Boston College Magazine, Fall 2025

GOAL DRIVEN

How Boston Bruins CEO Charlie Jacobs ’94 revitalized an iconic NHL franchise.

MAHJONG!

The age-old game of clacking tiles is suddenly taking America by storm.

The Church and Latinos

The influential BC theologian Hosffman Ospino on how Latinos, who now account for nearly half of US Catholics, are transforming the Church.

The influential BC theologian Hosffman Ospino on why the Church’s future depends on fully embracing Latinos, who account for nearly half of US Catholics, and 60 percent of those younger than eighteen.

By John Wolfson

Helping Boston College Entrepreneurs Soar

How SSC Ventures—a venture capital fund run by Boston College graduates—is enabling BC students and alumni to get successful startups off the ground.

By Elizabeth Clemente

Under the leadership of Charlie Jacobs ’94, the Boston Bruins have won their first championship since the seventies, rebuilt the team’s relationship with its obsessive fans, and celebrated one hundred years in the NHL. Jacobs believes the best is yet to come.

By Jacob Feldman

BC’s Next President

Our Summer 2025 cover story was an interview with Jack Butler, SJ, who next year will become the University’s twentysixth president.

Well worth the read! Just so excited to see the Jesuit-at-the-top tradition continue—which is not the case at every Jesuit institution.

Mark R. Sullivan ’81 Dudley, Massachusetts

The future of BC is in the best hands!

Jill Bruno ’89 Chevy Chase, Maryland

“

Congratulations,

Jack! The BC Eagles are lucky to have you. Looking forward to BC excelling even more!”

Steve Scully ’96 Rochester, Minnesota

How BC formed me as a person who recognizes the power of serving others was way more important than any course I took. BC taught me that the real goals of life aren’t money or prestige, but how we live and connect with other humans. Thank you to Fr. Jack and all my other BC mentors who helped offer their experiences to help build my own.

Matt Porter ’09 Boston, Massachusetts

I am grateful every day for how BC has affected my life: friendships that have deepened over the years, a faith that has sustained me and informed every season of my life, and, like many of our fellow BC grads, I found my life companion and the father of our children—forty-six years and counting! Welcome to your presidency, Fr. Jack Butler. You are sure to bring many great gifts to the leadership of our beloved Boston College.

Mary Piccolo ’76, STM ’92 Franklin, Massachusetts

What I’ve Learned: David Twomey

Recently retired as one of BC’s longestserving faculty members, the Carroll School professor and labor law expert reflected on a legendary career.

An excellent professor and person. Getting into his classes was a real challenge due to their popularity, but I was lucky enough to enroll in at least two. I was just teaching my young granddaughters his “yawn theory,” and often recalled his advice concerning the authoring of textbooks as I and, more recently, my daughters navigated through law school. Legend for sure!

John Edwards ’86 Islip, New York

On the first day of class, Professor Twomey took out a large stack of index cards and proceeded to ask each student their name and something they like to do in their spare time. Within two weeks he had all 140 students’ names memorized.

Phil Rectra ’90 Yarmouth, Massachusetts

Hot Ticket

Longtime head of ticket sales Jim O’Neill spoke about why he loves working at sports-mad BC.

Jim is a stand-up guy. Love seeing him get this well-deserved recognition!!

Martin Jarmond

Former William V. Campbell Director of Athletics Los Angeles, California

Jim and his family are truly the embodiment of what it is like to live like an Eagle.

Mark Wilson Brookline, Massachusetts

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Science Mind, Human Eye

Nobel laureate Martin Karplus is widely known for his pioneering contributions to the field of theoretical chemistry, but he was also a remarkable photographer. This 1955 photo, Diocletian’s Palace (Split, Croatia [Yugoslavia]), is just one of the compositions included in the new exhibition Martin Karplus: Moments and Monuments, on view at the McMullen Museum of Art through December 7. The exhibit showcases fifty-five images Karplus captured on a thirty-three-millimeter camera during his travels across Europe and the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s. Rendered in the richly saturated tones of early Kodachrome film, the inquisitive portraits of everyday postwar life are part of a significant collection of digital images that Karplus and his wife, Marci, gave to the McMullen before his death in 2024.

Linden Lane

Changing the Game

How Nicole Wong ’09 became an ambassador for mahjong, the Chinese game that’s having a huge moment in America.

BY SCOTT KEARNAN

Nicole Wong’s grandparents, like many in their generation of Chinese New Zealanders, were avid mahjong players. They taught the game to their four children, who competed to determine who would do the household chores, and hosted weekly sessions in which family and friends sat around a table strewn with clacking tiles, catching up over conversation. But when Wong’s parents immigrated to California in 1989, they had no one to play with. They never taught Wong and her brothers mahjong, a contest of luck and skill that derives from centuries-old Chinese card games. The family’s mahjong set sat in the garage, an unused relic gathering dust, for decades. “I lived a very Americanized childhood,” Wong said. “I knew that I was Chinese American, but I didn’t really have a super strong sense of what that meant.”

It wasn’t until the summer after graduating from Boston College in 2009 that Wong finally learned mahjong, while spending a month living with her grandparents in New Zealand. Today she is an expert, the author of the recent book Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora, and a sort of ambassador for the game.

The modern version, in which four players (or teams) pick and discard tiles to form a winning hand (“Mahjong!”), was popularized in the US in the 1920s by the American businessman Joseph Park Babcock, who learned the game in China and then brought a simplified version to the States. Over the past couple of years, the game has enjoyed a huge resurgence, particularly with Gen Z and Wong’s fellow Millennials. “Mahjong used to be a board game for Chinese grandmas. Now everyone wants to play,” announced one characteristically enthusiastic Slate magazine headline last fall, reporting on a boom of mahjong nights popping up at trendy bars, restaurants, and hotels from New York City to Nashville. Around the same time, a clip of Julia Roberts talking about her weekly games with friends on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert went viral across social media.

In 2023, Wong began hosting mahjong events at venues around the San Francisco Bay Area, where she now lives, teaching newbies to play. As the game has exploded around the country, so has her profile. This summer, Wong was invited by NPR to discuss mahjong and her book before an audience of two hundred players at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC. For Vogue magazine, she wrote about the role the game played in reconnecting to her heritage, and she has been interviewed about the recent surge of intergenerational interest by outlets such as Axios.

“

demic. Those years were an awakening. It’s very different than when I was growing up in the ’90s and early 2000s.”

Wong said that learning mahjong from her grandparents opened doors to conversations she’d never been able to have before, including about Chinese culture and family lore, like how her great-grandmothers were among the earliest Chinese immigrants to New Zealand in the 1920s. She also saw sides of her grandparents’ personalities she’d never witnessed before: “their cheekiness,” she writes in her book, “their competitive rapport, their smug pride in winning a hand—that cracked a little window into their younger days.”

“Now young people are playing it more, inviting friends over to play as they would any board game night. That was the goal.”

Wong, who majored in English at BC and codirected the AHANA Leadership Council’s Women of Color Caucus, attributes the revived interest in mahjong to two primary factors: a craving for social interactivity in an increasingly disconnected society, and a renewed embrace of cultural roots within certain branches of family trees. “People are gravitating to it as an activity in the same way people went to trivia nights when I was in my twenties,” Wong said. “Plus, when it comes to younger generations in Asian American communities, I think there is a curiosity and pride about cultural heritage that is more celebrated now, in the wake of the anti-Asian hate we saw in the pan-

In 2019, she embarked on “a creative side project to preserve my family history through the lens of mahjong,” she said. What began as a series of conversations with her parents about memories and personal traditions associated with the game morphed into The Mahjong Project, a website that explains gameplay and invites players around the globe to share their unique “house rules” and family stories about the game. The project, as well as the knack for storytelling that Wong developed as a former podcast producer for Spotify, formed a basis for Mahjong. The book offers tutorials, an overview of regional variations—including Taiwanese, Malaysian, Filipino, and American styles—and instructions on hosting mahjong nights, from choosing snacks to honoring superstitions (never tap someone on the shoulder!) to “the art of talking trash (like an elder).”

More than anything, Wong said, she wants to encourage others to treat the game as a gateway to conversation, connection, and community. It has certainly been exciting to her to see love and appreciation for the game grow in recent years, both within and outside of Asian communities. “There was a knowledge gap that needed to be bridged,” she said. “Now young people are playing it more, inviting friends over to play as they would any board game night. That was the goal.” n

BC Professor Heather Cox Richardson is Honored by Time

Six years after she started writing Letters from an American, her daily analysis of national politics, Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson has been named to the list of TIME100 Creators, the magazine’s roster of “the most influential digital voices of 2025.” Referring to Richardson as “one of the most popular historians in the US,” the publication noted her superlative success in keeping social media users informed and engaged: She has more than 3.2 million Facebook followers and 2.5 million subscribers on Substack, making her that platform’s most-subscribed individual creator.

“Social media strikes me as bringing a new tool to a process as old as humanity: creating community and exchanging information and ideas,” Richardson wrote in a post on Instagram, where she has more than half a million followers, acknowledging her placement on the list. “That process has always had the potential to hurt us, but at its best it has moved society forward. Figuring out how to use it for good brings together the past and the future in the present, and I am extraordinarily grateful to be part of it.”

Richardson, who joined BC in 2011 and teaches nineteenthcentury American history at the University, continues to see her profile rise outside academia. Last summer, for instance, she moderated an onstage conversation with former President Barack Obama for the nonprofit Connecticut Forum, and narrated a performance of Lincoln Portrait, a classical orchestral work that incorporates readings from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Scott Kearnan

Helping Pro Athletes Earn Degrees

Like a lot of star college athletes, Brooks Orpik ’22 and Chris Kreider ’16 left college early for professional sports careers—in their case, departing BC to join the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins and New York Rangers. Unlike many others, though, both later earned their degrees, attending BC’s Woods College of Advancing Studies. Inspired by such examples, the NHL and Major League Baseball players’ unions worked with BC to formalize what Woods College Dean David Goodman calls a “frictionless route” for pro athletes to complete their education. Goodman worked with NHL Players’ Association Executive Director Marty Walsh, the former Boston mayor who graduated from Woods, on an agreement to accept up to ninety transfer course credits toward BC’s 120-credit degree requirement. The University then created similar partnerships with the MLB Players Alumni Association, the NHL, and the Canadian Football League. “We strive to keep studentathletes’ educational path open,” Goodman said. Elizabeth Clemente

The McMullen Named One of Boston’s Best Museums

Yankee magazine has named BC’s McMullen Museum of Art the “Best Small Art Museum” in Boston. For its annual list of Boston’s top attractions, Yankee praised the McMullen’s permanent collection of masterworks by renowned artists such as Picasso, Homer, and Cassatt, as well as the rotating special exhibitions that are “curated as expertly as in much larger museums, but on a more intimate scale.” S.K.

ATHLETICS

Last summer Acacia Walker-Weinstein was named the inaugural Schiller Family Head Coach for Women’s Lacrosse. This is the third endowed women’s head coach position in BC Athletics history, thanks to a $2.5 million gift from Phil Schiller ’82 and Kim Gassett-Schiller P’24.

“The truth is the girls own this team, not me.… These girls are deeply, intrinsically motivated. Singular moments of success are not what these girls are seeking. They want long-term success, consistent success, and they’re always looking for more—like me.”

CAMPUS NEWS

Casey C. Beaumier, SJ, has been named the Haub Vice President for University Mission and Ministry. Beaumier succeeds Jack Butler, SJ, who will become BC’s twentysixth president next summer. In his new role, Beaumier is charged with leading the effort to maintain and promote Boston College’s academic and societal mission as a Jesuit university. Beaumier has held several key positions in his nineteen years at BC, most recently vice president and University secretary, and director of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies.

The Woods College and BC High School have partnered on a dual enrollment program. Eligible BC High juniors and seniors can enroll in up to two Woods College courses, including online and hybrid courses, at a discounted rate, with credits earned transferrable to Woods should the high schoolers pursue a degree there after graduation.

The women’s lacrosse team has set a program record with eighteen players named to the 2025 All-ACC Academic Team. To be selected, athletes must participate in at least half of their team’s games and maintain a 3.0 grade point average during both the previous semester and their entire college career. The lacrosse team has more than tripled its All-Academic selections since 2021.

TWENTY-FOUR SLICES EACH OF BACON AND CHEESE. American cheese is the default, but cheddar, Swiss, and pepper jack are available too.

SIX POUNDS OF BEEF.

The Eagle’s is the largest of the deli’s half-dozen “Challenge” burgers. First came the two-pound Cowabunga, named for the exclamation of the first person to finish it.

ONE BEVERAGE. Diner’s choice. Most impressively, “Furious Pete,” a competitive eater holding fourteen Guinness World Records, completed the challenge with two milkshakes.

FIVE POUNDS OF FRIES. They’re harder to finish than the meat, Osmani said. Pros know to dip them in warm water to make them mushy first.

BC’s Roche Center for Catholic Education and Boston College Ireland have partnered on a new initiative to reinvigorate and strengthen Catholic education in Ireland. The program will cultivate education leadership at Catholic schools across Ireland and equip educators to address contemporary issues such as disassociation from spiritual concerns and evolving educational expectations.

The computer science department has announced a new doctoral program. The fiveyear PhD program is scheduled to launch in Fall 2026 with a cohort of five students, with a goal to eventually expand to twentyfive. The program will emphasize the importance of social responsibility in the rapidly evolving field of computer science, which is among the top ten undergrad majors at BC.

photo: Christopher Garcia

ONE PICKLE. Finishing the challenge within an hour earns your money back, a one-hundred-dollar gift card, a T-shirt, and a photo on the deli’s framed display of victors.

Behold the Eagle’s Challenge Burger

Those with an appetite for competition know that Eagle’s Deli, the student hangout in Cleveland Circle, offers a legendary test: the Eagle’s Challenge Gigantic Burger. A menu mainstay for going on thirty years, it’s a beefy tower priced at $80.00 and stacked with a staggering twelve half-pound patties, twenty-four strips of bacon, and as many slices of cheese, served with five pounds of French fries, a drink, and a pickle. To conquer the challenge, you have to eat the whole thing within an hour. The burger achieved fame starting in 2009, when it was featured on the Travel Channel show Man v. Food. Since then, said Eagle’s co-owner Moe Osmani, countless people, from ambitious BC students to sensation-seeking YouTubers, have tackled it.

Fewer than twenty people have cleared their tray in the allotted time, Osmani said, nearly all of them professional competitive eaters—including one who recently finished in eighteen minutes. “We might have to introduce something tougher,” Osmani teased. “I’ve got ideas.” S.K.

Timeline of a Trailblazer

In her new book, A Woman of Firsts: Margaret Heckler, Political Trailblazer, Kimberly Heckler tells the life story of her mother-in-law, Margaret Heckler JD’56, a daughter of Irish immigrants who broke gender barriers to become a legendary congresswoman, presidential cabinet secretary, and ambassador. Here are just a few of the many milestones of Heckler’s career. Elizabeth Clemente

May 1956

Heckler is the only woman to graduate in her BC Law class after winning the University’s simulated court competition three years in a row.

November 1966

She wins her first campaign for Congress in the Massachusetts Tenth Congressional District, after beating a forty-twoyear incumbent in the Republican primary.

October 1974

President Gerald Ford signs into law Heckler’s groundbreaking legislation, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which gives women the right to credit in their own names.

December 1985

She becomes the first woman named US Ambassador to Ireland, eventually securing a $120 million grant for the new International Fund for Ireland to promote economic and social advancement.

January 1983

Heckler is appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services by President Ronald Reagan. Her landmark 1985 “Heckler Report” would become the first federal study of racial and ethnic inequalities in US health.

