REVOLUTION?
At Lawrenceville, students are using artificial intelligence to assist understanding rather than as a tool to replace it.
Sabbatical Musings
At our first School Meeting of 2025, I had a chance to offer a few reflections to the community on my fall sabbatical, and how my time away had served to reinforce my enduring belief in our deep and abiding commitment to community wellbeing, and the equally important campus ethos of Harkness teaching and community discourse.
First, I conveyed how much I had missed life on campus and being a part of all the exciting events that I glimpsed from afar on social media. As hard as it was to be away, I told the students, I did make good use of my time! Sarah and I were able to be with our children and granddaughter for extended periods, and we attended a number of fall family events that otherwise would have been near impossible. I was able to do a late-summer hike up Mount Katahdin in Maine with three of my children, I was able to go fishing as temperatures cooled and the fish were returning to Rhode Island waters from up north, my vegetable garden yielded a September bumper crop, and the fall clamming was excellent.
or in some cases reconsidering, what I had previously thought to be familiar issues. I devoured Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which depicted the opioid epidemic in Appalachia and societal biases against rural folk. While traveling in Turkey, I read 1453, a history of the “fall” of Constantinople from an Ottoman point of view, “a proud date in Turkey,” a woman sitting next to me on the plane remarked.
The carefully researched novel, Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa, gave a gripping, heart-breaking, multi-generational Palestinian perspective on their experience in the Middle East since 1948. And to consider a competing perspective, I read Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Israel Alone, a French philosopher’s cri de coeur on the double standard that the international community imposes on Israel and its existential need to defend itself in the face of systemic antisemitism.
STANDING TALL
After the students departed for winter break, the bell tower of Edith Memorial Chapel stood watch over the snowscape that whitened campus on December 21.
Photo by Nathaniel Bayona
I was also able to travel, going places and experiencing things that we had long hoped and dreamed of doing. We chose destinations that offered opportunities to learn and to see the world from a rather different point of view. After ten days in Turkey, we traveled in November to Japan and spent time in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. One of the many highlights was a 5 a.m. visit to the Tokyo bluefin tuna auction, where we met and conversed with an interesting array of the professionals involved there and experienced up-close this incredible intersection of commerce and culture. These moments inspired me to think about how important it is to be fully immersed in the global community right here at Lawrenceville — not only the rich diversity of thought, culture, and beliefs, but also our responsibility to cultivate spirited inquiry and to bridge lines of difference to make us stronger communicators, leaders, and citizens.
Just as important, I had time over the past several months to read and reflect in ways that my typical professional routines simply don’t allow. My readings offered a range of lenses for viewing,
As I said to the students, my readings were aimed at tending to my intellectual wellbeing, though not necessarily my intellectual comfort, because of course, learning involves getting out of our comfort zones and challenging our assumptions. In so many ways, this time for reflection on complex issues reminded me of what we strive to do for our students in all settings on campus, but especially around the Harkness tables and in the common rooms in our Houses. The opportunity to listen to each other, to question each other, and to disagree respectfully with each other is a fundamental part of our community’s wellbeing as we work together to learn and grow. These experiences, in turn, develop critically important habits of mind that Lawrentians take with them out into the world, and it is my belief that this has never been more important or more relevant.
My time away was indeed renewing in so many ways, and I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity. And as I return to campus and re-immerse myself in the life of the School, my appreciation for this remarkable institution has never been greater.
Sincerely,
Stephen S. Murray H’54 ’55 ’63 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21
The Shelby Cullom Davis ’26 Head of School
‘It’s Kind of Freaky but It’s Cool and It’s Fun to Work With’
At Lawrenceville, students are using artificial intelligence to assist understanding rather than as a tool to replace it.
Scans vs. Scams
As the chief technology officer for America’s fourth-largest voting machine manufacturer, Chip Trowbridge ’90 knows why the notion of widespread voter fraud is so far-fetched.
❝ I realized the beauty of research is that you never know where it will take you. I embraced every rabbit hole, excited to see what I would find at the bottom of it.”
Welles Grant recipient Sathvik Samant ’26, who investigated ethics-focused ways to introduce AI concepts to younger students. (See page 14)
EDITOR
Sean Ramsden
DESIGN
Bruce Hanson / EGADS
Landesberg Design
NEWS EDITOR
Lisa M. Gillard H’17
STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Paloma Torres
CONTRIBUTORS
Andrea Fereshteh
Sophie Liu ’27
Sarah Mezzino
Nicole Stock
PHOTOGRAPHY
Kim Epstein
Philip Montgomery
Nina Pandya Photography
Danielle Rappaport
ILLUSTRATION
Joel Kimmel
Sébastien Thibault
PROOFREADER
Rob Reinalda ’76
HEAD OF SCHOOL
Stephen S. Murray
H’54 ’55 ’63 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21
CHIEF ADVANCEMENT OFFICER
Greta Morgan
DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS
Jessica Welsh
The Lawrentian (USPS #306-700) is published quarterly (winter, spring, summer, and fall) by The Lawrenceville School, P.O. Box 6008, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, for alumni, parents, grandparents, and friends.
Periodical postage paid at Trenton, NJ, and additional mailing offices.
The Lawrentian welcomes letters from readers. Please send all correspondence to sramsden@lawrenceville.org or to the above address, care of The Lawrentian Editor. Letters may be edited for publication.
POSTMASTER
Please send address corrections to:
The Lawrentian
The Lawrenceville School
P.O. Box 6008
Lawrenceville, NJ 08648
©The Lawrenceville School
Lawrenceville, New Jersey
All rights reserved.
We live in interesting times, do we not? There is so much information competing for your attention these days, but even still, I’m sure that the subject of artificial intelligence, or AI, has earned its share of it. Are you using it? Or are you just reading about it, wondering how it’s relevant to you? Or are you just sticking your fingers in your ears and singing “la la la la la!” until it stops?
All three reactions are understandable, but make no mistake: AI is here to stay. What’s good is that Lawrenceville hit the ground running and has staked a place of true leadership among independent schools. We’re going to introduce you to the ways the School — the faculty, students, and the administration — has embraced AI, using it as a way to aid and assist understanding rather than a tool to replace it. It was affirming to learn how our students have been empowered to help set the agenda around this technological revolution at Lawrenceville, and their breezy, enthusiastic, and confident way of talking about it lends assurance to the skeptics or those born before these digital natives — not that AI is the exclusive domain of the young!
Artificial intelligence is such a boundless subject, but in this issue, we present an introductory overview of how AI is being thought about and used by our students and how the world us opening up to them because of it. I’m looking forward to talking to alumni who are working in the various aspects of AI for future issues of The Lawrentian, too. Stay tuned…
I also want to say a word about the invaluable help I receive from the people in our community, the ones who drop me a line or stop by my office to share a story idea. I’m always so grateful to them. Over the years, we’ve devoted many pages to the accounts that came to my attention this way, and there is another one in this issue. On Halloween, Karen Weber ’92 emailed to let me know her childhood friend, Chip Trowbridge ’90, was working as the chief technology officer for Clear Ballot Group, one of the nation’s leading producers of voting machines – an industry that has been much maligned over the past few years. Karen and I chatted a bit before she connected me with Chip and bowed out of the conversation.
I spoke to him just a couple days after the election, and it was most illuminating. Once the feature was written, I planned to follow up again with Karen to let her know, again, just how much I appreciated her thinking about us.
I never got the chance. The next time Karen’s name crossed my desk, it was the most unwelcome news of her passing, just a month after she had reached out to me. I would’ve enjoyed having her read the result of her thoughtfulness, but it’s no less meaningful to me now.
All the best,
Sean Ramsden Editor sramsden@lawrenceville.org
Inside the Gates
What is the best tradition in your House? Why? questions for Colette Burns, administrative assistant and private lesson coordinator now in her 37th year in the Performing Arts Department, who didn’t just leave her wedding dress in a box in the attic. 5
House Call
Joel Kimmel
5Q4
You’ve seen so many stage productions at KAC. Do you have a favorite?
I think they are all great, but one of my favorites, which was performed here twice, is Lucky Stiff — so funny!
Has anything you wore ever become part of the Performing Arts wardrobe?
There were a few pieces here and there, but the most loved possession I donated was my wedding gown. It was worn by Emily Li ’18 in The Mystery of Edwin Drood I told the costume department to alter it in any way needed, but when she tried it on, it fit her like a glove. Ah, remembering my youth!
If you could be part of a Harkness discussion with any three figures from history, who would you choose?
Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, and Mahatma Gandhi.
What is your favorite book or movie?
Hard to narrow it down, but I’d say The Shawshank Redemption — great on several different levels. What never fails to make you laugh?
Oh, that’s an easy one — my grandchildren. I became a “mom-mom” four times in five years! I have such a blast when we are all together. They bring me such joy and always make me laugh.
We have an ‘inspiration jar,’ filled with candy and small toys, that we pass around to members of the House who are especially kind or considerate. In sharing, we can appreciate those who bring bits of joy to the others in the House.
Riley McKibben ’25 MCPHERSON HOUSE
The best Raymond House tradition is the nightly Second Former study hall because it assures that we actually do work and don’t fool around irresponsibly.
Luke Tang ’28
RAYMOND HOUSE
Lawrenceville 101
Honors
Spanish: Muralists of Mexico
LA593
Honors Spanish: Muralists of Mexico explores Latin American art, from murals to multimedia works, with a focus on Latin American identity as reflected in art. Students concluded the fall term with presentations — en español, por supuesto — of an issues-based artwork they created, done in the spirit of one of the artists they studied during the term.
“Learning about the style and messages of Latin American artists made me think about who I am with more complexity,” Stephanie Schloss ’26 said.
Students study a range of artists, tracing the influence and legacy of muralism in today’s more contemporary art world, all informing their final projects.
“I hope that the students felt empowered by the art pieces they were able to produce,” language teacher Josefina Ayllón-Ayllón said. “The students took everything they had learned about identity and what defines a nation and concentrated on a specific social issue of particular importance for them and how it affected a specific community or the world.”
Old School
Essential Reading?
“What should librarians in secondary schools do to make readers of boys and girls, offer them what they want, or what their teachers and parents think they should want? In this library we have long insisted that attempting to force the young to read the classics will never make readers of them, will, in fact, tend to make them avoid reading for the rest of their lives. If you disagree, do a little checking up on the real readers you know and learn how each of them got that way.”
From “Volumes which no ‘Gentlemen’s Library’ Should be Without,” by librarian Oscar H. McPherson, Class of 1901, in the winter 1945 Lawrentian.
They Said It
❝We sit in common rooms and walk to Starbucks with people diametrically opposed to our views on the internet, and yet we refuse to acknowledge this discrepancy in person. … [S]ustaining relationships with people who disagree with you without any intention of addressing those differences is immature. How close is a friendship if neither
party is willing to examine their values in the other’s presence?❞
From “How to ‘Still Be Friends,’” which appeared in the November 15, 2024, issue of The Lawrence
The best tradition in Kennedy is Day Student Donuts because every week on Friday, I can wake up and consume mass amounts of sugar before going to the final day of classes for the week.
