BARNARD COLLEGE
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ALUMNAE NEWS Class of 2008 We recently wrote an e-mail to last year’s graduates asking for an update. Here are some replies: Alex Athan: “I just completed my first year in the chemistry PhD program at Stony Brook. I have been accepted into Professor Iwao Ojima's lab, and I will be starting organometallic research this summer. Christina Chu: “I just finished my first year at optometry school [at SUNY]. In May, I went to Ft. Lauderdale for the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting because my project was accepted in the poster presentation. During the summer I will be continuing clinical research and earning a Master in Vision Science along with my Doctor of Optometry.” Pali Jen: “I'm finishing up my year of work as a development fellow for a Catholic elementary school in East Harlem. I'll travel a bit and spend some time at the Painted Turtle Camp over the summer and will be leaving NYC for San Francisco as I start med school at UCSF this fall.” Ayelet Spitzer: “This year I am doing genetic research on obesity at the NIH in Bethesda. It is enjoyable as I am making some progress with my research. Next year I will be back in NY for med school at NYCOM.” Denise Napolitano: “Since September I've been working in the NYPD's Forensic Investigations Division. I'm having a wonderful time and I'm learning so much about forensic analysis. I especially enjoy the instrumental analysis that we do, such as identifying drugs using GC/MS and comparing fibers using UV-vis and IR spectroscopy. I'm really enjoying this experience and I'm glad I have the opportunity to work here.” Dara Wilensky: “My fellowship this year has been fantastic-- my job has exposed me to the city's most disenfranchised population imaginable (homeless mentally ill adults), and I really feel like I'm making a difference in my clients’ lives. I'm starting with my med school applications now, so I've got one more year of freedom... which is great because the Urban Justice Center [UJC] has hired me as a real employee for August and onwards (after my fellowship ends). I’ll be the health care advocacy coordinator for the Mental Health Project at UJC.” Lauren Jain ’08 will be attending dental school in the fall, but last we heard she was still deciding between Stony Brook and Columbia, both fine programs. Yetta Levine ’08 stopped by for a visit in May. She has been working in a plastic surgeon’s office this year and will start dental school at UMDNJ in the fall. Emily Miller ’08 has been working at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan as a clinical research coordinator, recruiting patients for a Lupus and Antiphospholipid Syndrome registry. This has given her a great opportunity to observe hospital-based clinical research, and has confirmed her decision to pursue an MD. She is preparing medical school applications, aiming to start in fall 2010. She continues to dance, and has danced professionally since graduation. Sonia Ortiz ’08 is a PhD student in chemistry at Northwestern. Her research is supervised jointly by SonBin Nguyen and Joseph Hupp. Lindsay Repka ’08, a PhD student in chemistry at Caltech, has joined the lab of Sarah Reisman. Kaitlyn Suski ’08 is a chemistry PhD student at UCSD, working in Kimberly Prather’s lab. Lhamo Tsering ’08 is a laboratory technician in the biology department at LaGuardia Community College. She hopes to start taking courses at CUNY this academic year, working towards her Master’s degree in biochemistry. Megan Verma ’08 travelled to Japan after graduation. On her return, she started work in a law firm in the city, planning to apply to law school. Classes of 2000-2007 Chantel Nicolas ’07 was working as an associate chemist at Cosmetic Essence, Inc. in Holmdel, NJ and as a graduate student at Fairleigh Dickinson. She presented a poster, "Regulation of Collagen, Elastin and Heat Shock Proteins by Caffeic Acid," at the regional ACS symposium at FDU. She has recently relocated to Atlanta, GA. Ritu Gupta ’07 tells us that a paper “Enantioselective Total Synthesis of (−)-Napyradiomycin A1 via Asymmetric Chlorination of an Isolated Olefin” was published in JACS. Ritu is a Ph.D. student in Scott Snyder’s lab at Columbia. Rebecca Goldstein ’07 has been working in a pathology research lab at CUMC since graduation. The work in the lab looks at molecular mechanisms behind Alzheimer’s disease and stroke. Rebecca starts in the PhD program in pharmacology at Weill-Cornell this fall. Bing Na Zheng ’07 is an Analytic Core Lab Technician at the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Luna Alammar ’06 writes “I am finishing up my second year as a graduate student in the department of Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology at Johns Hopkins