Game Changer

Inventing a new way to train for field hockey.

Most recent college graduates are just beginning their careers, but Pia Serowik ’25 is already busy running a booming business she started while still a student two years ago. Serowik, a former BC field hockey player, is the creator of Mr. Assist, a field hockey training tool. Modeled after an ice hockey device created by her father, former NHL player Jeff Serowik, Mr. Assist is a ball on a bungee cord that players can attach to their stick to practice passing and receiving. Mr. Assist was at one point the topselling field hockey accessory on Amazon, and the company, an official sponsor of USA Field Hockey, has even launched its own youth field hockey camp, featuring a curriculum designed by Serowik. “Field hockey has given me everything,” Serowik said. “Creating a product was a way for me to stay in it forever.” E.C.

LinkedIn Names BC a Top College for Career Success

College is an investment, and earning a degree from Boston College pays exceptional dividends. That’s according to the first-ever LinkedIn Top Colleges list, which identifies the fifty US universities “that best set graduates up for long-term success.” The social media platform for professional networking and career development considered several factors in compiling its inaugural list of top schools, including job placement rates and advancement into senior-level positions.

LinkedIn ranked BC number twentytwo, noting that the University’s alumni are particularly high achievers in the fields of financial services, healthcare, and technology. The list also credited BC alumni for being especially skilled in the use of the statistical software Stata, the programming language OCaml, and the field of applied psychology. Scott Kearnan

Where Eagles Say “I Do”

For some alumni, the milestones reached at Boston College don’t end with commencement—they continue all the way to the altar. For two decades now, the Connors Center, a BC-owned estate in Dover, Massachusetts, about thirteen miles from campus, has been heralded as one of the nation’s premier venues for nuptials. Last year, for instance, it was added to the Best Weddings Hall of Fame by the influential wedding website The Knot, and fielded 806 wedding inquiries through that site alone. “It always brings tears to my eyes to see a father, daughter, and oftentimes, mother walk down the aisle,” said Susan Burton, general manager of the Connors Center.

The property (one of three BC venues that host weddings) consists of a grand stone home built in 1902, as well as gardens and paths designed by landscape architects Olmstead and Vaux, who designed New York City’s Central Park. Here’s a look at the estate, by the numbers. E.C.

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More to Explore from BC Magazine

Our web channels are full of extras.

WATCH Which baseball team has the rowdiest fans? In an exclusive Q&A, Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Sal Frelick ’22 gives his take on crowd energy, names his favorite player, and dishes on his favorite stadium snack. Catch the full exchange on our Instagram. Follow: @bostoncollegemagazine.

SHARE We want to see BC through your lens! Share your favorite campus memories by sending photos to Boston College Magazine or tagging us on Instagram (@bostoncollegemagazine) or Facebook (BostonCollegeMagazine). Your snapshots could be featured in an upcoming issue or online. Email: bcm@bc.edu.

Average number of weddings each year at the Connors Center

1

Married couples who have celebrated with a milk-andcookies toast

Acres of land on the estate

Average number of guests per wedding

331

Windows in the main building

LISTEN “Life is fun and interesting and complicated, and I don’t think people should have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about their finances,” said longtime BC professor and retirement expert Alicia Munnell. Hear more of her candid take on planning for retirement on The Boston College Magazine Podcast. Visit: bcm.buzzsprout.com.

Old Paintings, New Discoveries

BC professors Stephanie Leone and John Lansdowne are uncovering the secrets contained in centuries-old artworks.

BY ALIX HACKETT

On a late August afternoon at BC’s McMullen Museum of Art, professors of art history Stephanie Leone and John Lansdowne ’07 were studying a thirteenthcentury painting of the Madonna and child, peering at something new Leone had just noticed. In the lower right corner, someone had crossed out the face of the devil, an ominous brown creature with wings and a tail. By modern standards, such an act would be considered vandalism, but that wouldn’t have been the case at the time when the painting was displayed publicly, Lansdowne said. Defacing an image of the devil would have been celebrated as a “devotional act,” publicly rejecting the evil figure. “It would have actually been thought of as improving upon, in a way, this particular piece,” he said.

Leone and Lansdowne weren’t aware of the graffiti when they selected the panel painting for their exhibition, Medieval | Renaissance: A Dialogue on Early Italian Painting, which runs through December 7. The nineteen pieces they chose, which include devotional icons, altarpiece panels, narrative scenes, and portraits from the late thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries, are part of the private Frascione Collection

in Florence, Italy, and have rarely been displayed publicly. Some have never been studied using modern techniques.

All that is about to change, said Lansdowne. As part of his art history seminar, Painting in Italy at the End of the Middle Ages, he and ten undergraduate and graduate students will have the rare opportunity this fall to conduct original research on three of the paintings. With guidance from Boston-area conservators, they’ll take a closer look at the paintings under specialized lights, and use minimally invasive methods like infrared photography to peek beneath the surface, searching for places where human alterations may have been made to the originals. Lansdowne also hopes to use X-ray fluorescence, known as XRF, to trace the deterioration of physical substances like paint pigments and metals, revealing how outside forces may have changed the paintings through the years. “For a lot of the metals, you can see ways in which pollution has maybe had an effect on these images,” he said. “It tells that longer history.”

Lansdowne first studied art history as a student at Boston College, graduating in 2007, and returned to teach in the depart-

ment in 2024, after pursuing a doctoral degree at Princeton and holding research positions in Europe and the Middle East. His early studies focused on medieval art, but he dislikes being confined to a single time period, and is fascinated by how artworks can be interpreted differently when viewed through various cultural or ideological lenses. “The medievalist interpretive approach is something that had an effect on me and is the basis for my training in the field,” he said, “but where I take it is another thing.”

As cocurators of Medieval | Renaissance, Lansdowne and Leone wanted to showcase how an art historian’s disciplinary background shapes their perspective. Both penned opening statements that hang on opposite sides of the gallery’s entrance: Lansdowne as a medievalist, and Leone as a Renaissance specialist. Many of the paintings they’ve selected are accompanied by separate placards presenting each professor’s impressions, which often focus on entirely different elements. In a portrait depicting the Augustinian friar Gabriele Veneto, for example, Leone describes the artist’s revolutionary use of oil paint to simulate the effect of light and shadow, while Lansdowne highlights a gold inscription naming the subject, which he links to late medieval practices of authentication. Both professors inspected the painting the week before the exhibition opened, going back and forth on when the inscription may have been added (almost certainly after the painting was completed), and the originality of its black and gold frame. “This is the fun part,” Lansdowne said.

Italian paintings produced during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are often claimed by scholars of both the medieval and Renaissance periods, which is precisely why Leone and Lansdowne chose that era as the focus of their exhibition. This “frontier zone,” as Lansdowne refers to it, was also a time of great artistic innovation, giving rise to techniques like punchwork, where artists used a metal tool to add pattern and texture to gold surfaces, and pastiglia, which created a raised effect. In Lansdowne’s seminar, students from across different majors and academic backgrounds will examine these elements up close and be encouraged to come up with their own unique interpretations.

More discoveries like Leone’s are likely to be made this semester. “It’s about looking closely and really seeing,” Leone said, surveying the devil’s scratched-out profile. “Half of the answer’s in front of you, and then you have to make sense of it.” n

Baking the Perfect Pi

Math teacher and pastry maker Benjamin Delwiche ’14, MEd ’15, has the recipe for success.

BY SCOTT KEARNAN

Benjamin Delwiche spends most of his time in two places: the classroom and the kitchen.

It’s been that way since his days at Boston College, where Delwiche crunched numbers as a math major when he wasn’t cracking eggs for his part-time job at a nearby bakery. Nowadays, Delwiche lives in Los Angeles and works full-time as a middle school and high school math teacher. At home in his kitchen, though, you’ll find him on social media, shooting and sharing videos of his science-minded methods for making cookies, breads, pies, and pastries. Over the past few years, his educational and instructional video clips have earned him more than two million fans and followers on TikTok and Instagram, where his handle is @benjaminthebaker.

Delwiche’s new cookbook, Dessert Course: Lessons in the Whys and Hows of Baking, is the sum total of his lifelong twin passions for math and baking. In its pages, Delwiche breaks down precise recipes for brownies, custards, and other treats to explain how even slight alterations of ingredient measurements, ratios, bake times, and other variables can yield very different tastes and textures. It’s this professorial approach to guiding amateur bakers that sets him apart from others online and on bookshelves.

“A lot of cookbooks have amazing recipes, but are missing the element of explanation,” Delwiche said. He believes that teaching the math and science behind baking gives readers a stronger foundation for perfecting the classics, from carrot cakes to banana breads, plus the know-how to personalize basic recipes. Dessert Course describes how the addition of baking powder makes for puffier snickerdoodles, for instance, and explains why subtracting egg yolks results in denser cakes. The book even has flow charts for helping bakers find their way to, say, their preferred oatmeal cookie, be it thin and crispy or thick and chewy.

Delwiche, meanwhile, likes to bring his baking background into the classroom, where his students sometimes get to taste-test their teacher’s experiments. “When math feels challenging, students often say, ‘I’m never going to use this,’” said Delwiche, whose dream is to one day have a Mr. Wizard’s World-style television show that demystifies math through cooking. “When I teach things like ratios and percentages, I center the unit all around baking. It helps them recognize that math is something people use on a daily basis.” n

Ready to bake?

Here are a few helpful crib notes Delwiche doles out in Dessert Course.

Weigh your best option.

Though his cookbook offers measurements in both volume (cups, teaspoons, etc.) and mass (grams), Delwich stresses that the latter is much more reliable. One cup of flour could range from 120 to 180 grams, depending on how you scoop, so he suggests investing in a kitchen scale for accuracy.

Crust your buttercream.

To add a bit of sugary crunch to cake frosting, increase the ratio of powdered sugar to butter. A 1:1 ratio results in a smooth buttercream, whereas a 2:1 ratio creates a more crystalline crust.

Cool your cookie dough.

Rather than pop it directly into the oven, let it sit in the fridge so the flour hydrates and the fat solidifies. He suggests at least 30 minutes of chilling time, and as much as 24 hours to yield even more complex flavor.

Menswear MVP

From Kelce to Gronk, star athletes are sporting the suits of Tom Marchitelli ’04.

BY ELIZABETH CLEMENTE

How in-demand is fashion designer Tom Marchitelli? Let’s put it this way: His custom garments fill the wardrobe of the highest-paid player in the NFL, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott. “He hasn’t repeated a suit in nine seasons,” Marchitelli said. “There’s 150 suits, and another fifty casual sets.”

Marchitelli has outfitted five hundred or so athletes across the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL in his custom menswear brand, Gentleman’s Playbook, for red carpet events, late-night talk show appearances, and arena arrivals on championship game days. Marchitelli’s striking ensembles, including wool and silk suits covered in bold plaids, hot pink pinstripes, gold marbling, and even tiger stripes—a design that was fittingly for Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow—have led to coverage in such publications as Sports Illustrated and the New York Times. “I always want to push the envelope on styles, designs, and colors,” Marchitelli said. It all started in 2013, when Marchitelli was working as a hedge fund accountant. Seeking a creative outlet, he combined his interests in sports and men’s fashion to launch Gentleman’s Playbook as a Tumblr blog where he critiqued the outfits professional athletes wore on red carpets. Then came his Instagram account, where he shared photos of himself in stylish suits he had accumulated over the years. “I’ve always had a penchant for custom tailored suits, since I was a little guy,” he said. “I still remember what I wore to the BC formal my senior year: an allblack suit with a red tie, because I saw someone on The Sopranos wearing that.”

Marchitelli’s social media exploded. He quickly gained one hundred thousand followers, including a ton of professional athletes. Among them was NFL quarterback Chase Daniel, the first person to ask Marchitelli to make a suit. Though he’d never designed before, Marchitelli couldn’t pass up the opportunity. In just weeks, he learned how to measure and connected with a tailor in California to craft a suit he’d custom designed for Daniel. Ever since, athletes have been recommending him for his formal and, increasingly, casual designs.

“The first guy that ever asked me to make a bomber jacket was Travis Kelce,” Marchitelli said. “I remember thinking, Can I make a bomber jacket? I’m not saying no, I’ll figure it out.”

Today he travels the country to measure each high-profile client for the perfect fit and act as a stylist, advising them on shoes, watches, and other accessories. Marchitelli says clients give him full creative control over outfits that tend to cost at least $3,000 each. “They really open it up to me,” he said. “They say, ‘Tom, what is your vision for this season or event?’ And I love that.” “I just don’t want to stop,” he continued. “I think I can do this for another thirty years.” n

Here

are

three of Marchitelli’s favorite stars to style

Evander Kane

Fernando Tatís Jr.

“This was Fernando’s MLB All-Star red carpet debut and there was one thing on my mind: winning best dressed. He has the most swag in the league, so we pulled out the big guns—pink silk—and guess what? He was voted best dressed.”

“He is hands down the best-dressed player in all of hockey and, in my opinion, possibly the bestdressed player in all of sports when it comes to suits. When it comes to bold doublebreasted suits, he’s in his own league.”

Rob Gronkowski

“All business for Gronk at the 2019 ESPY Awards in a black-onblack houndstoothprint three-piece. I’ll never forget being on the carpet and him yelling out to people, ‘Hey, if you like this suit, here’s the guy who made it!’ Can’t pay for a better advertisement than that! He’s a one of one for sure.”

A Dose of Humor

Stand-up comedian Cameron Esposito ’04 shares the healing power of laughter.

BY SCOTT KEARNAN

There are moments in comedian Cameron Esposito’s latest stand-up special, Four Pills, that play with your mind. They start more than halfway into the set, while Esposito is perched on a stool, firing off jokes about, among other things, mental health, a recent diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and the medications—hence the show’s title—used to treat it.

Suddenly, mid-sentence, the red curtains that surround Esposito disappear, along with the audience and its laughter. They’re replaced by Esposito sitting in an empty, silent, stark white room, performing to no one. The punchlines land differently: self-reflective and somber. Then—flash! It’s back to the red room with the live crowd and the raucous laughter. These jarring back-and-forths continue for the rest of the show, yanking viewers between two very different moods, and two very different ways of experiencing the same material.

It’s an artistic approach to film editing that Esposito uses to capture the duality of living with bipolar disorder. “It’s hard to describe mental illness to folks who don’t deal with a slightly different brain chemistry,” Esposito explained. “It was important to me to give people an opportunity for experiential learning. I wanted to juxtapose the loud stage performance with the quiet interiority of being medicated and facing oneself.”

Esposito has turned to comedy as a salve since first discovering a love of performing through My Mother’s Fleabag, the Boston College sketch comedy troupe. Since then, and over the course of an explosive career that includes books, tours, and podcasts, Esposito has used frank humor and deeply personal storytelling to discuss everything from surviving sexual assault to seeking rehab for substance use to understanding their gender-fluid identity. “I’m at war with my body,” Esposito cracks at one point in Four Pills, which is now streaming on the comedy platform Dropout. “It’s a lot to walk through the world with the body of Sofia Vergara and the jawline of Kevin Bacon.”

and once wanted to be a priest, stays motivated by the belief that laughter is medicine and stand-up comedy a kind of ministry. At the end of and white rooms merge together, a metaphor for finally reconciling personal struggle with success. “Bipolar disorder has also been my superpower,” Esposito said. “Mania is a hyper-color experience. When you walk down the street, you notice and absorb so much. I think that’s what helps me connect to people through humor.”

