., Al Brown explains that in 2015, he transitioned from his practice in interventional cardiology to become the chief medical information officer for his local four-hospital healthcare system and that he has now retired from that position as well. Also, just a few months ago, he and Sally were in Hanover (for Al’s “50ish” Dartmouth undergraduate Class of 1970 reunion) and then in Burlington (doing the same for Sally’s UVM reunion).
While in Hanover, they report having enjoyed a nice picnic with strawberry shortcake at Occom Pond with Dina and Dan Wing and Nancy and Fred Meier. A nice mini-reunion for sure!
From Montana, David Taylor reports that he spent most of the initial COVID lockdown period working from home as a consultant for a Dutch biotech company interested in immunotherapy for COVID. Then last October, he started working part-time in the clinical research department at a local hospital, a position that has allowed him to also teach medical students enrolled in the Northwest’s multistate WWAMI program.
As for me (Eric Brenner), I continue to teach the annual course in infectious disease epidemiology
Congratulations to Vincent Pellegrini the recipient of the AOA 2022 Distinguished Clinician Educator Award. Dr. Pellegrini is currently professor and vice-chair of education and research affairs in the Department of Orthopaedics at the medical center, and has an appointment as professor in The Dartmouth Institute.
in our U of SC School of Public Health. And this spring, as part of the school’s NIH grant relating to big data analysis, also taught the same subject to students from diverse fields, such as psychology, engineering, and computer science (!?). It was an interesting challenge to teach these matters to students from so many nonmedical disciplines.
Finally, as this column is being composed in early July, the Sept. 16-18 dates for our 50th reunion are looming ever closer! What a special occasion that will be for us to gather, either virtually or in person.
—Eric Brenner 724 Holly Street Columbia, SC 29205-1852 803-799-6797 ebrenner@rocketmail.com
73This column includes news from the two-year class of 1973 and the three-year class of 1973-4.
If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary David Knopman at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Department of Neurology, 200 First Street, SW, Rochester, MN 55905-0001; call 507-288-7557; or email knopman@mayo.edu
74This column includes news from the two-year class of 1974 and the three-year class of 1974-5.
If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Bill Thorwarth at 4014 North Center St., Apt 204, Hickory, NC 28601; or email wthorwarth@gmail.com
Vin Pelligrini D’77, MED’79 is the recipient of the 2022 Distinguished Clinician Educator Award given by the American Orthopaedic Association (AOA) during its annual leadership meeting.75This column includes news from the two-year class of 1975 and the three-year class of 1975-6. If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Oge Young at 2 Rum Hill Road, Concord, NH 03301-2556; or email ohpryoung@comcast.net
76We are currently seeking a secretary for the class 1976. To learn more or if you have news you would like to share, please contact the Office of Alumni Engagement at 603-646-5297 or email it to Geisel.Alumni.Relations@ dartmouth.edu
77If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Arminda Perez at 3905 Highgrove Drive, Dallas, TX 75220; call 972-658-0474; or email armindaperez22@yahoo.com
78If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Peter R. Rogol at 73 West Rock Ave, New Haven, CT 06515; or email PROGOL48@gmail.com
79Last month Dennis Angellis released two jazz albums: Virtually Jazz Vol. 1 and Virtually Jazz Vol. 2. Both are all original jazz tunes 90% of which he wrote, performed, and produced by himself during the first two years of the pandemic. They are available on all streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon Prime, etc.) They are mostly bebop and bossa nova reminiscent of the jazz period from 1940-1970. Check them out if you like that kind of music. He also has a previously released album of piano music. Just search by his name!
If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class
Secretary Dennis Angellis at 8501 Chilte Pine Rd NW, Albuquerque, NM 87120; or email dangellis@me.com
80If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Celine M. Stahl at 84 Pemberwick Road # A, Greenwich, CT 06831-5044; call 203-622-8493 (home) or 203-536-5276 (cell); or email cmsdms1980@gmail.com
81There are recent updates from several classmates: Gloria Martinez retired after four decades as a family physician with the Kaiser Foundation in Southern California. She was also appointed to the Dartmouth College Class of ’77 Executive Committee in June 2022. Gloria visits with Kathy Katamura in Connecticut and says she is doing well.
Miguel Damien continues working in New Jersey with his IVF practice. He is still an avid skier and race car driver.
Blair Andrew retired in Baltimore after decades of work as an interven tional radiologist and department director. He still loves to travel, wind surf, and golf.
Anne Griffin continues to prac tice psychiatry in Manhattan and to perform in concerts at Carnegie Hall with the Oratorio Society of New York.
Jim O’Brien continues to work on developing novel treatments for cancer from his offices in NYC and northern California. He still plays the piano and Japanese flute and not long ago took composition classes at Juilliard.
Susan Krysiewicz has lived in NYC since 1983, throughout her career in radiology and beyond.
Greg Ruhland is retired from his career in anesthesiology and critical care medicine and lives in Hilo, Hawaii. His son, Eddie Ruhland MED’13, returned to Hawaii and practices as an emergency medicine physician.
Robert Michler continues to work in NYC as the chair of both the Department of Surgery and the Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. Like Alan Donnenfeld and Anne Griffin, Robert contributed a poignant alumni wisdom story to the DMS alumni wisdom book that has been presented to students on graduation day for the past five years. This effort was begun in 2016 by Dan Lucey and Joe O’Donnell MED’71 and is being carried forward now by Sarah Johansen MED’89/’90. Classmates are encouraged to contribute their own alumni stories through the Office of Alumni Engagement at Geisel.Alumni. Relations@dartmouth.edu. Efforts by Dan, Joe, Sarah, and other alumni to fund in perpetuity these annual wisdom books for graduating students have reached about 20 percent of the required $100,000 goal.
—Dan Lucey 420 7th Street NW Washington, DC 20004 Cell: 202-299-4398
daniel.lucey8@gmail.com
—Mark Lena 125 Bennoch Road Orono, ME 04473 Home: 207-866-3839
mlena@roadrunner.com
82Hello, Class of ’82. I have lots to report this time. First, this is a reunion year for us! The reunion will be held Sept. 16-18, and I hope many of you are planning to attend. You should have gotten an email with the details by now.
Next up is some news on Karen Straus. She has three children: a 33-year-old son who does data analysis, a 30-year-old son who is a lawyer, and a 26-year-old daughter who is currently attending medical school in Grenada. She married Alan Donnefeld MED’81 after both of them parted with their prior spouses; their
wedding was held in Ireland. Karen still practices radiation oncology part-time.
Carolyn Brooks is practicing radiology in Chicopee, Mass., but is cutting back some to enjoy her new grandson.
Mary Ann Zetes retired after a career in pediatrics in northern California. She and Peter will be at the reunion in September.
