Continuum

’50s

Don Gale BA’58 MA’60 PhD’86 has been inducted into the Utah Broadcast Hall of Fame. Gale wrote and broadcast daily editorial comments for KSL radio and television for more than 20 years—some 6,000 editorials in all—and currently writes a monthly column for the Deseret News. He was on the faculty of the University of Utah Department of Journalism during the 1960s, served as president of the Alumni Association in the 1990s, and was chair of the National Advisory Council earlier this decade. In 2006, the University of Utah Press published his book Bags to Riches: The Story of I. J. Wagner. Gale currently serves the boards of Kingsbury Hall, the University Hospital Foundation, and the President’s Club. He was named a Distinguished Alumnus in 1998 and is a sustaining member of the National Advisory Council. LM

’70s

Marcia Madsen HBA’72, partner in the Washington, D.C., office of the law firm Mayer Brown, was named by The National Law Journal in June as one of “Washington’s Most Influential Women Lawyers.” “The lawyers on our list are power players and were selected for work that places them in an elite tier,” the publication said of its 32 honorees. Madsen’s citation notes that she is one of the few prominent women in the government contracts field, assisting clients in accessing the $500 billion spent annually on goods and services by the U.S. government. The publication also lauded her role from 2005-2007 as chair of the Acquisition Advisory Panel that submitted to Congress more than 80 major recommendations to make federal contracting more competitive, efficient, and transparent—setting the legislative agenda for Congress. Most of those recommendations have been adopted. LM

L. Gary Hart BS’73 MS’75 has been named director of the Center for Rural Health at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Before joining the center, Hart was director and endowed professor of the Rural Health Office in the Community, Environment and Policy Division of the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He also served on the advisory committee of the Arizona Area Health Education Center at the University of Arizona. Hart graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in geography and a secondary school teaching certification from the University of Utah, where he also received his master’s degree in geography. He is a graduate of the doctoral opportunities program in the Department of Health Services at the University of Washington School of Public Health and received a doctorate in medical geography from the University of Washington.

Roger Carter BA’75 was recently recognized as one of “America’s Top 100 Financial Advisors” by Barron’s magazine. Carter, who ranked No. 25 in the country, was one of a handful from the list profiled in the magazine. The Barron’s ranking reflects the volume of assets overseen by the advisors and their teams, revenues generated for the firms, and the quality of the advisors’ practices. Carter was also recognized on the “Top 100 Wirehouse Advisors in America 2010” list compiled by Registered Rep., a leading industry magazine. (A “wirehouse” is an industry term for a relatively large, multi-office brokerage firm.) A resident of Salt Lake City based out of the San Francisco office of Merrill Lynch, Carter works with 30 of the nation’s wealthiest families in Utah and Northern California. He is very active in the Salt Lake community, serving as a trustee of the Utah Symphony and Opera, Utah Youth Village, and Art Works for Kids! in Utah.

Allison Bliss BFA’78 was honored with the 2009-10 Woman-Owned Business Award from the Women’s Initiative for Self Employment, an organization in California that trains women to start businesses. A theater major at the U, Bliss initially moved to the Bay Area to work in theater, major Hollywood feature films, and television. After 20 years in that field, Bliss started her own marketing agency, Allison Bliss Consulting. A board member of the U’s San Francisco Bay Area Alumni Chapter and a U of U scholarship recipient herself, Bliss avidly works with the Bay Area Chapter to create events for local members to network, reconnect, and raise funds for scholarship awardees chosen by the chapter each year.

Michael Cantrell BS’78 has been promoted to the new position of president of Good Neighbor Pharmacy and group VP retail business development. Good Neighbor Pharmacy, a subsidiary of AmerisourceBergen Corporation, is a network of more than 3,600 stores that generated some $9.7 billion in prescription revenue in 2009, according to Drug Store News estimates. Cantrell joined AmerisourceBergen in 2009 as VP central fill business development. Prior to AmerisourceBergen, he was VP professional services at Longs Drug Stores, which at the time was one of the largest regional retail chains in the country. While at Longs, he was appointed to the board of RxAmerica, Longs’ wholly owned Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM), a third-party administrator of prescription drug programs. Cantrell is a registered pharmacist and holds a J.D. from the former Peninsula University in Mountain View, Calif. He is a current member of the State Bar of California.

Jane Dyer MS’78 MBA’93 PhD’08, CNM, FNP, has been inducted into the American College of Nurse Midwives as one of its new Fellows. A certified nurse midwife for more than 32 years, Dyer is associate professor (clinical) and director of the Nurse Midwifery and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner Program at the University of Utah College of Nursing. Through her leadership, the college’s Nurse Midwifery Program, the oldest continuously existing program west of the Mississippi, has achieved and maintained a prestigious ranking of 8th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The program focuses on recruiting individuals from the Intermountain West who will return to their home communities to provide care to local women and families.

’80s

Edward A. Gill BS’80, MD, FACC, has been elected president of the Pacific Lipid Association (PLA). A chapter of the National Lipid Association, the PLA is a medical education society for healthcare professionals who work in the area of lipid management and preventive cardiology. Gill is a professor of medicine in the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, and an adjunct associate professor at the same institution’s Department of Radiology. He is also a clinical associate professor in the Department of Diagnostic Ultrasound at Seattle University in Washington.