WHAT WE’RE LISTENING TO: The Pemberton Podcast

As a motivational speaker, executive leader, and author, Steve Pemberton ’89, H’15, MA’19, P’23 draws on deeply personal life experiences to encourage people to overcome obstacles, strive for success, and create opportunities for others. Now he’s doing this work through a new medium: podcasting.

“I wanted to create a more immediate and intimate way of sharing my story,” said Pemberton, whose The Pemberton Podcast expands on the themes of resilience, hopefulness, and gratitude he first explored through A Chance in the World, his 2012 bestselling memoir about growing up with a cruel foster family. “It feels like I’m sitting across the table from the listener, having a conversation.” For example, in one episode of the podcast, which launched over the summer, he recounts how finding connection and community at Boston College helped heal some wounds from his turbulent childhood.

Going forward, Pemberton plans to host guests with similarly evocative stories to “make the conversation richer.” And after publishing The Lighthouse Effect: How Ordinary People Can Have an Extraordinary Impact in the World in 2021, he’s also working on his next book, The Anchor Principle, about “the things that steady us in uncertain times,” he said. “My hope is always the same: that the stories I tell inspire others to reflect on their own lives and discover—and rediscover—the anchors that keep them grounded.” S.K.

Catching Up with Luke Kuechly

The BC football legend narrowly missed being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, but it may be just a matter of time.

BY LESLEY VISSER ’75, H’07

Luke Kuechly, the legendary Boston College linebacker, decided to cut loose. Known for his discipline and self-control, Kuechly was attending the glittering wedding last year of his close friend, the San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey, and Olivia Culpo, the former Miss Universe. When Earth, Wind & Fire’s classic song “September” came on, Kuechly astonished his friends by grabbing McCaffrey’s mother, Lisa, and taking her to the middle of the dance floor. Tuxedo jacket off, sleeves rolled up, collar open, Kuechly shimmied with Lisa and ended with a dramatic twirl. “She was solid gold content,” said McCaffrey’s father, Ed, the former Denver Broncos receiver. “And Luke was pretty great, too.”

Kuechly, the smart, physical wrecking-ball of a player, left the game following the 2019 season after just eight pro seasons. The brevity of his career may explain why he narrowly missed being elected last winter to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, despite being regarded as one of the greatest defensive players ever. Kuechly reluctantly decided to retire because he’d suffered too many concussions. “I could still play at 85 percent,” he said, “but that wasn’t good enough. I was heartbroken about retiring from football. I’d played in the backyard with my dad since I was four years old.”

ner. “I was in front of the Westin Hotel, waiting for Cam to pick me up,” Kuechly recalled, “when a red Ferrari with tinted windows pulled up. The window rolled down and I heard, ‘Get in, Cam’s in the car behind us.’ It was Michael Jordan.” A little overwhelmed, Kuechly added, “I didn’t say much at dinner.”

But on the field, his talent spoke loudly. “He gave us a defensive identity, and he did it with class,” said the former Panthers coach Ron Rivera. The undersized kid from Cincinnati was named the NFL Defensive

standouts Greg Olsen, Todd Blackledge, and Jonathan Stewart. “We’re mindful that they’re thirteen-year-olds,” Kuechly said, “but we’re trying to win!” Blackledge added, “He’s intense—he’ll yell at them about gap integrity.” Given his past concussions, Kuechly tells every parent to read about traumatic brain injuries, and to ask their kids about headaches or a blow they might have taken.

In 2022, Kuechly began his broadcasting career on the Panthers Radio Network, and last year he joined CBS Sports college telecasts as an analyst, partnering with Carter Blackburn. “Luke came prepared as if he were playing,” Blackburn said. “Some of the players were in awe of talking to him. But Luke guards his humility, he doesn’t let compliments affect him.”

Kuechly may not have made the Hall of Fame this year, but he received enough votes to become an automatic finalist in 2026, and he seems destined for eventual enshrinement. One of the most decorated players in the history of Boston College, Kuechly recorded a school-record 532 tackles in his career, and set an NCAA record for tackles per game. After winning the Bronko Nagurski Trophy as college football’s top defensive player following the 2011 season, he was selected by the Carolina Panthers with the ninth overall pick in the 2012 draft.

The day after he was drafted, Kuechly was in the Panthers locker room when star quarterback Cam Newton invited him to din-

Player of the Year in 2013. Three years later, he recorded a sack in the Panthers’ 24–10 Super Bowl 50 loss to the Indianapolis Colts. Then, in 2020, Kuechly left the game.

Kuechly said he’s content in retirement, focusing on bowhunting, golf, and his beloved backyard barbecuing. “I love to grill, and I think I’m pretty good at it,” he said. “I even have my Luke Kuechly blitz wings, which have all kinds of spice. I set the grill at 275 degrees for 80 minutes, and then—my signature move—I toss the wings around in a sealed bowl. They can sack your tongue for a ten-yard loss.”

Kuechly also coaches the Charlotte Christian middle school football team, where his fellow coaches include former NFL

Kuechly also continues his work with the Project Life Movement, which invites college students to join the pool of donors for bone marrow and stem cell transplants that can save the lives of people with leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell disease.

A public person but a private man, Kuechly, at age thirty-four and single, said he prefers experiencing the quiet of outdoors with his friends to the limelight. “Disconnecting,” he said. “Just enjoying nature.”

Kuechly’s latest challenge is to master bowhunting, a sport that is practiced by hunters and conservationists who believe it promotes the principles of fair chase and a sustainable ecosystem. The sport has taken him everywhere from South Africa to Wisconsin, and this year to New Mexico. Bowhunters must stalk animals at close range, which requires stealth and skill. “It’s hard,” Kuechly said. “You have to be so patient. It’s almost meditative.”

The star who spent his entire career playing before packed stadiums would rather be quiet and contemplative these days. Like another man who lived near the BC campus, Henry David Thoreau, Kuechly chooses to live deliberately—he and Thoreau most surely would have enjoyed each other. n

Figure of Speech

ALS robs patients’ voices. John Costello ’87 saves them.

BY SCOTT KEARNAN

“Do you want to clone your voice?” asked speech pathologist John Costello. I was sitting with him in his office at Boston Children’s Hospital, where for decades Costello has practiced his specialty: saving patients’ voices. Thanks to Costello and the clinicians around the world he’s trained in his methods, several thousand people, most of them ALS patients who know they will eventually lose control of the muscles in their mouth and larynx, have been able to preemptively preserve the ability to communicate using the sound of their own voice. He is an international leader in the field of “augmentative communication,” and voice cloning is the latest development.

Now Costello was offering to show me how it works, using my own voice. I read a prepared script—a few storybook-style sentences about sunshine and rainbows—into

SOUND METHODS

a voice recorder. When I finished, Costello uploaded the sixty-second audio clip to his computer and then typed out a few words that were different from anything I had actually said. “This is the voice we created with one minute of recording,” a voice suddenly boomed through a speaker, saying the very words Costello had just typed, and sounding uncannily like me. Costello then explained that with a longer recording, his AI-assisted program would sound even closer to my actual voice, better capturing my vocal tones, inflections, and speech patterns.

There are other tools out there that help speechless folks communicate using robotic-sounding voices and generic language. Costello’s efforts, though, are unique. He wants patients to sound like themselves. After all, to lose one’s distinctly individual voice, with all its unique color and character,

is to lose a piece of identity. “The voice is an acoustic fingerprint,” Costello said. “There are turns of phrase you use that the people around you appreciate and recognize—and it’s not just the words, it’s also the delivery.”

Costello directs the ALS Augmentative Communication Program, an adult program at Children’s. The three voice preservation techniques he’s developed (see “Sound Methods,” below) have also been used to help patients with other temporary or permanent loss of speech, from those recovering from craniofacial surgery to a woman whose jaw was removed due to cancer. Costello, who is an American Speech-LanguageHearing Association fellow, also leads an annual clinical course at a foundation in Italy for children with communication disabilities, and he has been invited to share his work at trainings in nineteen other countries.

While majoring in psychology at BC, Costello found a summer job through the Campus School that involved shadowing speech pathologists at Children’s Hospital. Around 1989, a few years into his own career at the hospital, he learned of the fear, panic, and frustration many young patients experience upon waking from tracheostomy procedures and finding themselves unable to speak. He came up with the rudimentary solution of distributing devices with prerecorded phrases that allowed patients to communicate on a basic level. That sparked an idea: What if he worked in advance to capture the individual voices of patients scheduled for surgery, or those with degenerative conditions? Today, it’s not only patients who ultimately benefit from his work. It’s also their family and friends, who won’t have to live without the sound of their loved one’s voice. Costello pointed to research that shows the voice of a mother can raise levels of oxytocin, the “love hormone,” in a child. “Voice is really powerful,” he said, “and really personal.” n

—Here are the three main ways Costello helps patients keep their voices.

MESSAGE BANKING Patients work with clinicians to prerecord themselves saying phrases both practical (“open the door”) and personal (“fuhgeddaboudit!”). The recordings are saved and sorted into categories for quick recall on everything from inexpensive phone apps to computers that can be operated with eye movements. (Many insurance companies cover the cost of the equipment.)

VOICE BANKING Special software uses the patient’s prerecorded words and sounds to create entirely original sentences (although the generated voice may sound somewhat mechanical).

VOICE CLONING After learning from a short recording of a patient talking (thirty minutes is ample), an AI-assisted program replicates the patient’s voice with impressive accuracy while saying things that are typed into a computer. The downside? Unlike the other methods, which work offline, cloning requires Internet access.

Saying Goodbye after Fifty Years

Senior receptionist Linda Reams reflects on a half century as a professional people person in the Office of Undergraduate Admission.

BY SCOTT KEARNAN

After nearly five decades of welcoming students and their parents to campus and mentoring generations of Student Admissions Program (SAP) volunteers, Office of Undergraduate Admission Senior Receptionist Linda Reams retired over the summer. “I thought I’d stay for maybe three years, but I fell in love with the kids,” Reams said. “They’ve all been my babies.” We spoke with Reams not long before her final day behind the desk, and she reflected on a long career, how her relationship with students and her faith evolved over the years, and what it takes to make a lasting impact on others.

What makes BC different from other places you’ve worked? “Before coming to BC, I worked for an advertising agency. It was cutthroat. When you lost a client, everyone that worked on the account lost their job—people who had been there for twenty, thirty years, gone through no fault of their own. Corporate is for the money.

Here, we’re for the people. I’ve worked with a great group over the years. Priests would stop by my desk to tell jokes. The staff are my friends. I’ve gone through a lot during my time here. Over the years, I’ve lost every member of my immediate family. It was my colleagues and students at BC who got me through it.”

How did you develop your special relationship with students? “When they come in, they’re scared. They might have been the big fish in the little pond, and here everybody is brilliant. I’m their surrogate grandmother here. We promise their parents we’ll take care of them, and that made me more involved with the kids. I’ve left my personal email and cell phone number with students in SAP so they can call me day and night. I’ve driven kids home from the airport after Christmas. I’ve gotten phone calls: ‘It’s my first Thanksgiving in my off-campus apartment, and I burned the turkey!’ It’s not in my job description. But I’m proud of these kids and I love them.”

In terms of your relationship to faith, what led you to convert from Catholicism to Islam? “I converted to Islam in 1990. My mother was as Catholic as they come. My father converted to Catholicism from Southern Baptist. I went to an all-girls Catholic school, where I questioned everything. I almost got thrown out! While working here, I talked to Father Skehan, who used to be the head of geology, and was the cousin of my exhusband’s mother. I looked into many different religions. I started reading the Quran. A couple years before my father died, I told him, ‘Dad, I can’t walk into another Mass.’ He said, ‘I don’t care if the way you worship is hugging a tree. Find it where you find it.’ A lot of what we believe in Islam goes hand in hand with the Jesuits.”

What’s the key to making a great first impression? “Kill them with kindness. I take that seriously, and you see it across the University. I had a parent come in today, and when I said, ‘Can I help you?’ they said, ‘Between here and the parking garage, three people have asked me that.’”

How do we form lasting connections with people? “Open yourself up. Be compassionate. I tell the kids in SAP, ‘If a parent comes in stressed out and takes it out on you, remember that they’ve just dealt with Logan Airport or Boston traffic.’ Be vulnerable, too. If a colleague is suddenly unpleasant one day, I’ll ask, ‘Are you alright? Do you want to talk?’ You don’t know what people are going through. If somebody doesn’t want to talk, back off. But at least you’ve opened the conversation. They might come back later and say, ‘I’m sorry. I was having a really difficult day, and here’s why.’ Give people grace. There’s a lot of layers to every onion.” n

Engineering a Success

Just graduated, the inaugural class of BC’s human-centered engineering program is off to a roaring start.

BY ED HAYWARD

A few months after making history, the twenty-six members of the human-centered engineering program’s first graduating class have embarked on an impressive array of work, graduate study, and other opportunities.

Many have taken engineering positions with companies focused on everything from water supply, public works, and health to the environment and construction. Others, meanwhile, have entered graduate programs including medical school, finance, biomedical engineering, nuclear science and engineering, and educational design technology.

“It is rewarding to see the breadth of careers our students are going into both within and outside the engineering field,” said Professor Glenn Gaudette, the John W. Kozarich ’71 Chair of the Department of Engineering. “That speaks to the Boston College education where we want them to find their passion.”

Gaudette noted that most members of the graduated class are pursuing engineering careers aligned with the program’s focus on health, energy, and the environment. Others are making documentary films and caring for the homeless, “because they found their passion while they were here,” he said.

One graduate, Nava Bozorgmehri ’25, is a product development engineer at Applied Medical, where she designs new surgical devices focused on the needs of surgeons and

patients. “The medical device industry is, at its core, human-centered,” Bozorgmehri said. “Every detail matters—how a device feels in a surgeon’s hands, how quickly a patient recovers after surgery, and how to ensure that products are high-quality while also remaining affordable. The human-centered engineering mindset I gained at BC guides my daily work to ensure the new devices we develop meet clinical needs and improve surgical outcomes in the most humane way.”

Will Purnell ’25, who began graduate study in biomedical engineering this fall at Duke University, said he feels uniquely prepared by the combination of BC’s traditional core curriculum and the human-centered engineering curriculum. “Boston College inspired me to look for unconventional solutions to engineering problems that more conventional programs might discourage or otherwise not emphasize,” he said. “I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to study engineering at BC,” Purnell added. “I went into this experience fairly blind, with little idea about what the program would actually look like, but I also had fairly strong confidence that I was in good hands. After four years, I can say this was certainly true.”

Charles Neill ’25, a design engineer at Acorn Engineering, said he formed close bonds with his classmates and faculty. “I really enjoyed being part of a group of people

with such diverse goals and personalities,” said Neill. “I am truly grateful to have been part of a major with people who have such distinct interests. Plus, being part of the development of new classes with new professors in a new major made for a unique experience.”

Boston College launched its humancentered engineering program in 2021, integrating BC’s core liberal arts focus and a rigorous engineering curriculum to prepare students to find solutions to critical human needs. The bachelor of science in engineering requires 120 credits, with two-thirds in engineering, mathematics, and science topics and one-third in liberal arts and humanities. Course offerings include Introduction to Human-Centered Engineering, Engineering for Society, Introduction to Statistical Data Analysis and Machine Learning, and Collaborative Service Engineering Project.

In many ways, the students in the inaugural class and those who have followed have helped faculty to refine the very curriculum that they study, said the program’s Director of Undergraduate Studies Jenna Tonn.

“We appreciate that our students took a chance on us,” said Tonn, also an associate professor of the practice in the department. “Students and faculty worked hard to make their time here an academic success and to prepare them for that next step and to reflect on what they want to do with their lives.” n

The Harvey Girls

In her new historical novel, Juliette Fay ’84 explores bonds of sisterhood between two desperate women.

