Georgetown Magazine Spring 2019

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JUSTICE SERVED

Georgetown now offers full-credit classes at the D.C. Jail. It’s just one of the ways the Prisons and Justice Initiative is making an impact on mass incarceration in America.

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RAISING CHILDREN IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Children’s use of digital media presents parents with lots of questions. Meet three Georgetown researchers who are working on science-based answers.

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A GOOD LAUGH

Three noted alumni comedians—Mike Birbiglia (C’00), John Mulaney (C’04), and Jim Gaffigan (B’88)—raised more than $1 million to support first-generation Hoyas at a sold-out New York City show.

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ANGER AND ANGUISH

Georgetown’s John Carr is a leading voice on the moral crisis of sexual abuse in the Church. He talks about how to address the devastation and how to move forward.

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CANINE CAMPUS CELEBRITY

Think you know Jack the Bulldog? Read on. Spoiler alert: He wasn’t always Jack and wasn’t always a bulldog.

03 CAMPUS NEWS

36 ALUMNI NEWS AND PROFILES

50 LIVES WELL LIVED

52 THE LAST WORD

FROM THE EDITOR

One of the many great things about Georgetown is that it constantly offers inspiring stories. Every story is special, but writing about the Prisons and Justice Initiative has been a profoundly meaningful experience for me.

The initiative, now in its third year, is an energetic hub of research, education, and outreach related to mass incarceration in the United States. Last fall, three undergraduates taking a Prisons and Justice Initiative course were significant contributors in successfully overturning a 27-year-old wrongful murder conviction in New York State, a case they worked on as a course exercise.

Many faculty and staff are part of Georgetown’s involvement in the D.C. Jail. I wasn’t able to write about most of them; in fact, I am still discovering how many Georgetown people are involved.

For the first time, Georgetown is offering full-credit-bearing status through the School of Continuing Studies to people incarcerated at the D.C. Jail. Two courses were taught last fall and two more are underway now. Marc Howard, initiative director and professor of government and law, is a regular presence at the D.C. Jail, teaching mostly on his own time in addition to his regular teaching schedule. Prison justice has become Marc’s calling and passion. After helping exonerate a childhood friend wrongfully convicted of murder, he couldn’t close his eyes to the injustice he saw.

Marc invited me to attend his weekly Democracy class, and I was able to go a few times. The incarcerated students are unfailingly polite and welcoming, and their comments and questions in class are reminiscent of any classroom discussion I’ve heard. I attended the first class with some skepticism, but I was simply blown away. I am grateful to Marc, the other faculty and staff, and the students at D.C. Jail for their education. They are inspiring and have made me a more thoughtful person.

I know that people hold a lot of opinions about the criminal-justice system: who is in it, how it works, and how it should work. I don’t have any answers, but I know it needs to be better.

—Jeffrey Donahoe

Office of Advancement

R. Bartley Moore (F’87)

Vice President for Advancement

Amy Levin

Associate Vice President for Communications

Georgetown Magazine Staff

Jeffrey Donahoe, Editor

Kate Colwell, Campus News Editor

Chelsea Burwell (G’16), Alumni News Editor

Editorial Team: Omar Abubars, Chelsea Burwell (G’16), Kate Colwell, Lucy Garry Flinn (C’86), Jane Varner Malhotra, Brittany Matter, Sara Piccini, Camille Scarborough

Erin Mary Greene, Executive Creative Director for Communications

Elisa Morsch, Creative Director Phil Humnicky, University Photographer Design courtesy of Washingtonian Custom Media

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Spring 2019, Volume 50, Number 2 Georgetown Magazine (ISSN 1074-8784).

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Georgetown Researcher Partners

With NASA to Detect Alien Life

If life exists on other planets, would an Earth-bound scientist even be able to detect it? Georgetown Assistant Professor of Biology Sarah Stewart Johnson is throwing out all assumptions and building new life-detection systems with the help of nearly $7 million from NASA’s astrobiology program.

“We only have one data point: life as we know it,” says Johnson.

Johnson, who is also a visiting professor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says that great strides have been made toward understanding early rock records and exploring Mars. However, NASA needs researchers to think outside the box as it prepares to reach into the solar system with missions to the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Until now, much of Johnson’s research has focused on how best to find indicators of life in extreme Earth environments. She and her team, including undergraduates, have helicoptered into the polar deserts of Antarctica, crawled into deep caves in Idaho, set up camp in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and hiked volcanic territory in Iceland to collect samples and bring them back to her Hilltop lab.

Now Johnson is also extending into agnostic work, branching into how to detect “life as we don’t know it.” Her team is developing approaches that do not presuppose molecular frameworks familiar to Earth-bound biologists. In space, they will seek evidence of things like chemical complexity and energy transfer, using techniques designed to work regardless of underlying biochemistry.

“Time and again, as we have learned more about Mars and other destinations in our solar system, we have discovered things we couldn’t possibly have imagined,” says Johnson. “I suspect the same will be true no matter where we find life.”

Johnson never imagined she would leave her home in Kentucky, where her parents rarely crossed the state line, to become an interplanetary scientist. But as a first-year undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, she cautiously accepted an invitation to join a research team headed into the heart of the Mojave Desert to test a prototype rover for Mars. It was the most exciting thing she had ever done.

“I’m captivated by whether we’re alone against the backdrop of a vast cosmos,” says Johnson. “It feels like the deepest mystery about our existence.”

To learn more about the Johnson Biosignatures Lab, visit johnsonbiosignatureslab.com

Photo: Detlev Van Ravensway/Picture Press

‘Generation I’ Fosters Whole Selves and Vulnerabilities

For the growing number of Georgetown School of Medicine students who are the first in their families to pursue medicine, navigating the path into and through medical school can be especially challenging. The pressure to excel in competitive undergraduate coursework, score well on the MCAT, and gain admission to medical school is itself overwhelming for many. Feelings of isolation, self-doubt, and anxiety can further encumber the experience of balancing medical school demands while maintaining relationships with families and friends, passing national board exams, figuring out potential specialties, and applying for residencies.

To offer a sense of belonging for first-generation medical students, a group of students on the medical school’s Council on Diversity Affairs created a club called Generation I. This supportive network of peers and mentors welcomes first-generation students to discuss the unique challenges they face. The group defines “first generation” broadly, encompassing first-in-their-family college graduates, medical students, or residents of the United States.

When she began medical school, the group’s co-founder Wooju Kim (M’21) says she felt the need to hide her first-gen status. Students who had parents or other relatives in medicine seemed to have a leg up in terms of networking and knowledge in general, Kim says. “It became convenient to have people see me as a smart Asian student from a prestigious college, rather than them knowing about what I lack.”

The club offered a place for students like her to talk openly about their concerns.

“Once we formed the club and shared personal stories in our first meeting, I was struck by how similar we were,” says Kim. As first in their families to study medicine, many of the students share a feeling of added responsibility towards their parents to be successful, she notes. “We’re motivated by our unique position in our families to study harder and ultimately become the best doctors we can be. Excelling in medical school is a way of expressing—and living up to—the gratitude we have for our families for helping us get to this point in our lives and education.”

Kim says cura personalis , or care for the whole person, helps first-gen students, but also their future patients.

“We can reconcile this conflict between the parts of us we highlight to get into and succeed in medical school and the vulnerable parts of us we feel we have to hide,” says Kim. “We want to proudly be our whole selves, including our first-generation stories and our values, and celebrate them. Recognizing our own vulnerabilities informs our interactions with patients and helps us become better doctors.”

Photo: Lisa Helfert

The student-run Generation I at the School of Medicine is a comfortable forum for first-generation medical students to be their “whole selves.” A recent meeting included Zuby Syed (M’22), Callie Takahashi (M’20), Heng Nhoung (M’22), Kimberly Walker, director of diversity and inclusion, and Susan M. Cheng, EdLD, MPP, senior associate dean for diversity and inclusion.

‘We Have More Work to Do’: Washingtonian Magazine Honors Epidemiologist for Alleviating Health Disparities in D.C.

Washingtonian magazine named Lucile Adams-Campbell— professor of oncology and senior associate dean for community outreach and engagement at the Georgetown University Medical Center, and associate director for minority health and health disparities research at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center—a 2018 Washingtonian of the Year.

The recognition honors individuals who have made considerable contributions in the areas of health, welfare, service, and cultural richness in Washington, D.C. Adams-Campbell, who is a native and longtime resident of the District, is committed to improving the health—particularly cancer mortality rates—of Black residents. Adams-Campbell, who is the first Black woman in the U.S. to earn a doctorate in epidemiology, leads Georgetown Lombardi’s Office of Minority Health (OMH) and the Capital Breast Care Center (CBCC), where she has addressed gaps in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment among minority populations. The OMH and CBCC offices are in Southeast D.C., which has the greatest health disparities in the city; approximately 90 percent of the population there is Black. The team includes experts in cancer epidemiology, health communications, exercise physiology, and nutrition, as well as nurse practitioners and community health educators. They promote evidence-based nutrition and physical activity interventions to reduce the impact of health disparities.

More than 16,000 women throughout the greater D.C. area have received cancer screenings through the Capital Breast Care Center since 2004.

“It has been an honor and privilege to work on behalf of D.C. residents through a leading institution and with dedicated colleagues who truly embody our commitment to justice,” says Adams-Campbell.

She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the Institute of Medicine’s National Cancer Policy Forum. Adams-Campbell also directs Georgetown’s master’s program in epidemiology.

In 2015, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) awarded Adams-Campbell the Minorities in Cancer Research Jane Cooke Wright Lectureship. She is also the current chair of AACR’s Women in Cancer Research Council. As a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), Adams-Campbell reviews NHGRI’s intramural program and advises the NHGRI scientific director.

“As long as health disparities continue to impact populations in this city, we have more work to do,” Adams-Campbell says.

Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Lucile Adams-Campbell was named a 2018 Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian magazine. Adams-Campbell, a Washington native, is an expert in health disparities affecting minorities. She leads Lombardi’s Capital Breast Care Center, which promotes evidence-based nutrition and physical activity interventions to reduce the impact of health disparities.

Photo: Jeff Elkins

App Studied at Medical Center Empowers Women’s Fertility Planning

The Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University Medical Center has completed an efficacy study of a new fertilityawareness app called Dot. Developed by Cycle Technologies, Dot uses algorithms to determine the probability of pregnancy on each menstrual-cycle day and gives women a clear picture of their fertility status. The app sends users evidence-based predictions for upcoming menstrual cycles, information about ovulation and likelihood of pregnancy, and alerts about changing cycle length.

“The great benefit of this app is that it’s very easy to use and understand, and at the same time, it’s effective,” says Victoria Jennings, principal investigator of the Dot-efficacy study and director of the Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH).

Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development under the Fertility Awareness for Communication Transformation Project, IRH conducted a study of the Dot app to assess efficacy and improve user experience. Based on the study’s findings and results of the exit survey, Dot is comparable to other methods of family planning, and study participants say they highly recommended it. However, Dot’s interface puts it ahead of other menstrual-cycle tracking apps by providing evidencebased information that women can use to achieve fertility goals.

Upon setting up their profiles, users are asked how they would like to use the app: to prevent a pregnancy, plan a pregnancy, or simply track periods.

“Dot performs three basic functions that can essentially help three different women, or even a woman at different stages in her life,” explains Jennings. “The app’s versatile approach comes by providing messaging and alerts based on the user’s personal profile. It has proven to be really empowering, not only because it gives women a natural method of family planning and provides them with a wealth of knowledge about their bodies, but it also encourages them to have open conversations about their reproductive health.”

Dot also includes a feature allowing users to share their fertility status with their partners, which, according to study participants, promotes healthy conversations about reproductive health and family planning. By inputting information manually, users can also log notes daily, such as symptoms, mood, and sexual activity. “I wanted an app to better track and manage my cycle,” wrote one participant from the efficacy study. “Dot has helped me take control of my body and know myself better.”