Marcus Tsai ’27
KENNEDY HOUSE
At the beginning of every school year, Kirby goes to Scamp for a morning, always the Sunday after House Olympics, where we play orientation games as a House. It allows for us housemates to really get to know each other before getting caught up in classes.
Essie Chafin ’26
KIRBY HOUSE
I really love McC’s milkshakes. I once dunked an entire cup down my mouth without a spoon, and the messiness that follow allowed my friends and I to have a good laugh!
Irene Fu ’27
MCCLELLAN HOUSE
While not a set “tradition,” the eagerness in our House’s members to drift together in common room spaces, such as a couch or table, allows us to grow closer together. Our bonds turn any event we hold into a memorable moment!
Melina Kyriakopoulos ’27
MCCLELLAN HOUSE
Hot Karl’s. We do it once a term. But we messed up and forgot to buy propane so it was kind of not good this fall term. Either way, we have a lot of fun picking the Weenie Boy each term and grilling with the rest of the School — when we have propane.
Christian Chan ’26
WOODHULL HOUSE
One 2 Watch
Hitting the Right Notes Anna Androulakis ’26
For the second consecutive year, Anna won the prestigious Grand Prix at the Music-Fest International Rising Talent Music Festival, earning the chance to perform in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. The Rising Talents Festival is open to performers from 5 to 25 years old, who are accepted after auditioning and assigned to the Grand Prix, Grand Prize, Gold, or Silver level prize of the Winner Circle Concert Series. Musicians must play by memorization.
A pianist, Anna performed Dance of the Elves op.21, no.3 by Génari Karganov, a year after playing Prelude in D flat major op.43, no.1 by Reinhold Glière.
“Music has become an inseparable part of who I am, something that I love and plan to carry with me for the rest of my life,” says the multifaceted Anna, who is eyeing a career in medicine. “I think it would be really rewarding to bring my love for music into my future career, even if it’s not the main focus.”
Although she calls playing at Music-Fest a terrific experience — “there is beauty in that style of music that is sadly overlooked by my generation” — Anna embraces a wide range of sounds, particularly the fun and energy of pop and R&B. “I have to admit, I’m a huge fan of musical theatre,” she says. “It is also a big part of who I am.”
FAST FACT
Anna, who calls musical theatre her “guilty pleasure,” played Cinderella in Periwig’s fall
House Call continued
Our birthday song because it’s fun.
Molly Keller ’26
MCCLELLAN HOUSE
Singing [our] happy birthday chant because it’s different and makes you feel so wonderful throughout the day.
Liv Whitmore ’26
MCCLELLAN HOUSE
Not only do we do Secret Santa, have some of the best decorations up in the House, and have the best Christmas spirit, but we also have one of the best traditions on campus in sophomore skits.
Varun Venkataraman ’26 CLEVE HOUSE
It’s unofficial, but I always liked coming down from study hall and seeing everyone in the House playing cards or pool.
Ray Taft ’25 GRISWOLD HOUSE
The McClellan birthday song. It is so unique and I don’t think I can ever think of “happy birthday” the same again. Also, it is memorable, so once you are in McC and sing it once you’ll want to sing it to every McSister you have.
Jael Gaines ’26
MCCLELLAN HOUSE
musical performance of Into the Woods in October.
things we learned producing this issue of The Lawrentian:
Jared Goldenberg ’10, technical director in the Kirby Arts Center, moved into The Lodge last fall, the same House in which he lived as an infant with his mother and father, longtime athletics administrator and head trainer Mike “G” Goldenberg H’94 ’96 ’97 P’05 ’10.
Mathew Johnson ’13 is part of head coach Dan Hurley’s men’s basketball staff at the University of Connecticut. Mat’s father, Herman Johnson P’13, coached for Hurley’s father, Bob Hurley, at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, N.J.
Although they were contemporaries and two of the leading conservationists of their time, Aldo Leopold L. 1905 and Ray P. Holland L. 1904 were sometimes adversaries per their public positions on wildlife and ecological issues.
What’s Cookin’?
Hoard this Gourd Want to ward off winter’s chill? “I am thinking about how therapeutic a warm bowl of butternut squash and apple bisque can be for the soul,” says Gary Giberson H’11 ’18 P’10, the founder and president of Sustainable Fare, which makes sure Lawrenceville eats well. Giberson adds that it stores well, freezes easily, and has a big fan on campus. “It is so popular that it was served at our head of school’s daughter’s wedding,” he proclaims.
True
Crime Club founded 2022 Club Hopping
When she has free time, Joelle Vermut ’25 fills it with true crime podcasts. “There’s something so compelling about piecing together fragments of evidence as you are hearing about a case and thinking through different perspectives,” says Vermut, who founded Lawrenceville’s True Crime Club in 2022. She’s not the only one who’s been drawn in: This year, the club had over 90 sign-ups, and it draws about 15 members to each meeting. They rely on a mix of current events and classic cases that remain unresolved or controversial, such as that of the Menendez Brothers. But the True Crime Club goes deeper, too. Discussions challenge members to examine biases and inequities in the judicial system and question their own assumptions. “Understanding these complexities has taught me how narratives are often shaped by incomplete evidence or societal perceptions,” Vermut says. “It’s also reinforced the importance of critical thinking, empathy, and digging deeper into the facts.”
Signing the basement. Each year, we gather in Griswold’s eerie basement to add our names alongside those of past students. This tradition is a rite of passage, symbolizing our belonging to the House.
Anthony Woo ’26
GRISWOLD HOUSE
We all gather in the common room and set up the Christmas tree. Everyone brings back an ornament that somehow represents them and hangs it on the tree, labeling it with their name and the year. The remainder is decorated with ornaments from years past.
Sophia Earl ’25
KIRBY HOUSE
Once, our HoH warned us that if the kitchen wasn’t cleaned after classes, she’d close it. I cleaned it beforehand, just for my House, and one of my housemates gave me the Jar of Inspiration, celebrating actions that show care and responsibility.
Kainat
A. MCPHERSON HOUSE
Butternut Squash & Apple Bisque Yields eight 6 oz. portions
2 cups butternut squash, peeled, seeded, diced, 1-inch cubes
1½ cups apples, peeled, seeded, diced, 1-inch cubes
⅓ cup onion, diced large
⅓ cup carrot, peeled, diced large
2 cups vegetable stock
1 dash ground cayenne pepper
2 dashes cinnamon
1 dash ground nutmeg
⅓ cup heavy cream
8 teaspoons sour cream, for garnish
1 tablespoon sliced chives
• Combine the squash, apples, onions, carrots, and stock in a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium low to simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the squash is very tender.
• Remove the pot from the heat and let cool, then puree the mixture using a blender or blender immersion stick. (You may prepare the recipe in advance up to this point; refrigerate in a covered container up to three days.)
• Return the puree to the saucepan and turn the heat to medium-low. Stir in the heavy cream, cayenne, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Taste and adjust seasoning if needed. Heat to a simmer, do not let soup boil, keep warm until ready to serve.
• Ladle soup into warm bowls and garnish with sour cream dollop and sprinkle with chives.
Photo by Kim Epstein
The Big Picture
Mist Opportunity
Unseasonably warm temperatures in early December saw a thick fog settle on Lawrenceville’s fabled Pond, but it didn’t keep hundreds of Canada geese from finding their way to the water.
Noteworthy
Finding the Joys of Lawrenceville
Orientation Week is more than you might remember it being.
WHEN EMILIE KOSOFF H’88 ’94 ’96 ’00 ’18 ’20 S’88 P’19 added Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy to her summer reading list, the acting co-head of school and dean of faculty found inspiration in its pages – and ways to rethink Lawrenceville’s annual Orientation Week. Intrigued by the questions posed by Gay – “What incites joy?” and “What does joy incite?” – Kosoff brought those queries to a retreat for Student Council members and prefects.
“What was most striking about that weekend in June,” Kosoff recalled in her Convocation address, “was the joy that radiated from the group as they stretched themselves not only to reimagine orientation, but also the ways in which they could shape the community they want to see us as.”
Through activities led by student Ropes Course Instructors at the Joshua L. Miner Ropes Course, new students built community and collaborative skills to prepare them for the year ahead.
That emotion — joy — served as a foundation to this year’s weeklong orientation, a comprehensive introduction for new (and a reminder to returning) students to the School’s culture, community values, and the essential skills needed for a successful Lawrenceville journey. Faculty, staff, and students from around the School developed and led an innovative and fun slate of orientation activities.
The goals of Orientation Week were twofold, according to Holli Olson, assistant dean of students: to build community and to give everyone the same clear understanding of community expectations.
“We want everyone to know that this is their home, and that they are seen as individuals,” Olson said. “We recognize that those things take time, and that they come with highs and lows, but there are supports in place to help them face those ups and downs. We have a lot of great resources, and it is OK to use those.”
From the dining halls to the Houses, across practice fields, stages, and rehearsal spaces, the camaraderie was evident. At the Harkness tables, students stretched their intellects around community expectations, wellness, the ethical use of both social media and artificial intelligence, and considered ways to agree or disagree respectfully about issues large and small. The joy was palpable at the Second Form Bowl Cup, House Olympics, Ropes Course Night Climbs, Big Red Farm Dinner, and more.
The Orientation Week format gives returning students a space to reconnect with old classmates and an environment to welcome new students.
“And that is much better than having to make eye contact awkwardly around the Harkness table with a stranger,” said Najja King ’25, the Student Council wellness representative. “And trust me, Harkness conversations flow a lot better after everyone has gotten the chance to get to know one another.”
Community members have the responsibility to “ensure that we are not just reacting to change but actively shaping it, as making the future possible through our actions each day will inspire joy and a sense of home for every member of our community,” said Marquis Scott , acting co-head of school, in his Convocation address
This charge is something a student leader like King embraces on a more granular level.
“Lawrenceville isn’t just a place where we buckle down when it comes to studying for tests and completing homework,” she said. “This is a place where you can, and should, laugh with people, trip over yourself while you’re learning how to line dance, and be picked up by your Housemate’s helping hand.”
11.25.24
Lawrenceville donated $80,000 to the Lawrence Township Education Foundation, representing nearly a third of the LTEF budget. This is one of the School’s longest-standing community partnerships, with nearly $1.9 million contributed since 1996.
11.2.24
Discussions, workshops, and interactive activities constituted Civic Awareness Day, sponsored by the Hutchins Institute for Social Justice. The day’s events were designed to inspire, inform, and invite action, according to Zaheer Ali, executive director of the Hutchins Institute.
10.30.24
The Civics Club, Young Democrats, and Young Republicans hosted a guided political discussion for the wider student community, an opportunity for students to share their opinions and engage in meaningful conversation on the policies of the presidential candidates.
10.19.24
Rian Julka ’25, Alice Kizilbash ’25, Sienna Mora ’25, and Kathlynn Yao ’25 presented their research at the annual fall conference of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States at Rutgers University.
Ali Leads PBS Series Unveiling
History of Islam in America
ZAHEER ALI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of the Hutchins Institute for Social Justice, is an executive producer of American Muslims: A History Revealed, a six-part PBS documentary film series exploring the deep history of Muslims in America through the stories of six individuals: immigrants, native-born converts, and those who were brought against their will.