BY SCOTT KEARNAN

Charlotte is a Boston socialite on the run from a savage husband. Billie is the daughter of poor Scottish immigrants working to keep her large family fed. These two young women have little in common, but their worlds collide and their lives intertwine in the 1920s in The Harvey Girls, Juliette Fay’s historical novel about one of the first groups of US women to work outside the home. Charlotte and Billie find themselves roommates while training as waitresses in Topeka, Kansas, and then working in a dining room inside a high-end hotel at the Grand Canyon. They don’t like each other or get along—at least, not at first. But as Fay’s novel unfolds, so too does a relationship between unlikely allies bonded by a journey of selfdiscovery and starting over.

The Harvey Girls is Fay’s eighth novel, and as is often the case in her books, her characters’ stories are inspired by real-life events. Starting in the 1880s, young women in small towns and cities in America’s East and Midwest responded to newspaper advertisements calling for “Harvey Girls.” The ads were placed by the hospitality magnate Fred Harvey, who had established the first restaurant chain in the US at stops along the new Santa Fe railway, which stretched from Kansas deep into the Wild West. Harvey was searching for wholesome young ladies to staff his eateries. He imagined that an army of smart and pretty waitresses would be warmly received by male railway passengers—miners, ranchers, and outlaws moving west to make their mark—who wouldn’t otherwise see a woman for miles.

The Harvey Girls, meanwhile, were lured by opportuni-

ties otherwise denied to women of their era: adventure, travel, a taste of (chaperoned) freedom, and a way to earn their own money. By the time Harvey’s restaurants closed in the late 1950s, approximately one hundred thousand women had worked at them, and yet, aside from a littleremembered 1946 movie musical starring Judy Garland, their story has largely passed from public memory.

“I’m particularly interested in telling unknown women’s history,” said Fay. Her 2017 historical novel The Tumbling Turner Sisters, for example, was a USA Today bestseller about a hardscrabble traveling vaudeville act. She first encountered the Harvey Girls while researching her 2019 book City of Flickering Light, about three friends trying to make it in Hollywood in the early days of silent film. As she read about the Harvey Girls and their experiences, Fay became fascinated by their very different reasons for leaving home to live in dormitories and work in train depot restaurants dotted across the West. “Some girls were running away from something, whether a bad marriage, abuse, poverty, or some other situation,” she said. “Others were so desperate to become Harvey Girls that they broke the rules. There were

girls as young as fourteen who said they were eighteen because their families needed money.”

Fay said she is drawn to exploring characters who are “down on their luck, and how they dig themselves out of the hole that they’re in.” In her books, that redemption typically comes with help from others. “I don’t believe in the self-made person,” she said. “I think we all need help. My characters help themselves by helping others.”

That concept of service has been important to Fay, who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, since her BC days, when she double majored in human development and theology. “I was interested in how people think about themselves, God, and society,” she said. She later joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, worked at a hospital for poor children in Guatemala, taught nonverbal autistic children in Boston and, after earning a degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, worked for both a child abuse prevention agency and a parenting education program.

She didn’t see herself becoming an author until the day she received a “terrible” book at a book swap and decided she should give writing a go. “I couldn’t put it down. It was so bad it was a page turner,” Fay said. “It got me thinking, What would I do with this premise?” In 2009, her debut novel was published: Shelter Me, about a grieving widow struggling to raise her children and mediate her hot temper around the well-intentioned people in her life. Shelter Me was the first in a series of novels by Fay to be shortlisted for awards or named featured book picks by publications such as Library Journal and Good Housekeeping

The Harvey Girls, she said, is about women pursuing second chances in tough times and finding support in one another, however unexpectedly. “We’ve all met someone and thought, They’re not my cup of tea, and then they become a close friend,” said Fay, reflecting on the bond that develops between Charlotte and Billie. “Sisterhood is a big theme in this book.” n

Please Yell at My Kids

What we can learn about parenting from

other cultures.

Scolding other people’s children is largely taboo in America, but in other countries, such as the Netherlands, it can be a key part of a community-oriented approach to raising kids. That’s just one of the surprising insights found in Please Yell at My Kids by Marina Lopes ’11, which examines different styles of parenting around the world. Lopes argues that American parents, and their children, could benefit from incorporating ideas and customs found in other cultures.

“When I had kids, I realized that many parenting practices I thought were the only way to do things were actually cultural practices,” said Lopes, who traveled extensively as a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. “That was so freeing, because I realized I could take inspiration from different sources and create something unique to my family.”

For her book, Lopes visited ten countries to interview parents about their cultures’ child-rearing norms, such as the Dutch practice of “dropping” blindfolded preteens in the wilderness at night to foster independence.

Along the way, Lopes was particularly impressed by the communalistic approaches to parenting that are common outside America, where most parents mind their own children and their own business. She even had cause to experience the difference firsthand: When she went through a medically complicated childbirth in 2017, she found herself grateful for the support she received during a Brazilian “birth party,” in which family and friends attend a birth and offer postpartum support. To some people, that may sound like overstepping boundaries, but to Lopes, who was born in Brazil but raised mainly in America, it was a refreshing alternative to what she considers a potentially isolating experience. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said. “We were never meant to parent alone. It was always meant to be a community endeavor.” Elizabeth Clemente

BRIEFLY

The Queens of Crime

Blood & Hate: The Untold Story of Marvelous Marvin Hagler’s Battle for Glory by Dave Wedge ’93

Wedge, a New York Times bestselling author, chronicles the life of iconic boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler, whose 1980s reign in the ring secured his reputation as one of the greatest middleweights of all time. Through historical anecdotes and interviews with those who knew Hagler best, this biography charts the athlete’s unbelievable rise from a childhood marked by poverty and struggle to his hard-won place in the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

by Marie Benedict (Heather Terrell ’90)

Five legendary female mystery authors team up to investigate the real-world murder of a young nurse in this gripping work of historical fiction. Set in 1930s London, Terrell’s latest release under her pen name imagines a world in which Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and others ditch the male members of their famous writing group, the Detection Club, to prove they can solve a puzzling case on their own.

Girls with Goals: How Women’s Soccer Took Over the World by Clelia Castro-Malaspina ’05

Soccer is now the most popular women’s sport in the world. Its players, though, have faced sexism, bans, and myriad other obstacles while building the game’s global success. CastroMalaspina’s thorough look at women’s soccer uses historical photos and personal anecdotes from athletes to trace the evolution of the game from its origins in nineteenth-century England to its widespread prominence today.

Intimate Conversations: Face to Face with Matchless Musicians by Larry Ruttman, BC Law ’58

Ruttman, a podcast host and author, shares and explores a love for classical music through a collection of dialogues with the genre’s most renowned modern musicians. He interviews more than twenty greats, from Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Harbison to opera diva Susan Graham, about their inspirations and musical influences.

Enduring Empire: U.S. Statecraft and Race-Making in the Philippines by katrina quisumbing king ’07

In this ambitious debut, king explores the influence the United States has had over the Philippines since claiming sovereignty over the Southeast Asian islands in 1898. Although Philippine independence was recognized in 1946, the author contends that a system of white hegemony was upheld long afterward by the “racial-imperial rule” that characterized the decadeslong colonization by the US.

The Church and Latinos

Nearly half of American Catholics are now Latino, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. But as the influential Clough School of Theology and Ministry Professor Hosffman Ospino has documented, Latinos aren’t benefiting from Church services and programs the way the groups who came before them did, and aren’t ascending to leadership roles in proportion to their numbers. In a wide-ranging interview, Ospino argues that with the Church challenged by declining attendance, a vibrant future depends on fully embracing its Latino members. by john wolfson

Hosffman ospino started out wanting to become a priest, not an academic. That’s an interesting thing to note about a Clough School of Theology and Ministry professor who over the past two decades has been the principal investigator on a collection of nationally recognized studies that have generated some $25 million in grant funding, and who has emerged as one of the nation’s leading researchers into the many ways that Hispanics are transforming the experience of American Catholicism.

“I went to a seminary but I eventually decided not to stay,” recalled Ospino, who was born and raised in Colombia. “I think I was too young to consider making such a big commitment with my life. Nonetheless, I thought that God was calling me to a role in the Church.” So in 1997, at the age of twenty-one, Ospino moved to the US and eventually took a position overseeing ministry at St. Patrick Parish in Lawrence, Massachusetts. As he organized much of the pastoral life of a culturally diverse community in which English, Spanish, and Vietnamese were all spoken, he began to ask himself, “How do we talk about and pass on the faith? Does speaking a different language make a difference? What happens when people don’t welcome one another? What about when people are struggling because of socioeconomics?”

These questions, in part, motivated Ospino’s decision to study at Boston College. After earning a master’s degree in theology in 2003, he completed the PhD program in theology and education in 2007. That same year, he became a full-time member of the BC faculty. Part of his work involved developing a program focused on Hispanic ministry. “That’s when I began more formally researching about Latinos,” said Ospino, who uses the terms Hispanic and Latino interchangeably. “I began to travel throughout the country, and everybody was asking the same question: How do we make a case so the larger institutional Church will understand that it’s important to invest in Hispanics?”

What has followed is a series of studies that, collectively, amount to perhaps the most comprehensive portrait of Hispanic Catholic life and ministry ever created in this country. Ospino and his research partners—including BC’s Roche Center for Catholic Education, a team of research assistants, and colleagues from other institutions—have collected data on everything from which parishes in the US offer Hispanic ministry to how Catholic schools are serving Latino Catholics to how and why some Catholic organizations are having success engaging Hispanics.

In the following conversation, Ospino shares what he’s learned along the way. At a time when the Church is suffering from declining attendance, he argues, it must do more to engage, embrace, and value the thirty-two million Latinos who now account for nearly half of American Catholics, but who he says have sometimes felt unwelcome in their own parishes.

The Catholic Church has undergone a demographic transformation over the past few decades. What does American Catholicism look like today?

There are about seventy-two million American Catholics, and the last time we had a good count—around the year 2018—about thirty-two million of them were Hispanic. So it’s approaching half of American Catholics that are Hispanic, and for those younger than eighteen, 60 percent are Hispanic. In a sense, demographics are already defining the future of Catholicism, and the key will be for us to understand what it means to be a church that eventually is majority Hispanic. Of course, other groups are also transforming the Catholic Church. Right now, the fastest growing group in the Church is not Latinos, it’s Asians. About 5 percent of all Catholics in the country are Asian, and in twenty to thirty years, they will be double that number. There are also growing numbers of African Catholics in the country.

Why does the racial and ethnic composition of the Church matter?

When we say “the Church,” we are talking about people. We’re talking about flesh and blood, people who have names. People who have cultures, languages, traditions, families. And we all are human in a particular way, usually shaped by culture and traditions. There is a way of being a White American Catholic, and there is a way of being a Hispanic Catholic or a Black Catholic. It’s important that as we evangelize to bring people into a relationship with Jesus Christ we recognize that people don’t stop being Black, stop being Latino, stop being White in order to worship God. People worship God in light of who they are.

Why is that important?

From a pastoral perspective, the institutional Church and the body of Catholics have a responsibility to make sure that whoever self-identifies as Catholic has the resources to grow in the faith and maintain their identity. If we don’t do that, then we could call that a pastoral failure. And in the past two or three decades, we have lost more than sixteen million Hispanic Catholics. They walked away, they stopped self-identifying as Catholics. The Pew Research Center has done several studies on this, and these Catholics simply drifted away. They were not engaged, they were not formed. They did not feel welcome in their parishes. And little by little they drifted away. Some of them stopped self-identifying as Catholic because they were angry. They felt there was bias, that there was no interest in engaging them. We currently have about thirty-two million Hispanic Catholics in this country. We could be at around fifty million. It’s astonishing. If you’re in the business of bringing people to Christ and people don’t feel themselves being drawn to Christ by you, then you’ve got to reconsider what you are doing.

That loss of sixteen million Hispanic Catholics stands out at a time when the Church is struggling with declining attendance. According to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Catholic parishes in the country have fallen from approximately twenty thousand to about sixteen thousand, and the number of priests has declined from nearly sixty thousand to about thirty-four thousand. Meanwhile, the number of Catholic schools has tumbled from more than eleven thousand to fewer than six thousand. What are the consequences for the Church if it doesn’t continue to improve its engagement with Latinos and other groups?

If we don’t ensure that the Hispanic community stays passionately Catholic, then what’s going to happen? It’s what we’re already seeing. We’re closing churches. We’re closing schools. We’re losing our network of Catholic hospitals nationwide. And that’s because communities that we’ve traditionally thought of as being that sort of base of the Church, whether Irish or Italians, they’re getting older. They’re dying. It’s a generational transition. It’s a demographic transition. We literally need human beings to run these institutions. The Catholic Church has a huge infrastructure. Somebody’s got to run the hospitals, somebody’s got to run the Catholic schools, and somebody’s got to run the Catholic parishes in this country. The median age of White Catholics in the United States of America is fifty-five. The median age of Hispanics is twenty-nine. The question is, how do we take advantage of the treasure of this younger population?

How is the Church doing with promoting Latinos into leadership roles?

In an ideal world, institutions and organizations should represent as closely as possible the populations they

Photographed by his wife, Guadalupe, Hosffman Ospino stands for a blessing alongside parishioners of St. Patrick Parish in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he has been involved in Hispanic ministry since 2001.

Ospino and his son William in 2023, singing with the community at St. Patrick Parish during the celebration of Las Posadas, an Advent ritual popular among Hispanic Catholics.

serve. But in the Catholic Church, we are behind in achieving that. We have close to three hundred bishops in the country who are active in their dioceses, and only around thirty of them are Hispanic. We know that less than 10 percent of Catholic priests in this country are Hispanic, and the number of Hispanic sisters is very small. So something isn’t clicking, and that’s what I’m trying to figure out. What are the best ways for us to identify the roadblocks for the Latino community to move into more ownership of what it means to be Catholic in the United States?

What do you make of the argument that the reason there are relatively few Hispanic leaders in the Church is because Latinos are still finding their way in American society?

Until the 1990s most Hispanics in this country were immigrants, and most of them were Roman Catholic. Churches had to offer rituals that perhaps they were not used to offering. They had to support Hispanics struggling with poverty, Hispanics that did not have documents. And alongside all that, they had to form people in the faith so they could pass it on to the next generation, which is mostly US-born. Since the 1990s, the number of Latinos who are US-born has increased dramatically. Today, two-thirds of all Latinos in the country were born here. And for Hispanics younger than eighteen—the children and grandchildren of all those immigrants—94 percent are US-born. The Jesuit theologian Allan Figueroa Deck said we have a tale of two churches—we’ve got the church that is established and the church that is emerging. Well, that was thirty years ago when he said that and we still have a tale of two churches—even though Hispanic Catholics are no longer emerging. They are established. Gone are the days when we could say, Well, the Latino community, it’s mostly immigrants and they’re still trying to get a sense of where they are. They’re still learning the land. No, those

days are gone. I hear this argument all the time when I tell people we need more teachers who are Hispanic in Catholic schools or more priests, and then they say, “Well, we don’t have that many Latinos who are educated to get to those levels.” No. There’s plenty of talent. There are plenty of people with the credentials. The problem is, there’s a little bit of a bottleneck. There are highly educated, highly capable Latino Catholics who could be running entire programs or institutions or structures, they just simply don’t get there.

And why is that?