Steph and Jaie Byers had a big event this year—the wedding of their son, Chip, and his partner, Andrew. They were married in Orlando and had an alligator meet and greet after the wedding! Their daughter Maria works for Noom; she is studying to be a health and wellness coach and still works as a dance teacher. And daughter Annie was one of Steph’s medical assistants during the pandemic and now works at a pediatric cardiology office; she’s getting a master’s degree in travel and tourism from Temple.
Diane Edge retired more than five years ago and is enjoying retirement. She and her partner, Chris, traveled often and spent their winter months hiking in Mallorca until COVID disrupted things. They then started hiking in the high country near Copper Mountain, Colo. She also does meditation and yoga regularly.
I hate to end on a sad note, but I was informed that we have lost another classmate, Doug Canning , due to severe injuries suffered in a cycling accident. He was chief of urology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he held the Leonard and Madly Abramson Endowed Chair in Pediatric Urology. I’m sure I’ll have a lot more news after the reunion.
—Patricia Edwards 5 Wheeler Road Bow, NH 03304-4213
Cell: 603-340-0796 drpatedwards@yahoo.com
84Meg Allyn Krilov wrote from the Bronx: “I am enjoying retirement in Riverdale. We have four children and five grandchildren between us; the oldest grandchild is 8 and the youngest is 2 weeks old! They are scattered from Michigan to Maryland to Virginia to Queens, so the telephone and FaceTime are great alternatives.
“We are in the process of buying a large co-op in Riverdale with more bedrooms, so that our children and their families can come and stay. Everyone is very excited about it, and we expect to be moved in by September, so maybe we all can celebrate Thanksgiving together!”
If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary David Curran at 8631 Sherwood Bluff, Eden Prairie, MN 55347-3433; call 612-868-8355 (cell) or 952-920-7001 (work); or email ddcfak@gmail.com
—Editor85This is from Rich Parker : “I can report that I am almost two years into being a hospice doctor on two weekends per month. It is very gratifying to be a real doctor again. The patients and their situations can be extremely complex, and I have learned a lot about using the subcutaneous route to administer many different meds, including Dilaudid, Ativan, Haldol, and morphine. I have prescribed phenobarbital and, at the other end of the spectrum, Narcan. One of the best parts of the job is that no one is rushing me and I get to take as much time as each patient and family requires. I still have my day job with Arcadia, a data and analytics company. And I still have my backup day job, working as an expert witness in hospital corporate negligence cases, especially in states like Pennsylvania, where there is no
immunity for not-for-profit hospitals. I hope to see many of you at our next DMS reunion, whenever that is.”
This is from Steve Massicotte: “I have three beautiful, smart, and artistic daughters. One has a master’s in cello performance, one has a master’s in voice performance (she’s a soprano), and my oldest has a master’s in education, with a focus on reproduc tive health education. I worked at the Indiana University Department of Ophthalmology for nine years before going into solo private practice for the next 18 years or so; I retired in 2018. Indy has been a great (and inexpen sive!) place to live and raise a family. We’ve been happy out here. They have state fairs! Awesome. Just connected with Bill Yeaton for the first time since med school. It was great talking to him.”
This is from Brad Pickett : “I’m still on the faculty at UNM in surgery and neurosurgery and still teaching medical students and residents about the fascinating world of hearing and balance problems. And I finally have a partner joining me after four years of being the only cochlear implant surgeon in New Mexico—hallelujah! I have a daughter who will be a senior in college, and a wife who loves horses, otherwise we might be retired. I rarely see Kathy Fraser or Gerry Muraida . I talk to Mark Carroll and Jim Zalucki several times a year.”
And this is from Bill Yeaton: “Not a lot new to tell about here beyond what was in my annual letter. My usual three-month summer furlough (at UC Davis) was cut to one month, so not much traveling this summer. Katie is just coming back from visiting her family in New Zealand, and we will both be heading back to Maine and New Hampshire for a couple of weeks and then straight back to work. Very busy, as we are very short-staffed and seeing lots of COVID cases day to day since the pandemic began. Hoping to retire within the next couple of years.”
I would like to get email addresses for those of you who have not updated your email contact info with the alumni office, so I can send you alumni board meeting summaries.
—Laurie Draughon 8437 E Arroyo Seco Road Scottsdale, AZ 85266
Cell: 925-324-3919; lauriefd@yahoo.com
86We are currently seeking a secretary for the class 1986. To learn more or if you have news you would like to share, please contact the Office of Alumni Engagement at 603-646-5297 or email Geisel.Alumni.Relations@ dartmouth.edu
87Stephanie Lash visited Elizabeth Marshall in Colorado this summer, and they had an amazing guided climbing adventure in Estes Park on a “via ferrata,” a climbing route equipped with cables and fixed anchors. Lash also attended Marshall Denkinger ’s daughter’s wedding while she was in Colorado.
—Harper Randall 4482 Fortuna Way Salt Lake City, UT 84124 HarperRandall@comcast.net
88If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Aris Damianos at 8 Winterberry Lane, North Hampton, NH 03862; call 603-964-3798; or email adamianos@ comcast.net
If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Helen S. Manber at 3838 California Street, Suite 308, San Francisco, CA 94121; call 415-668-4100; or email hmanber@ gmail.com
90If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary E. James Wright III at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Ctr., Urology, 301 Building, 4940 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 212242735; call 410-550-7739; or email ejwright1@gmail.com.
91We are currently seeking a secretary for the class 1986. To learn more or if you have news you would like to share, please contact the Office of Alumni Engagement at 603-646-5297 or email Geisel.Alumni.Relations@ dartmouth.edu
92After soliciting requests for updates, I only received a few responses—but I am telling myself that’s because so many of you plan to come to our reunion and tell everyone your news in person!
Diana Hilbert will be joining us in the fall but also kindly sent along an update now that she’s an empty nester: “I am planning on coming back to Hanover for our reunion in September.
I hope there is a good turnout. I look forward to seeing everyone, as I missed the last one. I plan to come solo, as reunions are not as fun for spouses—tee-hee. It would be fun to arrange a group activity just for our classmates—a hike, a canoe rental on the river, or a party. Seems like most of the structured activities are geared for large or multiclass groups.” Good news, Diana! Lenny Mankin will be leading a group hike for us on Saturday. Stay tuned for details!
“All is well in SF,” Diana continued. “I am still in private group practice with seven physicians. I spend most of my time doing outpatient primary care, but I also take care of my patients in the hospital and teach medical residents and medical students. I also have a small concierge practice, which I find quite gratifying. Stephen, my husband, is still doing all the business and billing for our practice. Spencer, my son, just finished his first year at Georgetown and is loving DC.”
Now that we’re at the 30-year mark, it’s not surprising to learn that some of us are considering retirement—and given what’s happened in the past few years, that development is even less surprising!