“You can’t tell the story of America without the story of Black people,” Ali said. “And you can’t tell the story of Muslims in America without the story of African American Muslims,” including enslaved Africans and converts to the Nation of Islam, Fard Muhammad’s Islamic and Black nationalist movement founded in Detroit in 1930. The series debuted in October on PBS Digital.
Ali is an educator and oral historian with over a decade of experience directing nationally recognized public history and cultural heritage initiatives. Previous to becoming the founding executive director of Lawrenceville’s Hutchins Institute, he was the oral historian at the Center for Brooklyn History. His work on Muslim histories in the United States has been featured in both print and broadcast media, including four documentaries seen on CNN and Netflix.
Creation Isolation
NOT EVERY LAWRENCEVILLE artifact held by the Stephan Archives in Bunn Library is suitable for display. Apart from the carefully catalogued items meticulously stored in climate-controlled cases, the three hundred or so pieces in the archives’ quarantine room — all affected by unremedied mold, pests, or rust — live a quiet life out of sight, awaiting conservation. The room is not connected to the library’s HVAC system, so as not to allow the circulating air to carry spores or other contaminants into the other sections of the archives. The contents of the quarantine room include:
n Large felt banners from the nascent days of the Circle Houses
n A set-piece sign from the 1994 feature film I.Q., identifying Pop Hall as the film’s “Princeton Hospital”
n A penny-farthing bicycle, popular in the 1880s, marked by its inordinately large front wheel; it was used by the Cycling Club at the time
n Early 19th-century vellum diplomas
n A handwritten 19th-century financial ledger
n Older books (beetles and other pests crave the keratin-based glue used in the binding)
n A cast-iron fireplate once used in Foundation House’s Alumni Study fireplace dating to the early 19th century and possibly owned by John Cleve Green; it was apparently stuffed up the fireplace’s chimney by mischievous students and went undiscovered for many years
LOST AND FOUND
On the Run
The popular Big Red Race raised $15K for HomeWorks Trenton.
FOR YEARS, THE annual Big Red Race was a fun and popular way to raise money for Lawrenceville’s School Camp, a longtime summer staple that connected students from the School with underprivileged local children in the fresh air and waters of rural Asbury, N.J. But even with the camp now shuttered, young students from Trenton are still benefiting from the efforts of the Lawrenceville community.
The School has donated $15,000 — proceeds from the 21st annual Big Red Race — to HomeWorks Trenton, a free, community-based, after-school residential program building the next generation of community leaders and embracing the goal of “changing the world, one girl at a time.” The 5K race was held last May on the Lawrenceville campus and virtually.
The funding is being used directly for the HomeWorks Trenton 2024-25 after-school residential program. HomeWorks provides approximately 180 days of dorm living,
360 transportation trips to and from school, 360 healthy meals, 240 hours of tutoring, as well as 30 hours of counseling per scholar, plus 360 hours of programming on academics, identity-driven leadership, and field trips, according to Natalie Tung ’14, the organization’s co-founder and executive director.
Holly Burks Becker H’98 P’06 ’09 ’12 and Jeff Durso-Finley P’13 ’14 ’19 ’22, co-directors of College Counseling, are the coordinators of the Big Red Race. Durso-Finley said HomeWorks Trenton was selected as the race’s beneficiary because “it perfectly fits the philosophy behind the Big Red Race — to give back to the local community, help local agencies and organizations that bolster education, and support those who work to provide opportunities for those in need of that support, all of which is at the heart and soul of HomeWorks. It’s a perfect match!”
Tung said the Big Red Race was one of her favorite School events during her days as a resident of Kirby House.
“This makes it even more special that HomeWorks is now one of the beneficiaries of the Big Red Race,” she said. “The HomeWorks team is very grateful to Jeff and Holly for choosing us, organizing this, and working so hard to continue this special legacy.”
Tung has said that the lessons about friendship, camaraderie, and support she absorbed from her housemates in Kirby was a strong motivator in establishing a residential program for the girls who attend HomeWorks.
“I am also grateful to my Lawrenceville family for doing all that they have to support us at HomeWorks since its inception,” she said. “From providing temporary housing, to giving us leadership and strategic advice, to partnering with us on programming, we could not be doing this without you.”
Natalie Tung ’14, Holly Burks Becker H’98 P’06 ’09 ’12 and Head of School
Steve Murray H’54 ’55 ’63 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21, celebrated after finishing the Big Red Race in 2024.
Turning Passion into Progress
The Welles Grant Fuels Student-Led Research FOR LAWRENCEVILLE STUDENTS with a passion for discovery, the William Bouton Welles ’71 Grants offer more than just financial support. Welles Grants provide the rare opportunity for young learners to turn their academic dreams into reality. Awarded annually, the grants enable recipients to pursue high-level research projects of their own design, spanning diverse subjects. Over the years, their work has ranged from authoring a book to a workable prosthetic hand for its inventor. All Welles Grant recipients are united by a common theme, however: turning passion into progress.
“I realized the beauty of research is that you never know where it will take you,” said Sathvik Samant ’26,
who investigated responsible, ethics-focused ways to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) concepts to younger students. “I embraced every rabbit hole, excited to see what I would find at the bottom of it. This led me to explore concepts I’d never encountered and develop my research in unexpected ways.”
A faculty committee selects the grantees, with funding amounts varying depending on the project’s needs. Grants cover a range of expenses, including materials, research costs, and travel. This year, 23 recipients explored topics around the globe, from arts to education, health to sustainability, and more. They presented their research to the School community at the end of the fall term.
Several Welles Grant recipients have already earned recognition for their work. Arisa Okamura ’25, the creator of SafeNavi, a navigation app designed to route users around unsafe areas, won the AWS Award in the 2023 Civic Tech Challenge Cup. Okamura’s app was also a finalist in Technovation Girls Japan 2024 and reached the semifinals of Technovation Girls 2024. Georges
Casassovici ’25 has filed a patent for an AI technology that enhances LiDAR capabilities, generating photorealistic 3D visualizations with new potential applications.
Okamura emphasized the importance of using the Welles Grant to make a societal impact while also enjoying the project itself. This year’s recipients demonstrated how these goals can be met in various ways. For instance, Miranda De Olden ’26 used her grant to advocate for mandatory civic education in New Jersey high schools, with a particular focus on the history and civic engagement of marginalized groups, such as Latinos.
“It was inspiring to learn how early civic education can significantly boost political involvement, including voting,” she said.
The Welles Grants program was established in 1987 by James B. and Ann Welles P’71 ’75, in honor of their son, William Bouton Welles ’71, a Harvardand Columbia Law School-educated lawyer who had died the previous year, with support from alumni, family, and friends, to commemorate his legacy and diverse interests.
Lena Haefele ’25 is working with the Bio-Inspired Engineering Research lab at the University of Virginia to create an autonomous underwater vehicle.
Michaela Chipman is the New Dean of Campus Wellbeing
MICHAELA M. CHIPMAN will join Lawrenceville as its new Meng Family Dean of Campus Wellbeing, effective July 1. She will work closely with Lawrenceville’s Wellness Team, students, residential life, faculty, and external partners to advance a holistic approach to student wellness, embedding wellbeing initiatives into various aspects of the School community.
Chipman, whose appointment was announced in January, has strong experience in meeting the unique needs of boarding school students as a wellness coordinator, school administrator, teacher, dorm head, and coach. She is committed to implementing proactive, solution-driven strategies that align with the goals outlined in Lawrenceville’s strategic plan, House, Harkness, and Heart: A New Era for Community Wellbeing
Chipman comes to Lawrenceville from The Loomis Chaffee School, where she is the interim dean of the senior class, a member of the School’s Wellness Strategic Planning Committee and Student Life Committee, and leader of the Peer Health Educator program.
“I am deeply impressed by Lawrenceville’s dedication to integrating wellness into the core of the school experience, and I am eager to build systems that empower students to act as the architects and stewards of their wellbeing,” Chipman said. “My personal mission is to ensure that every student feels dignified in their individuality, connected to their community, and equipped to craft a life that brings them enduring joy and a deep sense of purpose.”
BOOKMARKS
Paging Through New Works from Lawrentians
Literary Lawrenceville alumni share time-honored and science-based methods to unlocking better mental and physical health, as well as a journey of family discovery involving two generations of Navy men.
Nina Cheng ’04
Chinese Medicine for the Mind:
A Science-Backed Guide to Improving Mental Health with Traditional Chinese Medicine.
The modern world can be a nightmare for our mental health, and to many, modern medicine lacks the answers. Cheng and a team of renowned practitioners and scholars of Chinese medicine share practical, accessible remedies and protocols you can use to improve your mental and emotional well-being.
John J. Macionis ’66 P’10 and Myrna Garcia Haag
Why Your Diets Fail and the Science that Really Works
After losing 40 pounds, Macionis wanted to bring his nutritionist’s secrets to success to a wider audience; their joint effort is the fruit of that inspiration. In challenging conventional dieting wisdom by applying science to unlock the secrets of sustainable weight loss, the pair provide evidence-based explanations that empower readers to make informed choices about their health.
William W. Stanard ’63
Mare Incognito
Returned from the war after a covert mission, wounded former Swift Boat skipper Ned Taylor discovers he and his sister have inherited a house and boat. While trying to uncover his father’s mysterious past, played out in secrecy during Ned’s tour in Vietnam, he struggles to recall the specifics of a battle that nearly cost him his life.
Joel Kimmel
Where Mystical Meets the Real World
By Lisa M. Gillard H’17
or mathematics teacher Anton Fleissner, Introduction to Number Theory and Differential Equations is more than a typical high school math class. This college-level seminar, available to students who have completed or are enrolled in other 500-level math courses, captures both the ancient wonder of mathematics and its modern relevance, linking its lessons to practical use.
“If you are interested in why there are infinitely many Pythagorean triples or why the square root of two is irrational, those are statements in number theory known long ago,” Fleissner says. “It’s mystical, but at the same time, it has deep real-world applications.”
To explain how its principles now underlie critical technology, Fleissner notes that check digits, which verify the accuracy of tracking numbers for an assortment of travel tickets, as well as book-publishing identification numbers, or ISBNs, are grounded in number-theoretic properties. This, he says, demonstrates the impressive ability of number theory to ensure security and catch human errors in important systems.
The real-world relevance of the subject is appealing to Fleissner’s students.
“Number theory is foundational to modern cryptography and blockchain, which rely on the concepts of prime numbers and divisibility to keep our data safe and our digital world in order,” Sofia Liu ’25 says.
Nitza Kahlon ’25 was attracted by the mix of creativity and the need to generate logical arguments to back up claims.
“It adds so much in other areas of life,” she says. “Creativity and problem solving are key skills that go from school, to sports, to projects, and more.”
Mathematics teacher Anton Fleissner enjoys revealing the complexity and beauty of number theory and differential equations to his students.
What’s special about number theory is the way it takes these simple elements and builds upon them, creating complexity that can be very interesting and beautiful.