From a theological perspective, there is no such thing as the Church and Latino Catholics. Latino Catholics are the Church. And so are White Catholics, Black Catholics, Asian Catholics, and Native American Catholics. So what we are witnessing here is a portion of the Church not fully embracing and appreciating another portion of the Church. And that’s the challenge. There are cultural factors. There are socioeconomic factors. There are political factors. Sometimes it’s bias. There could be just simply the assumption that Latinos are not capable of doing what’s required. And if Latinos are not at the decision-making table in terms of who gets hired and who doesn’t get hired, then Latinos are not going to get there.

Catholic schools have historically been instrumental in helping to launch immigrant groups into upward mobility in America. What does your research say about how they are doing with Latinos?

Catholic schools have for decades been an incredible instrument in helping educate the next generation of Catholics so they can be leaders, so they can form society and build society. And they did very well with the children of Euro-American Catholics—Irish, German, Italian. It’s not news that these Catholics, thanks to factors like education, politics, and hard work, moved from being migrant communities into the middle and upper classes. They have evolved and grown in this country. And Catholic schools were very important to them. By the 1940s, about 55 percent of all Catholic children in this country, most of them Euro-American, were enrolled in Catholic schools. And it’s not an accident that today about 55 percent of adult Euro-American Catholics have at least a four-year college degree. In a sense, Catholic schools catapulted them into the middle and upper classes. Now the question is, when the demographics change, will the Catholic Church and will Catholic schools do the same thing for the new generations? And unfortunately, our Catholic schools and many of the Catholic structures have a poor record of engaging Hispanic, Black, and Asian students and families. The number of children from those groups in Catholic schools has been historically very low.

Over the decades, we’ve lost more than sixteen million Hispanic Catholics. They stopped self-identifying as Catholics. They were not engaged, they were not formed. And little by little they drifted away.”

There has been a concerted effort in recent years to increase those numbers, and I think we are doing well, but we can do better. In the US, there are about eight million school-age Hispanic children who are Roman Catholic. How many of them are enrolled in Catholic schools? About 244,000. It blows your mind. That’s around 3 percent of all Hispanic school-age children. The migrants who came to this country, they came here to give their children a better opportunity. And that’s education. They know that education is going to be kind of that holy grail. So the question is, how do we make the best use of Catholic schools that have proven to be effective to educate Euro-American Catholic children, but today Hispanic Catholic children are not there in a similar way? In a sense, Catholic schools are not having the same impact on Hispanic Catholic children as they did upon Euro-American Catholic children.

We’ve discussed the closing of Catholic parishes and schools, but what are the other challenges created by dwindling attendance?

For more than a century and a half, Catholicism has been the largest Church in this country. Until the 1990s, 25 percent of the US population self-identified as Roman Catholic. In the late nineties, for the first time in a century and a half, Catholicism starts shrinking, even though millions of Catholics are arriving every year—you have an influx of Catholics from Latin America, from Asia, from Africa arriving in this country, and still Catholicism as a Church is shrinking. Today only about 20 percent of the country self-identifies as Catholic. When you have 25 percent of the population, you’ve got a voice. Catholic sensitivities—social justice, the idea of the common good, fighting for the rights of minorities, fighting against slavery and racism—when you have that 25 percent, it really tilts the conversation. But if Latinos don’t decide to stay in the Catholic Church, that public voice could be lost.

How can the Church better engage the Hispanic community?

There needs to be a structural, institutional conversion. We need to stop looking at Latinos as just migrants or transients. We need to start looking at the Latino community as essential to who we are as a Church and society. Once you consider a sector of your community essential—the key to your future—then you start investing in them. So we need better faith formation. Better accompaniment of Hispanic families, more investment in Catholic education. Accompaniment is the idea of journeying with people. You walk with them so they’re not on their own. Many pastors, many school leaders see wealthy Catholics as essential to advancing the mission. Why? Because if you cultivate them, they will stay within the Church and they will support your mission and your work. Well, we should be able to manage to do the same thing with Latinos and other groups, people that may not be super wealthy but they have children and they have the gift of the faith. We should be able to see that as a treasure and invest in that particular treasure.

What do those kinds of investments look like? I have seen it right here at Boston College, which of course is a very important Catholic institution. One example: When I was halfway through the Theology and Education PhD program at BC’s Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry, Professor Thomas Groome asked me, “What can we do to serve Hispanics better and to attract more Latinos?” I put together a number of thoughts and gave him a document. Three months later, Tom Groome called me and said, “We got a grant to support Hispanic Catholics. Do you want to put your plan into action?” A lot of my ideas were about strengthening the Hispanic ministry concentration in the master’s degree program.

The concentration had been in the program for nearly twenty years, and only three students had gone through that program. In year one when we launched the new program, we had seven students. I’ll give you the magic formula for how we did it. It’s very simple. Three things. One, you need Latino faculty. You want to talk to Latinos about the Latino experience? You need Latinos. Two, you need to do outreach. Rather than spend $2,000 to advertise the program in the journals and go to events where Latinos were not present, I said, give me that $2,000 and I will use it to go to a community meeting, and I’ll speak to ten, fifteen, twenty people and those people will send us one or two students. And that worked. And the third piece is scholarships. We need to make sure we get resources because a lot of Latinos who are engaging in ministry are raising families and don’t come from the upper-middle class. Many of them are immigrants and they need more resources to do that. Boston College provided all three. They trusted me. And in ten years between 2005 and 2015, we enrolled almost 120 Latinos. I’m proud of that, but I also need to be honest about this: Being at Boston College makes a huge difference. It has provided me a platform, and the support to do this kind of work. It has flourished in a way that it would not have flourished, perhaps, if I had gone to a university that did not have the interest in research, or in the Hispanic community. So, in a sense, things align—the vision that I had, the energy that I had, and the mission of Boston College as a Jesuit, Catholic institution with leaders who believe in this. Fr. Leahy [Boston College President William P. Leahy, SJ], from day one, I mean, as a priest, he has been closely following the work that I’ve been doing. I have sat down with him several times and he’s been incredibly supportive. All four deans the Clough School of Theology and Ministry has had so far have made Hispanic ministry a priority, all of them since the time the school began.

As you pointed out, BC is a powerful institution. What can Catholics do on a more individual level to support and engage all the communities of the Church?

In the broader Church, we also need pioneers, the people that I call the superheroes of Catholic life. Like Fr. Samuel Mazzuchelli in the Midwest. This guy was a new priest, in his early twenties. He volunteered in the 1830s to come from Italy to the United States. He arrived and there was nothing here. There was a group of immigrants, and everybody wanted places to worship. Nobody knew how to build a church. So, Fr. Mazzuchelli rolls up his sleeves and ends up building thirty, forty churches with the people. Then the sisters, these women would just come and start building schools. They would live in the schools they’d just built, in the attics or the basements, and teach thousands of little kids. And they didn’t open just one school, they

“ We need to start looking at the Latino community as essential to who we are. Once you consider a sector of your community essential—the key to your future—you start investing in them.”

would open two and three and ten of these schools. And then at some point, these Catholics start venturing into health care and building hospitals. What does a nun or a priest know about running a hospital? But they did it. The pioneering spirit of these Catholics is super inspiring, and I see a lot of that in the Hispanic community.

In a way, one of your more recent research projects involves training those with the pioneering spirit.

About a decade ago, Notre Dame theology Professor Timothy Matovina and I started asking ourselves, What if we formed young adult Hispanic Catholics—college students born and raised in the US who come with a different perspective and with well-trained theology—and we deployed them in Hispanic communities? And so we answered a call for proposals from the Lilly Endowment and we initially applied for $5 million. They gave us $7.9 million for our project, Haciendo Caminos, which launched in 2023 and runs through 2027. Right now we have more than 150 Latino fellows studying in eighteen Catholic universities, including Boston College, who are getting master’s degrees to work in Hispanic communities, engaging in ministry, religious education, and pastoral counseling. This summer we conducted a two-week symposium with thirty-one of those fellows for two weeks in San Antonio, talking with them about a new vision for Hispanic ministry.

You also conducted a separate study about organizations, most of them small and led by Latinos, that are using their own innovative methods and ideas to successfully reach young Hispanic Catholics. What is the secret of those organizations?

In 2021, we launched a study identifying a dozen of the best ministries in the country serving young Hispanic Catholics. We found them by asking pas -

tors and community leaders to tell us which ministries were doing great work. We invited these ministries to open their hearts to us. They opened their programs, their finances, their leadership, boards of directors— everything. We did an organizational analysis of these twelve groups. What was fascinating was that as we went through countless interviews, we began to see that, across the board, the same ten words appeared in every conversation. Words like “community,” words like “family” and “mission” and “vulnerability.” We eventually came to call these words the ten pillars of success. The organizations were successful in their outreach to Hispanic Catholics because they were integrating all these ten pillars. The emphasis on them was different, depending on the organization, but they all were using them.

What else did they have in common?

They were doing a lot with very little. A lot of them began with someone who just had an idea and great intentions. One of the organizations, Fuerza Transformadora, which means “transformative power,” was started by a former gang member in Little Rock. Once he got his act together as a young adult, he wanted to help others like him. He started just inviting people to his house, meeting with them, praying with them. Then others heard the word and it kept growing, growing, growing, growing. They were serving thousands of people every year. A lot of parishes and dioceses really struggle to reach young Hispanic Catholics, but here we had these Hispanic leaders who with very little were reaching thousands of people. So we wanted to know, how are they doing it? How are they creating these communities? We learned that those pillars of success actually were important. It was also amazing how much they were able to accomplish with so few resources. Sometimes only volunteers, or sometimes one or two people on staff. A budget of what, $30,000, $40,000? In the report I wrote in 2023, I said it is a true miracle that these people are doing so much with so little, and imagine if they could build organizational capacity.

What kind of reaction did that report generate?

Well, one day I received a phone call, and it was from an officer with the Lilly Endowment who’d sat down and read the report. We had a meeting in Chicago and he said, “What could you do to help those organizations?” I said, “Just give me a few days and I’ll put some ideas together.” I came up with a plan that became my next project, Nuevo Momento. They gave us $15 million to work with fifteen organizations. Many of them are ones in the report, but there are other ones as well. For five years, we’ll be working with them, providing them with resources. They’ll have partners helping them on questions of fundraising, executive leadership development, board formation, and many other aspects related

to organizational life. The idea is that after those five years, these organizations will be in a stronger position to do what they do.

What’s it like for your research to have this kind of impact?

I must say that I’m humbled. There’s an element of trust when you jump into larger projects like this. You don’t know where things are going. You may have a sense of how you want to support the communities, but this is like music. You compose a song, you sing a song, but you don’t know how people are going to receive the song. I feel that doing this work has allowed me to contribute, to give something to my Church and to this society in which I live. In doing this work, something beautiful is that it has attracted other Latinos who want to do something similar. And now they are replicating some of this work and they’re doing it on their own. So it seems to me that this is the work of the Holy Spirit, and it allows me to be an instrument of the Holy Spirit. I have a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment that I have done what needed to be done. And it’s flourishing. And Boston College, the institution that has given me a home to advance this work, is flourishing as well. And for that, I’m very grateful. n

Helping Boston College Entrepreneurs Soar

How SSC Ventures—a venture capital fund run by Boston College graduates—is enabling BC students and alumni to get successful startups off the ground.

BY ELIZABETH CLEMENTE

IIN THE NEARLY FOUR DECADES SINCE he graduated from BC, Peter Bell ’86, P’20, P’25 has been an entrepreneur, a CEO, a college professor, and a BC trustee. But most consistently, he’s been a venture capitalist, helping entrepreneurs grow their crazy ideas into successful companies. Back in the summer of 2011, one of those young entrepreneurs was Tom Coburn ’13, a rising junior at BC. Coburn caught Bell’s attention when he won the Boston College Venture Competition with his idea for a software company, called Jebbit, that allowed companies to gather data about their customers through interactive methods like quizzes.

Intrigued, Bell offered Coburn the use of his office that summer as a place to continue to workshop the idea. Jebbit went on to become a juggernaut in the digital marketing space, and Coburn ultimately dropped out of BC to run it full-time. Coburn and Bell stayed in touch, however, and in 2014, Coburn approached Bell with an idea for an organization in which Eagle alumni could help younger BC entrepreneurs by investing money, experience, and mentorship into their new companies. Thus was born

Soaring Startup Circle, or SSC, which eventually evolved from a nonprofit into a venture capital fund. “The whole mission has been around embracing, strengthening, and helping the BC entrepreneurial community,” Bell said.

In three rounds of funding to date, the SSC has raised and invested in excess of $5 million into more than sixty-eight companies founded by BC alumni. But money is just the beginning of the support the fund offers the entrepreneurs it works with. SSC’s 150 BC alumni mentors—lawyers, business executives, accountants, and other professionals—provide free advice to the founders in the network. Additionally, every summer the SSC selects a few promising new company founders, gives them $10,000 to refine their startup ideas, and brings them all together for a twelve-week program featuring workshops, one-on-one coaching, and guest speakers.

Today, SSC has four general partners: Bell, Coburn, Christina Quinn ’13, who is the founder and managing partner of Lua LLC, and Duncan Walker ’13, a Jebbit cofounder who is the CTO at Heard Inc. The team also includes three venture partners.

When it comes to finding the next great entrepreneur, Bell said, “experience is overrated. If you look at the companies you use every day, most were started by people in their twenties. We meet people really early and help them before it’s obvious. That’s why it works.”

Many SSC-backed companies have found success, such as the real estate software company Aryeo, which Zillow

acquired in 2023 for $35 million; Moolah Kicks, a women’s basketball sneaker brand beloved by WNBA players; and Beam, the vitamin brand promoted by celebrities like former Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson. SSC uses what’s known as a two and twenty fee structure. That means that when one of their companies is sold, goes public, or exits the fund for some other reason, 80 percent of SSC profits go to investors, and the other 20 percent, plus a 2 percent fee, goes to the partners that manage the fund. “If you’re an investor and you don’t get a good rate of return, you’re not going to keep investing,” Bell said. “This is not a donation, we’re investing in people.”

SSC was deliberately established to be separate from Boston College, Bell said, because the fund simply cannot invest in every alum’s idea, a reality that might place the University in a difficult position. When deciding whether to invest in a company, Bell said the fund looks for “the five Ms”—the company’s market, management team, business model, momentum, and magic. Of the nearly seventy companies that SSC has invested in, thirteen have entirely women leadership teams or a sole founder who is a woman, twentytwo have at least one female founder, and half have a founder with an identity that is traditionally underrepresented in venture capital. In the broader industry, Quinn said, nearly 84 percent of global venture capital investments in 2024 went to companies with entirely male founding teams.

SSC has an application form on its website that founders can fill out to connect, but Quinn said that most of the fund’s investments do not originate with an elevator pitch. “I think the best way to get an investment from someone is to focus on building a human relationship,” she said, “because at the end of the day, investors are people.”

In the pages ahead, you’ll learn more about SSC and some of the companies it has invested in.

THE BIG IDEA: An investing tool to help bridge the racial wealth gap

T5 YEARS OF OPERATION

7 EMPLOYEES

30,000 USERS

REVOR ROZIER-BYRD ’05 WAS disillusioned with corporate America. It was 2019 and Rozier-Byrd was working at a financial services company, feeling disappointed that there appeared to be so little effort in his sector to address the economic challenges faced by many communities of color. “Here I was at one of the largest financial institutions in the world,” he said, “and we were having these conversations as if we didn’t know how to solve for issues of the racial wealth gap, financial access, and inclusion.” So he came up with a plan. He would use the skills he’d developed as a corporate transactional lawyer and director of strategy and business development to help financially empower people. “I decided I wanted to be part of the solution,” he said. His career in finance had illuminated three pathways to building wealth: owning real estate, owning a business, and investing in the stock market. Because a much smaller percentage of Black families are invested in the stock market than White families, he decided that the best way to help was to teach people how to invest. He got to work building an app to do just that.