I am taking the liberty of excerpt ing Joe Franklin’s lovely Facebook message about his 30-year career— starting with entering medical school at the age of 35, through his residency in emergency medicine in 1992 in Philadelphia, a brief trial in a primary care residency in Mobile, then comple tion of his emergency medicine training in Oklahoma City. He proceeded to work in small, rural ERs and spent 14 years in critical access outposts in Grimes, Madison, and Burleson Counties in Texas, followed by seven years in Houston. He now plans to tran sition to a different pace. He reflected that he has “worked with many a good doctor and especially the nurses. God has allowed me the unique privilege of
Stephanie Lash ’87 and Elizabeth Marshall ’87 climbing “via ferrata” in Estes Park.Dean Compton, Michael Hoggard ’22, and John Houde MED’92, HS’93, at this year’s graduation ceremony.
Congratulations to John Houde who was one of two alumni inducted into the AOA at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in spring 2022.
Joe, sincere congratulations on such an illustrious career. Your patients were so lucky to have you! And we are lucky to have a new vacation spot—be careful what you wish for, Joe; you may have guests sooner than you think!
Evan Teplow is not retiring, but he has a job that includes a three-month sabbatical every three years. He is going to be traveling to Nepal soon on a medical trek—I cannot wait to hear about the trip when he returns. It may derail him from joining us in September, but hopefully he can break away a little early from work! He also sent some news about Fred Coler, who “bought a sweet little cottage in the town where he surfs, and he’s fixing it up beautifully.”
I hope everyone will read Chris Colwell ’s opinion piece at dartgo. org/colwell_columbine. With all that is happening in our world, his thought ful essay is a good reminder that our continued efforts to advocate not just for our individual patients but for the safety of our communities has value.
caring for my fellow man (and woman and child) and has blessed me in so many ways!! There’s a certain bond occurring among people undergoing a certain hardship together; working in an emergency department, especially at St. Joe’s, seemed to create that among doctors, nurses, ancillary staff, EMS, and law enforcement. I treasure it all—even the difficult, the abuser, and the antagonistic, but more so the appreciative or those in need or desper ation. Please know that if we’ve worked together in the ED, there’s an excellent chance your face and manner come to mind. Thank you for the difference you’ve made to me and to our patients.”
And, because Joe is Joe, he kindly wrote to me with a few more details: “With Cody and Hannah safely on their own, Cheryl and I are trying, through
God’s grace, to write another chapter before assisted living. :-) To that end, we have our property on the market here in central Texas and are near completing a fixer-upper in Alpine, a small community in far west Texas, just north of Big Bend National Park. I hope to practice some degree of primary care, making house calls in a part-time practice, trying to find an approach that provides good care to the patient. Part of our remodeling includes guest quarters separate from the house. This part of Texas is beautiful high desert, with a great climate. We’re well situated between two national parks and several state parks—meaning the door is open for visitors!” He signed off with “Thank you for this indulgence.” It is hardly an indulgence to hear about his storied career and all the care he provided.
I’m sure, given how amazing our class is, there are many similar stories that can and will be shared. I hope that we will enjoy many of them in person in September. I look forward to seeing you very soon!
—Anna Vouros 106 Elm Street Concord, MA 01742 Cell: 617-320-0659 avouros@partners.org
93If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Robyn Jacobs at 18 Justin Morrill Memorial Highway, South Strafford, VT 05070; or email rjacobs@hygeiawomen.com
94If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Kristin Casale at 94 Meadow Wood Dr., Greenwich, CT 06830; or email kpcasale@gmail.com
95If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Kristen O. Hansberry at 6385 Oxbow Bend, Chanhassen, MN 55317-9128; call 952-473-5500; or email Khansbe15@gmail.com
96I haven’t heard from any of you with updates; please send me just a short one! So, lacking any news, I did a little online sleuthing. John Gaitanis is now the chair of pediatric neurology at Tufts Children’s Hospital, after having practiced in Providence for a long time. I found a video of a lovely, very articulate presentation he gave recently on cannabinoids and autism. He looks exactly the same as the day he wandered late into our first anatomy exam. (Do others remember that? Dr. Binder asked him what happened, and he shrugged and said, “I was just dillydallying.”) He’s still smart, offbeat, and self-deprecating.
Speaking of lovely, Jennifer Retsinas, who I think is practicing in Cambridge (the web was a little contradictory) and is a fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, has some really cool paintings on display on the ACOG website, along with a neat commentary on algorithms in medicine and their relationship to art. You can view her work and reflections at dartgo.org/ retsinas_artofmedicine
Please write in and tell me how you are doing! I hope everyone is well.
—Emily Transue 1248 22nd Avenue E Seattle, WA 98112-3535 emilytransue@gmail.com
97A warm hello to all my ’97 classmates.
This year has been exciting for Christopher Couture, who ventured to the Winter Olympics in Beijing to serve as a physician for the
U.S. Nordic Ski Teams. Walter Rush has been keeping in touch with his sailing passion this summer with his family, while enjoying some much-needed recharge time.
As for me (Lucy Vega), I am recov ering from COVID (I’m at day 9 as I write this).
Mark your calendars for this year’s DMS reunion weekend, on Sept. 16-18! I hope to see you all there.
Enjoy your summer and be safe. Please feel free to text/call me at 401-301-9505 with any updates on yourselves. I would love to connect with you. See you in the fall!
—Lucille Vega
RI Healthcare Family Practice 962 Warwick Avenue Warwick, RI 02888-3650
Work: 401-383-7830 Cell: 401-301-9505 vegadirectmedical@gmail.com
At left, top: Walter Rush ’97 with his family. Bottom: Christopher Couture ’97 took a break from working with the US Nordic Ski teams to grab a photo with the Olympic Rings during the Winter Olympics.
98If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Rondall Lane at 547 23rd Avenue, Unit A, San Francisco, CA 94121; or email rondall.lane@ucsf.edu
99Hi, all! Summer is in full swing here as I write. It is wonderful to have our boys—now 15, 14, and 12—out of school and enjoying the summer.
I recently caught up with Liz Perry, which was wonderful. Even though 23 years had passed, it felt like yesterday that we were studying together for weekly quizzes and SBM tests.
Liz lives in Madison, Wis., with her wife Rita and daughters Charlotte (15 years old) and Maxine (12 years old). I am learning that they are creative, smart, and adventurous, just like their moms. Liz has been a family physician in the Family and Community Medicine
Department at UW Health in Madison since 2009. She works in the clinic most of the time and also teaches medical students. Liz also works with the Wisconsin Literacy Group to help improve health literacy for their patients, and she recently was named medical director of patient and family experience. I hope to see her in person this year and cannot wait to hear more about these endeavors.
Please send along any updates for me to share. I look forward to hearing from you.
—Danielle Albushies4 McNichol Lane Bow, NH 03304-5409 dalbushies@gmail.com
00Hi, all! I hope 2022 has been good for you all so far. I’ve received a few updates.
After 20 years of diverse experi ences following the Air Force path, Hilary Murnane Stamp is circling back to New England and taking a pediat ric position in Amherst, Mass. After all those years on the move, they’re excited to plant roots.