Kahlon says that number theory has always been her favorite area of mathematics, having been exposed to it through math competitions. She says most high-schoolers will know integers, prime numbers, and divisibility, “but what’s special about number theory is the way it takes these simple elements and builds upon them, creating complexity that can be very interesting and beautiful.”
Later in the year, the class will delve into differential equations, which offer a more direct connection to everyday life.
“Differential equations are really just about equation solving where the equations themselves involve derivatives,” Fleissner explains, adding that its applications range from thermodynamics to aerodynamics. Students will model dynamic systems, such as how the temperature of an object changes when placed in a different environment or how a spring behaves.
Although the course is challenging, Fleissner believes students rise to the occasion.
“I often worry, Is this too hard? Or too easy? ” he admits. But he’s gratified when students thank him for a thought-provoking test, noting that the balance between difficulty and accessibility is crucial.
“They want to be challenged,” he says.
‘Very Interesting and Beautiful’ What is it about Number Theory and Differential Equations?
“‘Beautiful’ math is kind of an oxymoron, but the way these deep concepts can be represented simply and eloquently is the ‘beauty’ of the subject — building to the complex from the simple. Coming to a concise and clear proof or an elegant solution has always been my favorite part of mathematics.”
Nitza Kahlon ’25
“I have always been interested in cryptography and blockchain, fascinated by how numbers protect ‘truths’ and thereby build trusts in our world,’’ she explains. “So, I see number theory as math’s answer and solution to the philosophical questions and real-world problems of ‘how do you build trust and defend authenticity?’”
Sofia Liu ’25
“The class emphasizes a lot of thinking outside of the box, a lot of trial and error, and especially a lot of collaboration. If you like math, this is the course for you.”
Mila Cooper ’26
“As the coursework becomes more challenging, support from peers becomes more invaluable as everyone has their own unique experiences and perspectives for each problem. It may seem intimidating, but it is actually one of my most fun and chill classes, so I would definitely recommend it.”
Kevin Xu ’26
“We collaborate in small groups over different problems before presenting our work to the larger class. As we present, other class members ask questions and challenge our work, and we defend it, giving us a solid understanding of what we are doing.”
Ava Martoma ’25
The Net Result
Mathew Johnson ’13 is an integral part of a coaching staff that was vying for its third straight national title.
It’s the ultimate in college basketball: cutting down the nets at the end of March Madness. The time-honored ritual is a privilege conferred upon the sport’s national championship winner, the only team left undefeated at the center of everyone’s brackets. In the sport, what could possibly be better than ascending that ladder, scissors in hand, to clip your own little piece of that white nylon twine?
How about doing it two years in a row?
Because that’s what Mathew Johnson ’13 has done the past two springs as a member of the University of Connecticut’s men’s basketball staff. As the Huskies’ video and scouting coordinator, Johnson is in charge of film production for the team, as well as the management of recruiting efforts for the program. For a squad that absolutely steamrolled every opponent it faced over the past two NCAA Tournaments in 2023 and 2024, every aspect of the program had to be firing on all cylinders. The coaching staff, led by Dan Hurley, seemed to know every tendency of their opposition as they advanced through the brackets, and that began with Johnson’s work.
“Mat is somebody I have deep ties with. He’s from Jersey and he comes from a basketball family,” said Hurley, a Jersey City native, when Johnson was promoted into his current role in 2022. “We have the same circle we kind of grew up with in the game.”
Now in his third year in the role, and his sixth overall at UConn, Johnson does have a history with the Hurley family. He spent his first two years of high school at St. Anthony in Jersey City playing for Hall of Fame coach Bob Hurley Sr., who won four national and 28 state championships in his 39 years coaching the Friars. Johnson’s father, Herman Johnson P’13, coached under the elder Hurley at St. Anthony. Spending time at his father’s various workplaces put the basketball bug in Mat Johnson.
“From the time that I was born, I was in the stroller and I would go with him to the gym,” Johnson told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2023. “He was the person that introduced me to basketball, taught me basketball, and really just made sure that I kept it as a daily thing.”
With a coach for a father, Johnson was bound to pick up the habits that would make him a winner.
“The thing I loved about him is that he always wanted to do things the right way,” Herman told the Inquirer. “I would tell people, if you put the team in the gym and tell them to run ten laps, half the team would be cutting the corners. Mat was that guy that would make sure he ran outside of the lines.”
After he transferred closer to his South Jersey home, Johnson’s high school basketball career was interrupted by a heart ailment that came to light only after he passed out during a workout. Once two specialists diagnosed it as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, his playing days appeared to be over, but the Minneapolis Heart Institute told Johnson that he did not have HCM. It was literally a lifeline to continue playing the game he loved, but collegiate programs weren’t as convinced, fearful of taking on the liability. Johnson enrolled at Lawrenceville as a postgraduate in the hopes of proving himself his talent and his health.
It was a fortuitous decision. Playing for head coach Ron Kane ’83 P’20, he averaged 16 points per game, with six assists, four rebounds, and three steals. College coaches began calling again, and Johnson chose the Division II University of Tampa. In his four years there, he never experienced another cardiac episode, but having fulfilled his dream of playing college basketball, he decided to turn the page.
Mindful of something Bob Hurley had told him a few years earlier — “You can still have an impact on the game of basketball through coaching” — his next move came into focus. When a graduate assistant’s role opened up on Dan Hurley’s UConn staff, Johnson went for it.
Since then, he has played an integral part of the Huskies’ rise to the top of the college basketball world. UConn’s 2023 title team beat each of its six opponents in the NCAA Tournament by at least 13 points, the first team since the Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985 to do so. The 2024 squad did them one better, winning every game by 14 or more. The Athletic called last year’s Huskies the most dominant national championship team of the last forty years. After UConn won it all two years ago, Johnson was reflective about overcoming his obstacles to be part of something great.
“You make sacrifices to accomplish hard things,” he told the Inquirer. “Whether it’s being told that you can’t play basketball anymore, it requires a lot of sacrifice to achieve those things. I’m just so grateful that it all paid off.”
Mathew Johnson ’13 and the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team were in pursuit of a third consecutive national championship this spring.
Johnson and son Micah cut down the net after the Huskies’ rout of Purdue in the 2024 final.
Go Big Red
Claims to Fame
Lawrenceville’s newest class of Athletic Hall of Famers earned their plaques in a variety of ways.
BIG RED’S LAST unbeaten and untied football team racked up one last victory when the 1962 squad was inducted into Lawrenceville’s Athletic Hall of Fame during the Home for Hill Weekend in November. They were joined by fellow inductees Grant Newsome ’15, Melissa Magee Speidel P’10 ’12, and Aaron David Whitehurst Jr. ’04
The inductees join 117 current members whose names are inscribed on plaques in the Big Red Reading Room in Tsai Field House.
Lawrenceville’s football program was coming off four consecutive undefeated seasons, but many expected the 1962 team to take a step back that fall. The offense featured an undersized backfield and an inexperienced offensive line, and on paper, the attack seemed underwhelming. But prognosticators should have paid more attention to the
Big Red Roundup
Lawrenceville successfully defended the Meigs-Green Cup during Hill Weekend in November. The trophy was presented after football’s 26-14 win, their fifth in a row, including a victory over the M.A.P.L. champ, Blair.
other side of the ball, where the defense would yield an average of just 7.1 points per game. Behind those stingy “Red Raiders,” Lawrenceville’s scoring clip of 22.8 points per game was more than enough.
The season finale saw Hill School race out to a 12-0 lead, but a score by Laird Busse ’64 got Big Red on the board, followed by the extra point by Bob Poitras ’63 P’90. A fourth-quarter touchdown by Todd Orvald ’63 P’89 ’95 sealed the deal for Lawrenceville, which edged their rival by a single point and ensured immortality for head coach Jack Reydel H’60 ’62 ’65 ’67 ’68’s gutsy squad.
Representing the 1962 team at the induction were Orvald, Ed Dimon ’63, Larry Tondel ’64, and captain Bob Casey ’63 P’92 GP’21 ’24. Melissa Magee Speidel began her 30-year tenure at Lawrenceville in 1987 as assistant athletic director
Boys’ cross county ran its way to the Mid-Atlantic Prep League championship this past fall behind the strong efforts of Taksh Gupta ’25, who won the individual title. The Big Red girls finished second in the M.A.P.L.
Todd Orvald ’63 P’89 ’95, Ed Dimon ’63, Larry Tondel ’64, Kim Newsome P’15, Melissa Magee Speidel P’10 ’12, Aaron David Whitehurst Jr. ’04, and Bob Casey ’63 P’92 GP’21 ’24 accepted plaques signifying induction into the Athletic Hall of Fame in November. Orvald, Dimon, Tondel, and Casey represented the 1962 football team; Newsome accepted on behalf of her son, Grant Newsome ’15.
and right away played a pivotal role in establishing the School’s first girls’ sports programs. She is the namesake of Lawrenceville’s Melissa Magee Speidel Best Female Athlete Award.
Speidel developed a passion for sports at an early age. In high school, she made the boys’ tennis team and was introduced to field hockey. At Ursinus College, she competed in field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse, and was enshrined in its Hall of Fame in 1992. A member of the U.S. National Field Hockey team, Speidel missed a chance to compete in the Olympics in Moscow due to the United States’ boycott of the 1980 Summer Games.
Speidel led the field hockey program at The College of New Jersey to three NCAA Division III National Championships and an AIAW championship in lacrosse in 1981 and is a 1996 inductee of the New Jersey Lacrosse Hall of Fame.
Grant Newsome graduated as one of the best dual-sport athletes in Lawrenceville history after starring in basketball and football. On the gridiron, he was a three-year starter, played on the 2013 Mid-Atlantic Prep League champions, and was a captain, twice earning first-team All-M.A.P.L. honors before being named a Semper Fidelis All-American. His playing career at the University of Michigan was halted by a knee injury as a sophomore, but Newsome
Girls’ tennis claimed the Mid-Atlantic Prep League championship, with Katelyn Ni ’26, Mahika Kasarabada ’26, and Blair Bartlett ’27 all earning First Team AllM.A.P.L. honors.
nevertheless earned Academic All Big-Ten Player and Big Ten Distinguished Scholar honors. After being cleared to play as a senior, Newsome opted to medically retire from football and immediately joined the Wolverines’ coaching staff as a student assistant.
In 2022, he became a full-time assistant coach on the Michigan staff and served as tight ends coach for the team that won the 2023 national championship. In 2024, he was named the program’s offensive line coach. Newsome is a two-time selection to the 247 Sports 30 Under 30 list, which recognizes the best coaches under the age of 30.
Another two-sport star, Aaron David Whitehurst Jr. was a key member of one of best basketball teams in Big Red history and a record setter in both the high jump and 110-meter hurdles. He was a track-and-field captain, a Mid-Atlantic Prep League and New Jersey Independent School Athletic Association champion at Lawrenceville before excelling in both sports at the University of Pennsylvania.