WHY SSC SAID YES:

“Trevor’s mission is really incredible. We don’t necessarily have a social impact mandate in our fund, but we’re always interested when companies can do well by doing good.”

He began asking for help from friends in finance, law, and startups, and for months, he would stay up until 3 a.m. to refine his business plan. In 2020, he launched Stackwell, an app that simplifies investing by automatically investing money that users deposit. The app also automatically rebalances portfolios to keep them in tune with investors’ financial goals. Stackwell, a for-profit company, charges a $5 monthly subscription, keeping the service accessible to low-income users, and does not charge fees to users for assets under its management. Stackwell further distinguishes itself from other investment platforms by including articles about finance. Rozier-Byrd met the SSC partners through connections from BC, and he ultimately received two investments from the fund. Today, Stackwell has seven full-time employees and more than thirty thousand users, many of them generated through partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, and with other institutions that serve minority communities. Stackwell partner organizations pay for participants to access the app and provide seed money for them to invest in the market. In one program, for instance, Stackwell runs on-campus investment workshops and gives students their first $1,000 to invest, all of it made possible through $1.65 million in grant funding from The Prudential Foundation and other philanthropic organizations. “We’re showing up and saying, we see you, and we have this unwavering belief in your upward mobility and potential,” Rozier-Byrd said.

THE BIG IDEA: AI-assisted ultrasounds for early breast cancer detection

BY THE TIME SHE GRADUATED FROM BC, Bailey Renger ’22 had interned at NASA, worked on quantum computing at Harvard, and been accepted to a PhD program at Brown, but it was a personal medical experience that inspired her to launch her startup, BeSound Breast Health. The company provides women with easy access to advanced ultrasounds that use AI technology to scan for breast cancer. BeSound was formally founded last year by Renger, who is CEO, and John Stanco ’18, the company’s chief technology officer, but it began as a concept five years ago, when Renger began experiencing pelvic pain. An ultrasound at the time revealed a tumor on her ovaries, but could not determine whether it was cancerous. As she spent months fighting with her insurance company to cover the cost of further imaging, Renger was struck by the contrast between the ready availability of the advanced technology she was using in her research and the struggle for access to other technology that could provide answers about her health. “We can see to the edge of the universe, literally, but

WHY SSC SAID YES:

“Some ideas we get look like a moonshot. The question is, do we believe this person can actually make it happen? If Bailey succeeds, does the world look like a better place? I think the answer is resoundingly yes.”

it’s so difficult to see two and a half centimeters into the human body,” she said. “It’s not a physics or even a technology problem, it’s an access problem.” In 2022, Renger participated in the SSC Summer Accelerator program before heading off to pursue her doctorate at Brown. During the twelve-week program, she began building BeSound and soon dropped out of Brown to pursue it full-time. This fall the company will open its first clinic in Los Angeles, where it will provide the advanced scans, which can quickly and accurately determine whether a lesion is a malignant tumor, a cyst, or something else. BeSound plans to open clinics nationwide in the coming months via partnerships with diagnostic companies. Women can use the BeSound app to sign up for scans, which cost about $350, and then to view their results. “It’s diagnostic imaging that can reduce unnecessary biopsies,” Renger said. “It’s really empowering for women to have more answers at the point of getting a scan or shortly after.” Today, Renger herself is in good health, but she makes sure to get follow-up scans every six months. “What I find really motivating is 99 percent of breast cancers when they’re detected early are survivable,” Renger said. “It’s really exciting to see those statistics and be able to provide a solution to women because it’s the closest thing we have to a cure.”

THE BIG IDEA: Business software tools for real estate photographers

BRANICK WEIX ’19 HAD A RELATIVELY unusual job in high school. Rather than flip burgers or bag groceries, Weix worked as a real estate photographer, getting paid to use a drone to take aerial photos that agents used to market properties. The gig taught him about the administrative challenges professional photographers face with things like payroll, scheduling, and digitally storing all the photos they take. Out of those challenges came Weix’s concept for Aryeo, the company he cofounded in his dorm room during his sophomore year. The software platform automates many of the administrative tasks required of professional photographers.

As a sophomore at BC, Weix got to know SSC general partner Tom Coburn ’13 while enrolled in TechTrek, a popular course that allows students to meet with entrepreneurs. Coburn was one of the alumni who encouraged Weix’s ambitions to launch Aryeo, and together with TechTrek Professor John Gallaugher and Shea Center for Entrepreneurship Director Jere Doyle, helped teach him everything from how to create his first pitch deck to how to fundraise. In 2018, Weix won BC’s Strakosch Venture

Competition with his pitch for Aryeo, which gave him $15,000 to continue building the company. BC also provided him with office space to work on the idea,

and he spent hours cold-calling dozens of local photographers asking them to try his software. From there, the company experienced meteoric growth. After SSC became one of Aryeo’s earliest investors, in 2019, the company hired its first employee in 2020. By 2023, more than 10 percent of all real estate transactions in the country were being processed through its software. One regular customer was the powerhouse real estate website Zillow, which ended up buying Aryeo that same year for $35 million. Weix was twenty-six. “It’s a little like you don’t know how to wrap your head around it,” Weix said. “It was extremely gratifying.” He continued working for Zillow as Aryeo CEO until 2024. He’s now in the early days of building his second startup, which SSC has already invested in. Weix also serves as an SSC mentor, usually focused on advising the network’s young entrepreneurs who work in software. “You see these people go start their own companies and you never know how it’s going to come back around,” he said. “I love to help people go build more things out in the world.”

7 YEARS OF OPERATION

$35 million PRICE ZILLOW PAID TO BUY ARYEO IN 2023

250,000 REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONALS USING THE SOFTWARE

WHY SSC SAID YES:

“When someone has a little bit of them that’s willing to defy the odds, you want to get on board with that. Branick had a business in high school. He had done the job of the people he was trying to serve.”

Mentor Spotlight

AS A SUCCESSFUL TECH executive, Jason Krantz ’95, P’23 is more than just an SSC investor, he’s also one of the fund’s 150 alumni mentors, a network of professionals including lawyers, business executives, and accountants who give free advice to entrepreneurs associated with SSC. Krantz is the founder and executive chairman of Definitive Healthcare, a technology company that generated more than $252 million in revenue last year. But despite his success, memories of founding his first company as an inexperienced twentysomething have never left him and inform his mentorship of SSC’s young entrepreneurs. “It’s really looking at, what are my battle scars? What are the things I’d do differently if I could go back in time?” Krantz said of his approach. “It’s about trying to teach those lessons to allow them to scale quicker, make fewer mistakes, and achieve all their goals.” Access to mentors such as Krantz is one of the most valuable benefits for the handful of young entrepreneurs who are accepted into SSC’s Summer Accelerator program each year. During the program, the participants receive one-on-one coaching from mentors with experience in related industries. The mentors also deliver talks during the program, covering such important topics as what to look for in hiring early employees, how to sell a product as it’s being made, how to get products to market quickly, and how to rapidly innovate. Krantz’s biggest piece of advice for young entrepreneurs? Just go for it. “Worst case scenario, you give this a whirl for a couple of years and the stars don’t align,” he said. “But the amount you learn and the value you have to the next startup or employer goes up dramatically.”

THE BIG IDEA: An app that plans first dates

WWHY

SSC SAID YES:

“With a lot of dating apps, the only way to make money is by offering premium services. Ophelia’s partnership model with venues is a way that makes money immediately. If you can do that, that’s a much more sustainable business model.”

HEN BO BRAINERD ’25 WAS A junior at BC, she found herself fed up with modern dating. At social events on the weekends, people weren’t approaching each other. Things were a little better on the dating apps, where she had plenty of matches, but her conversations rarely led to dates. What was needed, she decided, was a dating app that didn’t just connect people, but actually helped facilitate their first meeting. So Brainerd came up with the idea for Ophelia, a dating app that would match couples and then plan their date. Brainerd’s concept won the 2023 Start@Shea Elevator Pitch Competition, an annual student startup competition run by BC’s Carroll School of Management. It then placed second in BC’s Strakosch Venture Competition. Impressed, SSC general partner Christina Quinn ’13 recommended that Brainerd apply for the 2024 SSC Summer Accelerator, in which a few new entrepreneurs are selected to attend an intensive twelve-week startup training course and provided with mentorship and $10,000 to develop their business. The program helped Brainerd

1 YEAR OF OPERATION

8 EMPLOYEES

5,000 USERS ON WAITLIST PRIOR TO LAUNCH

refine her concept for Ophelia. Today, the platform no longer connects people. Instead, users must already have someone they want to go on a date with and answer a few questions about their interests. (Would they rather attend a sports game or walk around a museum?) The app then curates a date itinerary for them using a database of Ophelia’s local business partners—everything from pottery studios to gaming arcades—and charges a fee equal to 10 percent of the total cost of the date. There are also options for creating your own itinerary. Brainerd said SSC has helped her immensely. In addition to the investment she received, she’s also learned how to code and build her website from the fund’s mentors. “I owe my entire metamorphosis from founder to entrepreneur to SSC,” she said. When Ophelia officially launched in September, it already had more than five thousand users on its waiting list. The app is only available in Boston for now, but Brainerd hopes to expand to New York City by the end of this year. “People ask me, ‘what’s the end goal?’” Brainerd said. “I’m like, I just want people to be happy and in love.”

THE BIG IDEA: Affordable, quality kitchenware for home cooks

BACK IN 2017, WHEN DAVE NGUYEN

JD’06, MSF’08 and Eunice Byun were living in New York City, the two friends made a pact that would change their lives: to stop eating so much takeout. As they started cooking more and ordering less, they noticed a hole in the market for kitchen tools. “There was a lot of stuff that was really expensive at specialty stores, like a $300 chef’s knife that was way too intimidating for us,” Nguyen said. “The alternative was a $20 knife that didn’t feel well-designed or good quality.” Nguyen, who was then director of retail planning at Chanel, and Byun, vice president of global digital marketing at Revlon, saw an opportunity. Together, they drew on their corporate experience to start Material Kitchen, a purveyor of affordable, high-end kitchenware ranging from pans and whisks to ice cream scoops and cloth dinner napkins. After hearing about SSC, Nguyen reached out to SSC general partner Peter Bell ’86 and was able to secure an investment from the fund in 2023. Today, Material

Kitchen products are sold in retailers like Bloomingdale’s and The Container Store. The company has been featured in national publications such as Vogue, Bon Appétit, and New York Magazine, and has nearly one hundred thousand social media followers. SSC provided the growing company with financial support, of course, but “I had also been looking for ways to become more active in the BC community and thought that this could be a way to do so,” Nguyen said. He’s an active participant in the SSC Slack group, regularly answering business questions from other entrepreneurs in SSC portfolio companies; volunteers at SSC events for BC students; and last semester acted as a mentor in the University’s Accelerate@Shea entrepreneur program. Looking ahead, he and Byun hope to one day open a brick-and-mortar store. They also plan to continue using sustainable materials in their products, including a microplastic-free cutting board and a salad bowl made from recycled plastic and renewable sugarcane.

WHY SSC SAID YES:

“Material is a bit later-stage than our typical company, but we were impressed by the deep consumer experience of Eunice and David, so we were excited to learn that the company had a BC affiliation that fit our criteria.”

THE BIG IDEA: Entertainment-focused vacation rentals for large groups

WHY SSC SAID YES:

“Dan and Bobby demonstrated the qualities we believe are highly valuable to entrepreneurs. They’re intellectually curious, unafraid to try new ideas and pivot in the face of failure, and willing to take a risk.”

WHEN DAN BRETT ’18 ENTERED the SSC Summer Accelerator program back in 2020, he and his cofounder, Robert Harrington ’18, had an idea for a meal kit delivery service. It wasn’t long, though, before Brett and Harrington realized that the whole thing wasn’t viable. So to bring in extra money, they started delivering Christmas trees dressed as Santa, unexpectedly making national headlines and enough income to fund a new idea for a company called Dryfter. Today, the company owns and operates a network of Vermont vacation homes outfitted specifically for large group events like bachelor parties, work retreats, and weddings. Dryfter’s houses, which are each large enough to sleep more than a dozen people, are equipped with amenities like golf simulators, poker tables, saunas, and pickleball courts. The idea was inspired by customer frustrations with property-rental companies like Airbnb. “We just kept hearing from people over and over again that the experience wasn’t great,” said Brett, who is Dryfter’s CEO. (Harrington has since

photo:

left the company). “The hosts weren’t responsive, there were ridiculous fees, and it wasn’t great for large groups. So our original concept was, we can do this better.” What sets Dryfter apart from its competitors? Primarily, it’s that the company owns all of its properties. After a successful eight-month pilot program using rented homes, Dryfter raised enough capital in 2022 to purchase its first home, and has since acquired four more. The company continues to benefit from its association with SSC. It found some of its biggest investors through SSC connections, and Brett sends out monthly emails to SSC members, sometimes with questions about business matters, like how to monetize Dryfter’s social media following, which has ballooned to nearly one million people. Dryfter promotes a “hyper fixation on hospitality” among the company’s small team of twelve part-time employees. All guest messages, for instance, are answered within five minutes. “It’s all completely in-house,” he said, “which leads to a much better guest experience.”

goal driven goal driven goal driven

Under the leadership of Charlie Jacobs ’94, the Boston Bruins have won their first championship since the seventies, rebuilt the team’s relationship with its obsessive fans, and celebrated one hundred years in the NHL. Jacobs believes the best is yet to come.

by jacob feldman

photographs by david le

OOOon a june afternoon in 2001, fifteen thousand Boston Bruins fans filled City Hall Plaza to celebrate the NHL championship won four days earlier by… the Colorado Avalanche. Midway through the prior season, legendary Bruins defenseman Ray Bourque, who’d played in black and gold since Jimmy Carter was president, had requested a trade. A year later, Bourque helped Colorado win the NHL title that had eluded the Bruins since 1972, leading Boston Mayor Tom Menino to invite him back to town to celebrate.

Though that party—where Bruins fans toasted a Stanley Cup won by another team—represented a low point in the team’s history, it also coincided with the beginning of a new era for the organization. Not long before, Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs had called his sons Lou and Jerry Jr. into his office. He told them that he’d been thinking about bringing his youngest son, Charlie, into the family business. Jacobs’s idea was that, rather than live and work in Buffalo with the rest of the family, Charlie would be based in Boston.

Although Lou and Jerry admit today to being a little jealous at the time that they were passed over for their younger brother, they acknowledge that the choice made a lot of sense. Charlie had ties to Boston—he’s an Eagle, after all—and a passion for hockey that bordered on an obsession. And after nearly making the US Olympic equestrian team in the 1990s, he also had the kind of competitive drive it would take to help restore the Bruins to greatness. Now the family just had to convince him to take the position.

After graduating from BC in 1994, Jacobs had taken a job in hockey not with the Bruins but with the Los Angeles Kings. A few years later, he moved on to start his own successful web publishing company in San Francisco. “I could’ve stayed in San Francisco and been very happy,” Jacobs recently recalled. But he had teared up from his couch while watching Bourque win that Stanley Cup. His heart was still with the Bruins.

Afterjoining the franchise in 2001, Charlie Jacobs is today the Bruins’ CEO. Though there have been the inevitable ups and downs of professional sports, the team under his leadership has been quite a success, winning the NHL championship for the first time in nearly four decades in 2011, and making it back to the finals in both 2013 and 2019.