And speaking of circling back, I got this from Mike Betsy: “Michael Jr. is now officially part of the Dartmouth Class of 2026. Cheryl and I have been enjoying our return trips to the area and reliving lots of fond memories. Michael was recruited to play football, so we’ll be up there at least four or five times this fall for games. Looking forward to the next four years. The whole experience was so wild. On his recruiting trip, the parents were taken to dinner by the coaches at Jesse’s Steakhouse. I related stories about when we were back in med school—and broke—and Jesse’s was like the Taj Mahal. If someone’s parents were in town and took you to dinner there, it was like the greatest thing ever!”
As for me (Maya Mitchell Land ), my news is that I hopefully will have
completed a 10-day trek on the John Muir Trail with my almost-15-year-old son by the time you read this (we are starting two weeks from when I’m writing this). He wanted to do the whole thing, but that was more than I could fathom (or get off work for). He also has his sights set on doing the whole AT. I hope to see everyone before too long. Take care!
01If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Jill Marple at 102 Somers Place North, Moorestown, NJ 08057; call 856495-8613; or email jill.a.marple.97@ dartmouth.edu
02If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Jennifer Vines at 2940 North East Cesar Chavez Blvd, Portland, OR 97212; call 503-453-5879; or email vines. jennifer@gmail.com
03Hi, DMS Class of 2003!
We are so sorry to have been off the radar for a bit,
but we all have had a lot to deal with these past few years. It was so lovely to get news from so many of you—thank you! We are amazed and proud to hear about everything that everyone has been doing: so many inspiring things, both professionally and personally all over the country.
Jen Levy Perkins made a major cross-country move to the West Coast. She writes: “In August of 2020, I decided to pick up and move 3,000 miles across the country, leaving Duke with two kids, two dogs, a husband, and a cat. I am now at UCSF. I am a professor of medicine and surgery, the associate chair of medicine for ambulatory and population health, the ambulatory executive medical direc tor for medicine specialties, and the co-director of the endocrine neoplasia destination program. I got my MBA in 2014 from Fuqua, with a certificate in health sector management, and I love working on care redesign and patient access. At UCSF, we are in the process of an enterprise-wide access central ization transformation. Basically, I am really loving my job. I particularly love the weather here, but I sure do miss Enfield, N.H., housing costs. My 14-year-old daughter is an amazing artist and baker. My 12-year-old son, Miles, is apparently a master strategist and can get us out of any escape room. They grow up so fast.”
Another West Coaster, Lisa Chong , writes, “My updates are mostly centered around my rescue dog that I found in Thailand. She is paralyzed, and I was able to get her to walk again with the use of prosthetics. She is featured on a TV show called Wizard of Paws, which airs on Disney+. She is also in a Subaru car commercial and this past week was on Access Hollywood. My little star! I’m still at Kaiser Permanente in Orange County. I live in Huntington Beach and roller-skate regularly and was featured in a commercial for one of the local restaurants, Sahara Sandbar,
Mike Betsy Jr, son of Mike Betsy ’00, in his Dartmouth College football uniform.as a roller-skater—so proof that life exists beyond medicine. Feel free to check out frida_strong on Facebook or Instagram. We are hoping to get into schools and educate/inspire people, using my dog’s story, to believe in their dreams, overcome challenges, and accept each other for our differences.” What an amazing dog, Lisa, and we definitely could use all of those inspir ing messages!
From a little farther down the coast, in San Diego, Youssef Tanagho MED’05, an assistant clinical professor of surgery/urology at UCSD School of Medicine, writes: “I am adjunct faculty at UCSD and practice urology in San Diego with the Sharp Health System. I do a lot of endourology and specialize in BPH and stones. I am part of a large private practice group called Genesis Healthcare Partners. We are the largest urology group on the West Coast— about 40 urologists!”
Heidi Becker, another resident of the western half of the U.S., writes: “Aaron (Kirkpatrick) MED’02 and I are celebrating 20 years of wedded bliss this summer! Along the way, we’ve navigated two medical careers (Aaron as a breast imager and me as an ophthalmologist); parenting two spirited kiddos (Abe, 16, and Aliza, 14); one cancer diagnosis (my now 12 years clear of lymphoma); multiple moves, including Aaron’s transition from Army medicine in San Antonio to private practice in Denver; and myriad other challenges and rewards. Look us up if you’re coming through Denver—we love having visitors!”
Moving onward to the Southwest, Angi Sanchez MED’04 and Paul Sanchez write: “Greetings from New Mexico! We are enjoying our 15th year back at home in the Land of Enchantment. We tell everyone we will be ‘ashes in Albuquerque!’ Paul is a thriving ophthalmologist in private practice. He owns Southwest Eyecare, as well as a surgery center and an
optical shop. I (Angi) am biased, but his patients agree that he is a fantastic surgeon and a compassionate doctor. After many years dividing time between clinical medicine and administration, I have returned to full-time family practice. The pandemic reminded me of where my passion is. Our state is in great need of primary care providers, and I am proud to serve. Our oldest child (born at DHMC when we were in school) is graduating from college and will start grad school in sustainabil ity in August. A true hippie following their passion! We have two more at home (Lilia and Isabella, in 10th and 11th grade). They are fantastic kids and keep us busy! Life is great, and we would love to hang out with anyone who is buzzing through Albuquerque!”
East Coaster Yongping Wang , direc tor of the Cell and Gene Therapy Lab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an associate professor in the Department of Clinical Pathology and Lab Medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, writes: “I am still here in Philly, at CHOP. We have quite a few projects with CHLA colleagues related to transplant and cellular therapy. Time flies. I have two kids just a few years behind yours—11 and 9. I’m as busy as always, as the field of cell and gene therapy is exploding, and I feel lucky to be right in the middle of it. As you are probably aware, Penn/CHOP are one of the epicenters of CAR T-cell therapy.” Such incredible advances these past few years, and unbelievable that Yongping is in the center of it all!
Ben Lannon, in New England, writes: “I am doing well. I am practicing as a reproductive endocrinologist in Portland, Maine. My group is Boston IVF out of Massachusetts, and I run a satellite. It has been very fulfilling work, even amidst the turmoil of abortion politics. Jane and I live in New Castle, N.H. We just celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary. Our daughter, Gigi, is 16 and just finished her sopho
more year at Phillips Exeter, my alma mater. Our son, Oliver, is 13 and going into 8th grade. In my free time, I have taken up road biking. I have also been involved in advocacy work, and we just passed legislation mandating insur ance coverage for fertility treatment in Maine. I hear from a few DMS class mates from time to time.”