Whitehurst was a defensive stopper for two Ivy League title-winners in basketball who, days after the hoops season ended, would swap his sneakers for track spikes. As a freshman in 2005, he earned first-team All-Ivy honors and captured the 110-meter hurdles title at the 2005 Heptagonal Championships. He recorded the seventh-best ever time in the event for the Quakers.
Girls’ Volleyball won the inaugural Mid-Atlantic Prep League championship as well as the New Jersey Independent Schools Athletic Association Prep A title. Jalia Dublin ’25, Alice Kizilbash ’25, and Madisyn Stockwell ’27 were N.J.I.S.A.A. Prep A All-League.
Boys’ Water Polo won the Garden State Tournament and finished fourth at the Easterns, where their girl counterparts finished third.
David Aaron Whitehurst ’04 competed in the 2005 NCAA Tournament against Boston College.
Grant Newsome ’15 started for Michigan as a sophomore on the offensive line, the group he now coaches.
An Echo of the Past
Exactly fifty years after his father led Lawrenceville to its first lacrosse state title, Marsh Chambers ’77 helped lift Nantucket High School to its first.
IF YOU LISTEN closely enough, you just might sense that life moves in a rhythm, like the cadence of the waves rolling in on the shores of a Nantucket beach. Things happen, and then they happen again, even if it’s years later.
Like exactly fifty years later.
A decade and a half after Marshall Chambers H’58 ’62 P’77 established the boys’ lacrosse program at Lawrenceville –there were only boys at the School in those days – his team captured its first state championship in 1974.
In the late 1990s, his son, Marsh Chambers ’77, helped get the boys’ lacrosse program off the ground at Nantucket High School. Last June, coaching with his brother, Sammy Chambers, Marsh helped lead the Whalers to their first state championship when they claimed the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association Division 4 title over Sandwich, 7-6.
Their triumph came exactly fifty years after “Big Marsh” saw his Big Red team break through. A great deal has changed since then, but the two title-winning teams do share at least one other thing in common: their biggest fan.
“It was special because I have seen so much that I really know the game, and to watch them in the beginning and progress to what they were at the end, it was amazing,”
Ginnie Chambers H’54 ’58 ’59 ’60 ’61 ’62 ’66 ’67 ’68 ’71 ’73 ’79 ’80 ’89 P’77, who cheered in person at both championship tilts, told the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror. “They learned and they grew and they became a championship team. It was amazing how that team developed.”
Even at 96, Ginnie remained a fixture at Whalers games and was there when the island celebrated the team with a parade through the cobblestone streets of its downtown.
“They’re such a good group of kids, all of them,” she said. “They all call me Mimi, and they’re all friends with Colton.”
Colton is Colton “Cole” Chambers, Sammy’s son, a team captain who scored twice for the Whalers in the state final. He is Ginnie’s grandson and Marsh’s godson.
“I still can’t believe it,” Cole told the Nantucket Current after the game. “I can’t believe this is happening right now. It is crazy. This is what we all dreamed of and worked for our whole lives.”
Marsh says he often channels his father’s understated style when working with the Nantucket squad, and he hears the echo of his lessons at particular moments, such as the first few after the state final.
“When I ran onto the field after the final whistle, I didn’t know what to do. His voice was right there: Act like you’ve been there before,” he said to the Inquirer and Mirror. “So, I took like three more steps and I said, ‘I’ve never been here before, I can act the way I want.’ But I heard it. He was definitely there.”
Girls’ fencing successfully defended its N.J.I.S.A.A. championship in February. The boys’ team finished second. The girls’ and boys’ indoor track and field teams both captured their respective N.J.I.S.A.A. and M.A.P.L. championships in February.
Blair Bartlett ’27 set a school record in the 3200m with a time of 10:29.59, the second-fastest time in the United States this season, at the N.J.I.S.A.A. Championships. She also ran a Big Red record time of 2:13.30 in the 800m, good for 21st in the nation, and the 1000m.
Sofia Swindell ’25 broke her own school record in the 55m hurdles, running in 7.97 seconds in the N.J.I.S.A.A. finals. It marks the 13th-fastest time in the country this season and is the first time Sofia has shattered the 8-second barrier. She also set records in the 800m, 400m, and 300m.
Sammy Chambers, son and team captain Cole Chambers, and Marsh Chambers ’77 celebrated Nantucket High’s first state lacrosse championship at a parade through downtown. Sammy and Marsh are both assistants on the staff.
Squash Teams Land in Top 10 at Nationals
LAWRENCEVILLE’S GIRLS’ AND boys’ squash teams finished fourth and ninth, respectively, at the 2025 U.S. High School Team Championships in February. The annual tournament brought 112 boys’ and 96 girls’ teams to Philadelphia to compete for their titles. The strong showing by the girls’ and boys’ teams came on the heels of both repeating as Mid-Atlantic Prep League champions the week prior.
The girls entered the tournament ranked second in the country. After defeating Conestoga (Pa.) High School, 6-1, in the Round of 16 and Pingry School, 4-3, in the quarterfinals, Big Red was blanked 7-0 by top-seeded Greenwich Academy in the semis. The girls were edged 5-2 by Tabor Academy, which had already knocked out the third-seeded Agnes Irwin School, to place fourth.
The boys came into the tournament ranked ninth. After a 6-1 first-round loss to The Haverford School, the boys moved into the consolation round and defeated Belmont Hill, 5-2, and Rye Country School, 5-2, to clinch the School’s second Top 10 finish of the weekend.
Both programs sustained a level of excellence set in 2024, when the girls’ and boys’ squash teams finished second and eighth, respectively. That represented the highest-ever tournament finish for the girls.
Audrey Cheng ’25 set a school record in the pole vault at the M.A.P.L. Championships, soaring to a height of 11 feet, 7 inches, to claim the title.
Posner Tapped to Lead USA Lacrosse U-15 Team
WHEN USA LACROSSE sought a coach to lead its U.S. Youth National Teams at the Under-15 age grouping, its search inevitably led it to Lawrenceville and the one who has guided his squad to two consecutive national championships among high school teams.
Jon Posner, Big Red’s head boys’ lacrosse coach, was tapped to lead USA Lacrosse’s U-15 team in March as part of the National Team Development Program.
“It’s a great opportunity, and I can’t wait to get started,” Posner said.
Since taking over as the head coach Lawrenceville in 2020, Posner has turned the program into a national power, including consecutive No. 1 finishes in the USA Lacrosse Magazine Top 25 and the Q-Collar Inside Lacrosse National Power Rankings in 2023 and 2024. Prior to that, he built the program at Culver Academy in Indiana into one of the nation’s best, including three No. 1 national rankings. He has a career coaching record of 344-64 entering the 2025 season, and more than 150 of his players have gone on to play college lacrosse.
“I’m incredibly honored to be named the head coach of the U-15 Team USA,” Posner said. “Any time you have the chance to represent your country, it’s special, and I’m excited to work with these young athletes at such a pivotal stage in their development.”
Lawrenceville’s program, he explained, “emphasizes accountability, a relentless work ethic, and being great teammates — values that translate at any level. I hope to instill that same culture within Team USA, helping these players grow both on and off the field while competing at the highest level.”
Posner believes the opportunity to collaborate, learn, and compete on the international stage will not only help Team USA succeed but will also push him to be a better coach.
“I look forward to bringing those experiences back to Lawrenceville to continue elevating our program and helping our players grow,” he said.
Lexie Koch ’25 bested her previous 60m school record of 8.23 seconds with a time of 7.99 at the Penn Relays Winter Showcase, where Mike Bradley ’25 set new school marks in the 60m and 200m and Owen Eldridge ’25 set a record in the 3000m, the No. 90 time in the country.
At the Jambar Coaches Invitational in New York, Dele Joa-Griffith ’26 broke the school record in 600m, clocking in at 1:24.71 seconds; Jael Gaines ’26 set a school record time of 1:17.59 in the 500m, her first-ever time ever running the event.
The girls’ squash team celebrated its fourth-place finish at the U.S. High School Team Championships.
Lawrenceville’s Jon Posner will coach the USA Lacrosse U-15 Team.
Encore
Return Engagement
Years after finding his purpose on the KAC stage, Jared Goldenberg ’10 is back — behind the scenes.
MANY LAWRENTIANS WILL recall the brass zodiac compass inlaid on the pathway that descended from Irwin Dining Hall to the front of the Semans/LawsonJohnston Squash Courts. The compass points were properly aligned with directional geography, orienting passers-by to the direction in which they were headed.
To Jared Goldenberg ’10, however, the compass meant a little bit more. Heading home from dinner toward the townhouses on the other side of The Pond, where he lived with his family, including longtime athletics administrator and head trainer Mike “G” Goldenberg H’94 ’96 ’97 P’05 ’10, Jared would often pause at the medallion to seek direction. But not simply north or south, east or west.
“I had this little ritual where I would stand there and just reflect on something, maybe make a wish or set a goal,” he says. “I had this idea that this compass was going to guide me.”
Goldenberg eventually landed this past fall in the very place where he believes he first found himself — the Kirby Arts Center — this time, as its technical director. It was the latest beat in a story that has seen him working behind the scenes in stage and production lighting, video, and carpentry for Busch Gardens, Walt Disney World, the Blue Man Group, and Universal Orlando.
At Disney, Goldenberg realized just what a vital effect the lighting has on the way customers experience a live event.
“When you go to see a band that you love on stage in a big stadium, yes, the music is obviously why you’re there,” he says. “But, I mean, come on — the lighting! People go nuts for what it can do.”
Throughout his decade in the industry, Goldenberg always kept close the first stage he knew.
“I always thought to myself it would be really amazing to come back here and help students figure out what their passion is,” he says, “and help them find that trajectory like this school did for me.”
Goldenberg recalls struggling at Lawrenceville, mostly because he lacked a clear aim, unsure what interested him enough to pursue. Taking Foundations of Theatre with Derrick Wilder H’78 as a Third Former provided him a beacon of clarity.
“I took that class and I thought, this is what I want to do with my life,” Goldenberg recalls. “I had something to fight for, and I started committing, doing my homework, and studying, and applying myself to all of my classes because I didn’t want to lose this opportunity”
Goldenberg says performing elevated his self-confidence in a way that permeated his entire life.
“Every day I felt more and more confident in what I was doing,” he recalls. “And I think that was the boost of confidence that I needed in everything else.”
Now that he’s returned, Goldenberg wants to help connect students with their ambitions, but acknowledges that their moment of inspiration may not arrive quite as it did for him.
“Theatre is not the only place that people can find that transformation and that growth,” he says. “For some it may be a robotics class where they realize, oh my gosh, there is something exciting here I want to sink my teeth into. It could be a poetry class; it could be a certain math class. They find it just clicks for them, and that propels them even further.”
The Pit Crew
The Periwig Club’s fall musical, Into the Woods, wowed audiences in October. Director Matt Campbell’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1986 musical allowed characters from ageless childhood chestnuts like Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood to share one stage in a new story.
Throughout the performance, the sounds of the orchestra filled the Kirby Arts Center from the pit before the stage. Beginning in summer, the talented student musicians spend hours honing the pivotal musical accompaniment, and the experience is quite unlike anything else in their experience.