Medical School. I am in Dr. Janice Clements' lab studying the innate immune response to HIV infection in the brain. I'm enjoying my time very much here and am having a lot of fun.” Yevginiya Monisova ’06 wrote in March: “I am well into my first year of grad school in the CMU-Pitt joint PhD program in Computational Biology. I have two advisers: a computational/machine learning expert, Dr. Su-In Lee, and a Biological Sciences Professor Javier Lopez, both from Carnegie Mellon. The general topics of my research are nonsense mediated decay and how it connects to alternative splicing, as well as recursive alternative splicing, the specialty of Lopez’s lab. Although all my work right now is computational, I will be doing wet-lab experiments in the future. The course work this semester is challenging. Today, in Cell and Systems modeling lecture we were discussing integration methods and Oregonator came up”. [This model chemical oscillator is discussed in Chemistry BC3252y.] Dartmouth medical student Aimée Peck ’06 “brought lights and cameras to Tanzania, to film the actions of the selfless villagers who are key players in a global battle against a disease called river blindness. She hopes to shine klieg lights on an epidemic that, before effective treatment was available, infected up to 60% of people in some areas and blinded up to 10% of those infected.” [quoted from a Dartmouth Medical Newsletter] Martha Low ’05 received her DVM from the veterinary school at Illinois this May. She will be interning at a veterinary clinic in Langhorne, PA. She plans to pursue veterinary ophthalmology. Pam Cole ’05, in the Nutrition and Applied Physiology Master’s program at Teachers College, is very enthusiastic about health science journalism and media. She has a monthly column in Fight! Magazine, and has worked with Joy Bauer, the nutritionist for the Today Show. Diana Huang ’05 has graduated from SUNY-Buffalo School of Medicine and will begin her residency in OB/GYN at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan this summer. PhD students at Northwestern find time to do more than science. Roxanne Atienza ’03, in the Scheidt group, was included in the blog Sexy Science (http://sexyscience.blogspot.com); see Women of Science, Set 1. (In spite of the name, this site shows successful women in science in a positive light.) She is pictured by her fume hood. Way to go, Roxy! Ruo Hong Zhai ’03 is finishing dental school at NYU. We were glad to see her in April 2008 at the Barnard party celebrating Quandra Prettyman and the Africana Studies department. Elnaz Menhaji-Klotz ’02 received her PhD in chemistry from Yale in 2008, working in the group of John Wood. She is now a postdoc at Columbia in Prof. Tristan Lambert’s group. Charli Long ’00 visited us in November. She enjoys her work in animal drug evaluation with the FDA in Maryland. Her job involves some travelling to the Midwest. Crystal Suri ’00 graduated from Mount Sinai School of Medicine with a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences in 2005. Since then, she has been working as a patent agent the a law firm Jones Day and is attending Fordham Law School in the evenings with an expected graduation of May 2010. Sarah Tully ’00 is a postdoc at Scripps in Ben Cravatt’s lab. She says that she is learning a lot. She is funded by a Damon Runyon Fellowship. Congratulations, Sarah. Classes of the 1990's and 1980’s Jennifer Montgomery ’99 wrote recently: “ I finally finished the USC/Caltech MD/PhD program this May. I received my PhD from Caltech in 2007 with my thesis titled "The effects of behavioral stress and endothelin receptor antagonists on cancer". Then I returned to USC to finish off the last two years of med school. I spent this fall traveling around the country interviewing for a radiology residency position. In March, my husband, son and I found out we would be moving to Ohio. I will begin my radiology training at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, OH starting July 2010. Radiology residency requires a "preliminary" year in either surgery or medicine before radiology training. I opted for medicine and will be spending this year at Summa in Akron, OH. I have mixed feelings about returning home to Ohio although I am very happy about the programs in which I will be training. My mother is also thrilled to have her grandson so close. We just completed the move from Pasadena, CA to Akron, OH last week and things are finally starting to settle down.” Jennifer met her husband Fraser at Caltech where he was a post-doc; their son, Ewan, just turned 3. Ogei Yar ’94, a physician at St. Stephen’s Hospital in Newark, is working on developing enhanced cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. Ogei had done research at Barnard with Prof. Lessinger, kept in touch