The Institute for Reproductive Health conducted a study of Dot, a new fertility-awareness app, to assess efficacy and improve user experience. “The great benefit of this app is that it’s very easy to use and understand, and at the same time, it’s effective,” says Victoria Jennings, principal investigator of the Dot efficacy study and director of the institute.

Endogenous Protein May be Used to Reverse Metabolic Disorders

A study of obese mice by a Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center research team has found a natural protein to be a powerful regulator in metabolism. The study, published in Scientific Report s, found that the forced expression of the protein through eight treatments over 18 days reduced the weight gain of obese mice by more than a third.

The protein, known as the fibroblast growth factor binding protein (FGFBP3 or BP3 for short), could play a pivotal role in reversing metabolic disorders, such as Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease. BP3’s ability to modulate metabolism of cells in the body poses the potential to reverse fat accumulation in the liver, says the six-year study’s senior investigator, Anton Wellstein, a professor of oncology and pharmacology at Lombardi.

“It was quite striking to look at the fat composition in the animals that received the treatment,” said Wellstein. “You could feel the weight difference in the animals when you picked them up.” The change was also evident when the mouse livers were examined through a microscope.

The BP3 research falls under the umbrella of the Wellstein lab studies of FGF growth-factor proteins, particularly those that stimulate cancer growth. These types of proteins regulate cell growth, wound healing, and cell metabolism.

“Cell growth and maintenance needs metabolism, and when metabolism goes the wrong way, then you get a disease from it, like diabetes, which damages many organs and may cause blindness,” Wellstein says.

The study is a work in progress; Wellstein’s team is busy seeking a commercial partner that can produce the protein to the FDAquality standards and in amounts required for human studies. He aims to see whether the treatment works as predicted in clinical trials and evaluate the protein’s mechanism of action in clinical studies.

Wellstein views metabolic disease as an “emerging global threat to human health.” According to the World Health Organization, obesity has nearly tripled since 1975 across all ages, while the American Diabetes Association says that people of color have a higher risk for Type 2 diabetes. Diabetes also hits lowincome communities harder than most: A GoodRx analysis found that the cost of insulin has increased 64 percent since January 2014. Wellstein hopes to find an approach that will diminish the negative impacts of the disease.

METABOLIC SYNDROME DISORDERS REVERSIBLE BY AN ENDOGENOUS PROTEIN

In a surprise finding, a natural protein Georgetown researchers investigated for its possible role in cancer turned out to be a powerful regulator of metabolism in mice. Eight BP3 treatments over 18 days reduced the fat in obese mice by more than a third. The study suggests potential therapy to reverse metabolic syndrome disorders.

An Innovative Way to Engage Students?

The “ding-ding” of a dome-shaped bell rings out in a basement classroom at the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies (SCS). Someone has an answer.

Professor Maria Trujillo came up with a fresh idea for educating at SCS while watching her husband and his daughter jockey to be the first to answer questions while viewing the TV game show Jeopardy! As faculty director and associate professor of the practice for the Systems Engineering Management and Technology Management graduate programs at SCS, Trujillo wondered: Could she channel the speed, competition, and a strong knowledge base of these game show participants into making an interactive education tool for graduate students? She decided to play-test it with her family, and then bring it to SCS.

Trujillo’s Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) class focuses on big-picture questions relevant to international development and its history: Why do some countries lag in development? How do you measure success?

“I design my courses around questions, not textbooks,” Trujillo says. “What says questions better than Jeopardy! ?”

With more than 25 years of experience in the applications of technology in international development, Trujillo knows that textbooks cannot provide all the answers in a rapidly changing world. So she devotes the last 30 minutes of her weekly 90-minute class to interactive exercises that test the students’ mastery of content in real time.

What is Jeopardy! Style?

In Trujillo’s low-budget version of Jeopardy!, answers come directly from textbook readings, PowerPoint slides create the game board, Post-it notes cover cells already used, and the scoresheet is paper. Student contestants make selections from content-specific categories relevant to course materials, ring in, and give their response—always in the form of a question, of course. Like game show contestants, they aim to ring in first, provide the correct response, and rack up the most points—but in this case for grades.

The majority of Trujillo’s students are non-traditional learners, most of them older, working professionals.

“Our students are open to different ways of learning,” she says. “In fact, they expect it.”

“The interactive nature of the game format helped me to retain knowledge and reinforce class learning,” says Trujillo’s former student Christopher Ajiri (G’17), who is now senior risk manager of enterprise data management at Capital One. “It is very helpful to visualize how topics fit into a bigger category.”

Ajiri says even his most reserved classmates came out of their shells during the game. “For some, their competitive nature took over,” Trujillo adds.

But unlike on television, in this game everyone goes home a winner.

Professor and Former Student Develop ‘23andMe’ for Mosquitoes

Georgetown biology professor Peter Armbruster and a former student, Jacob Crawford (C’03), reunited through a $2-million NIH research grant to control disease-carrying mosquitoes. As an undergraduate, Crawford worked in Armbruster’s lab, and they have kept in touch ever since.

“Jacob represents everything I love about working with Georgetown undergraduates,” Armbruster says. “The students here are really bright, motivated, and fun to work with. The close-knit nature of the university made it easy for Jacob and me to connect and keep in touch for all these years.”

After graduating from Georgetown, Crawford went on to earn his Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University in 2012. He now works on next-generation mosquito-control technologies for Verily, a subsidiary of Google focused on addressing global health challenges. Crawford and Armbruster reconnected in person at an arthropod genomics conference, where they talked about overlapping interests and their desire to work together again. Armbruster’s NIH grant helped make that possible.

“Working in Peter’s lab was a great experience,” says Crawford. “He was a excellent mentor and we got along very well, which helped foster a long-term relationship. That’s something I think Georgetown professors are particularly good at.”

Together they research the Asian tiger mosquito, a daytimebiting insect capable of transmitting many dangerous diseases, including Zika virus, West Nile virus, and dengue fever. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this mosquito has quickly become a serious public health risk for nearly 40 percent of the world.

“We want to understand how this mosquito adapts to different climatic environments across its worldwide range,” says Armbruster.

The genetic data that Armbruster and Crawford are collecting will allow them to develop tools that will help researchers determine the genetic composition of individual mosquitoes or populations of mosquitoes.

“One of the tools we’re developing is going to allow us to perform analyses similar to 23andMe—but for mosquitoes,” Armbruster says. “This will allow us to use genetics to rapidly determine the geographic origin of new invasive populations and relate that to ecological adaptations and the ability to transmit pathogens.”

Eggs of Aedes albopictus are desiccation resistant and can be stored on dry paper towels (left). A research focus in Peter Armbruster's lab is to understand the physiological adaptations that allow eggs to survive winter conditions in temperate regions of the species distribution.

School of Foreign Service Marks 100 Years of Global Service

In the aftermath of World War I, the United States emerged as both a military and economic power. “This critical moment in world history inspired the creation of the first U.S. school of international affairs,” says Joel Hellman, dean of the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Founded by Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., in 1919, SFS was, in fact, named and created six years before the establishment of the U.S. Foreign Service. It initially focused as much on commerce as on diplomacy, but in the 1950s, the business program broke off and became what is now the McDonough School of Business.

designed to honor its “century of service” and to focus on how the school remains central to critical global conversations.

“One hundred years later, the world is again questioning longheld assumptions about the relationships between nations and cultures,” Hellman says. “SFS is here as an essential forum for these discussions and an institution promoting values of international cooperation and understanding that lead to peace and prosperity.”

SFS has already begun bringing in Centennial Fellows—such as retired General Wesley Clark, retired Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis, and author Azar Nafisi—to work with students. Additionally, in 2018 the school launched the Lloyd George Centennial Lecture Series on the Future of the World Order.

With programs at the undergraduate and master’s levels, SFS has consistently been top-ranked by Foreign Policy for creating world leaders in the private sector as well as in public service.

During the 2019–2020 academic year, SFS will mark its centennial with a series of celebrations, lectures, performances, and events

Celebrations on campus and around the world will also mark the centennial year, the most prominent of which will take place on campus November 15-16, 2019, featuring a performance of the play My Report to the World , honoring SFS professor Jan Karski, starring Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn. Additional programming will include panels and addresses on world affairs featuring leading alumni, and a gala dinner at the National Building Museum. In March 2020, SFS will host the ultimate Diplomatic Ball—a beloved annual student tradition—honoring generations of SFS-educated diplomats.

Keep up-to-date at sfs.georgetown.edu/sfs-100

Photo: Sidney R. Bayne

In addition to its campus role, the School of Foreign Service, which turns 100 this year, was an educational resource to the the U.S. armed forces. A handwritten note on the back of this photo, dated January 1945, reads “Father Walsh lecturing on Geopolitics.”

The world is again questioning long-held assumptions about the relationships between nations and cultures.

Law Center Partners with Ward 7 to Build Climate Resilience

Georgetown Law’s Climate Center works to help state and local governments prepare for the impacts of climate disruption. Now the center’s Adaptation Program has been recognized for its innovative local partnership with residents of Washington, D.C.’s Ward 7, a community with few climate policy resources, to address current climate challenges.

“We’re starting to see changes in weather and precipitation,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center and professor from practice. “We’ve seen heat waves, along with heavy rains contributing to accidents and flooding. This is becoming the new normal, and we need to try and get ahead of it.”

To pinpoint climate challenges facing local communities and brainstorm scalable solutions for climate resilience, the center worked with the District government to facilitate a community-driven planning process in neighborhoods in Northeast Washington that were identified as “frontline communities” facing the greatest climate risk relative to other parts of D.C. Historic underinvestment has left Ward 7—situated east of the Anacostia River—with poor storm drainage, leading to polluting and dangerous street flooding during rainstorms. Ward 7 communities face systemic inequalities of low income, high unemployment, high crime, and disenfranchisement, all of which make them more vulnerable to the effects of rising temperatures and extreme weather events.

The project launched in November 2017. To attract local expertise, the center reached out to community leaders, distributed flyers, and held evening information sessions with free food and childcare. Thirteen individuals were selected who were representative of the community population—young people, multigenerational residents, new residents, renters, homeowners, and business leaders of racial and generational diversity. This team became known as the Equity Advisory Group, or EAG for short.

“The people most affected by climate change should have a seat at the table to decide what resilience will look like in their own communities,” says Program Director Jessica Grannis.

EAG members were paid living-wage stipends to work together for two hours once a month. The EAG swiftly identified community pain points; analyzed how racial justice, community health, and climate justice connect; and generated intersectional solutions. At a public meeting in September 2018, the EAG presented its recommendations, which included developing workforce opportunities that will lead to gainful employment in the resilience economy and building “resilience hubs,” places that can maintain electrical power and emergency services even during disaster events.

“ One big gap identified by the EAG is that people east of the river don’t have access to emergency-response services, cooling centers, or health services,” says Grannis. “This group wanted to make sure there was at least one place in Ward 7 to go in the event of a power outage to charge your phone, get emergency information, and meet your healthcare needs.”

EAG members have continued to apply lessons from the adaptation-planning process to workforce development and community education. After receiving a Climate and Energy Leadership Award from the Metropolitan Council of Governments in October for its work with the EAG, the Climate Center remains in touch with the EAG to discuss how to work with the D.C. government to implement solutions.

The Georgetown Climate Center relies on the support of foundations and donors. To learn how you can help, visit georgetownclimate.org

WARD 7

JUSTICE SERVED

The Prisons and Justice Initiative is changing the narrative about mass incarceration.

by JEFFREY DONAHOE

Photos: Lisa Helfert

across the

help.

At the front of the room, Howard nimbly directs the class, drawing out the quieter students, turning on a dime to respond to comments about Brexit, the administration, and the problems inherent in global economies.

“I want a lot of discussion here,” says Howard, professor of government and law. “These topics are fiercely debated within American foreign-policy circles, and we need to find new solutions.”