Jason McBean gave us a few updates from Connecticut. He writes: “Professionally, I am enjoying running a private dermatology practice in Fairfield, Conn. It is busy, rewarding, and fun caring for patients in the community in which I live. My wife, Michelle Conroy-McBean (DartmouthBrown MED’03), is the geriatric psychi atry fellowship director at Yale and is busy launching another academic year as I write this. Our son, Jackson (16), and daughter, Hayden (14), are keeping us entertained with driving lessons and sports. Socially, Terry Healey, Matt Plante, and I are struggling to continue our summer tradition of family gath erings. Throughout the years, we have enjoyed reconnecting each summer and basking in the mayhem that involves our collective nine kids, with semi-attentive parents at the helm. Between the teenage schedules of the four Healey kids, the three Plante kids, and the two McBean kids, the 2022 get-together is looking a bit shaky. Hopefully, we can make something happen soon, if only with the parents. Recently, friend, classmate, and ortho paedic surgeon extraordinaire Katie Bardzik Vadasdi, down the road in Old Greenwich, Conn., provided royal treat ment in repairing my torn meniscus after years of running. It has been great reconnecting with her, even though it took a torn meniscus to do so.”
Sara Pietras Alexanian, a clinical associate professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, writes: “I’m doing well. I work at Boston Medical Center in the endocrine section. I’m director of the inpatient
diabetes program here and active in teaching, research, and quality improvement. We live outside of Boston and have two girls, ages 5 and 11. It is amazing how time quickly passes!”
Also from Boston, Katie O’Donnell writes: “No big news from me. It has definitely been a crazy few years—I run all of the medical student programs at Boston Children’s now and am the associate HMS dean for UME at BCH, so we had to flex a lot and learn how to teach virtually and so on. I think I prob ably learned more than the students! In my hospitalist and toxicologist world, the pediatric mental health crisis during the pandemic has been stag gering. In good news, we are celebrat ing my dad’s 75th birthday on Friday, and the whole family will be together (including my brother and family who live in Chile). As you know, we are his favorite DMS class ;-).”
And lastly, our international class mate Sharon Johnston from Canada writes: “I am very happy to take a break from writing grant applications and join you in providing a DMS 2003 update. I don’t know where the update needs to start from, but Roger and I have two teenagers who just kicked my butt hiking up very tall and steep mountains in the Rockies for a week. We thought about moving out west, because the mountains are beautiful, but I don’t think the four of us and our dog could afford a doghouse to share there. We are still in Ottawa, and I am now the scientific director for the Montfort Hospital Research Institute, doing my clinical work mostly in concussion care at the clinic we founded, as my husband’s research area is concus sion. Somehow, it seems like we’re still always in the middle of applying for research grants.”
It’s pretty awesome how our class is making such a positive impact all over the country (and Canada!) in these challenging times, and how we are all united by the practice of medicine and
the foundational years that we spent at DMS. We were newly inspired by reading all the amazing and diverse updates from the DMS Class of 2003 and continue to wish you all the best!
—Junko Ozao-Choy Division of Surgical Oncology Harbor-UCLA Medical Center Assistant Professor of Surgery David Geffen SOM at UCLA 1000 W. Carson St., Box 25 Torrance, CA 90509 Work: 310-222-3033 jozao-choy@dhs.lacounty.gov —Blair Hammond 48 Monroe Avenue Larchmont, NY 10538 Home: 212-744-3944 blair.hammond@mssm.edu
04Hello, all! It was great to get messages from some of you. It has been 18 years since we graduated from medical school!
I (Ndidi Onwubalili) know you are all out there doing wonderful things and look forward to hearing back from even more of you before the deadline for the next column. I am also very excited to hopefully see some of you in 2024. Private practice is busy (busier than I would like sometimes), and I feel the need to pull back somewhat. My son starts middle school this fall, and I have been warned that this will be an interesting time. At least he is excited. My daughter will be entering third grade. They keep us busy, and we are crazy about them. I have also decided to be intentional about taking time out for myself—to read, see family and friends, work out, and just be bored. The pandemic has shown us all that we need this more than ever. I also plan to finally learn how to swim. It’s about time. Looking cute by the water won’t cut it anymore. I tried skiing more this year (I know—I had ample unused opportunities in New Hampshire), and I have to say that this African is starting
to finally like it. I am not sure if I will ever love it, but this is a big step for me.
I was glad to hear from Fremonta “Monty” Meyer : “Since residency, I have been working at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, doing mainly outpatient psychiatry, with liaisons to oncology (at Dana-Farber) and lung transplantation. One of my favorite activities has been starting and co-leading several stage 4 breast cancer therapy groups. I previously had several leadership roles (interim resi dency program director and medical student clerkship director) but decided that clinical work/teaching was more meaningful, and I also wanted more time to play the violin—two orchestras and chamber music. I even started singing in a chorus, though it is not as fun with KN95 masks! I’ve been lucky to spend time with several DMS friends who live in Greater Boston— Lien Le and Mike Leslie —and while I was traveling west to Utah and Nevada— Danielle Adams and Amanjit Dhatt .”
Ram Mani has also been in touch: “I’m staying busy at Rutgers University and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (in New Brunswick, N.J.) as a neurologist, clerkship director, clinical researcher, and director of neurology quality improvement projects. I was promoted to associate professor in the past couple of years, our Epilepsy Center has been productive in the care of patients with seizures/epilepsy (my subspecialty), our neurology department continues to have clinical/ research/educational growth, and I’ve been leading some exciting epilepsy trials that offer those with uncontrolled seizures novel medications and effec tive surgical options. I’ve taken some of the excellent educational experiences that DMS provided us as triggers for some curriculum updates at RWJ, to make sure our medical students and other trainees receive an outstanding medical education. We’ve implemented more effective interactive virtual
learning; moved up the start date of MS3 by a few months; and used more simulation and case-based learning in the clinical years, while having direct patient care continue for the students. Look for some publications on those efforts this year. My wife, Shital Mani, works at an ophthalmology practice in Tinton Falls, N.J., with DMS alumnus Donald MacDonald MED’80; they’re
looking for another ophthalmologist to join the busy practice—anyone inter ested? I’m looking forward to summer vacation with my wife and two girls. I loved seeing our classmates at the 2019 reunion, and I’m looking forward to seeing more classmates this summer at some New Jersey gatherings. I periodically see Tom Kirn (an MD-PhD in our class) at RWJ; he’s doing well
and staying busy amidst the national pathologist shortage. Neurosurgeon Hai Sun MED’07, also an MD-PhD, and I collaborate on epilepsy patient care and research at RWJ. It’s so great to see our graduates firsthand doing excellent work at our medical center. I’ve attached another pic from the 2019 reunion. Who remembers the name of the auditorium shown in that picture?”
Clockwise starting at the top left: Members of Class of 2004 at previous reunion: (front to back) Ram, Ndidi, Kirsten Redborg, Bryan Coffing and Laura Wolfe. Danica Liberman ’04 with husband Brad and sons Leif, Axel, and Beck. Ndidi Onwubalili ’04 with her children Max and Maya at the 2019 Reunion. Fremonta Meyer ’04 and Amanjit Dhatt ’04 together while Monty traveled west. While vacationing in Italy with his family, Eric Quinoñes ’04 went for a long ride in Sorrento and along the Amalfi coast. He commented, “In my 35 years of cycling it was the most memorable ride I have been on. La corsa più bella. Grazie Italia!”