When I visited Jacobs recently in the thirty-onestory office tower that houses the team’s headquarters on the corner of Causeway Street and Legends Way, he was dressed casually in blue jeans, a button-down shirt, and sneakers. His rescue dog, Berry, slept in the cor-

ner. He spoke softly enough that you could be forgiven for forgetting that his family owned the place, or that Jacobs had a large part in the construction of the tower we were sitting in.

When Jacobs’s father, Jeremy Jacobs, bought the Bruins in 1975 for $10 million, he recognized it as a business opportunity. With the transaction, his company, called Delaware North, had purchased a historic franchise with a committed fan base, plus control of the legendary Boston Garden, where both the Bruins and the Boston Celtics played. Delaware North was founded in 1915 by Jeremy Jacobs’s father and two uncles as a theater concession business. Over the decades, the business grew rapidly, selling hot dogs and beverages at ballparks and horse racing tracks, and eventually evolving into a multinational hospitality company.

Acquiring the Bruins may have made good business sense, but it brought with it all the challenges of running a team in a city known for its demanding fan base. Under Jacobs’s ownership, the Bruins continued to make the playoffs each year through 1996—part of an NHL-record streak of twenty-nine straight seasons. But when the run ended without a title, criticism grew for spending near the bottom of the league in player salaries despite being near the top in profits. Making matters worse, Jacobs was rarely seen in Boston, instead entrusting General Manager Harry Sinden to lead the team. In an unscientific 2001 ESPN fan poll of the worst owners in sports, Jacobs came in number one. “There was a website called, ‘Please Sell the Bruins,’” Charlie Jacobs recalled. “As if we didn’t care—or all we cared about was selling concessions, which is nonsense, absolute nonsense.” Charlie, after all, had been a Bruins fanatic for basically his entire life.

Growing up in Buffalo, Charlie Jacobs watched Bruins games via a massive satellite dish, running out to clear snow off it in the winters. While in college, he would attend games and sit next to Sinden, soaking up information. “It wasn’t like we would go to Bruins games and drink beers and laugh and have fun,” his friend Philip Richter recalled. “It was work.”

After graduation, Jacobs was determined to work in hockey, and to earn his way. “I wanted to go out and learn the game,” he said. So in 1994 he left Boston for LA, joining the Kings organization. The work was hardly glamorous. One of his early jobs, for instance, was listening to radio broadcasts to ensure the correct ads ran during games. “I literally worked in the basement,” he recalled. His exposure to team videos eventually helped him to see the benefits of new internet technology, and then a business opportunity. In 1998 he cofounded the company Total Media Group, which helped businesses publish videos digitally and create an online presence. The company started in a garage and grew to a staff of thirty by 2001, when Jacobs left Total Media Group and moved east.

Jacobs’s first job with the Bruins was to observe. “Nobody said, ‘If you come here you can run the Bruins,’” he said. Instead, he’d sit inside the hockey operations department, watch the games, and continue learning from Sinden.

He lived in a hotel across from the team’s arena, and traded holidays with family for time on the road alongside team scouts at junior games, college contests, and world youth championships. “I got to travel a lot, which was difficult because I had young kids,” he said, “but also fun because we were doing it for the game.”

Even as Jacobs was developing the skills required to one day run the organization, however, the Bruins and the entire league struggled. Bruins attendance dropped each year from 1999 to 2003, bottoming out at twentyfirst in the league. Meanwhile, in the five seasons from 1999 to 2004, the team had five different head coaches. Then, in 2004, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced a lockout of players, part of a fight to create a salary cap.

Six weeks later, when Jacobs traveled to St. Louis to witness the Red Sox win their first World Series in eighty-six years, he couldn’t help but wonder when Bruins fans would enjoy a similar moment. He was thirty-three at the time, and a Stanley Cup hadn’t been raised in Boston since he was six months old. His first thought after waking up was often: How do we get back

there? But at the close of 2004, the team seemed farther away than ever.

The 2004–2005 NHL season was ultimately canceled, the only time an entire major pro sports season has been lost in North America. As the league got ready to resume playing the following season, it was clear the Bruins had work to do when it came to reconnecting with fans. And it was Charlie who would lead that effort. He oversaw a marketing campaign that featured staffers interviewing fans and the creation of a series of TV spots featuring the actor Denis Leary with Bruins players. Jacobs also reintroduced sections of ten-dollar tickets for the first time since 1987.

Then, in November 2005, the Bruins traded their star captain Joe Thornton to the San Jose Sharks. The shocking move stunned Thornton, fans…and Charlie Jacobs. He was boarding a plane when his phone rang. It was the team’s then-GM Mike O’Connell.

“Hey, I just traded Joe,” O’Connell said.

“Can you undo it?” Jacobs asked him.

By the end of the season, O’Connell was out. Sinden, then team president, sat Jacobs down and said he ought to help pick the next GM. Jacobs was thirty-four at the time, a year younger than his father had been when he took over the Bruins, and though it would be another decade before he was formally named CEO, his growing influence in the organization was already unmistakable.

Bruins CEO Charlie Jacobs ’94 joined the family business in 2001 after working for the Los Angeles Kings and then cofounding a successful internet company. Under his leadership, the team has won its first NHL title since 1972 and made two other Stanley Cup finals.

top : Charlie Jacobs, at left, with his father Jeremy Jacobs, who purchased the Bruins in 1975 and remains the team’s owner and governor.

bottom : Jacobs hoists the Stanley Cup in celebration of the Bruins’ 2011 NHL championship.

The jacobs’ interests in the Bruins are vast and multifaceted. Owning an NHL franchise today means managing an arena (TD Garden is worth nearly $1 billion alone), running a media business (the Bruins control 20 percent of New England Sports Network), maintaining a brand so meaningful that countless locals have tattooed its logo onto their flesh, and overseeing a group of professional athletes plus everything they need to perform at their best. But as Jacobs explained it, they’re all interconnected.

Everything from new arena seats to an upgraded scoreboard are seen as elements that improve fan experience, drive business outcomes, and ultimately help the team win. When Jacobs began playing a larger team role in 2006, he focused first on players’ perceptions of the organization. “I felt like we needed to put more importance on making sure that this was a destination,” he said. “We should have players clamoring to play here.”

That process began with the pick for general manager, Peter Chiarelli, a former players’ agent who was working as an assistant GM for the Ottawa Senators. Chiarelli

knew what athletes were looking for in their team. In his first offseason, the Bruins were able to sign two of the top free agents on the market, center Marc Savard and defenseman Zdeno Chára. In the draft, meanwhile, the team added important future pieces in Phil Kessel, Milan Lucic, and Brad Marchand. They also traded for Tuukka Rask, who would become a dominant goalie.

Jacobs was around the team’s facility nonstop, working to improve the locker rooms, the business areas, and the overall organizational culture. Taken together, the new talent and focus ignited a three-year run starting in 2008 that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. When the 2007–2008 season ended with a surprise playoff appearance, fan attendance the following September at the team’s preseason “State of the Bruins” town hall doubled. Jeremy Jacobs was there, too, reflecting Charlie’s encouragement that his dad make more appearances in town. The Bruins made the playoffs again the next season, managing to win a series, and did the same in 2010.

As the 2010–2011 season approached, the Bruins’ transformation seemed complete. The team was big, fast, and skilled. But maybe most significant for Jacobs, it was tough. “The Bruins came on the ice,” he recalled, “and they had a certain gravitas to them—a feel of, Hey listen, you better keep yourself in line or you’re gonna get something handed to you.”

Jacobs was hardly the only one excited. The team’s fourteen thousand season tickets sold out. “This is like a keg of TNT,” Jacobs said at the time. “Hopefully it explodes.”

It certainly did. That season, the Bruins made it to the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time since 1990. Facing the Vancouver Canucks, the Bruins got off to a difficult start, losing the first two games on the road. But then that toughness emerged, and from that point on, the Bruins dominated the series, winning four of the next five games to claim the team’s first championship since 1972.

The win was the culmination of a decade-long rebuild. “There’s no words to describe that feeling,” Jacobs said of his time on the ice and in the locker room that night, celebrating with his family and his team. “I just want to get back there.”

Asceo of the bruins, Jacobs is in charge of the team’s business operations, but he also prioritizes its philanthropic endeavors. The Boston Bruins Foundation that he founded in 2003 and oversees today as chairman has raised more than $74 million to date. Meanwhile, he remains intensely focused on the on-ice product as well. He likes to watch the team’s morning skate and then tries to end meetings by 3 p.m. so he has time to exercise and eat before each game starts.

He does his best to avoid inflammatory conversations about the team that play out on the radio or in the papers. And he tries not to text decision makers

right after a game, at least giving them the night before weighing in on what he saw. “He’s very passionate,” team President Cam Neely said. When Jacobs does send one of those texts, Neely said, “it just shows his passion.”

Away from the Bruins, Jacobs continues with his other competitive endeavor: riding horses. He grew up on a horse farm and has always been fiercely competitive during equestrian events, recalled his longtime friend Philip Richter. In 2017, Jacobs helped Team USA claim the top prize at the Nations Cup. “There’s no one else in show jumping doing what he’s doing, period,” Richter said, specifically noting Jacobs’s ability to adapt to each horse he rides, whether they’re temperamental or placid.

The bruins championship in 2011 looked like it was just the beginning, but so far it has remained the pinnacle. The club managed to return to the finals two years later, and then again in 2019, but both campaigns ended in disappointment.

“I thought we had the best team in the league at the time,” Jacobs said of the painful 2019 loss, which culminated in a Game Seven defeat at home. He still remembers the barricades set up along the streets that night, the roads cleared of traffic in anticipation of a celebration. Instead, Jacobs walked silently down Canal Street. “Do you know that feeling you get when you lose something—maybe something you loved?” he said. “That takes a while to get over.”

The finals losses may still sting, but it’s impossible to deny that the Bruins have remained a successful franchise. Heading into last season, the team had made the playoffs for eight consecutive seasons, the longest such streak in the league. Ultimately, however, that season was nothing but a disappointment. The Bruins won their fewest games in a full season since 2005–2006 and didn’t qualify for the playoffs.

When it comes to expectations for the future, Jacobs said that the disappointment of last year changes nothing now that the 2025–2026 season is underway. The goal, as always, is to capture another Stanley Cup, especially now that his father is eighty-five years old. “I feel pressure that we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to win,” he told the Boston Globe earlier this year. “There’s nothing more that I would want to do as an executive, but also as a son, than to make sure that we get another championship while everyone’s still around to share it.”

Nearly a quarter century in, Jacobs keeps moving the franchise forward. He oversaw a $100 million renovation of TD Garden ahead of the 2019–2020 season that coincided with a more than $1 billion investment in the neighborhood that surrounds the arena, bringing a grocery store, movie theater, and corporate building to what had been a relatively barren patch of downtown Boston. The project was beyond anything his father had envisioned. For her part,

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu called Charlie “a treasure in our community.”

From there, Jacobs turned his attention to the Bruins’ centennial season. The team arranged a yearlong series of celebratory events leading up to December 1, 2024, the one-hundred-year anniversary of the first game the Bruins ever played. As part of the festivities, the team unveiled a statue last fall to honor its first century, a ten-foot-long, 3,500-pound Bruins bear sculpted by Harry Weber.

The bronze statue debuted on a sunny Saturday afternoon in November, with Jacobs joined by local dignitaries and team icons. Unlike when he first joined the organization, there were no criticisms, no cries to sell the team, only well-wishers and autograph seekers. “This is a very special day,” Jacobs said to the gathered crowd. “While this statue pays homage to our past, it is also a beacon to our future. As we mark one hundred years of Bruins hockey, we should look forward to the next hundred with excitement and hope.” n

Jacob Feldman is a sports business reporter at Sportico and the founder of The Sunday Long Read, an email newsletter celebrating the web’s best stories.

top : Jacobs unveils the Bruins’ new bronze statue in 2024 to help celebrate 100 years as an NHL franchise.

bottom : Jacobs, an accomplished equestrian, competing at the 2017 Jumping and Dressage World Cup Finals.

From Foundation to Future

Honoring its roots while embracing its potential, the AHANA Alumni Leadership Council launches a new era of engagement.

The Boston College Alumni Association is proud to announce an exciting new era for the AHANA Alumni Advisory Council (AAAC).

Arivee Vargas ’05, JD’08, H’22, a founding member of the AAAC and previous vice chair, will serve as chair of the council alongside a dynamic, new executive committee (EC). The EC represents a wide range of class years, professional expertise, diverse volunteer experience with the University, and deep personal connections to the Heights. Together, these leaders will help shape the council’s engagement strategy, guide its initiatives, and keep the BC AHANA community connected through new annual programs and events.

Additionally, to further celebrate the legacy, history, leadership, and formative experiences of our AHANA alumni, the council has been renamed the AHANA Alumni Leadership Council (AALC). With a renewed vision and goal to increase engagement and connection between alumni and the University, the AALC will continue serving as a powerful network for alumni of color, while advancing a shared Jesuit mission of being men and women for others. The council will also continue to offer current undergraduate students mentorship and professional networking opportunities through its partnerships across BC’s campuses.

Initially launched in 2014, the council has benefited immensely from the strong foundation, unwavering dedication, and leadership of the council’s cofounders—Juan Concepcion ’96, MEd’97, MBA’03, JD’03, and the Honorable Darcel D. Clark ’83—as well as Bob Marshall ’88, P’17, who most recently served as chair of the AAAC from 2019 to 2025.

Following on the success of the third RECONNECT alumni gathering in 2024, the AALC is poised to further amplify the voice and impact of the AHANA alumni community at Boston College through new events beginning in early 2026! To ensure you stay in the know on all the exciting developments to come, including important news and event invitations, update your contact information at bc.edu/update

Arivee Vargas ’05, JD’08, H’22

Newton, Massachusetts

executive committee

Mian Azmy ’02

New York, New York

Lubens Benjamin ’23

New York, New York

Earnestiena Cheng ’15

New York, New York

Dane O. Fletcher ’94

Milton, Massachusetts

Joe Irineo ’03

Glen Rock, New Jersey

Diana Isern ’05

Queens, New York

Kevin L. Jackson ’04

Mount Vernon, New York

Tamy-Feé P. Meneide ’05, MA’06

Newton, Massachusettts

Mikayla Sanchez ’23

Berkeley Heights, New Jersey

Alumni Class Notes

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Some alumni notes have been edited for length and clarity. The statements shared by alumni in class notes are their own. They are not endorsed by, and should not be ascribed to, Boston College or University Advancement. To view the full notes, visit bc.edu/bcmnotes or scan this code

1956

70th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026 Al Carignan has reached the age of 90, and this past year, he was in and out of hospitals. He is now receiving home hospice care, and he would like to hear from classmates.