The 90-minute class moves at a good pace. The students are hungry to learn and arrive in class with heavily marked-up copies of the assigned readings. It’s two weeks after Howard returned their midterm exams—still taken with bluebooks— and the final exam is already on their minds.

Despite these typical concerns, these are no ordinary Georgetown students. Clad in orange jumpsuits and watched by guards, the students in this section of the Democracy course are incarcerated at the District of Columbia Jail in Southeast Washington, where the class is taught in a plain room with bars at the window. It’s the same course and syllabus that Howard has taught on Main Campus. This past fall, for the first time, the students at the jail earned the same Georgetown credits.

‘Society is Missing Out’

The Georgetown Prison Scholars Program at the D.C. Jail, as the program is formally known, is part of the Prisons and Justice Initiative (PJI), which Howard directs. The threeyear-old initiative sponsors research, coursework, and public events with the goal of establishing a national platform to address the issue of mass incarceration. PJI also works directly with the incarcerated and those leaving the prison system to provide education and support.

Howard’s current academic emphasis on criminal justice is something of a “second career” at Georgetown; he was hired as a comparative-politics specialist working on issues

Photo: The Washington Post, Lucian Perkins

The eight students in Professor Marc Howard’s Democracy class are getting assertive with their arguments about the role of U.S. development assistance abroad. They are almost equally divided. One student insists on the importance of building relationships that the U.S. can draw on in the future. A student

seminar-style rectangle of tables is vocal that if countries don’t want our help—or don’t even want democracy—the U.S. should stay out. Others think the U.S. should wait to be invited to

of democracy and democratization around the world. His latest book, Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism (Oxford 2017), shows that not only does the U.S. incarcerate people at rates seven to ten times higher than other comparable democracies, it also locks them away under conditions that are brutal and inhumane.

“These are human beings who may have made mistakes or perhaps been wrongfully convicted but who, in any case, deserve our compassion, deserve our support, and deserve recognition of their humanity,” Howard says.

“We are failing incarcerated people,” says Aliyah Graves-Brown (C’17), PJI’s program coordinator. “We are missing out on really incredible people who made mistakes, but who recognize their mistakes and are now different people,” she says.

As an undergraduate, Graves-Brown was introduced to PJI through Howard’s two courses, Prison and Punishment and Prison Reform Project. A precursor to the D.C. Jail program, the all-volunteer Prison Reform Project took place at Jessup Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Maryland. At Jessup, Georgetown students and incarcerated persons taking the class did equal work to create three sets of policy briefs on criminal-justice reform.

“It completely changed my life,” says Graves-Brown. “It gave me what I wanted to do—what I was meant to do.”

In addition to the for-credit and noncredit courses, Georgetown faculty and students lead a lecture series and music and debate programs. “People at Georgetown are understanding how important a problem this is,” says Joshua Miller, director of education at PJI. “Something is happening at Georgetown—something’s in the water now.”

College Credit

By offering credit-bearing courses, Georgetown is providing a model for how universities can contribute to criminal-justice reform.

“Prison education programs can channel the abilities of incarcerated people and prepare them for successful reintegration as productive members of society,” Howard says. “It’s a no-brainer—it costs very little, and it will make our country both safer and morally better.”

“Working with incarcerated students is really exciting,” says Miller, who teaches in the philosophy department at Georgetown and is in his fourth prison education position.

After moving on from Maryland’s Jessup Correctional Institution, Howard and Miller found an enthusiastic partner in the D.C. Department of Corrections (DOC) and launched a successful pilot program with noncredit courses in spring 2018.

Two credit-bearing courses—Howard’s Democracy class and Introduction to Philosophy, taught by Professor Judith Lichtenberg—were introduced last fall, followed by two more this spring. Between the credit and noncredit courses, Georgetown is teaching about 50 incarcerated students each semester.

Howard refers to the jail, only partly in jest, as “Georgetown’s southeast campus.” He hopes that, with further donor support and resources, the program will grow and expand. Eventually he would like to be able to provide a full semester’s worth of courses for twice the number of students and to open new “campuses” in other D.C.-area prisons.

“Programs like ours can thrive anywhere,” Howard says, “because our country has built countless concrete boxes with metal cages that are filled with human beings whose talents and lives are being wasted.”

Professor Marc Howard, director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative, is one of several faculty members teaching incarcerated students in a new program at D.C. Jail. Howard previously taught for several years at the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland, where he also brought Georgetown students inside for a mixed class (on the cover and top photo, facing page). All other photos taken at the D.C. Jail, fall semester 2018.

Interior Freedom

The students at the D.C. Jail are enrolled as Georgetown nondegree students through the School of Continuing Studies. They all have either high-school diplomas or GEDs and completed a competitive admissions process. The D.C. Jail program is the only prison-education program in the country that allows men and women to be in class together.

Georgetown faculty teach as close to the standard of Main Campus courses as possible, even though time and movement in jail are under no one’s complete control. Anything, from a student’s lawyer’s visit to a facility-wide lockdown, can change the weekly class structure. Last fall, the cohort shrank when two students were transferred into the federal prison system.

Crime and Punishment is one of the courses that philosophy professor Judith Lichtenberg teaches at Georgetown, so it’s no surprise that she chose to teach in the corrections system. On the Main Campus and at the D.C. Jail, Lichtenberg’s class introduces students to classic works in philosophy. Socrates’s Credo, which deals with his trial and imprisonment, strikes a chord with the incarcerated students. “They admire his integrity,” she says.

Her classes are discussion-based, “which is how philosophy is taught,” Lichtenberg says. But it’s also because there’s no Internet access in the jail classroom. “It’s liberating in a way,” Lichtenberg says.

“They say some amazingly insightful things,” she says of her students at the D.C. Jail. “The students here have things to teach that are different and enormously rich.”

“When I am in class, when I am reading for class, and being respected in class, I know that I am as free as any man in the outside world,” says student Momolu Stewart, who has been incarcerated for 22 of his 38 years. He is in the D.C. jail awaiting a possible release this spring.

“To have professors believe in me and to treat me like a Georgetown student on campus is changing my life,” he says.

Making an Exoneree

Georgetown made international news last September when three undergraduates helped to overturn a wrongful conviction. They were in PJI’s Making an Exoneree course, co-taught by Howard and Marty Tankleff, Georgetown adjunct professor and himself an exoneree.

Students Julia Fragonas, Naoya Johnson, and Isobella Goonetillake (C’18) investigated the case of Valentino Dixon of Buffalo, New York, who was in the 27th year of a 38.5-years-to-life sentence for murder. The case was one of four potential wrongful convictions the class of 16 undergraduates reinvestigated and sought to exonerate.

Fragonas, Goonetillake, and Johnson interviewed witnesses, experts, and Dixon’s original prosecutor and public defender. The students’ discovery work showed that the prosecutor had never revealed to Dixon’s defense attorney that a gunpowder test on Dixon’s clothes had come back negative, a major violation in the original trial. Howard says this evidence, compounded by the fact that another man had confessed to the murder several times, helped convince the current district attorney to reconsider Dixon’s case.

Now a free man, Dixon spoke in Gaston Hall last November and was joined on stage by the students and faculty who worked on his case and others who brought Dixon’s story into the public eye.

“Georgetown students made me a believer that anything is possible—and that justice can be done,” Dixon said.

“Speaking to Valentino on a weekly basis, establishing a relationship with his family, and being able to interview the prosecutors and defense team for this case has opened my eyes to the impact that students passionate about prison reform can have on the life of a wrongly convicted man,” says Goonetillake.

The theme of exoneration is the genesis of Howard’s commitment to prison justice, his sense of calling. He and his co-teacher Tankleff are childhood friends—they first met at the age of three at Lovey-Dovey House Preschool on Long Island. On the first day of their senior year of high school, Tankleff’s parents were murdered. Tankleff was convicted and received a 50-years-to-life prison sentence.

Although convinced that Tankleff was innocent, Howard moved on with his life—college, graduate school, teaching at Georgetown. Then, a decade into Tankleff’s sentence, Howard began writing to and visiting his old friend, promising to fight for Tankleff’s freedom; Howard even made plans to attend Georgetown Law. Just before he started, Tankleff was exonerated and released. Despite this good news, Howard stuck with his plans: “My eyes had been opened to injustice, and I couldn’t close them again.” He enrolled at Georgetown Law while still teaching fulltime, shifted his teaching and research to focus almost exclusively on criminal justice and prison reform, and finished his J.D. in 2011.

Returning Citizens

Howard is quick to point out that although exonerating innocent people is a critical and rewarding component of his work, it sits within a broader goal of addressing the crisis of mass incarceration. This includes providing support and opportunities for “returning citizens,” the term for people reentering society after incarceration. Less than two weeks after Dixon spoke in Gaston Hall last November, Georgetown launched the Pivot Program, a noncredit certificate in business and entrepreneurship created specifically for returning citizens.

The Pivot Program is a McDonough School of Business program with the College. Classes take place at Georgetown’s downtown campus. The program consists of a year of academic work and supported employment. D.C.’s Department of Employment Services partnered to create the program, which is partly funded by a federal grant from the Minority Business Development Agency of the Department of Commerce.

Georgetown has also joined forces with the D.C. Mayor’s Office on Returning Citizen Affairs (MORCA) to offer the Paralegal Fellowship Program, which graduated its inaugural class in

January. At graduation, eight out of the nine graduates had been hired into full-pay/full-benefit, one-year paralegal fellowships at major law firms and legal organizations in the D.C. area.

MORCA is directed by Brian Ferguson (C’18). Before attending Georgetown, he had been wrongfully convicted of homicide and served 11 years of a life-without-parole sentence. Ferguson will be leaving MORCA this year to study comparative social policy at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, one of only 48 students in the nation to receive the award.

Human Transformation

It’s less than a week before Christmas, and the students from the credit and noncredit courses, many family members, and Georgetown faculty gather in the large multi-purpose room at the D.C. Jail for an end-of-semester celebration. It starts late due to “movement” problems that slow down the process of escorting everyone through two multi-story buildings.

Each student receives a Georgetown T-shirt, which all excitedly put on over their orange jumpsuits. Student speakers praise prison staff and thank Georgetown for the opportunities. One student reads a poem he’s written specially for the event. The two students who transferred mid-semester to the federal system send letters that are read out loud.

Fourteen months ago, a credit-bearing class was just a dream, Howard says. With a second semester of classes soon to start, “we’re no longer a pilot, we’re a thriving program.”

“You are good people,” Howard tells the students. “You are a living model of human transformation. You deserve to return to freedom and to share your knowledge and talents with society.”

Learn more at prisonsandjustice.georgetown.edu. Read more at magazine.georgetown.edu

Photo: Rafael Suanes

Valentino Dixon (far left) of Buffalo, New York, shared his story last November in Gaston Hall with Isobella Goonetillake (C’18), Julie Fragonas, and Naoya Johnson, three students who successfully challenged his wrongful murder conviction.

Without it, do they fall behind?

Does it come down to parental engagement?

Three Georgetown researchers are inventing novel ways to study these questions and contributing to international conversations about childrearing.

When young children use digital technology, do they miss out on valuable childhood experiences?

Photos: Phil Humnicky

Psychology professor Rachel Barr started the Georgetown University Early Learning Project (ELP) to study

“Children are surrounded by input and stimulation,” says Barr. “We know from over a hundred years of developmental science that they are really shaped by those influences. Their brains are so plastic, so ready to learn.” Enter Georgetown’s Jesuit mission to serve the greater good: “At ELP we want to provide every child with the best resources to pick up information.”

Since children draw information from family, media, and languages, all of which vary across countries and communities, Barr needed to collect global research data in a concerted way. So she connected researchers from Michigan to Germany to Australia with expertise in sleep, stress, eye tracking, longitudinal design, and many other fields to launch the Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure (CAFE) Consortium.