Paul DeKoning reminded me that we last saw each other in Durham, N.C., at a Kroger grocery store, when we were in residency circa 200506. He says: “We still live in New Hampshire, and I’m still the PD for emergency medicine at Dartmouth. There are a few of us DMSers still around. The kids are growing, and there is never a dull moment!”
Danica Liberman wrote in from the other side of the country: “I’m still in Los Angeles and working in the pediatric emergency department at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and am on the faculty at USC. Recently, I’ve been adding more teaching into my academic responsibilities, both at the med school and on the undergraduate campus at USC, to create more predict ability in my work schedule and longev ity in my career. Overnight shifts in the ED don’t get easier with age, and the clinical work is certainly more emotion ally draining than med school prepared any of us for. And life at home is often more chaotic than the craziness of the emergency department. With three boys (Axel, 8; Leif, 6; and Beck, 3) there’s rarely any peace and quiet, but they’re happy and healthy and defi nitely keep things exciting. I unfortu nately missed our last reunion in 2019, but I am already excited about our 20th in a couple of years and am planning to make the trip to see everyone!”
Another update from the West is from Kirsten Redborg : “I have been living and working in beautiful Washington State for the last 10 years. I am currently keeping busy raising two little girls, ages 1 and 5. I work as an anesthesiologist at St. John’s Medical Center in Longview, Wash., where I occasionally bump into Shannon Lucas in the ED! Would love to hear from others who want to reach out. My email is kredborg@gmail.com.”
Linda Lee is right here in New Jersey, and one of these days our DMS Jersey reunion with Ram Mani will
happen. She is doing well and writes: “Asef Khwaja and I took a family trip to Maui to visit my sister and her family! It’s been four years since we last saw them! We have three kids—Kiran (11), Remy (9), and Rohan (8). We are both still at CHOP (in the ED and radiology) but spend most of our time chauffeur ing our kids to various activities. We live in Haddonfield, N.J., and would love to meet up if anyone finds themselves in our neck of the woods!”
Bryan Coffing MED’05 caught up as well: “The Coffings are enjoying life in Colorado. Caleb (13) and Lucas (10) are already better skiers than Bryan (35ish), and Eli (41/2) is quickly catch ing up. Mia (ageless) suffers constant pranks from her four boys and will be canonized later in the year. We miss our DMS friends and encourage visitors!” 35? Stop it, Bryan! I hope your boys can get me up to speed when I visit you. I was happy to hear from you all. If anyone needs their email address updated, please reach out to me at ndidi5@hotmail.com. Till next time!
—Ndidiamaka Onwubalili ndidi5@hotmail.com
05We are currently seeking a secretary for the class 1986. To learn more or if you have news you would like to share, please contact the Office of Alumni Engagement at 603-646-5297 or email Geisel.Alumni.Relations@dartmouth.edu
06If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Katrina Mitchell at 4087B Foothill Rd, Santa Barbara, CA 93110; or email kbm9002@me.com
07We are currently seeking a secretary for the class 1986. To learn more or if you have news you would like to share, please contact the Office of Alumni Engagement at 603-646-5297 or email Geisel.Alumni. Relations@dartmouth.edu
08If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Rebecca (Rotello) Craig at 3137 Casa Bonita Dr. NE, Albuquerque, NM 87111; or email rebecca.rotello@gmail.com
09If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Kristen Telischak at 725 Hobart Street, Menlo Park, CA 94025; or email kristentelischak@gmail.com
10If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Sarah Dotters-Kat z at 1908 N Hawick Court, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-7738; call 541554-1817; or email sarahkd@gmail.com.
11If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretaries Jill Rosno Huded at 8009 Cherokee Lane, Leawood, KS 66206-1131; or email Jill.huded@gmail. com or to Abiodun T. Kukoyi via email at abbeykay@gmail.com
Linda Lee ’04 sent in a photo of her children with her update, Kiran, Remy, and Rohan.12Hello, classmates! While this is a reunion year for us, it seems not many of us are able to return to Hanover in September. But I have an excellent alternative! The weekend of October 8, we’ll be doing a virtual gathering— and Will Flanary MED’13, aka TikTok’s @ drglaucomflecken, will be participating in a comedy night with his wife and other Geisel students. You can tune in on October 8 for that at dartgo.org/ comedy.night
You should have already received and hopefully registered for our virtual reunion gathering that same weekend! I look forward to connecting with all of you on-screen!
—Kolene Bailey
6191 Massive Peak Circle Castle Rock, CO 80108 Cell: 603-209-1439 kolene.bailey@gmail.com
13Sam Bakhoum received the Geisel Young Alumni Achievement Award in May. You can read more about it on pages 8–9.
Will Flanary, aka TikTok’s @ drglaucomflecken, will be participating in a comedy night this fall with his wife and other Geisel students. Will has more than 1.6 million followers for his parodies of medical personalities and send-ups on a wide range of similar topics. He was also this year’s Yale School of Medicine commencement speaker and the subject of a Q&A in the Washington Post titled “TikTok doc makes physicians laugh at themselves.” Be sure to tune in for the fun on October 8 at dartgo.org/comedy.night!
If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretaries Jill Kaspar Baird at 2434 NE 58th Ave., Portland, OR 97213; call 515-520-9899; or email jill.kaspar. baird@gmail.com
—Editor
14If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Justin K. Kim at PO Box 724, Mercer Island, WA 98040; call 206-512-6261; or email justinkim.dart@gmail.com
15If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Emma Tang at 1405 Crossfield Ave, Kingston, ON K7P 0E7 Canada; call 603-359-2860; or email Chentang00@gmail.com
16If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretaries Wenlu Gu by calling 262-498-4995 or email Wenlu.gu@gmail.com or Lynn K. Symonds at Lynn.k.symonds@ gmail.com
17If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Lovelee Brown at loveleebrown@gmail.com
If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretary Alex Orfanos at Alexander_ Orfanos@brown.edu
Sam Bakhoum, PhD’09, MED’13, was presented with a thank you gift from Charles R. Thomas, Jr., MD, D’79, for presenting Grand Rounds at Dartmouth Health while he was in Hanover receiving the Young Alumni Award.
19 Congratulations to the classmates who completed their residency this year!
Annie Cravero is holding down the fort in Seattle, Wash., and starting her job as an attending hospi talist at the University of Washington Medical Center.
Elizabeth Hoffman is enjoying her ob-gyn residency at Pennsylvania Hospital and frequently sees Karissa Tauber, which brings her profound joy. She is looking for jobs in Denver so she can be closer to family and her new niece!