“Playing along with singers is different than just playing on our own since we have to rely heavily on visual and audio cues,” says Jane Shindnes ’26, who plays the flute and piccolo.
Another difference is that unlike a common instrumental recital, their music must be played in tandem with the action on the stage.
“The music accompanies the scene and plot instead of the music itself being the main character,” violinist Arisa Okamura ’25 says. “It’s very different because for this music, the key, tempo, and time signature changes a lot more frequently than the classical music pieces I usually play.”
— Sophie Liu ’27/The Lawrence
Arya Vishwakarma ’25 and her viola backed the action during Into the Woods
‘IT’S KIND OF FREAKY (AND IT’S FUN TO WORK WITH)
BUT IT’S COOL’
At Lawrenceville, students are using artificial intelligence to assist understanding rather than as a tool to replace it.
BY Sean Ramsden
n hour after sunset, it was chilly outside in mid-October when Jennifer Parnell
P’23 headed over to Upper House at 7:30 p.m., hoping to run an idea past a faculty colleague who was on House duty that night.
Inside the brightly lit common room, as Parnell waited among the cushy club chairs, couches, and billiards tables, a student was struggling with a math problem and appealed to her for help.
“I was like, no, I’m a history teacher,” she recalled. “I haven’t seen anything even slightly related to calculus since, like, 1979.”
But then Parnell, who came to Lawrenceville in 2021 after earning awards for her innovative work at Kodiak High School in Alaska, pivoted to offer the frustrated student a solution.
“I said, ‘AI can help you with that,’ and he’s like, No, I already have the answer,” Parnell continued, explaining that the student was trying to understand how to get to the solution himself. “I said, ‘No, AI can help you understand how to get that answer.”
As the boy earnestly positioned his laptop in front of him, Parnell mapped out a process that required no knowledge of calculus, only that the student lean into a basic tactic of the Harkness table — Socratic inquiry — but in this case, using artificial intelligence, or AI, as a Socratic tutor. Parnell fed him some initial prompts to enter into ChatGPT 3, giving the platform context around his situation: You’re going to tell it the work is important. You’re going to tell it it’s meaningful to you. You’re going to tell it where you are — at a prestigious independent school that’s very competitive.
“And then you’re going to explain that you want AI to help you understand how to solve this problem, but not at any point to give you the answer,” Parnell told him. “Just keep asking it questions in a Socratic method.”
The student began a dialogue with ChatGPT, typing openended questions and receiving follow-up questions in return, laying down blocks of understanding along the way. When he couldn’t answer one of GPT’s questions, Parnell urged him: “Well, tell it you can’t, and it will adjust the level of what it’s asking you.”
After about ten minutes, Parnell saw a smile of satisfaction spread across the boy’s face. “I get it,” he quietly announced. “I get it.”
“Excellent. Could you teach it to someone else?’” she recalled asking him. “And he said, ‘Yes, because the part that I didn’t understand was this step right here and now I understand that step.’”
With its public introduction on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT sparked a revolution that most people still don’t fully understand. Unlike other technological advances — the internet, for a primary example — this publicly accessible generative AI platform did not gradually infiltrate the culture over years while it improved incrementally. Rather, it struck like a thunderbolt, in one day and all at once. Though AI technology has developed over generations, revealing itself more recently and subtly through chatbots on retail websites or natural-language processing models like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT 3 suddenly brought this user-friendly large language model to anyone with an internet-abled device. At once, users were able to interact with this generative pretrained transformer, or GPT, in a conversational way, using prompts and natural dialogue to have the model develop creative prose, formulate vacation plans, or think through sophisticated work processes. ChatGPT could ask follow-up questions to clarify a user’s input, or admit its mistakes and correct them as it worked through the prompts, and even reject requests it “knew” to be inappropriate.
Though adoption of the technology continues to spread, ChatGPT still resonated immediately, growing from 13 million new unique users each day in December 2022 to 180 million users twelve months later. But as with any technological revolution in its nascent days, people remain uncertain, uneasy, and even divided on how to regulate the use of AI in institutional settings. A November 11 headline
“It’s an intellectual revolution, and you want to be part of that.”
in The Chronicle of Higher Education asked, “Is It Time to Regulate AI Use on Campus?” In the story, reporter Lee Gardner writes, “As the technology spreads throughout all aspects of academe — and evolves at a pace measured in months, not years — experts and a burgeoning number of administrators believe that colleges need to establish guidelines about its use or face potential disaster.”
To be clear, a significant part of the need for policy, according to Gardner, involves data security more than use by students in their academic work: A staff or faculty member giving information to a generative AI platform also provides its deep-learning capabilities with training data that could then reappear in answers it provides to another user. This could entail a violation of federal privacy laws or the inadvertent disclosure of admissions information or financial data that an institution would otherwise shield from its rivals.
But the most immediate focus on just about every campus across higher and secondary education was on academic dishonesty and preventing the use of AI as a workaround. In the earliest days of ChatGPT, administrators and faculty members at Lawrenceville reacted with concern about this, too.
“I think our first inclination when we started thinking about AI and our students was to teach ethics in AI,” explains Bernadette Teeley P’24, dean of academics, of the class titled AI Applications and Ethics, which launched in 2023. “That was the first [AI-related] class Lawrenceville offered, and I would say that was our reactive answer to what we were seeing. It was so steeped in our mission that our job is to prepare students to be ethical leaders and to live lives of integrity.”
Mission statements can ring hollow when institutions do not treat them as lighthouses shining a beacon of guidance
in uncertain waters. In this case, Lawrenceville’s instinctual deference to its mission pointed the School on a course to become a pioneer among independent schools.
“And so that was a really a keystone piece for us, which — I have to say — we were the only school doing that,” Teeley continues. “And still, when we look back on how schools first approached it, we were the group that approached it from that lens. And that has proven to be the right lens.”
The eleven-week, 400-level course had Fourth and Fifth Form students grappling with questions such as why a society would build AI, how the technology learns and adapts, if it’s possible to prevent or limit bias in algorithms, whether AI boosts creativity or makes us less intelligent though thoughtless delegation, whether AI can be effectively regulated, and even whether it poses an existential threat to humanity. (This year’s Fifth Form Capstone course will also be AI-focused.)
Parnell, who last spring was named director of innovation and AI projects, says the School’s choice to focus on ethics was prescient, given the unrestrained pace of the technology.
“Academic work must be grounded in deeper issues and essential questions,” she says, adding that the student evaluations of the course were excellent, with them citing the content as “relevant, purposeful, and joyful.”
“Those are my three criteria,” Parnell says. “AI fits all of that. It’s purposeful. It’s absolutely relevant. And for a lot of these kids, it is joyful. They’re not doing some of this AI work on campus because they feel they have to do it or it’s a requirement. A bunch of them are doing it in their spare time
“As Lawrenceville students…” She pauses, letting you contemplate just how they are allocating what might be their most precious resource for the sheer joy of learning. “They’re doing this in their spare time.”
Perhaps that is not a surprise. After all, who is more curious than a Lawrenceville student?
“You might not ever work with it, but why not learn a new skill? Why not explore something fun? Because I think it’s extremely useful, but it will only be useful to you if you practice with it,” says Lena Haefele ’25 of the many AI platforms. “It’s kind of freaky but it’s cool and it’s fun to work with.”
Haefele is part of Lawrenceville’s AI Council, a student-driven group that is setting the agenda for AI use on campus. The AI Council seeks to safely, ethically integrate the potential of AI into traditional Lawrenceville principles. Its members have also enjoyed learning from experts in the field through events such as MIT’s AI at the Crossroads conference in New York in October. That opportunity made an impression on Haefele.
“I mean, something that was said at the MIT conference was, it’s not so much an industrial revolution,” she recalls, “but it’s an intellectual revolution, and you want to be part of that.”
Lawrenceville does, of course, have AI policies. There are, to be sure, ways students can use it to cheat, though it’s not easy. The School’s current position on generative AI is that unless a student has clear and specific permission from their teacher to use AI tools in completing an assignment, using them will be considered a form of academic dishonesty. Teachers are welcome to use AI or refuse its use in their classes. Toward that end, the AI Council is there to advise the community on its adoption, something the council believes is consistent with the tenets of Harkness.
“Our council is centered around striking a balance,” explains Sathvik Samant ’26, a founding member of the group. “Striking a balance between human and technology, striking a balance between face-to-face, Harkness-style communication, and also using AI as a resource.” Samant says the AI Council wants to create understanding around a technology that remains uncharted territory for many students and faculty members alike.
“We’re trying to learn from other people, trying to bring experts here to have open conversations about this,” he says, “including students and teachers, so everyone has a seat at the table.”
The AI Council was originally composed with equal numbers of students and adults, but Parnell says the adults have left it to their young learners, who quickly proved their capable leadership.
“They did slides for orientation. They’re preparing materials to help the freshmen come in. They’re working on guidance for different teachers in terms of how you could bring AI into an 80-minute class period, what you can do for assessments, what you can do for assignments, how you can start to use AI in a lot of ways,” she explains. “They’re entirely student driven.”
One tool developed by the council is the AI Scale of Use, a five-level chart that faculty members are using to establish clear expectations of students. Regardless of the degree to which AI is employed, there is an expectation that all work done in any class will reveal the student’s personal understanding and analytical skills.
Samant is glad for the opportunities and the agency he and his peers were given.
“I think that our administration did a really good job of setting down ground rules and stuff like that,” he says, “but also not barring [AI] from existence, not pretending it didn’t exist.”
At the MIT conference in New York, which six students attended as guests of Latif Alam ’08, council members heard from early adopters and innovators who are already harnessing AI to transform industries and to provide actionable
“We’re trying to learn from other people, trying to bring experts here to have open conversations about this, including students and teachers, so everyone has a seat at the table.”
insights into the rapidly evolving AI landscape and its impact on business and society.
“The opportunities that the AI Council has given me, like talking with alumni, being able to go to these conferences, made me realize how important the human aspect of AI is,” Haefele says. “And it’s really about how we use AI. The AI Council has made me realize … that I want to focus on how we interact with AI, because I think that’s the most applicable for education in our community.”
Haefele, who along with several other members of the council, recently pitched Teeley on a pilot project for AI use in classrooms, says her primary aim with the group is to show that this technology is not a replacement for knowledge but, rather, a way to augment it.
“The main goal for what I’m trying to do in the AI Council,” she says, “is promote using AI as a tool to assist your understanding instead of using it as a tool to replace understanding.”
The Fifth Form calculus student Parnell guided in the Upper House common room is illustrative of AI’s teaching potential, an event from which she draws inspiration.
“It was marvelous,” she recalls. “It was just really powerful to witness it happening in real time with a student who, at that moment, was struggling and how it could help him.
“I’m going to try and push a little bit more this year,” Parnell continues. “I’m getting into some of the Houses.
I’m doing some speeches, presentations with tricks and tips about AI in different Houses at night during study hall, because I want to teach kids how to use it responsibly.”
That Socratic method of inquiry Parnell used to guide the calculus student toward his breakthrough is something that she believes is an extension of the very ideals he and his peers idealize about Lawrenceville. In relating that story, she added that the student wondered if he could run into disciplinary trouble if he used the same process in other classes. For Parnell, his concern seemed to underscore a belief she holds firm about her students.