Instead of just tallying the amount of time children spend using media, the CAFE Consortium measures complete household use of media to assess the content and context of early media exposure. Researchers divided up factors like screen-based or physical learning, indoor or outdoor learning, and media use by parents when the child is present or absent.

The study requires parents to assess their family access to different media devices—ranging from entertainment systems and gaming consoles to virtual assistants. Parents then install and run an app on all household mobile devices to track usage patterns. With feasibility tests completed, CAFE members will submit the preliminary findings for publication early in 2019. Barr partners with organizations like ZERO TO THREE, a nonprofit devoted to improving the science of early childhood. Working together with data collected by CAFE members and others, Barr, Rebecca Palarkian from ZERO TO THREE, and Georgetown alumna Elisabeth McClure (G’13, ’16) released the 2018 “Screen Sense” guidelines for parents, childcare providers, and policymakers

“Parents are trying to figure out how to raise their kids in the best possible way and they’re going to different sources for advice such as pediatricians and child development organizations,” says Barr. “But those sources are all entirely dependent on empirical research like what we do in the consortium. All of this advice has to be evidence-based.”

Researching the Role of Parental Mediation

A child sits in a dark room, playing a computer game on a bright screen, eyes darting below a black cap covered in lightemitting sensors attached by dozens of wires to a machine that records brain signals.

To learn more about the ways in which the brain works while children are learning using media, Georgetown researchers use functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a non-invasive brain-imaging technique that shines low-level light on a child’s head. The fNIRS sensors measure how much light bounces back, and readouts from the cap show which parts of the brain are activated when a child engages with media.

This “Media and the Mind” neuroimaging research at ELP started as a dissertation by graduate student Sylvia Rusnak (G’22) and will continue beyond her graduation. Rusnak is particularly interested in how children learn directly from others as compared to how they learn via video chat. She is also interested in how learning from interactive apps differs from learning with tangible objects. While the research is in its early stage, Rusnak, with guidance from Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) professor Evan Barba, constructed a remote button for this original research technique. The study will address how the brain registers the differences between learning via an app or video chat versus via a real person and real objects.

Another series of studies conducted at the ELP demonstrated that children have difficulty transferring what they learn from an app to a physical puzzle. Children ages 1-3 years were

the ways children glean information about the world during the first two years of their lives.

shown how to play a puzzle game on a touchscreen; the same children were then asked to play the game with a physical puzzle board. The researchers found a gap between interactive app learning and offscreen learning. The learning gap shortened when parents showed children how to solve the physical puzzle.

“When you look at lots of images of children and media, the child is often alone,” says Barr. “It’s very hard for a child to learn on their own. But if you invite adults in, they can support that learning. It becomes digital play!”

Programming Friends to Assist Parents and Teachers

Psychology professor Sandra Calvert thought she would become a preschool teacher until she met an academic who studied Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood , and the idea of studying a TV show’s mass effect on children captured her imagination.

“I realized that if I learned how to use educational media, I could impact millions of children at one time,” says Calvert.

Calvert now leads the Children’s Digital Media Center (CDMC) at Georgetown, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. CDMC aims to understand how interactive digital-media experiences affect children’s short- and longterm social adjustment, academic achievement, and personal identity. This consortium of scholars, researchers, educators, policy-makers, and industry professionals aims to improve the digital-media environment in which children live and learn.

Calvert has moved beyond studying the amount of time children spend on media devices, now focusing on the components of their media diets. She says that the key factors

in children’s learning from educational media are repetition, complexity, engaging characters, captivating and comprehensible stories, and parental involvement.

“The content in a video is constant, but the messages that a child takes away can be more and more complex, especially if the parent helps them and guides them,” says Calvert.

Parents are just one part of the developmental puzzle; Calvert also studies the effect of fictional characters on children’s educational development. Recently, CDMC has been conducting studies on the effects of parasocial relationships, which are one-sided, emotionally tinged relationships with media characters that hold social and emotional value. For example, a child can bond to Elmo from Sesame Street in ways that are similar to their bonds with a human friend.

“Children tend to treat characters as real people,” says Calvert. “The line between what’s real and what’s pretend for young children is much fuzzier than it is for adults. And just like you learn more from your favorite teachers in life because you care about them, young children learn more from their favorite media characters because they care about them.”

A lot of times teachers feel like they have to compete with media characters. We want them to be allies.

Looking towards the future of classroom-to-home lessons, Calvert is particularly interested in how media characters could become educational aids to teachers and parents.

The CDMC is currently investigating whether children learn early math skills better from characters who interact in intelligent ways. To do so, Calvert, Barba, and former CCT student Stevie Chancellor (G’14) developed a computer game, “Diego’s Birthday,” in which children play with an intelligent character from Dora the Explorer who appears to understand them. This program was effective in teaching early math skills. But research in the field of child development frequently has to play catch-up to the media it studies; Barba has found that the original game platform requires rethinking. He and Calvert applied for a grant to modify the game for transmedia education.

“It’s a really complex learning environment right now, and we need to think about all the different ways that we have opportunities to engage kids,” says Barba.

“Children now live in a transmedia world where the characters drive messages across boundaries,” from screens to home to school, says Calvert, noting that “you can program knowledge into a friend who is a media character.” Calvert believes that teachable friends could assist educators. “A lot of times teachers feel like they have to compete with media characters. We want them to be allies.”

Reaching Underserved Children and Fathers

Aware of income-based discrepancies in early-childhood learning, Georgetown researchers are also considering how digital media might facilitate learning in families with fewer resources and more challenges.

What matters in a world increasingly dependent on digital technologies is whether a child can parse how media is manipulating them.

Over the past decade the ELP and Youth Law Center— which advocates transforming foster-care and juvenile-justice systems—have collaborated on a media-based intervention for incarcerated teen parents called “Just Beginning,” dubbed the “Baby Elmo” program by the teen fathers. The program provides coaching and videos featuring Sesame Street characters—including muppet Baby Elmo and his father— to teach fathers by example how to play with their visiting infants and toddlers. The study found that participants who finished the program demonstrated more sensitive and responsive parenting skills such as following their child’s lead, praising, encouraging, and talking with their child.

Barr recounts how one day in the juvenile justice facility she saw a young father watching Baby Elmo and smiling. “He said, ‘I can imagine how my daughter would love this and I can play with her.’ It was immediately a connection that he could have.”

“Over the past 40 years, Sesame Street has provided a very important resource, particularly for low-income families,” Barr notes. “In high-resourced homes, there are lots of different choices. But in low-resourced homes, technology is a really great equalizer. With PBS, when you track kids over time, it’s the kids in low-resourced homes who are benefitting the most from high-quality media.”

Parenting in a World of Evolving Technologies

A toddler sits on a parent’s lap, waving to a grandparent through video chat. The parent shows the toddler how to hold a raisin up to the screen to “feed” the grandparent. The grandparent holds up a raisin as though they are pulling it through the screen and eats it with gusto. The toddler giggles and reaches for another raisin.

As media evolves, Barr has seen it connect generations. Using video chat technology can help young children form nurturing relationships with people regardless of time and distance.

Barba, who has two daughters under the age of 8, adds that the question of whether digital media hurts brain development is always relative. He argues that a child’s brain is developing in valuable ways by interacting with a TV, for example.

“It provides incredibly complex narratives, moral questions, lots of motion and color that they need to process,” says Barba. “Their brain is doing work there, and who are we to say if that work is positive or negative?”

In her work, Barr meets many parents anxious to set their children up for success. “People are worried with questions like ‘If I don’t give my kids access to tech, will they fall behind? How do I protect them but also help them experience childhood?’” they ask her. “Parents are really trying to juggle these things.”

Barba sees critical media consumption as a tool necessary for all children growing up in the digital age. What matters in a world increasingly dependent on digital technologies, in Barba’s view, is whether a child can parse how media is manipulating them.

“I think people forget that being able to digest and consume media is a skill that needs to be learned and honed,” says Barba. “If you never show your child anything on a television or a computer, you’re doing them a real disservice, because they need that fundamental literacy.”

When Barr hears grandparents claim that technology is melting their grandkids’ brains, she says there is moral panic with every new technology; people feared that writing would harm the memory system, that radio would end conversations, and that television would wreak havoc.

“There’s nothing ever new in the world, but humans have an incredible ability to use tools,” says Barr. “Oftentimes people will only think about what the device is doing to them, rather than how humans have developed all of these different tools. It’s how we use the tools that is more important.”

As a father, Barba believes the only constant throughout the history of human parenting is parental concern. In ancient times, when the most advanced technologies were made of stone, parents still fretted about whether children would use rocks as weapons or as tools.

“I don’t think being a dad in this age is any different from being a dad in the Stone Age,” says Barba. “You are always worried about your kid wielding that rock.”

When you track kids over time, it’s the kids in low-resourced homes who are benefitting the most from high-quality media.

Georgetown alumni comedians Jim Gaffigan (B’88), John Mulaney (C’04), and Mike Birbiglia (C’00)

A Good Laugh

There’s nothing better than a good laugh—especially for a good cause.

That’s what prompted three noted Hoya comedians—Jim Gaffigan (B’88), John Mulaney (C’04), and Mike Birbiglia (C’00)—to share their special brand of humor at a fundraising event in January.

Stand Up for Georgetown, held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, raised more than $1 million for the Georgetown Scholars Program. The show sold out quickly.

“The event was Jim’s idea,” says Michelle Mauboussin (B’86), one of the evening’s volunteer organizers and GSP advisory-board chair. “He was very invested in making this a fantastic show,” she adds, noting that Gaffigan personally recruited Mulaney and Birbiglia to join him.

Emily Chen Carrera (B’88), another lead event volunteer, says that Gaffigan was motivated by the GSP’s support of first-generation college students like his father, Michael (F’57). “Jim wanted to highlight the cause and also have fun.”

The Georgetown Scholars Program, founded in 2004, provides resources and support for more than 600 undergraduates a year from all socioeconomic backgrounds, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college.

At the stand-up event, each comedian laced his set with Georgetown stories, making the show especially meaningful to the Hoya audience. Gaffigan shared that his first time performing was at Georgetown Cabaret in his senior year. The Exorcist stairs provided dramatic tension to a Mulaney joke. And Birbiglia related a story about calling Gaffigan for career advice—after discovering that he was the only graduate in the alumni directory with “comedian” listed as occupation.

Photo: Kevin Mazur

Photo: Phil Humnicky

AND

ANGUISH ANGER

Georgetown’s John Carr Discusses a Church in Crisis and Ways to Move Forward

In the wake of last summer’s Pennsylvania grand jury report on widespread sexual abuse of children by Catholic clerics and the Church’s cover-up efforts, Georgetown’s John Carr has been a leading voice on how to address this devastating chapter in the Church’s history and how to move forward.

Carr founded and has directed the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown since 2013, and also serves as an adjunct theology professor. He joined Georgetown after more than 20 years as director of Justice, Peace, and Human Development at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and a fellowship at the Harvard Institute of Politics.

He spoke with Jeffrey Donahoe, editor of Georgetown Magazine, about the fallout from the Pennsylvania report, the current state of the Church, and how the Catholic community might move forward amid great pain and doubt.

Many have described this chapter in the Church’s history as a “moral crisis.” What words would you use? In August 2018, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the Bishops’ Conference, called this a “moral catastrophe,” and he is absolutely right. The human, moral, spiritual, and institutional costs of this evil are incalculable.

For me, the crisis has two parts.

One is what happened to young people and vulnerable people. An institution that is supposed to protect people and be an institution that parents want their children to stay close to literally abused them. We always must begin with the victims and the survivors. The Church has taken some important steps since 2002 to protect young people from clerical sexual abuse.

The second part of this is the way in which our leaders failed. Many enabled, they covered up, they treated credible allegations of abuse as a legal or financial or human resources problem. The fundamental problem is that [clerical leaders] were isolated; they saw what was happening primarily through the eyes of priests, not victims or families.