Hannah Systrom is heading back to the Upper Valley to start a gastroenterology fellowship at Dartmouth Hitchcock.
Andrew Cox graduated from his Yale internal medicine residency and is looking forward to practicing as an attending hospitalist at the VA, prior to doing a sports medicine fellowship.
Trevor Barlowe is heading to the University of North Carolina for a gastroenterology fellowship.
Good luck to those who have graduated and to those continuing in residency!
—Kathleen Leinweber Kathleen.A.Leinweber@hitchcock.org
20If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretaries John Damianos at John. damianos94@gmail.com or W. John Porter at Wjohnporter4@gmail.com
21If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretaries Chad Lewis at chad.y.lewis@gmail.com or Gayathri Tummala at gtummala46@gmail.com
22If you have news you would like to share, please send it to Class Secretaries Joseph Minichiello at jminichiello13@ gmail.com or Isabelle Yang at yangisabelle1@gmail.com
Hello, everyone. As I write this, we are at the halfway point through 2022. COVID is still with us, but I’m thankful that we now know much more about its treatment and the risk of severe disease. There was no news from any fellow biomedical science graduates for this issue, so this will be a shorter column than usual. Send me a note when you can, anytime. No need to wait for me to send out a request. I will incorporate all correspondence I receive into this column. You are welcome to email me at any time of the year at robert.joyner@tidalhealth.org
But I can share a brief update from me, Bob Joyner (Physiology PhD’98— Leiter Lab). I am still developing the research institute that I direct. It’s certainly an adventure, given the distrust of science that seems to exist everywhere, at all levels. I try to take everything as an opportunity, and right now the opportunity exists in science and health literacy. So I have been accepting any chance I get to speak in public venues about clinical research and science generally. It has been fun
and also
enlightening. Moral of the story: Don’t watch the news. :-)
Some of you are aware that my first grandson, James, passed away a few years ago as a result of meningitis. We live with his memory and talk about him every day. It is a pleasure for me to share the word that my second grandson, Leland Dekker Joyner, is now 8 months old. In the adjacent photo, Leland and his proud daddy, Joshua Joyner, are enjoying time at a local park. I don’t know how to reconcile the heartache with the joy, but my wife tells me everything has a purpose, so I will go with that.
And now I will leave you, as I usually do, with a quote—this time about perseverance, something that, at 54 years of age, I am still learning:
“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perse verance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.” Those are the words of Marie Curie, as quoted in the 1937 biography Madame Curie, written by her daughter, Eve Curie.
Until next time! I hope you enjoyed this update, and I look forward to hearing from some of you soon.
Adam Schwartz (MPH/MS’02) is opening a third hospital in San Diego with Kaiser Permanente and uses tools from TDI (actually CECS, back when he was at Dartmouth) every day!
— Bob Joyner
TidalHealth Peninsula Regional Richard A. Henson Research Institute 100 East Carroll Street Salisbury, MD 21801 Work: 410-543-7017 Robert.Joyner@peninsula.org
Jeremiah Brown (MS’03, PhD’06) has been appointed to a two-year term as chair of the Science of Implementation in Health and Healthcare Standing Study Section at the NIH. He is a professor of epidemiol ogy and of biomedical data science at Dartmouth and also holds an appoint ment as a professor at TDI. OUT
Congratulations to Trenika Williams who was one of two alumni inducted into the AOA at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in spring 2022.
Joshua and Leland, son and grandson, respectively, of Bob Joyner PhD’98.Tracy Geoffrion (MPH/MS’08) recently completed her 10th and final year of clinical training. Her Dartmouth education often comes in handy as she is active in clinical research. She will be spending time at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, learning about Adult Congenital Heart Disease from the leader in the field. She looks forward to starting her Congenital cardiac surgery practice this fall and is in the process of selecting her first faculty position.
Michelle (Conway) Wozniak (MPH/ MS’10) is now the Prevention Director for III Marine Expeditionary Force in Okinawa, Japan. She oversees a capability of prevention specialist and analyst embedded within Marine Corps commands across the Pacific Region. This capability focuses on reducing behavioral health risk and promoting behavioral health protective factors that service members and their families experience. Also a plug! If anyone is interested in military public health work overseas get in touch because Michelle knows of a few billets open!
Lisa (Jackson) Lucas (MPH’14) and her husband, Rob, welcomed their third (and final!) baby in late May. Pepper Denise Lucas is getting lots of hugs
and attention from big sister Lucy, age l1/2, and big brother Rory, age 21/2. The Lucas family enjoys peaceful nights around the fire on their back patio in rural Wisconsin and looks forward to visits sprinkled throughout the year from Tina Jackson (MPH’10), aka “Aunty Tee Tee,” and Lisa and Tina’s mother, Diane.
Joseph Bond (MPH’20, HS’20) completed his MPH and the Leadership Preventive Medicine Residency at Dartmouth in 2020, then entered a two-year clinical fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at MGH and Harvard Medical School. He has accepted an offer to remain on the faculty.
Edward Rego (MPH’21) will soon be heading to medical school at Duke, after working for a public health organization in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., that involves utilizing community health assessments (CHAs) and community health improvement plans (CHIPs). He writes that he first learned about CHAs and CHIPs during his MPH studies at TDI.
Ovya Ganesan (MPH/MS’21) is currently a medical student at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.
Jason Brodeur (MPH’22), a state senator from Florida’s District 9, received the Legislator of the Year Award from the Florida Mental Health Advocacy Coalition for his work on suicide prevention, accessing behavioral services, and addressing the opioid crisis.
—Tina Jackson 939 South Serrano Ave., Apt 403 Los Angeles, CA 90006 tina.e.jackson@gmail.com
Congratulations to John A. Fromson (Psychiatry ‘79-80) Vice Chair for Community Psychiatry, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. He has been elected the 58th President-Elect of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society (MPS). MPS represents the majority of psychiatrists in Massachusetts and is a District Branch of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Its
Left to right: Lisa (Jackson) Lucas MPH’14 brought home baby Pepper to brother Rory and sister Lucy in late May. Jason Brodeur MPH’22, center, received the Florida Legislator of the Year Award.physician members are committed to providing outstanding medical/ psychiatric care through accurate diagnosis and comprehensive treatment of mental health and emotional illnesses. Dr. Fromson is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the APA and says, “It is indeed an honor to represent my psychiatric colleagues and the needs of their patients at this level of MPS leadership. Working closely with MPS members, staff, patient groups, clinical sites, academic centers, as well as insurance and regulatory agencies, there is much we must do to enhance the care of patients and the well-being of our members.”
I heard from Avie Rainwater (Psychology ’88-89), who recently attained emeritus status on the medical staff of McLeod Regional Medical Center, following 30-plus years on the consulting service at the hospital.
And news also came in on three recent residency alumni, as follows:
Sarah Bingham (Pediatrics ’18): “I graduated from pediatric emergency medicine fellowship at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in June 2021. I transitioned to the University of Alabama, where I work in the Children’s Emergency Department as an assistant professor of pediatric emergency medicine.”