with him, and attended his memorial this spring. Linda Liou De Jesus ’93 is the Global Strategic Program Manager in the Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis Division at Agilent Technologies. Jen Chin Chapman ’90 is a patent attorney with Bristol-Myers Squibb. Laural Boone ’88, also an attorney, recently moved to Lovells, a UK law firm with a new NYC intellectual property practice. Prof. Chapman has run into Laurel, sometimes with her family, on upper Broadway a couple of times this year. Yasmin Khakoo ’86, a physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, is a pediatric neurologist with expertise in diagnosing and treating the neurologic complications of cancer. Polly Kanganis ’84 was a Spanish major at Barnard, with minors in both Chemistry and English. She enjoys keeping up with our department though the newsletter. She sent us an update: “After Barnard, I went on to earn a M.S. in Clinical Nutrition at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia, where I was introduced to some amazing researchers and physicians in the field of cholesterol metabolism. I eventually worked in Dr. DeWitt Goodman's lab where some of the best research in mevalonic acid, and other precursors of our current day Mevacors, Lipitors, etc. took place. My training at Barnard was excellent preparation for my research work with Dr. Goodman's group. Eventually, I attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and earned my M.D. in 1990. I completed a residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia-Presbyterian and have been in private practice since 1994. For the past nine years I have been running a solo practice, now exclusively focusing on GYN.” We enjoyed reading about the research of Jean Greenberg ’83 in the April 6 Chemical and Engineering News. Her group has shown how plants make and use azaeic acid, a C9 dicarboyxlic acid, as a messenger for defense. Jean is a faculty member at the University of Chicago. Robin Hochberg Louie ’81 stopped by for a visit in January. After a career in business and raising a family, she is exploring the possibility of returning to chemistry, possibly as a middle school science teacher. Classes before 1980 Lauren Plante ’79 writes: “After Barnard I went to medical school (Albert Einstein), then did a couple of residencies, got a couple of board certifications, and went to Hopkins for a master's degree in public health. Currently I’m Associate Professor of obstetrics and gynecology plus anesthesiology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia...my clinical practice is in maternal-fetal medicine and critical care obstetrics. Two cats, one dog, two kids, living in Bala-Cynwyd, PA, but looking to move west again. Susan LaFlamme ’77 is a Professor at Albany Medical College. Her lab investigates molecular mechanisms governing integrin-mediated adhesion and adhesion-dependent processes. We received an e-mail from Pearl Steinmetz-Herskovitz ’75 last June. She reports: “My family and I have been living in Israel for the past 22 years. 3½ years ago we moved to the city of Rehovot, where I am Director of the CT Unit at Kaplan Hospital. My interests are CT of the genitourinary system and of the chest. I have published several articles with a nephrology colleague on the Functional Surface Area of the Peritoneal Membrane in The Journal of Nephrology Society, and presented papers at several international conferences. My husband works in Occupational Safety and Health in a civilian capacity for the Israeli army. Our oldest son, Yaakov is finishing his B.A. in Philosophy at Hebrew University, and intends to continue with a Masters. Our second son, Netanel is now 23. In 2001, when he was 16, he was injured in a terrorist attack (suicide bomber). He has overcome his injuries and is very strong emotionally. He recently finished his army service and is pursuing a B.S. in Occupational Therapy at Haifa University. Our youngest child (a daughter), Re'ut (= comradeship), is 11 and finishing 5th grade. The politics / problems in this beautiful country are often upsetting (especially when one thinks one could do it better in a different way), but it's wonderful living here, contributing, and hoping to make a difference in this complicated world.” Jackie Barton ’74 becomes Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech on July 1. A Caltech website says the Provost Stolper and President Chameau "are confident that Jackie has the judgment and energy to lead the division creatively and effectively, and that she will be an outstanding advocate for the division and for the Institute as a whole." Susan Krown ’67, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, specializes in the treatment of malignant melanoma and the malignancies associated with AIDS and HIV infection. |