In the early 1980s, I was working at the Archdiocese of Washington when a senior cleric was credibly accused of horrific abuse. I was the only layperson in a room with a group of clerics. Except for the Archbishop, the clerics saw it through the eyes of a priest: “This couldn't possibly happen. No, he’s not like that at all.”

I saw it through the eyes of a father. Short of the death of a child, I couldn't imagine anything worse. This affects faith, authority, family, priesthood, Eucharist, sexuality. Too many of our Church

Mleaders didn’t feel the hurt and anguish, and they don’t understand the anger.

Recent developments led you to talk about your own experience, which you shared publicly for the first time at an Initiative Dialogue on the crisis. When I’ve been talking to journalists about the sexual abuse crisis, I found myself saying that secrecy and silence are big parts of the problem. But I had been silent about my own experience in a high school seminary. I did not experience the horrors that I’ve read about in the Pennsylvania grand jury report but I did experience several instances of sexual harassment and abuse. I do not think of myself as a victim; I see myself as a survivor.

I pushed that [high school] experience away. I didn’t tell my parents. I never told my wife or my children. I didn’t talk to the bishops about it. But I came to feel that if I was critical of the silence of others, I had to deal with my own secrets. And so last fall, I wrote down what happened to me, and I began to talk, first with my family and then with others.

It was freeing for me. Sharing my story clearly was a source of encouragement and solidarity for others. When I was on the PBS NewsHour, a cameraman came up to me and said, “Thank you. That happened to me too.”

What has this crisis meant for you on a professional level?

I have worked for some bishops who are at the center of this crisis. The failures of our leaders, including men I regard as friends, and allies, and supporters, has been crushing. The lesson I have learned is there is simply no substitute for

Because of the sex abuse crisis, the voice of the Church is not as credible, strong, and powerful as it should be on behalf of the unborn and undocumented, the poor and vulnerable.

accountability, for accepting responsibility, for transparency. That there have to be structures that not only protect the vulnerable, but dismantle the culture of isolation and clericalism that allows evil to happen or to be tolerated.

I have also learned through sad experience that there are not enough parents in the room when decisions are made, especially not enough women. Survivors and their families have to be at the center of genuine reform and renewal. Greater lay leadership is essential, but some laypeople enabled and contributed to this crisis, focusing on protecting the institution rather than the vulnerable.

I have been blessed to serve the Church in wonderful ways, but I have also seen a culture of destructive clericalism marked by isolation, arrogance, factionalism, and lack of responsibility and accountability. The core issue is the misuse and abuse of power as well as resources, authority, and trust. Laypeople, reflecting the diversity of the Church, need to be empowered to help lead the people of God, not as replacements for ordained ministers but as partners in governance and financial issues, parish and institutional life as well as the formation and evaluation of clergy; helping set criteria for bishops; and carrying Catholic principles into public life.

What would you say to somebody who asks, “Why should I stay in the Church? Why raise my family in the Church?”

Those are legitimate questions. This is a time of testing for all of us.

First, it’s not just [the clerics’] Church and we shouldn't let them have it. It’s our Church. It’s the Church of Jesus Christ.

The second thing is that the Church is more than its failures. This has been a horrible chapter, but it is not the only chapter. Because of the Church, every day thousands of homeless people find shelter. Every day thousands of young inner-city kids get a good education. Every day immigrants and refugees are welcomed. Every day on this Hilltop young people are formed to be leaders for the future. We are more than our institutional failures.

The third thing I would say is, we need you. We need your voice. We need your participation. This is a time that requires lay women and men who take action to renew and reform our community of faith. At a tough time for our nation we have ideas and people that can make a difference.

Pope Francis convened the presidents of the Church’s bishops’ conferences worldwide at the Vatican in February [ 2019 ] for a summit on sex abuse. Is there a precedent for this kind of summit?

My take on the Vatican summit is two-fold. One, it’s frustrating it took so long. And secondly, it’s a miracle: it’s never happened before. It’s a sign of progress that Pope Francis pulled together the leadership of the Church from around the world. Pope Francis has been too slow to respond [to the issues of sexual abuse] in my judgment, though I admire him enormously. But he has acted very decisively after listening to survivors. That is a lesson for the whole Church, listen to survivors and their families.

What was the impact of the Vatican gathering?

In America, I think many people may have been disappointed that it ended without a detailed plan on how to prevent abuse or binding rules on how to deal with survivors or cooperate with law enforcement. But there were some substantial signs of hope. One is that it emphasized that this is a fundamental challenge for the whole church, not just a problem for the United States, or Ireland, or Chile. And that’s imperative. Secondly, among the most powerful presentations were those from survivors and women, both of whom have not been heard enough on this question or in the Church. Both

We bring people together across religious, political, ideological lines. We are also a center that encourages young leaders not to be cynical about their faith or politics.

voices are crucial, and it is progress for survivors to be heard, and for women to have a strong voice when decisions are made.

Can people hope for longer term outcomes from the summit?

The three themes that shaped the global gathering were responsibility, accountability, and transparency. The patience of the Church’s faithful is exhausted. My patience is exhausted. However, there are signs this institution understands that the status quo is unacceptable, and that more decisive action is necessarily.

What does that help look like?

I think the Gospel, and the sacraments, and Catholic social teaching give us a way to assess the horrors we’ve experienced. But more importantly, the principles of Catholic social teaching give us a path forward. Respect for human life and dignity, solidarity with victims, a concern for the weak, a focus on the common good.

What can Georgetown do to share Catholic social teaching and its implications for the Church and society?

I think Georgetown has an enormous contribution to make. We have three things that really matter:

First, we’re not only the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the U.S. —we’re in the nation’s capital. We invite in and reach out to leaders and young people with a wide range of views to lift up the moral dimensions of major issues and encourage people to pursue the common good.

Second is leadership. President DeGioia and other Georgetown leaders understand the role of the Church and Catholic social teaching in the world and are examples of lay leadership in action.

What is crucial for me is the understanding that this is not simply about sex, or theology, or ecclesiology—this is about power and the abuse of power. And therefore the abuse of people, trust, money, and authority. So we have to take on a culture, a clerical culture, and episcopal culture, which is focused too much on itself, too much on protecting the institution and their own power and not enough on proclaiming the Gospel, protecting the vulnerable, and on justice and healing for victims and families. And we can only hope and pray that we’re breaking through that culture.

One of the ironies is that Pope Francis is the most powerful cleric in the world, who has said clericalism is a big part of the problem, but it’s surrounded by a fortress of clericalism in the Roman Curia. So right diagnosis, but formidable challenge. And we should help him.

And third, Georgetown, with the perspective of Catholic social teaching, looks at the world differently. We have a Catholic and Jesuit tradition of engagement, of respect for human life and dignity. We are helping to form a generation of leaders who can bring those values to a broken church and a divided country.

What are a few examples of what the Initiative is doing to specifically address the current crisis?

Over the past year, we’ve had three standingroom-only dialogues where people have shared not only their anguish, but their commitment to help overcome this. In April, we’re co-hosting a conference with Georgetown Law School on the legal aspects of the crisis.

In June, we’re convening top leaders from across the country to chart a path forward to help overcome this crisis. We will also focus on how the voice of the church and the principles of Catholic social teaching can be heard in a policy context where the Church’s voice is muted. We

I have learned through sad experience that there are not enough parents in the room when decisions are made, especially not enough women. Survivors and their families have to be at the center of genuine reform and renewal.

have a message this capital needs, this country needs, our world needs. Lay leaders need to be a major part of delivering that message. That is the mission of the Initiative.

The Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life

Three Dialogues on lay leadership and the abuse crisis have drawn full houses in downtown Washington, Dahlgren Chapel, and Gaston Hall, but they are just a few of the gatherings organized by the Initiative, which has presented more than 60 programs attended by more than 20,000 since its 2013 founding. Georgetown began the Initiative to use Catholic social teaching to shape the intersection of faith and politics.

How can another crisis be prevented?

It’s going take all of us.

We need to renew and reform the Church not simply to fix this crisis but to proclaim the Gospel, to serve the “least of these,” to work for a more just society and more peaceful world. This is a time for mission, not just repair or maintenance.

We have to insist that our leaders be accountable and that our institutions focus on mission, not turn inward on themselves. Moving forward begins with listening to survivors and victims. It requires new policies, new procedures, new structures. More than anything else, it requires a change of culture.

This is the work of the whole Church, of lay women and men, and of Georgetown in these tough times.

“We’ve gone from an idea to a place of civil dialogue in a divided capital,” says Initiative founder and director John Carr. “We bring people together across religious, political, ideological lines. We are also a center that encourages young leaders not to be cynical about their faith or politics.”

The programming is diverse: President Barack Obama participated in a panel on poverty. Vatican cardinals have interacted with students. And a former cashier from the Main Campus dining hall talked about making a living and raising a family in a dialogue on the dignity of work.

“What President DeGioia has made possible, and what we are providing, are unique opportunities to bring together leaders at Georgetown and in Washington for discussions that are lively and substantive and respectful all at the same time,” says Kim Daniels, associate director of the Initiative. “We bring Catholic principles to the conversations that matter. At this challenging time for our Church and country, there’s no better place to be a part of the conversation.”

“There is absolutely a hunger for the Initiative’s programming,” says Carr. “People are searching for a moral vocabulary in the midst of what feels like ethical and national chaos.”

“The principles of Catholic social teaching—human life and dignity, solidarity and a priority for the poor, human rights and responsibility—are ways to enrich and deepen public life and to move our country forward in demoralizing days,” Carr says.

Learn more at catholicsocialthought.georgetown.edu

I think the Gospel, and the sacraments, and Catholic social teaching give us a way to assess the horrors we’ve experienced.

Afurry encounter with Jack the Bulldog, Georgetown’s beloved four-legged mascot and campus ambassador, is something of a rite of passage for students. This 60-pound, San Diego-born English bulldog, who stole our hearts the moment he arrived on the Hilltop as a puppy five years ago, brightens the atmosphere everywhere he goes. From his skateboarding finesse at Hoya basketball games to his playful fashion choices, this multi talented pup is the pride, joy, and unofficial face of campus.

Georgetown Magazine looks at the century-long legacy of the university’s furry ambassadors and recognizes our current Jack the Bulldog.

While the students hoped to name their new mascot “Hoya,” the bulldog—a breed known to be headstrong— had ideas of its own, refusing to respond to anything other than “Jack.” And the rest is history…

From top left: Georgetown mascot predecessors included a bull terrier, Hoya I, and Stubby, called the most highly decorated war dog of WWI.

In 1951, a student organization, the Mascot Committee, campaigned for the return of a canine mascot after a 10-year hiatus. The students offered to fund the insurance, upkeep, and care of the dog. An English bulldog arrived on campus in fall 1962.

With some dedication (and snack incentives), it didn’t take long for Jack to master the art of skateboarding. Between his skateboard and cruising in his mini-Jeep, Jack rides in style at home basketball games at Capital One Arena— how cool!

Jack has an active social media presence with more than 14,000 Instagram followers and 7,500 Twitter followers.

Born in San Diego on June 29, 2013, our current mascot Compatible’s John B. Carroll—better known as Jack the Bulldog—was a gift to the university from Janice Hochstetler (Parent’12, ’13). The campus Bulldog Advisory Committee selected McKenzie Stough (C’13) as Jack’s official caretaker soon after his debut in October 2013.

Jack is paws-itively all smiles when he sees students arriving on the Hilltop for New Student Orientation and Move-in Day.

It’s not glitz and glam all the time. When he’s not posing for photos or dressing up, Jack is just a good ol’ dog who loves rolling around on Copley Lawn or catching a quick nap. Whether it’s donning a costume or chowing on freshly fallen snow, Jack’s charm and accessibility convert even non-Hoyas into fans.

One of Jack’s proudest moments is sending his buddies off for graduation. He’s sure to miss them, but he knows they will pursue great things.

Follow Jack the Bulldog’s daily adventures and tag your Jack memories using his Instagram account, @gujackbulldog.