“It’s this idea that we are all learning how to live in this new space and what the ethics are, what’s appropriate and how to use it responsibly and how to use it to help you learn — not to help you cheat — but that’s the path that we’re all navigating,” she says. “Because we have kids here that love actually to learn. They don’t want AI to do it for them. They want to be the one that says, I can do this on my own.”
To that end, Teeley sees that same process as being in full alignment with the tenets of Harkness education.
“If we take a generative language AI that is prompted by a human prompt, and then gives a response, and then the human has the opportunity to ask another question, I think that’s exactly what’s happening at the Harkness table,” she says. “When you’re interacting with AI in that very basic format, you’re … trying to ask a question that gives you the data that you’re really looking for. And I think the process of asking questions is at the heart of Harkness teaching and learning.”
NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN
ChatGPT may seem like the predominant AI platform, but here are several others Lawrenceville students are using, with their most effective deployment:
PERPLEXITY
Used for searches; in many cases, Perplexity might be faster than Google or ChatGPT
CLAUDE
For project management and writing
WHISPER
For talk to text; i.e., dictation, transcription
MIDJOURNEY AND IDEOGRAM
For high-quality imagery
TOPAZ GIGAPIXEL
To upscale low-quality imagery
DASHWORKS OR GURU
To build an AI knowledge base of all your apps and documents
NOTEBOOKLM
To consolidate notes into podcasts
Chip Trowbridge ’90 is the chief technology officer at Clear Ballot Group, which manufactures voting machines certified in 14 states. He says a return to paper-based balloting and layers of redundant security measures have effectively rendered large-scale fraud impossible.
vs.
As the chief technology officer for America’s fourth-largest voting machine manufacturer,
CHIP TROWBRIDGE
’90 knows why the notion of widespread voter fraud is so far-fetched.
BY SEAN RAMSDEN
ate in the afternoon of November 7, not even forty hours after polls closed on the presidential election of 2024, a kind of calm seemed to be settling over Chip Trowbridge ’90. It didn’t owe to the result of the vote so much as it did to the decisive Electoral College margin by which Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris to become the 47th president of the United States. There would not be, it seemed apparent, a repeat of the 2020 aftermath, when Trump cast aspersions on the election process, charged widespread voter fraud, and questioned the integrity of poll workers, all without substantive evidence. His refusal to accept the results of the vote set off a wild chain of events that began with dozens of unsuccessful courtroom challenges and culminated two months later with a violent, unprecedented attempt at the Capitol to halt the certification of the election results.
It also cost Fox News $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems after several of the network’s hosts broadcast false statements about Dominion machines having been rigged to steal the election for Joe Biden. So, for Trowbridge, the chief technology officer at Clear Ballot Group Inc., his relief derived from the idea that his industry — voting systems — and the hundreds of thousands of poll workers and election officials they support would be spared the lawsuits, harassment, and even death threats they previously endured. And that, he says, nodding to the obvious, is good.
“The fact that it was decisive helps,” he says, “because … I think there is a much less chance or a lower chance that there will be continued litigation through November, December, into January, like what we have seen.”
Into late winter, Trowbridge’s estimation has proven correct. Though the nation’s political divide remains deep, Trowbridge can testify to the reliability of voting in the United States and the fantastical chances of any widespread scheme to corrupt it. He takes you through the many layers of security checks and redundancies in the voting process, including physical security measures, ballot design and verification, and the separation of ballots from identifying information. He’s just as quick to underscore the commitment to integrity by the officials and staffers who run the elections on the local level.
“Election officials take their jobs seriously,” Trowbridge says. “And part of that seriousness is — whether they may have some sort of partisan affiliation as a person — you never see it. And everyone that I work with, they really just want to make sure that they count everyone’s vote accurately.”
Trowbridge’s observation includes the civic-minded poll workers who volunteer their time to support the voters in a given district.
“More than anything, they just want to be done by 11 p.m. and not show up in the news,” he says. “I mean, really, we’re talking underfunded, understaffed, overworked people.”
lear Ballot’s machines are certified in fourteen states — both “red” and “blue” ones — to record the choices of some 40 million registered voters. What began as a small election-auditing outfit just over a decade ago is now the fourth-largest vote-tabulation company in the nation. Clear Ballot’s ClearCast Go machines allow paper ballots to be scanned quickly and efficiently; its accessible ClearMark machines produce an identical paper ballot that is verifiable and auditable. Clear Ballot was founded and staffed by former engineers from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Endeca Technologies, which is where Trowbridge had spent his career in technology and software before joining them in 2022.
“You probably used my software if you ever shopped online at Lowe’s, Walmart, Home Depot, J. Crew, or L.L. Bean,” he says. “We invented the search system where you filter by brand, category, color, size, but then we added merchandising stuff on top of it. That was my background.”
Clear Ballot is part of a trend that is in some ways doing a technological about-face, returning the industry to the more analog, paper-based ways of the past, but with modern security ideals in mind. From Colonial times, when voters were sworn in and declared their choice of candidate by speaking it aloud, the methods of recording votes have advanced through drop-in ballot boxes to lever-style devices that could successfully punch a hole next to a candidate’s name on a ballot. This style reached its zenith in the mid-1960s, when the smaller, less expensive, and more accurate Votomatic became the standard.
Those were not perfect, however. The 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was muddled by “hanging chads” — the perforated squares that line up with the names of candidates — in Florida, and the matter wasn’t decided for Bush until a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. The surrounding fiasco prompted the Help
Once ClearCast ballot scanners are tested, they are shipped in the same brand of black cases that roadies use to pack rock bands’ equipment. “We’re literally using the same cases that Aerosmith would use,” Trowbridge says.
America Vote Act of 2002, which calls for minimum standards in each state for election administration. States were required to upgrade their voting equipment to mitigate questions about voter intent and improve accessibility for voters with physical disabilities. Direct Recording Devices, or DREs, which record votes electronically, came from this, but they do not produce a paper record and their use today is limited.
“The bulk of our ballots in the U.S. are paperbased now,” Trowbridge says of the move toward optical scanners that produce a voter-verified paper audit trail. “And what’s cool about it is: Great, [suppose] the technology is hacked. Guess what. You still have the paper record of the electorate’s choices, so if you have to, you can count the paper. The paper is the ultimate fail-safe.”
Ah, but that word: hacked. It was central to the “Stop the Steal” movement. Is hacking these machines even possible? Here, Trowbridge points to an article that ran in the January 1990 issue of Spy magazine titled “Is There a Santa Claus?” In it, Richard Waller examined the logistics of Santa’s around-the-world Christmas Eve mission and enumerated in five points how the physics would render the task utterly impossible. Though its ultimate conclusion wasn’t exactly revelatory, the tongue-in-cheek piece did illustrate just how wide the chasm is between childlike naïveté and the ability to absorb the realistic limitations of what’s conceivable, even when granting such magical possibilities as flying reindeer.
The conviction that it is possible to perpetrate widespread fraud on paper-based voting machines requires a similar suspension of disbelief, according to Trowbridge. ClearCast machines are not connected to the internet — there is only an electrical cord running from the back, no different from a vacuum cleaner’s — so tampering cannot be perpetrated via a remote server; it would have to occur at the voting site.
Even before they are shipped from their manufacturing facility in New Hampshire to voting precincts, ClearCast machines are tested and packed with a taped seal indicating an inventory number. Each unit has three seals on the case, and three on the devices inside the case. If a scanner needs to be cleaned, a team of Republican and Democratic monitors from the precinct will watch Trowbridge or a colleague closely “to make sure
lear Ballot’s machines are certified in fourteen
that I’m not doing anything bad.” If a seal needs to be broken, the monitors will ensure the inventory number matches the one they have in their log book.
“And then, when I’m done doing the servicing,” he says, “they’ll close it back up and they’ll reseal it with a new seal, and in their log book, they’ll put the new inventory control number for that.”
Once ballots are fed into the machine to be scanned, data is stored on three redundant drives, including two fixed USBs. Anything done on the devices by a poll worker is logged by a recording device not unlike the black box on a jet.
In Cleveland, where Trowbridge spent the final days of the campaign, about 1,200 Clear Ballot devices are employed, with each of those used by anywhere from 500 to 2,000 voters, with their votes tabulated and reported as election night results. But even as vote totals are being reported, those paper ballots are sent to a heavily secured central office to be retabulated on high-volume scanners with completely different hardware from different manufacturers, running different software.
“They’re rescanning every ballot,’ says Trowbridge, adding that these will become the official results of that district’s election. So, even if a malefactor somehow managed to corrupt the
underscore just how unlikely this is — it’s just one machine that cannot “talk” to any others. Unless the hypothetical wrongdoer could also somehow manage to hack the central count system, the discrepancy will be obvious. And all of this is before any auditing takes place.
“They’ll know that because they’ll be able to compare the results from what happened at the precinct with what happened in the central tabulation,” he explains, adding that random samples are also reviewed by hand to avoid incongruities with the electronic outcomes. “And that’s just the start of it. The amount of checks in the system, it’s just astounding.”
It’s important to remember that even if a malefactor somehow managed to hack a scanner, it would alter the results of just a solitary voting machine out of the thousands some districts use. It’s not the sort of fraud anyone could reasonably call “widespread.”
Trowbridge says small-scale abuses — filling out a ballot and casting a vote for a recently deceased spouse, for instance — are easily spotted because of monitors at drop boxes. Larger plots, such as ballot-stuffing, also fail because even if precinct monitors implausibly do not spot the offense in progress, the vote counts will not be reconcilable. Even then, all Election Day ballots are coded as such. Vote-by-mail ballots carry a different code recognizable by poll workers and the scanners.
“Someone would have to take a ballot out of that location that day, take it off to a printer, get it printed, and then run back, and then stuff the ballots in,” he explains. “So, you couldn’t take an online sample ballot or an absentee ballot that got mailed to you and make photocopies of it. That just wouldn’t work.”
His work with Clear Ballot has taken Trowbridge from the Pacific Northwest to his old middle school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — on his very first site visit — and it all assures him that the integrity of America’s most cherished institution remains intact.
“I would never say anything is absolutely perfect, but we use the Swiss cheese metaphor,” he says. “If you have one layer of Swiss cheese, yeah, it has holes in it, but if you put another piece of Swiss cheese on, the holes don’t line up. And when you add fifty pieces of Swiss cheese, it’s like a wall.”
Though extremely effective and efficient, ClearCast ballot scanners are remarkably low-tech, with no internet or networking capabilities, which makes remote hacking impossible.