Miriam Y. Lacey PhD’81, associate professor of Applied Behavioral Science at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, has been named director of its Master of Science in Organization Development (M.S.O.D.) program. An authority on organization behavior and development, Lacey has been at the forefront of integrating behavioral science with principles of total quality management. She works with Fortune 500 companies such as Exxon, Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, Tektronix, McDonald’s, and Microsoft on the implementation of large-scale change for greater quality, productivity, and employee commitment.

Mark Zabriskie BS’85 PhD’89 has been named dean of the College of Pharmacy at Oregon State University. Zabriskie, a professor of medicinal chemistry and natural products at OSU, specializes in the search for natural product drug leads. After receiving a doctorate in medicinal chemistry from the U, Zabriskie completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Alberta. He joined the OSU faculty in 1992.

’90s

Lt. Col. Michael Antonio BS’90 is the new director of operations and training for Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Antonio joined the Corps from a desire to serve the country. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and mathematics from the University of Utah, he attended The Basic School. Following flight school, he was designated a Naval Aviator in 1994. He has been on numerous deployments, including in Iraq, Kuwait, Thailand, Korea, and Okinawa. He was most recently commanding officer of the MCB Hawaii’s Marine Corps Air Station for two years.

Sue Liu BS’97 (double degree, political science and sociology) recently became an Obama Administration official. As senior advisor at the Department of Labor, Liu works with her colleagues to develop policy, guidance, and programs to strengthen training and educational opportunities for U.S. workers. Her previous experience includes working at the Department of Education on adult education and career education program management. She was also a policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza, where she worked with Congress to ensure job training and education access for vulnerable segments of society. In addition to her degrees from the U, Liu holds a MSW from Washington University in St. Louis.

’00s

Talese Peterson Hunt BA’02 has been a member of the world-famous Radio City Rockettes since 2007. Hunt trained in dance for 16 years and has starred in many local theater productions, most recently in Pioneer Theatre Company’s production of A Chorus Line. Her Rockette contract runs from October to January each year, when she performs in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at Madison Square Garden. Hunt, 31, spends the rest of the year with her husband in Utah, where she stays in shape as a certified Pilates instructor. She also works as an actress and model with Salt Lake City’s McCarty Talent Agency. Hunt grew up in Sandy and began dancing at age 3, inspired by the musicals her parents watched on television. She studied jazz, tap, ballet, hip-hop, contemporary, and modern and was president of the dance company at Skyline High School.

Benjamin R. Arenkiel PhD’04, a McNair Scholar in neuroscience, has joined the genetics faculty at Baylor College of Medicine. The McNair Scholars program identifies “rising stars” in four areas of biomedical research—neuroscience, juvenile diabetes, breast cancer, and pancreatic cancer. Arenkiel was most recently a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow in neurobiology at Duke University. He is investigating how neurons make and maintain proper connections during development and throughout adulthood.

Kung-Shan Cheng PhD’05 is currently working with the Hyperthermia Group at Duke University Medical Center conducting clinical tests and working on improving algorithms for a real-time adaptive controller designed to focus external thermal power on a target tumor while sparing or minimizing damage to the surrounding tissues. Cheng left Utah for North Carolina to do postdoctoral research at Prof. S.K. Das’ laboratory at Duke, where his research has included the development of model-reduction techniques to realize the real-time adaptive controller for a multi-antenna hyperthermia treatment using magnetic resonance temperature image (MRTI) as feedback. Cheng and his colleagues at Duke have written several major full-length practical and theoretical research papers on the work, including a recent publication in Medical Physics.

Miriah Meyer PhD’08 isn’t a biologist, but she helps biologists better understand their work. The daughter of an artist mother and chemist father, Meyer is a computer scientist specializing in the emerging field of visualization, which uses graphic computer representations to help scientists and others envision, manage, and interact with large quantities of complex data in ways that would otherwise be impossible. A postdoctoral research fellow in computer science in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Meyer spends her work hours not at SEAS, but rather in a biology lab at Harvard Medical School, learning how DNA affects the development of thousands of tiny cells inside fruit fly embryos. She then uses computer graphics to reveal the minute differences and similarities across many species’ profiles to the scientists who do the research.

The Beza School in August 2010. As of November, the second story was nearly complete, and the library was well under way.

The University of Utah Executive MBA Class of 2008 pulled together to collect and donate $11,000 for a school building project in Ethiopia in partnership with the Children of Ethiopia Education Fund (COEEF). COEEF’s mission is to empower girls in the country through education, with a focus on sustainable efforts to benefit them, and, if possible, the greater student body and community. Bryan Peterson BS’04 MBA’08 spearheaded the EMBA class’s involvement in COEEF. Peterson and his family had already been sponsoring two Ethiopian sisters through the program for a few years. When given a class assignment “to do a presentation on something that we where passionate about,” he recalls, he introduced his study group to COEEF. “They asked me to represent the group by giving my presentation to the entire EMBA class,” which was then inspired to raise funds to help build something for COEEF. “Each of the 60 students and some instructors in our program contributed, and many of the companies that each of them worked for also contributed matching funds,” Peterson notes. It took just over a year to hit (and slightly exceed) their goal of $10,000. Just a few years later, the Beza School Building Project in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia, is nearing completion. The first phase utilizing the donation are two classrooms already being used by students. The second phase of the project is a library, which is partially finished. Members of the EMBA Class say they are pleased with how well the construction has gone. Says Peterson, now associate director of technical services with the Utah Education Network at the U, “Everyone in the EMBA class of 2008 was very excited to hear that the project was moving forward and that we were able to make a real difference in the lives of these girls. We understand that in a real way it literally is not just an education but in many cases a matter of life and death.”

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