Photo: Phil Humnicky

Dear Fellow Hoyas,

Bringing a taste of Georgetown to your community is part of the mission of the Georgetown University Alumni Association (GUAA). With close to 200,000 alumni living in 120 countries spanning the globe, we connect with alumni via our network of 67 regional clubs and 30 international clubs through a variety of social, educational, charitable, and athletic events.

Hoyas love to learn and have a good time. We did both at the International Alumni Weekend in Mexico City last October. I’d like to thank the members of the Latin American Board, especially faculty advisor Ricardo Ernst and Alvaro Fernandez Garza (MBA’95), who helped us secure former Mexican President Felipe Calderon as keynote speaker. President Calderon was absolutely riveting—in a very intimate setting—and gave an insider view of regional politics, drug cartels, immigration, and U.S.-Mexico relations.

I’d also like to thank the Georgetown Club of Mexico City, especially Delana Lensgraf (F’13) and Emma Marwood (F’08), for hosting elegant, cosmopolitan events culminating with the gala dinner at the Soumayo Museum. My wife, Debbie (F’71), and I especially enjoyed the spectacular walking tour of the ancient city of Teotihuacan featuring the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, one of the world’s most impressive archaeological and religious sites. (For coverage, go to alumni.georgetown.edu/news.)

At the alumni association Board of Governor’s Winter Leadership Weekend in January, President John J. DeGioia shared with the board an update on “Global Georgetown.”

To summarize his remarks: Academic excellence, a D.C. location, Jesuit values, and service to the world are at the core of Georgetown’s global identity. With an international

community of scholars and students based in a global capital, Georgetown advances the common good through research, teaching, and outreach around critical global issues. To learn more, go to global.georgetown.edu.

The board also welcomed School of Foreign Service Dean Joel Hellman, who shared his vision for the future of the school, which is celebrating its centennial this year. As the United States’ first school of international affairs, SFS has made Georgetown synonymous with diplomacy, global leadership, and service to the world. Today we face a different set of challenges—from transnational networks of violence to climate change, economic integration across borders, and new forms of global communication. Dean Hellman seeks to ensure that the next generation of SFS graduates are prepared to lead in a new era by shaping peace and engagement across nations.

I encourage you, no matter where you are in your alumni journey, to join us at an upcoming event, where I promise you will learn and have fun.

• John Carroll Weekend Boston, May 2–5, 2019. Visit jcw.georgetown.edu for schedule, hotel information, registration, and bios on this year’s award recipients.

• Black Alumni Summit, September 27–29, 2019, Washington, D.C. To learn more and register, visit bas.georgetown.edu

Richard M. Hluchan (F’71) President, Georgetown University Alumni Association

Hoya Saxa,

Academic excellence, a D.C. location, and service to the world are at the core of Georgetown’s global identity.

Alumni Bring D.C.’s Unique Jazz History Center Stage

With the recently released book DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC, Georgetown alumni and faculty are shining a spotlight on the city’s important role in the genre’s development. Editors Maurice Jackson (G’95, G’01), a professor in Georgetown’s history department, and Blair A. Ruble explore how women shaped the music, the genre’s impact on international diplomacy, and its effect on social equality.

D.C. is home to famed venues—including Blues Alley, near campus— and the birthplace of legendary jazz artists, but Jackson says there is a bigger message.

“It’s about what jazz has done for the city,” he says. “The desegregation of many D.C. venues was inspired by those who supported jazz and its community. African-American traditional jazz is born out of songs of struggle. While music itself cannot solve problems, it can inspire.”

Anna Harwell Celenza, Georgetown’s Thomas E. Caestecker Professor of Music, contributed a chapter, “Legislating Jazz,” which examines how jazz and its leading names became ambassadors for diplomacy and international relations during the 20th century.

“I was inspired by the students in my classroom who were government majors and studying public policy,” she says. “Their interest excited me to dig deeper into this subject.”

Celenza says the DNA of jazz is representative of America’s multicultural essence, making it a prized piece of the nation’s culture and a tool for global diplomacy.

“Jazz is both historic and a living art form, so there’s always another chapter for jazz and for music in general in D.C,” she adds.

Rusty Hassan (C’67), DC Jazz contributor, former Georgetown lecturer, and longtime friend of Jackson’s, arrived at Georgetown in 1963 already a jazz aficionado with vinyls in tow. Becoming a radio host for WGTB-FM, Georgetown’s student radio station, helped launch his career as a D.C. jazz radio personality. Hassan’s DC Jazz chapter retraces moments from his professional and personal journey, including memories with famed local jazz pianist John Malachi, who is featured on the cover of the awardwinning book.

When asked about the future of D.C. jazz, Hassan says it rests in the hands of music educators and historians.

“The preservation of D.C. music— through recording oral histories, continuing the annual D.C. Jazz Festival, and documenting the influence of figures like Chuck Brown on go-go and R&B—is taking place as we speak,” says Hassan. “Even seeing young performers in the jazz clubs throughout D.C. encourages me. It’s great to see universities like Georgetown, Howard, and UDC contributing to that preservation and educating the next generation of artists. The music is in good hands.”

Photo: Lisa Helfert

Rusty Hassan (C’67) and Maurice Jackson (G’95,’01)

A Life-Saving Device That Could Save the Inventor

In fall 2018, Shavini Fernando (G’18) swept two Georgetown entrepreneurship pitch competitions, won four awards, and earned a total of $40,500 for her invention of OxiWear, a wearable tech device that alerts users when their oxygen levels drop critically low. The first person to benefit from this life-saving device? Fernando herself.

Fernando, a Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) alumna, was 33 when she learned that she was born with a hole in her heart. Her undiagnosed condition of Eisenmenger’s Syndrome led to pulmonary hypertension (PH), a silent disease that causes oxygen levels to drop with the slightest activity, usually without the person realizing it before they lose consciousness.

Most people with PH, especially sleeping children, die because they don’t get help in time. Until now, the only device available to people with PH to measure vital signs has been a bulky finger cuff. “No one’s going to be wearing that all the time,” says Fernando. “You can’t be working with something huge on your finger.”

When doctors in Sri Lanka estimated that Fernando had two years to live, she sought treatment at Johns Hopkins University. Bored with sitting at home, she soon enrolled at CCT to combine her passions for graphic design, IT, and business, and ended up creating virtual reality and video games.

One day, Fernando’s coworkers in the English for Heritage Program saw that her face had turned blue. Although Fernando felt no change, her heart had stopped. After being rushed to Johns Hopkins, she came up with the idea for OxiWear.

“My doctors warned me not to live alone because I don’t know when my oxygen levels drop down. So I asked them, ‘What if I have a device that will monitor my vitals and warn me?’ And they were like, ‘Go ahead and make it! We’ll help you!’ ”

And so a collaboration began. Fernando’s doctors advised her to monitor oxygen levels, so she used light sensors, like those in a Fitbit, to calculate the ratio of oxygenated blood cells. Through CCT, she created a wearable device for the ear that beeps when levels stray from a user-specified oxygen range and offers the option of calling 911.

“I’m a very hands-on person,” says Fernando. “I like breaking and making things. I want to know how they work.”

After winning over both the judges and the audience with OxiWear at the Leonsis Family Entrepreneurship Prize “Bark Tank,” created by Ted Leonsis (C’77, Parent ’15, ’17), and Global Impact Pitch Competition, Fernando has experienced an outpouring of support from StartupHoyas and Georgetown.

Fernando, who lives a self-proclaimed “active, hippie lifestyle,” is still adjusting to attending black-tie dinners with potential investors in OxiWear and taking advice from the vice president for research at Fitbit. Her next step is to create a smaller, production-level prototype of her device, launch a Kickstarter campaign, and find partner companies.

Shavini Fernando (G’18) wears a first-level prototype of OxiWear, her invention to alert users with pulmonary hypertension when their oxygen levels drop critically low. Fernando has the condition herself.

When Dr. Ayaz Virji (C’96, M’00) and his family moved to the rural town of Dawson, Minnesota—population 1,400— in 2014, they were the only Muslims in that community.

Virji chose Dawson because he wanted to practice medicine where it was needed most. At first, things went well. The family fit into the warm and friendly community.

That all began to change with the 2016 election of Donald Trump, whose so-called “Muslim ban”—barring entry of people from specific Muslim-majority countries—stirred up hostility and suspicion.

When a patient overheard Virji talking with a colleague about the ban, she chimed in with, “Yeah, we need to keep Muslims out,” he recalls. “Do you know you’re talking to a Muslim?” he replied. “Well, I don't see you that way,” she said. “Well you should—that’s what I am,” he countered. Virji experienced other similar encounters.

“People looked at me as an exception, not the rule,” Virji says. He began to seriously consider whether the family should move.

In spring 2017, Mandy France, pastor of Dawson’s Grace Lutheran Church, asked Virji to give a community lecture on Islam. She thought it would be helpful and positive.

Virji hesitated. “I did not want to do anything positive— I wanted to leave,” he says. Then his 16-year-old son

came home and said, “Can't we just pretend we’re not Muslims so we can stay in Dawson?” Virji remembers.

“I said to myself, ‘If not me, then who’s going to do this?’”

He gave the talk in the high school auditorium before 400 people. While some seemed interested in learning, others accused him of being a terrorist. His own neighbor protested that a Muslim shouldn’t be allowed to speak in public.

Word spread about Virji’s talk. In less than two years, he has given 22 lectures in Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C., at churches, libraries, and community centers. He pays his own expenses and uses vacation days when necessary. He has written a book, Love Thy Neighbor, which will be released in June.

Virji, who didn’t grow up in a religious family, followed his brother Azad (B’95) to Georgetown. He credits the signature Problem of God course for his first serious introduction to Islam and religion in general. “The course was phenomenal,” he says. “For me, the course’s message is that universality, love, inclusion, and generosity were the core of all religions.”

He sees his college years as especially formative. “I would say, outside of meeting and marrying my wife and having my kids, it was the best four years of my life. The seeds were planted there to who I am now.”

Read more at magazine.georgetown.edu

Photo: Lisa Helfert

‘IF NOT ME, THEN WHO?’

Photo: The Washington Post/Salwan Georges

PROVIDING HEALTH CARE IN A SOCIAL CHANGE MODEL

In 1988, Maria Gomez (N’77) was working as a nurse at the District of Columbia Department of Health. At the time, political strife and extreme poverty in Central America had caused a large wave of migration to the United States. Once in the U.S., many of the women migrants had nowhere to go to receive prenatal care. Then–D.C. Mayor Marion Barry asked Gomez to create a solution. At only 33, with a group of young and idealistic friends, she decided to take the chance. “We saw the good we could do, not the barriers.” Mary’s Center was born, and on the first day, dozens of women came.

In 30 years, Mary’s Center has grown from a basement clinic in Adams Morgan to five health centers in the District and Maryland and two senior wellness centers offering comprehensive care to more than 50,000 women, men, and children annually. Gomez serves as president and CEO, and remains committed to the social-change health model she first learned at Georgetown.

“Mary’s Center’s mission is simple,” Gomez says. “Make sure people are born healthy and stay healthy, have social support in their community and education that moves parents and children up the economic ladder.”

“Check-ups aren’t exciting,” she admits, “so I want this to be a fun place, to be a community center, not just a health center.” She’s pleased to serve many of her original patients—and now their children and grandchildren.

An immigrant herself, Gomez came to the U.S. from Colombia at age 13 with her widowed mother. “My mom may not have had much education, but she knew that it was the ticket,” she says.

Arriving at Georgetown School of Nursing (now the School of Nursing & Health Studies) as a Community Scholar, she found supportive faculty members who helped fill gaps in her education. Gomez in particular remembers Professor Allan Angerio. “I loved his rigor and that he really saw students as individuals.”

Clinical training proved to be transformational for Gomez. “I realized that I had something to give and a responsibility to give back.”