Meet Brandon
A retired captain in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves once deployed to Afghanistan, Brandon Drew Shields ’03 is no stranger to poise under pressure. But his winning appearance on Wheel of Fortune during Veterans Week was his first time appearing in that situation. Not surprisingly, he was tactical. “My goal was to win the prize puzzle,” Brandon says. “I knew if I won that, there’s a good chance I could go to the bonus round.” A longtime “Wheel Watcher,” Brandon looks to solve for words before the letters are presented based on category and the number of spaces, a knack he attributes to his English teachers, who instilled a love of the language in him. “When I got to the bonus round, it was pure adrenaline!” he says. “I called my letters, and they all showed up. I knew the puzzle, solved, and then we all celebrated.” Grateful to win, Brandon’s real thrill was seeing his son interviewed by hosts Ryan Seacrest and Vanna White during the show’s last segment. “That never happens,” he says. “Being on the show was a dream come true.”
Celebrating our community’s support of Lawrenceville
Lawrenceville recognizes its donors through a variety of giving societies intended to celebrate, connect, and engage our generous community.
1810 Loyalty Society
Founded to honor our most loyal donors, this society recognizes donors who have made a gift to Lawrenceville, at any level, for three or more consecutive years, and those who have made a multi-year gift commitment.
The 1988 Society
Established to recognize, connect, and engage the School’s most outstanding alumnae donors. Membership is conferred by lifetime giving totals to Lawrenceville.
The John Cleve Green Society
Participation in any of Lawrenceville’s planned giving programs — including bequests, life income arrangements, and other deferred gifts — automatically qualifies donors for membership in the John Cleve Green Society.
The Red & Black Leadership Society
Annual Membership in the Red & Black Leadership Society begins at $2,500 with special provisions for Lawrenceville’s young alumni. A leadership gift to The Lawrenceville Fund each year is one of the most significant declarations you can make of your commitment to Lawrenceville’s mission.
Since 1931, The Lawrenceville Fund has been a vital source of momentum for Lawrenceville, and the primary means for all alumni, parents, and friends to help sustain the distinctive features that make Lawrenceville special. The success of The Lawrenceville Fund reflects a spirit of shared experience and mutual encouragement, as each generation of Lawrentians preserves the legacy of opportunity it received, strengthens it, and passes it on. The Lawrenceville Fund is the School’s highest philanthropic priority.
The Sixth Form
Founded to honor Lawrenceville’s most generous donors. Composed of alumni, parents, and friends, membership is conferred by lifetime giving totals to Lawrenceville.
For more information on Lawrenceville’s giving societies, scan QR or email tlf@lawrenceville.org.
Fair to Fowl
Conservationist Ray Holland, Class of 1904, was a fierce advocate for migratory birds and the force behind the Postal Service’s still popular duck stamp.
BY Sarah Mezzino
In his 1946 book Now Listen, Warden, the Class of 1904’s Ray P. Holland related this paraphrased anecdote:
A United States Game Warden is journeying by train through the American Midwest during the 1920s. He sits next to a traveling salesman and strikes up a conversation without ever properly introducing himself. The salesman is a skilled talker and lightly touches upon several polite topics including sporting life. In turn, the warden asks the salesman if he’s ever hunted duck. The salesman replies that he just had a marvelous weekend mallard shooting in the town adjacent to the train’s original station. The warden then introduces himself and relays that it’s not duck season and hunting is illegal this time of year. The warden then asks for the salesman’s name. The salesman responds,“I’m the biggest damn liar this side of the Mississippi!”
Raymond Prunty Holland collected and documented dozens of tales similar to this during his career as both a district inspector and U.S. game warden for the Midwest and the editor of Field & Stream magazine. Although many of Holland’s stories are humorous, they record the reality of enforcing early wildlife conservation and management laws. Like his contemporary, Aldo Leopold, Class of 1905, Holland’s lifelong interest in hunting, fishing, camping, and hiking led him into an occupation that was just taking shape
This artwork by famed cartoonist and noted conservationist Jay N. “Ding” Darling graced the first Federal Duck Stamp in 1934. Darling was the chief of the Biological Survey, a precursor of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, from 1934-36.
within the country. But unlike Leopold, Holland’s impact on the field is often overlooked despite his fervent advocacy for migratory birds.
By the time he became a U.S game warden in 1914, Holland was already an established freelance writer and photographer stationed in his hometown of Atchison, Kansas, nestled alongside the Missouri River. In fact, Holland began freelancing by submitting a paper he wrote as a Lawrenceville student to Sports Afield magazine. His flexible schedule allowed Holland to trek through the wilderness and engage in sporting life, which was the overarching subject for all of his written pieces. He quickly observed, however, that both “game hogs” and “market hunters” were rapidly depleting waterfowl populations through mass slaughter. At first, Holland drafted articles urging sportsmen to try “his way of spring shooting,” which eschewed riflery and supported the use of Kodak cameras to capture images of waterfowl. But when the Migratory Bird Protection Act of 1913 was passed by Congress, Holland began to lobby congressmen via telegram to support appropriations to enforce the law.
As a U.S. game warden, Holland took a holistic approach to enforcing wildlife conservation and management laws within his assigned Midwestern territory, publishing articles and humorous tales to advocate for game and presenting lectures to hunting clubs.
As he spoke for the rights of migratory birds and other local fauna, the constitutionality of the Protection Act of 1913 was being questioned by numerous Midwestern states, many of which argued the Constitution’s Commerce Clause was not a valid foundation for national waterfowl regulations. To combat this notion, an international treaty with Canada was proposed and implemented as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. A year later, Holland was forced to legally test the constitutional power and extent of the treaty.
During the spring of 1919, Holland arrested several men — including the state attorney general of Missouri, Frank W. McAllister — for hunting ducks in the offseason. Although McAllister initially tried to retaliate during his arraignment by having Holland arrested for possessing wild ducks without a state hunting license — a charge eventually dropped — the state of Missouri ultimately claimed that Holland’s arrests were unconstitutional. The treaty was upheld in the lower courts but Missouri appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On April 20, 1920, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Holland in Missouri v. Holland. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s statement identified the constitutionality of both the
Migratory Bird Protection Act of 1913 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. It was also determined by the court that migratory birds do not claim permanent homes within a state’s boundaries and are therefore not property of the state. The ruling was an achievement for the wildlife conservation movement and for Holland’s career.
Three months after the Supreme Court ruling, Holland published an article in the July 1920 issue of Field & Stream magazine proposing the creation of a fifty-cent “duck stamp” attached to hunting licenses that would allow the licensee to shoot migratory waterfowl. In essence, the stamp would act as a federal hunting permit issued by the Department of Agriculture that would generate revenue to fund migratory bird refuges.
By 1922, the “duck stamp” initiative was backed by Dr. Edward H. Nelson of the U.S. Biological Survey (the precursor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) and proposed to Congress as “The Public Shooting Grounds Bill.” Widespread opposition to the bill — including from Aldo Leopold — claimed the proposed refuges would become federally operated hunting grounds that would not foster the population growth of migratory birds.
Congress vetoed the bill, but Holland and his colleagues would persevere. Holland became editor of Field & Stream magazine in 1924 and used his position to continue his advocacy for waterfowl, but it was the Dust Bowl that helped prompt the creation of the Duck Stamp Act in 1934. Droughts in the American Midwest caused migratory bird breeding grounds to dissipate, but hunters continued to massacre fowl, decimating the population and forcing federal intervention. Holland’s vision for migratory waterfowl came to fruition fourteen years after he began campaigning for its creation.
After resigning from Field & Stream in 1941, Holland drafted numerous articles during the postwar period for popular publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, and published several books. Holland helped to revitalize the American Game Protective Association after thirty years of dormancy in 1958 and, as its president, helped to establish game refuges throughout the Midwest during the 1960s. Holland leaves a legacy of wildlife advocacy that few can rival but all can be inspired to achieve.
Sarah Mezzino is the curator of decorative arts and design for The Stephan Archives. This article was inspired by research conducted for the exhibit “Canceled Culture: First Day Covers and Historic American Stamps,” on display in Bunn Library through 2026.
Longtime editor Ray P. Holland, Class of 1904, was remembered in the pages of Field & Stream following his death in 1973.
Our Common Bond
No matter how different our individual experiences were, we are linked through Lawrenceville. Let’s celebrate that.
By Heather Elliott Hoover ’91 P’20 ’23 ’24
The Lawrenceville Alumni Association has existed for as long as alums have returned to gather at their alma mater, beginning in the middle of the 19th century. It has always played a vital role at the School. The Association Constitution defines our role as such: “To advance the interests and to promote the welfare of The Lawrenceville School and its alumni and to foster close relations among them.”
As we continually focus on this purpose, we recently voted to amend the bylaws to change the name of the leadership of the Association from the Alumni Association Executive Committee, or AAEC, to the Alumni Council. This name change is intended to increase awareness of our leadership team among both the alumni body and the School leadership. Additionally, the new name is tied more clearly to our mission.
As I am in my last year as president of the Alumni Council, I want to acknowledge our team and their incredible commitment the Lawrenceville Alumni. We are twelve Lawrentians who represent a span of graduation years, geography, and perspectives. We live all over the country and the globe, and we bring varying perspectives to all areas of our work focusing on Alumni engagement. I am incredibly proud of the time and energy that our team volunteers to Lawrenceville. These dedicated leaders are listed below.
The conclusion of my eight years as a member of the Alumni Council has allowed me to reflect on what I value most as a Lawrenceville alumna, which is our connection.
It does not matter when you graduated or where you traveled from to attend Lawrenceville. What is important about Lawrenceville is the same for each of us. We left Lawrenceville as better versions of ourselves thanks to housemates who supported us, teachers who passionately shared their knowledge, and coaches who pushed us to be our best. No matter how different our individual experiences were while here, Lawrenceville is our common bond and it should be celebrated.
On behalf of the Alumni Council, we encourage you to celebrate that connection by attending Reunions, as well as Lawrenceville events near your home, or virtual events. You can also contribute to class notes, and volunteer your time to your class either through reunion planning or other volunteer roles. Be an engaged member of our amazing and historic Alumni Association. Go Big Red!.
Heather Elliott Hoover ’91 P’20 ’23 ’24 is concluding her term as president of the Lawrenceville Alumni Association.
ALUMNI COUNCIL
Officers
Heather Elliott Hoover ’91 P’20 ’23 ’24, President
Greg G. Melconian ’87 P’25 ’27, First Vice President
Emily Wilson Elipas ’05, Second Vice President
Committee Members
Katherine Minton Aisner ’95
Sophia Caronello ’92
2024-25
Johanne Soeun Chu ’10
Dwight Draughon ’04
Barry Gonzalez ’82
Alex Iannaccone ’04
Michael Kasperzak ’72
Marcus Montenecourt ’87 P’26 ’26
Meera Nathan ’90 P’24 ’24
Faculty Representative
Kris Schulte H’92 P’15
Current Alumni Association President Elliott Hoover ’91 P’20 ’23 ’24 enjoyed Alumni Reunion Weekend with her immediate predecessor, Charlie Keller ’95.
Moment of Illumination
Perhaps it’s fitting that the aurora borealis revealed itself most vividly over Bunn Library, already a center of brilliance, on the evening of October 11.
Photo by Gil Domb P’17
USPS no. 306-700
The Lawrenceville School Lawrenceville, New Jersey 08648
Parents of alumni:
If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us at contactupdates@lawrenceville.org with their new address. Thank you! May 30–June 1, 2025
alumni/reunion