Charles Cappetta (Pediatrics ’90-93), Dartmouth Health Children’s pediatrician and children’s health advocate, has been selected as the recipient of the 2022 Sandi Van Scoyoc Legacy Award by the New Hampshire Children’s Health Foundation. The foundation is a leading funder to improve the health and wellness of children in the State of New Hampshire.
The program leaders of DHMC’s hospice and palliative medicine fellowship gathered for a group photo with this year’s graduates and several alumni.
Hillary Spencer (Pediatrics and Preventive Medicine ’12-18, MPH’18): “I’m currently living my dream as a ‘disease detective’ with the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, assigned to the Chicago Department of Public Health!”
Justin Zelones (Plastic Surgery ’15-18): “I completed a microsurgery fellowship at Stanford after my plastic surgery training at Dartmouth. Currently, I am working for Plastic and Hand Surgical Associates in Maine.”
The program leaders of DHMC’s hospice and palliative medicine fellowship gathered June 18, 2022, for
a group photo with this year’s gradu ates and several alumni. Pictured are Amber Barnato, MD, MPH, MS (Hospice and Palliative Medicine HS’18), the director of TDI; Meredith MacMartin, MD (HS’11, Internal Medicine; Hospice and Palliative Medicine HS’12; Guarini’19); Laura Ostapenko MED’13 (Palliative Medicine Fellowship ’22); Hannah Ruede (Palliative Medicine Fellowship ’22); Charles Whang (Palliative Medicine Fellowship ’17); Michael Barkowski (Palliative Medicine Fellowship ’22); Emily Kobin (Palliative Medicine Fellowship ’20); Jonathan
Avie Rainwater HS’89 earned emeritus status at McLeod Regional Medical Center.
Dartmouth Hitchcock dermatology residency alumni returned to the Upper Valley in July for the program’s first reunion—and celebration of the second anniversary of dermatology becoming a stand-alone department. They joined current and former faculty, nurses and staff for a weekend of reconnecting, reminiscing and fun.
Pictured are those who hiked Mount Cardigan during reunion weekend. Photo taken by Brian Simmons, MD, HS’20.
Jolin (Palliative Medicine Fellowship ’18), Kathryn Kirkland MED’86; Emily Tsanotelis (Palliative Medicine Fellowship ’22); and Sylvia Christie (Palliative Medicine Fellowship ’22).
An oar symbolizes the beginning of a professional journey that starts with fellowship and continues post-train ing. Using an oar is a skill that needs practice and honing over time, regard less of whether someone is just starting their fellowship or is the director of TDI. Paddling is also a team sport, which is true of this field and medicine in general. Lastly, the oar is a symbol of creating a community of support.
—Bob Lewy, MD, HS’72, Internal Medicine 176 Upper Turnpike Road Norwich, VT 05055-9557 Home: 802-649-2194 lewyrob@hotmail.com
The Dartmouth Hitchcock neurosurgery residency program recently hosted a 75th anniversary celebration. Current and former residents, faculty, and program leaders gathered to celebrate this milestone and reflect on the tremendous impact alumni and faculty leaders, and their work, have made over the years through groundbreaking research and clinical care.
The following deaths have been reported to us as of July 31, 2022. To report the death of an alumnus/a, please contact Annette Achilles at 603-646-5297 or Geisel.Alumni.Relations@Dartmouth.edu.
Richard A. Mayo MED’49
W. Hardy Hendren III MED’50
Gilbert F. Mueller, Jr. MED’52
James E. Cavanagh, Jr. MED’52
Francis A. L’Esperance, Jr. MED’54
Philip F. Parshley, Jr. MED’54
Alan Gazzaniga MED’59
William M. Colaiace MED’60
Bruce A. Feldman MED’63
Douglas A. Canning MED’82
Megan W. Evans MED’86
Neil B. Minkoff MED’94
Robert W. Christie, HS’52, ’56
Edward B. Clark, HS’71
Over the last few years, we’ve learned to expect the unexpected. That’s one of the reasons the Health Leaders Circle launched in 2020. Health Leaders Circle is a committed group of donors who give $5,000 or more in a fiscal year to an unrestricted fund at Dartmouth Health and the Geisel School of Medicine, including the Fund for Geisel, Medical Student Scholarships, the Fund for Research and Discovery, and the Cancer Director’s Fund for Excellence.
Unrestricted dollars are flexible, allowing emergent and critical needs to be funded immediately — not later.
This past year, philanthropy allowed Geisel to upgrade the student gym and invest in initiatives such as Healthy Students, Healthy Physicians, which provides mental health screening, increased access to individual and group counseling, and wellness and resil iency programming.
Like staff and alumni do every day, Geisel is always looking to improve and innovate. Supporting an unrestricted fund provides the resources that make innovation possible.
More than 30 alumni stepped up last fiscal year to join Health Leaders Circle. Their support is invaluable.
I look back very fondly on my two years at Dartmouth Medical School, for the life-long friendships and for initiating my life-long involvement in the cognitive neurosciences. I had several wonderful mentors (including Alex Reeves, George Stibitz, and Wilbert Chambers and especially Miguel MarinPadilla) who encouraged me to pursue the neurosciences. I am very grateful that DMS gave me the opportunity to attend and study medicine. I am happy to give something back to enable others to experience the privilege.
David S. Knopman D’72, MED’73 Health Leaders Circle Member, 2022
Steven D. Leach, MD Director, Dartmouth Cancer Center
Preston T. and Virginia R. Kelsey Distinguished Chair in Cancer
Goal: Harness the power of integrated collaboration across all of Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Health to drive innovation and save lives.
During the last 50 years, Dartmouth Cancer Center has become a national leader in cancer research and continually recognized with a national Pinnacle of Excellence Award in Patient Experience by Press Ganey. Our Cancer Center is creating knowledge for the world, while caring for the community.
Dartmouth Cancer Center stamps another milestone in its great timeline with the dawning of the Byrne Family Cancer Research Institute at Dartmouth Cancer Center. The Byrne Institute will serve to strengthen Dartmouth Cancer Center’s tightly knit collaborative research structure, weaving together bright minds from diverse specialties across Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Health.
The result? Delivering life-saving contributions to global cancer research and improving lives right here in the Upper Valley, across the nation, and around the world.
Thank you to the philanthropic supporters, researchers, clinicians, and the community for all that you have done to make the last 50 years worth celebrating.
TO LEARN MORE, CONTACT:
Bethany Solomon Executive Director of Development Medical & Healthcare Advancement
Dartmouth Cancer Center
Dartmouth Health / Geisel School of Medicine Bethany.Solomon@Dartmouth.edu 603-646-5134 geiselcampaign.dartmouth.edu
Celebrating 50 years of bringing Dartmouth Cancer discoveries to the world and caring for our neighbors