She found herself acting as what she likes to call “an interpreter” between both ends of the care-delivery system. She could bring her patient-based perspectives to class—for example, explaining that talking about smoking cessation needs to start with the consideration that patients might find smoking to be their only pleasure.

Coming full circle, Gomez has returned to the School of Nursing & Health Studies this spring as a distinguished visiting professor.

“What I learned from Georgetown was that passion and integrity can take you anywhere.”

Read more at magazine.georgetown.edu.

Photo: Lisa Helfert

You Don’t Need an Engineering Degree to Be a Hoya Tech Success

Here’s a piece of advice from the Forbes magazine Coaches Council, published last summer: Recruit for “learnability,” wrote one expert coach. “With changes in organizational structures that require agility, collaboration, and communication, it’s critical to find people with creative mindset who are able to innovate and adapt.” These skills are hallmarks of a Georgetown University education, and they are paying off for a large and growing group of alumni who are leaders in technology.

To locate and support alumni techies in the San Francisco Bay area, Bud Colligan (F’76) and Maureen Rutter Brown (C’81)— along with Michael Callahan (F’90), Fabio Rosati (B’87), Melissa Tidwell (C’99), and Scott Morse (F’74), and with the support of the alumni association—founded the Georgetown Technology Alliance (GTA) in 2009. The alliance’s purpose is to create opportunities for shared learning and service around technology and biotech issues while deepening ties between the technology community and the university.

Colligan provides strategic counsel and capital to startups—a talent that might have begun at Georgetown, where he was an early leader of The Corp and founder of Vital Vittles. He is founder and chairman of South Swell Ventures, an investment firm focused on entrepreneurs, sustainable software, marine sciences, food, and farmtech companies

in California’s Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito counties. “It’s been great working with other Georgetown alums, uncovering some who were hidden, and bringing them into the GTA network,” he says. “It was very gratifying to get the alliance off the ground and watch it blossom.

“In the tech industry, there’s no substitute for human skills such as analytical thinking and writing, collaboration, creativity, leadership, and high EQ, which enable people to work together to solve problems,” Colligan adds. “Georgetown’s emphasis on this is timeless.”

In the tech industry, there’s no substitute for human skills such as analytical thinking and writing, collaboration, creativity, leadership, and high EQ , which enable people to work together to solve problems.

Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J., vice president for mission and ministry, moderated a panel discussion, The Future of Tech, in innovation hub Seattle at the 2018 John Carroll Weekend. Panelists included Douglas Buffone (F’11), director of business development, Skydance Media; Melissa Chan (B’13), business development manager, Microsoft; and Jamil Poonja (C’12), head of corporate development and government relations, Stride Health.

To celebrate its tenth anniversary, the Georgetown Tech Alliance is launching the Future Leaders in Technology (FLITE) program to help undergraduate students interested in career opportunities in the tech sector but who may not have the access or resources to explore the industry. FLITE will take flight at the first GTA-sponsored gala dinner at San Francisco’s Bently Reserve on April 10, with investor and author Roger McNamee as speaker. Proceeds from the dinner will fund two internships and provide financial assistance to help students cover summer travel and living expenses in the Bay Area, New York, or Washington, D.C. The FLITE criteria: students in financial need and with a liberal arts perspective. Why do liberal arts grads thrive in the tech world? “The liberal arts offer people the most essential tools they need for critical thinking and reasoning,” says Christopher S. Celenza, dean of Georgetown College. “Accordingly, they also give people the ability to situate and resituate themselves in different

contexts—a necessary skill in our world today. And, most important, the liberal arts present students with a number of pathways leading to self-knowledge.”

Today, GTA is led by co-presidents Michael Shim (C’95) and Melissa Tidwell (C’99). Shim is founder and managing member of True North Cos., a private investment and advisory firm. Tidwell is vice president and general counsel at Reddit. “We have an incredible group of alums who are very successful in the tech sector, and the GTA has proven to be an incredible networking resource connecting Hoyas with one another and back to our alma mater,” Shim says. “We are thrilled to continue to grow the GTA through the FLITE program and by counseling Provost Bob Groves on industry trends to inspire relevant and future-focused coursework for students,” he adds.

Learn more at georgetowntechalliance.com Read more at magazine.georgetown.edu

Q&A with Georgetown Technology Alliance Co-President

Melissa Tidwell (C’99), VP and General Counsel at Reddit

What was your Georgetown-to-tech journey?

There is no one journey to end up in tech. I graduated from the College in 1999 with a degree in American Studies, then got a law degree from NYU. I initially started in litigation, but I was not a fan of trial work. Eventually I decided I wanted to work in tech, so I moved to California in 2006 and joined Google, working Google Apps to Google Cloud Platform, Google Fiber to Google Play. I worked on a wide variety of issues and counseled both the business and the product teams. After eight years, I got the opportunity to be Reddit general counsel. I’ve expanded my purview here to include communications and public and product policy.

Reddit was a start-up when you joined. Why leave Google for a start-up?

The authenticity was very compelling. I wanted to build something. It’s also a really cool product. If you have a question and need an answer, ask Reddit.

What’s the 30-second elevator speech on Reddit?

Reddit is a community of communities. We have a community waiting for you from DIY to Game of Thrones to Keanu Reeves.

Do you have advice for women wanting to break the glass ceiling—in tech or in any sector?

Like anything in life, anything worth having is worth working for. But you can’t climb the corporate ladder just for the title—you have to love what you do in order to make that type of commitment. So work hard, know yourself, and have fun.

What advice would you give Georgetown students interested in tech careers?

Go for it! A liberal-arts undergraduate degree is a huge asset. Tech industry wants and needs a wide variety of backgrounds, particularly as it grows.

What’s on the horizon for the Georgetown Tech Alliance?

We still think of ourselves as a start-up. There is a lot we want to do, but we all have full-time jobs so it’s hard to find the time. We’ll continue to be a voice for the university, to find unique ways to engage the community around technology, and to ensure students have access to where we are today.

A Deeper Calling: Four Georgetown Alumni Reflect on Their Spiritual Journeys After Becoming Jesuits

The journey to Jesuit priesthood—called formation—is not for the faint of heart. From the first days of the novitiate to final vows, the process requires years of arduous academic study, ministry to the ill and needy around the world, and deep interior reflection.

“In the novitiate, I was able to experience things I never imagined during my time as an economics major at Georgetown or working as an economic analyst after graduation,” says Brendan Gottschall (C’12), a Jesuit-in-training currently living in Beijing, China.

“I worked in jail ministry, taught high school, worked as a technician in a cancer hospital, and learned Spanish. These ‘experiments’ are designed to challenge and stretch the novice so he can grow into the life of the vows.”

Despite the rigors of formation, young Georgetown alumni like Gottschall continue to be called to serve as members of the Society of Jesus. To learn more about what inspires them, Georgetown Magazine interviewed Gottschall and three of his brother Jesuits—Kieran Halloran (F’14), Chia-Yang “C-Y” Kao (MSFS’06), and Christian Verghese (C’15)—about their journeys thus far.

‘A Consistent, Resolute Zeal’

Not surprisingly, all four Georgetown alumni first began contemplating joining the order when they were students interacting with Jesuit teachers and mentors. At college in Taiwan, for example, Kao began participating in Christian Life Community, a lay Catholic movement that adopts Ignatian spirituality. “There I met my first spiritual director, Rev. Jaime Valenciano, a Spanish Jesuit missionary who deeply influenced my Jesuit vocation,” Kao notes.

“In the beginning, it felt awkward to share my life with someone about whom I did not know much,” he continues. “After a few years of meeting with him regularly, I had grown more comfortable in sharing my most intimate inner thoughts and saw him as a spiritual mentor and an additional father figure.” For Verghese, now studying philosophy and mathematics at St. Louis University, the spark was ignited during his years as a student in a Jesuit high school and college. “What struck me most about every Jesuit was their passion. Despite the vast diversity in their work, I found a consistent, resolute zeal in each member of the community. They carried and devoted themselves with a Gospel joy that spoke to me.”

Photo: Ben Munson

Christian Verghese (C’15) and Kieran Halloran (F’14)

‘To Love and Serve’

In the early days of formation, as Gotschall notes, Jesuit novices are “stretched” through rigorous service. “One of my experiences in novitiate was to work as a care technician in a cancer hospital,” recalls Halloran, a fellow graduate student with Verghese at St. Louis University. “Most of our patients passed away during my month there. However, amid all these challenges and all this suffering, there was love and care and there were moments of joy.

“God is always present to us, offering His love and care if only we take the time to notice it. This is just one of many experiences that really shaped me from my time in novitiate.”

In addition to their service mission, Jesuit novices attend a 30-day silent retreat to carry out the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

“The goal is, as St. Ignatius said, ‘en todo amar y servir’ (‘in all things to love and serve’),” Gottschall says.

For Kao, now at Loyola University in Chicago, the retreat proved to be the central experience of his time as a novice. “Through contemplative prayers we walked with Jesus from his birth, ministries, and eventually his suffering, death, and resurrection,” he says. “On the beautiful and prayerful ground where the retreat house is located, I was amazed by God’s greatness and immensity.”

‘A Depth and Joy of Life’

On one hand, the Jesuit formation is a profoundly personal experience as each aspiring priest seeks his individual calling; on the other, the process fosters an enduring sense of community among the order’s members.

“The biggest impact this journey has had on my life is the people with whom I come into contact,” says Verghese. “These friendships direct me to find the active love of God in the world and respond to it freely.

One example is Kieran Halloran. “This past summer, he took me to the 9/11 memorial, where he lost his father 17 years ago.” Halloran’s father was a lieutenant in the New York City Fire Department.

“As we walked through the immense museum, I began to appreciate the seriousness of such a loss for Kieran, who was not even 10 when he lost his dad,” Verghese says. “However, at that moment—and still today—I see a man with unshakeable joy. He and I continue to grow as Jesuits, as companions to each other, and as companions to Jesus.”

Halloran expresses similar sentiments: “My journey to taking vows has given me a depth and joy of life that I didn’t have before—a depth and joy that comes from my relationship with God.”

Photo: Maya Jain

Photo: Maryland Province Jesuits

Chia-Yang “C-Y” Kao (MSFS’06)

Brendan Gottschall (C’12)

My journey to taking vows has given me a depth and joy of life that I didn’t have before—a depth and joy that comes from my relationship with God.

MOVING FORWARD AND PUSHING BOUNDARIES

Every three months, Dr. Christina Hanna (F’08, M’14) packs her bags and travels from Philadelphia to Butaro, Rwanda, where she treats young cancer patients.

“I don’t tend to take the traditional path,” says Hanna, recipient of this year’s Young Alumni Award from the Georgetown University Alumni Association. Since her freshman year on the Hilltop—when she talked her way into the School of Foreign Service’s Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) major as a pre-med student—Hanna has been pushing boundaries. Among her many accomplishments, she earned a master’s degree in public health and recently completed a combined residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, at the same time volunteering in Rwanda to implement a pediatric leukemia protocol with the international organization Partners In Health. Along the way, she found mentors who helped clear the obstacles. “Georgetown was an incredible launching pad,” she says. “I found an openness of thought that allowed me to keep moving forward in this crazy, cockamamie journey.”

Hanna started out as a biology major in the College. “At the suggestion of one of my floor mates in Harbin, I took David Edelstein’s class Intro to International Affairs.” she says. The course opened up a wider perspective to Hanna on the underpinnings of health—political, economic, and social. As the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, global health seemed like a perfect fit.

She met with Professor Charles Weiss, then STIA director. “He didn’t flinch when I said I wanted to study organic chemistry and international finance. He was nothing but supportive.”

Hanna became a constant presence in the office of STIA curricular Dean Mini Murphy. “I threw so many wrenches into the mix—I think I gave her a number of small heart attacks,” Hanna says. In her already overloaded sophomore year, Hanna decided she wanted to take intensive Arabic.

The first SFS student to be accepted early to Georgetown Medical School, Hanna took another slight detour, deferring for a year to develop youth smoking-cessation programs in Cairo as Fulbright Fellow.

“Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” Hanna says. One day, she was being harassed just outside a youth center, and everything changed. “One of the children, who couldn’t have been more than 8, spoke up and said, ‘Don’t harass Miss Christina.’ For all they’d been through, to still come out the other side as compassionate, caring human beings—it was amazing.”

Her experience bridging cultures continues to serve her as she practices on both ends of the oncology spectrum in the U.S. and Rwanda. “The collaboration with my colleagues has shown me that good ideas have no boundaries. Together we can innovate to deliver better and more equitable global health care.”

Read more at magazine.georgetown.edu

Photo: Alice Kayibanda

OLYMPIAN CROSSES BORDERS IN LIFE AND SPORTS

Rookie bobsledder Chris Kinney (C’11) was at the starting line for his first Olympic run at last year’s Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Korea, when a chant of “Hoya Saxa!” pierced the air. Several Georgetown friends had come to PyeongChang to support him. Not surprisingly, Kinney recalls, people in the crowd asked, “What the heck? What’s Hoya Saxa?”

“The chanting got me so fired up,” he says. “I felt a sense of excitement I'd never felt before in my life.”

Kinney, a pusher in one of Team USA’s three four-man bobsleds in PyeongChang, was a newcomer to the sport, having made his first national-team run in 2016. If you had been at Georgetown with him, you’d remember Kinney as a sprint and hurdles star, an All-American, and a three-time Big East track-and-field champion.

“Georgetown was such a great experience. It opened up the world for me,” he says. “I really came into myself as an adult and especially in athletics.”

A Japanese major—“an awesome department,” he says—Kinney was recruited after graduation by Xebio, a Japanese retail-sports company. Kinney was hoping to run professionally, and the company wanted to support his ambition. “It was a dream come true,” he says. Kinney moved to Tsukaba, Japan, worked at the company, and trained with a Japanese national-team coach.

But after four years in Japan, Kinney noticed that his running speed had reached a plateau. At the same time, he had become intrigued with bobsledding. “I thought it would be perfect for me because I’m on the larger side of sprinters, and in bobsled you need mass while being able to move that mass quickly. So this really puts my sprinting ability to good use.”

In 2014, while in the U.S. for a track meet, Kinney participated in a national bobsled competition, finishing second. Based on his performance, he was invited to the second stage of rookie camp. After another year in Japan, he returned to the U.S. to pursue bobsledding.

He was on the national team but learned he’d make the Olympic team only a few weeks before the 2018 games.

Today Kinney is working on his MBA at East Tennessee State University, the Olympic bobsled summer training site.

“I’m focused on the Beijing Olympics in 2022 and also what I'm going to do beyond the Olympics.”

There’s only one hitch to bobsledding, the Georgia native admits. “I hate the cold.”

Read more at magazine.georgetown.edu

Photo: Getty Images AsiaPac

More than two dozen Georgetown alumni were sworn into the 116th Congress on January 3, continuing Georgetown’s long legacy of alumni serving the public. A total of 28 alumni, who represent 21 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands, took the oath of office in the U.S. House of Representatives (21) and Senate (7).

By State

Alaska

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (C’80) – R

Sen. Dan Sullivan (G’93, L’93) – R

California

Rep. Ted Lieu (L’94) – D

Florida

Rep. Lois Frankel (L’73) – D

Rep. Stephanie Murphy (G’04) – D

Rep. Francis Rooney (C’75, L’78) – R

Hawaii

Sen. Mazie Hirono (L’78) – D

Illinois

Sen. Richard Durbin (F’66, L’69) – D

Indiana

Rep. Trey Hollingsworth (G’14) – R

Rep. Peter Visclosky (L’82) – D

Maryland

Rep. Steny Hoyer (L’66) – D

Sen. Christopher Van Hollen (L’ 90) – D

Massachusetts

Rep. Lori Trahan (F’95) – D

Michigan

Rep. Debbie Dingell (F’75, G’98) – D

Nebraska

Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (G’86) – R

New Mexico

Rep. Xochitl Torres Small (F’07) – D

New Hampshire

Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (L’84) – D

New Jersey

Rep. Rebecca “Mikie” Sherrill (L’07) – D

New York

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (G’94) – D

Rhode Island

Rep. David Cicilline (L’86) – D

Texas

Rep. Henry Cuellar (F’78) – D

Rep. Filemon Vela (C’85) – D

Vermont

Sen. Patrick Leahy (L ‘64) – D

Virgin Islands

Rep. Stacey Plaskett (F’88) – D

Washington

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (C’86) – D

Wisconsin

Rep. Mike Gallagher (G’12, ’13, ’15) – R

Rep. Bryan Steil (B’03) – R

Wyoming

Sen. John Barrasso (C’75, M’78) – R

Lives Well Lived honors a few alumni who have recently passed away with short obituaries. We share with you these portraits of alumni beyond the headlines who have made an indelible impact living day-to-day.

You can find an In Memoriam list at alumni.georgetown.edu/in-memoriam.

Harry Jacobs (F’47)

Born in Germany, Harry Jacobs (F’47) immigrated to the United States as a child to escape Nazi persecution. After completing his sophomore year at Georgetown, he enlisted in the Army and entered the 12th class at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. While serving in Europe, Jacobs was a “Ritchie Boy”—German-born U.S. special intelligence officers who used their language and cultural backgrounds to build rapport in prisoner-of-war interrogation and to perform counter-intelligence. He served in the Battle of the Bulge, the Ardennes, and Bastogne, and was among the troops that liberated the Ohrdruf forced-labor and concentration camp in Germany, the first camp liberated by U.S. troops. For his service, he received several French and US honors. After the war, he returned to Georgetown to complete his degree. Jacobs worked for the federal government from his graduation until he retired in 1981. His son Brad says that his father “appreciated how the university was able to propel him into the next parts of his professional journey.” Jacobs and alumni friends frequently gathered for watch parties at M Street bars in Georgetown.

Jacobs died on November 23, 2018, at the age of 94. In addition to his son Brad, he is survived by his wife of 62 years, Selma; daughter, Trudy; son Steven; and five grandchildren.

Colleen Conway-Welch (N’65)

Colleen Conway entered Georgetown School of Nursing in fall 1961 at age 16 on a full scholarship. She earned advanced degrees at Catholic University School of Nursing and New York University. She was a midwife and nurse and also served in emergency and perinatal units in several states. She later headed the nurse-midwifery program at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. She became dean of Vanderbilt University’s School of Nursing in 1984. Under her leadership, the school launched a doctoral nursing program and expanded health care for underserved communities. She endowed a scholarship for graduate nursing students at Georgetown School of Nursing & Health Studies in 2011.

Patricia Cloonan, NHS dean, recalls first meeting Conway-Welch. “I had the pleasure of meeting Colleen when she was honored as a ‘Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing.’ I share with many a deep respect for Colleen's distinguished tenure at Vanderbilt, as well as her commitment to advancing and championing the nursing profession. Her legacy makes this school very proud.”

Conway-Welch received an honorary degree from Georgetown in 1997. She died on October 12, 2018; the cause was pancreatic cancer. She was predeceased by her husband, Ted Welch.

Joseph A. Catanzano, DDS (D’71)

Joe Catanzano (D’71) graduated from the dental school, but his enthusiasm for Georgetown matched that of an undergraduate alumnus. He had a wide circle of Georgetown friends, starting with his wife, Pamela [Soldano] (N’68), whom he met in Darnall cafeteria.

Catanzano, who died from MDS/leukemia on October 3, 2018, served in the Navy after dental school, retiring with the rank of captain. He later served in the Navy Reserve and was activated during the first Gulf War.

After 20 years in Boston, the Catanzanos moved to Washington, where Joe practiced dentistry with his best friend from Georgetown dental school, Charles Ferrara (D’71).

The Catanzanos eventually lived a few blocks from campus. “Dad would work out at Yates Field House and come home having made a new friend,” says his daughter, Kirsten Catanzano Messina (C’98, G’04). “He could talk about anything.”

“Joe was really a cup-half-full guy,” says his wife, Pam. “Even when he was sick, he lived a life of gratitude.”

In addition to his wife and daughter, Catanzano is survived by a son, Joseph III—also a dentist—a daughter-in-law, a son-in-law, and three grandchildren, whom he was indoctrinating to his beloved Georgetown basketball.

Kevin J. McIntyre (L’88)

In fall 2017, Kevin J. McIntyre (L’88) was facing unbelievable pressures. He was awaiting Senate confirmation as chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). He was quietly, and largely privately, battling an aggressive form of brain cancer that he knew would take him from his wife and their three young children. But he also took the lead in establishing a law center scholarship to honor a deceased classmate, Don Huston.

“It says a lot about Kevin’s competence, integrity, and care that he made sure that a friend was remembered when he was facing such enormous burdens,”, says Matt Calise, senior director for Law Center alumni relations, who had known McIntyre for more than a decade through his alumni board service.

McIntyre stepped down as FERC chair in October 2018 to focus on his health.

He died at age 58 on January 2, 2019, at his home in Arlington, Virginia. Survivors include his wife, Jennifer Brosnahan McIntyre; and their three children, Elizabeth, Thomas, and Anna; his parents; and four siblings.

Developing Inspired and Effective Interfaith Leaders

by Rachel Gartner, Rabbi and Director for Jewish Life

This summer marks my eighth year of serving as Georgetown’s Rabbi and Director for Jewish Life. One of the unexpected pleasures of my role is that the majority of the stories I tell sound like the beginning of a joke: A rabbi (me), an imam, a priest, and a minister walk into— you name it—a classroom, a panel discussion, a Reunion or John Carroll Weekend event, a commencement ceremony. To more authentically meet the call to pluralism, Campus Ministry recently added a Hindu Brahmachari to lead our Dharmic Life program, and student leaders now represent Latter Day Saints and Buddhists. As we expand, my stories grow richer and more delightful every year. And more important, so does the actual work of dialogue. But even as we grow our religious representation at Georgetown, I urge us not to become complacent. As members of the Georgetown community we are called to robust, multi-faceted dialogue that goes well beyond private discourse among clergy and even public presentations by clergy, chaplains, and religious professionals.

The 34th Conference of Jesuits specifies four approaches:

• The dialogue of life, where people strive to live in an open and neighborly spirit, sharing their joys and sorrows, their human problems and preoccupations.

• The dialogue of action, in which Christians and others collaborate for the integral development and liberation of people.

• The dialogue of religious experience, where persons, rooted in their own religious traditions, share their spiritual riches—for instance, prayer and ways of searching for God or the Absolute.

• The dialogue of theological exchange, where specialists seek to deepen their understanding of their respective religious heritages, and to appreciate each other’s spiritual values.

The aim is interfaith leadership by all people with whom Jesuits educate and influence. We want to engage with each other everywhere: in the streets and in the workplace, in neighborhoods and in religious institutions. Georgetown is supremely well-positioned to develop inspired and effective interfaith leaders whose influence will reach far beyond Healy Gates and into the halls of power in the U.S. and across the globe.

Georgetown’s interfaith leadership potential hinges not only on how many diverse religious professionals we hire but also on whether or not we center interfaith work in students’ lives and learning.

Meaningful interfaith work is hard. It is grounded in specific philosophies of engagement across differences. It is skills-based. It takes practice. It entails making lots of mistakes and making peace with things like public failure, personal vulnerability, and disappointments. It is also a transferable skill: Teach students to do interfaith engagement well, and they will be better able to engage hard issues across all kinds of other divides.

At a moment when rhetorical and political trends are undermining both the message of interfaith dialogue and the ability to do what it takes to achieve it, it is urgent that we double down on these priorities. Now is a time not only to inspire our students but also to equip them with boldness, dedication, and the hard skills necessary to make this vision a reality.

Meaningful interfaith work is hard. It takes practice. It entails making mistakes.