1958

Dan Cummins passed away peacefully on March 7 after a long battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his family members, including his wife, Elaine. Dan was a longtime supporter of BC, with a focus in recent years on the McMullen Museum of Art. He was the first of three generations to attend the Heights. // Felix Puccio celebrated his 90th birthday on March 7. On his mother’s birthday, he decided to give a shout-

out to Boston College Magazine. He has been actively involved in the restoration of the St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church, beekeeping, many building projects, and now pickleball. He started playing at the age of 85 and is actively involved with a local senior group that plays three times a week. // John Cloherty retired after over 50 years as a neonatologist and pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has five kids, three of whom went to BC, and 16 grandchildren, three of whom are current students at BC. John’s wife, Ann, died 10 years ago. He is still doing some teaching at Children’s, and he is splitting time between Westwood, Massachusetts, and Popponesset, on the Cape. // Ellen Every Yavel is spending the summer at her cottage in Harwich Port, Massachusetts. She would like to get together with her classmates. // Bob Johnson writes that “time marches on for us oldsters.” Last fall, Bob survived two stays in the ER intensive care unit. He can still read military history books and he reads three newspapers a day. He can still cut the grass and shovel snow. He is immensely proud of how BC has earned its superb reputation. “God bless all the guys who have gone on,” he reflects. // Bill McGurk is still with us. He retired from teaching at Brown University and the practice of clinical psychology in Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of 59, and he spent winters each year sailing in the Bahamas on his 40-foot sloop with his wife, Ann. They had three sons and six grandchildren. They built a post-andbeam house on Prince Edward Island, Canada, on 40 acres of land that has been in his family since 1802, and he lived there

each summer. Bill now lives in Venice, Florida. // Marian Bernardini DeLollis writes that Joan Downing Lachance, the decades-long Class of 1958 treasurer, passed away in May. For over 20 years, Joan and James “Mucca” McDevitt carefully guarded the funds coming in and going out for all the Class’s Reunion events and the Class lunches on Cape Cod and in Naples, Florida. Attending Joan’s wake and funeral Mass, along with many family members and friends, were Marian, Virginia DeGenova, Joyce Ryder Rizzuto, and Deacon Anthony Rizzuto ’71

NC 1958

Patty Schorr sends best wishes to her classmates. She misses hearing from them and hopes they will send news in order to continue to claim their spot on the first page of the Class Notes section. Patty continues to adjust to life at the Windrows, a lively retirement center, and joins the residents playing bridge and bocce ball. The highlight of Patty’s year was the arrival of her eighth greatgrandchild, Rose Evangeline. She feels very blessed.

Class correspondent: Patty Schorr // dschorr57@verizon.net

1959

Jack Flanagan still follows BC’s great sports teams. And when he attends a game at Alumni Stadium, he has fond memories back to 1957, when players on the football team helped to move the stadium to its current location. Unfortunately, they lost the opening game at Alumni Stadium to a great Navy team, 46 to 6. Jack got his jersey dirty that day. Go Eagles! // Jim Masson’s wife of 55 years passed away on November 24, 2022. Since then, he has moved to Oklahoma to be close to his two kids and his grandkids. He is currently living at a facility called Silver Elms Estates, which offers independent living arrangements.

Class correspondent: Bill Appleyard // bill.appleyard@verizon.net

1960

Bill Gozzi, Bernie Gleason, Pete Marceau, Tom O’Connell, Bob Trainor, and Tom Rodhouse celebrated their 65th class reunion by playing golf at Pinehurst, in North Carolina.

NC 1960

Kathy McDermott Kelsh, Nancy Madden-Leamy, and Pat Winkler Browne traveled from New York, Connecticut, and Maryland to join their classmates from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. They all agreed to do it again next April or May at a mini reunion. Class correspondent: Patricia Winkler Browne // enworb1@verizon.net

1962

Larry Sanford notes that, much like the 2025 World Championship–winning US hockey team, which has two BC alums, the 1933 World Championship–winning US hockey team also had a BC alum: Laurence “Pete” Sanford ’31, Boston College Varsity Club Athletic Hall of Fame inductee. // Paul Horrigan has worked with the 550 veterans of Westborough, Massachusetts, since his retirement in 2019. Paul is the commander of American Legion Post 0613, and he is also a member of VFW Post 9013 and the Westborough Veterans’ Advisory Board. All of these groups participate in Memorial and Veterans Day Ceremonies, clothing drives for homeless veterans in Worcester, Buddy Poppy drives twice a year to raise funds for veterans’ activities, and free veterans’ breakfasts twice a year. // John “Jack” Murray ’62, MBA’70, has recently shared with his classmates his newly discovered talent, pencil sketching. He brought some of his completed works to the First Friday Luncheon at Reunion. His peers were quite impressed. Class correspondent: Eileen Faggiano // efaggiano5@gmail.com

PMC 1962

Ken Keppeler submitted a note about the passing of his wife of 47 years, Jeanie McLerie Blackmar. She was a great companion and musical partner, and a fantastic singer, fiddle player, and guitar player. Together, they played all over Canada, the United States, Mexico, Europe, the UK, Ireland, and once at a wedding in China. They were known as Bayou Seco, and they played Cajun music. They met in southwest Louisiana and then moved to New Mexico, where they collected Spanish colonial music and dances. Jeanie has a daughter, Nellie Sipko, whom Ken raised with her from the age of eight.

NC 1963

Marjorie “Margie” Reiley Maguire, Mary Ann McGeough Kane, and Carleen Testa McOsker spent a lovely weekend together in Exeter, New Hampshire, in May 2024, when Margie traveled from Milwaukee to visit her granddaughter. In Spring 2025, she visited Clare McMahon Yates at Clare’s home in Albany, New York. In September 2024, Margie also visited with several Newton friends in the Philadelphia area. Margie also visited Meg Finegan Schmid, who was not able to attend the Sacred Heart high school reunion with Margie and Barbara. Meg’s husband, Ed, died in 2019. Margie also had “tea” with Liz Madden and Molly Tobin Espey. Sadly, Molly’s husband, David, had recently died on April 19, 2024, but happily, Molly has become a first-time grandmother. She plans on frequent commuting between her home in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, and Portugal. // Mary Jane Becherer Ferson of Duxbury, Massachusetts, died peacefully on August 27, 2024. She had three children and three grandchildren. // Karen Mulvey of Chatham, New Jersey, who dedicated her life to social work with a focus on child development and care, died on September 9, 2024. // Judy Brill Callahan of Bellingham, Massachusetts, who had been a science teacher and then a banker, died on October 2, 2024. Her husband, Brendan, died in 1995. // Kathy O’Brien Piper of Warrenton, Virginia, a lifelong educator, died on October 10, 2024. // Carolyn McInerney McGrath of Darien, Connecticut, who was active on boards and committees of civic and

charitable organizations, died peacefully on December 17, 2024. Her husband, Gerry, died in 2013. She had three children and 11 grandchildren. // Marjie Dever Shea’s husband, Dan Shea, LLB’62, died peacefully in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on February 10, 2025. // Anna “Alma” Fortin Wong’s husband, Oscar, died on May 25, 2025, in Asheville, North Carolina. Class correspondent: Colette McCarty // colette.mccarty@gmail.com

1964

Liz Schuster Downey began writing books six years ago. Her first book is for adults and the other four are for children. They are all true stories and involve her family. The books are available on Amazon and through Barnes & Noble. They are The Cat Who Came to Dinner, Harry the Highrise Spider, Baby G: A Tale of Two Tails, Bernadette: A Bear at Bear Lake, and the latest, Ferdinand the Flying Frog // Dan Tannacito recently published his first novel, Murder at Point Lookout Beach, after a long and fulfilling career as a university professor in the US, China, and Turkey. The novel grew out of his experiences as a lifeguard on Long Island, New York. // James Spillane, S.J., ’64, MA’68, MDiv’76, wrote to his classmates from Jakarta, Indonesia, where he arrived in June after an enjoyable six-hour train ride from Yogyakarta. He stayed in Jakarta for over a month at the downtown Jesuit high school Canisius College, which had just finished its school year when James arrived. As a “team building” exercise, a convoy of 10 tourist buses made the 10hour trip to Yogyakarta and its environs.

NC 1964

Mary Lou Cunningham Mullen writes that her granddaughter Elise Mullen ’25 graduated from BC. She is the 14th member of the Mullen family to graduate from Boston College. Elise’s grandfather, Peter Hart Mullen ’61, has interviewed prospective BC students for 30 years in South Bend, Indiana. Both grandparents are so very proud of Elise, as well as of Audrey Mullen ’22, her older sister.

NC 1965

Marylou Murphy and fellow classmates Judy Clune Groppa, Cathy Dacey Perkins, and Kathy Heffernan came from around the country to Cape Cod to celebrate their 60th Newton College Reunion in May. Great memories, great times! Does anyone else remember the Last Chance? Class correspondent: Linda Crimmins // mason65@me.com

1966

60th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026 Stu McGregor recently published his third book on Tuxedo Park, New York, the village that the tuxedo jacket was named after in 1886. The book deals with the history of this exclusive, private community, its people, and the town outside its gates. Tuxedo Park and neighboring Tuxedo, where in 1900 one percent of the population controlled over 90 percent of the wealth, are a microcosm of our country’s changes. Stu questions if we have returned to a new Gilded Age. // John Connor shared the following update: “Sold the house. Sold the car. Kept the cat. Moved onto the Villa Vie Odyssey residential cruise ship in San Diego with [my] husband Richard Harris and our 20-year-old cat Mocko on June 15. The ship will take three and a half years to circumnavigate the globe.” // Gerard “Gerry” T. Kennealey, MD, celebrated his 80th birthday with his family, including nine additional Eagles: Anne Kennealey McManus ’71, MS’73; Cathy Walsh ’88 and Tom Ohlson ’88; Peter Kennealey ’96; Brendan Kennealey ’98; Katie Burns ’01 and Douglas Kennealey ’01; Nicole Duffy ’03, MA’06, PhD’13; and Emma Kennealey ’29

1967

Walt Mahoney writes that he has seven wonderful grandchildren, ages 20 through

five. It’s been a big year, with Walt’s 57th wedding anniversary and 80th birthday. He celebrated in New York City on his birthday, and will celebrate all year round with cruising, road trips, and visiting family and friends. // Raymond Cioci writes that he enjoyed his 80th birthday celebration last year in Alaska with extended family on the Silversea cruise ship. Of course, the name of the ship has nothing to do with his gray hair, he writes. Raymond’s birthday celebration was wonderful because it turned into a celebration of all birthdays, including those of his children, their spouses, and his late wife’s sisters and spouses. // Bill Noonan passed away at home on May 15. Bill was an accounting major from Jamaica

Plain. He was a 1963 BC High graduate as well. He served a tour in Vietnam with the US Army and he remained in the Army Reserve and retired as a Colonel. He is survived by his wife, Jean, and three children. An avid runner, Bill completed the Boston Marathon many times. He also ran the Berlin, Montreal, Dublin, and New York City marathons. Bill worked at the IRS for 42 years and he served as a track official for college-level events. // Charles Benedict ’67, MBA’70, has been appointed the official bugler of his Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2498 in Needham, Massachusetts. Class correspondents: Mary-Anne and Charles Benedict // mainside55@gmail.com

1968

Bob Lanfear and his wife took a cruise around the British Isles with classmates Janet Charubin ’68, MA’70, and David Krol. It was a great trip. // Art Desrosiers and Jerry DeLaney hosted a festive mini-reunion at Delray Beach, Florida, and Singer Island in West Palm Beach. Attendees included fellow science majors Pradeep Nijhawan, Kip Doran, John Malone, and Paul Langlois and their wives. These Eagles are all eager to descend on the Heights for their 60th Reunion in 2028! // Cleary Gottlieb senior counsel Mark Leddy ’68, JD’71, received Chambers and Partners’ Lifetime Achievement Award. He has earned a stellar reputation as an expert for counsel in transactions and regulatory matters. This honor is a recognition of his critical role in some of the most transformative

transactions in history, and his appearance before antitrust regulatory agencies and federal courts in civil and criminal litigation. Mark has been regularly described to Chambers as the “lion of the antitrust bar.” Class correspondent: Judith Day // jnjday@aol.com

1969

Chuck Auth is now 78 years old and winding down. His health is burdensome and he would like to commiserate with others in the same hole. You can email him at chuckauth@aol.com. // Brian Flynn of Medfield, Massachusetts, passed away on March 8. He was a leading figure in the American equestrian world. An outstanding rider and competitor, he became a judge at some of the most famous horse shows in the country, with over a thousand engagements. He contributed numerous innovations to the sport and was inducted into the National Show Hunter Hall of Fame. Class correspondent: Jim Littleton // jim.littleton@gmail.com

NC 1969

Eight classmates recently traveled to Ireland! Paula Fisher Paterson; Carol Romano Tuohey; Polly Glynn Kerrigan; Bebee Carroll Linder; Kathy Hartnagle Halayko; Sue Davies Maurer; Susan Power Gallagher; and Mary Gabel Costello NC’69, MEd’72, met in Shannon. They toured the beautiful green countryside in a van and stayed at a lovely home that Susan’s sister owns in

Sneem! They visited Kinsale, Killarney, Kenmare, and Dingle, with stops along the way. They’re keeping “OFAB” alive. Old Friends Are Best! Class correspondent: Mary Costello // mgc1029@aol.com

1971

55th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026

Hon. Gerard J. Boyle and his wife, Barbara Cahill Boyle ’79, are welcoming their son Maj. Sean C. Boyle, MBA’27, to the BC family as he begins his studies at the Carroll School this fall. // Samuel Scribner recently gave a lecture on Beethoven aboard a river cruise in Germany. Class correspondent: Jim Macho // jmacho@mac.com

NC 1971

Kate Russell finally retired from Gartner, Inc. in December 2024. She is looking for her next adventure! If you know anyone who needs a really good project manager/closet organizer, let her know. She recently traveled to Lisbon and Turkey, and is heading to Australia later this year. She is still living in Greenwich, Connecticut, and having fun with Susie Martin, Chris Peterson Spader, Dayl Soule, and Chrissie Seelig Waindle. A second grandson was recently added to the family. Time doth fly. // After a brief illness following a fall in her Ledyard, Connecticut, home, Kate Foley passed away on April 10, 2025. Kate earned a master’s degree in vocational rehabilitation counseling from Assumption College in Worcester and a second

master’s degree in industrial relations from the University of New Haven. Kate spent her entire career of 38 years with the State of Connecticut Bureau of Rehabilitation Services. A full obituary was in The Day newspaper of New London, Connecticut. // Melissa Robbins sends news that after spending 31 summers in Idaho, she and her husband, Mike Lombardo, are selling their house in Idaho Falls. Since their 1994 Dodge Caravan died just after Melissa arrived in Idaho Falls last May, they had to buy a new car. Rather than ship the new car home, Melissa and Mike will be making one more crosscountry drive once that house sells. Happy trails! Class correspondent: Melissa Robbins // melissarobbins49@gmail.com

1972

Lucille Niles Walsh and Mike Walsh just returned from a BC Beyond tour from Ireland to Iceland. It was a fantastic trip exploring Northern Ireland, several Scottish islands, and the Danish Faroe Islands, along with many stops in Iceland. There were 30 participants; they were wonderful people, and Lucille and Mike made new friends. It was the trip of a lifetime! // Bill Brodeur spent 35 years working for the Social Security Administration, mostly in the South Bronx. He moved to Monticello, New York, and lived there for five years. He is now married and retired in North Carolina. // Dr. Tom Herlehy was recognized as “the Rotarian of the Year” at the Rotary Club of St. Petersburg’s annual award event on June 24, 2025. Tom

was recognized for his leadership of the Rotary Club Service Committee. Tom ensured that the Rotary Club provided volunteers to the Special Olympics for its golf, volleyball, and swimming events; to the Salvation Army for its bell ringing and fundraising activities outside local supermarkets around Christmas; and more. Tom mentors two students as well. // Joseph Ferris has begun offering private coaching for youth in track and field and cross country. He is a United States track and field–certified coach and official with 15 years of coaching experience. His private group, called “A Step Above,” focuses on advanced training to help athletes achieve their goals. Joseph has completed multiple marathons, including two Boston Marathons. // Anne Marie Sousa shared that her father, John P. “Jack” Calareso, passed away on June 11. While he was not a very engaged alumnus, he had great pride in his alma mater and he taught his children and his grandchildren the Eagles fight song. His grandson is Dominic Calareso ’28. Class correspondent: Larry Edgar // ledgar72@gmail.com

NC 1972

Meg Barres Alonso and Mario Alonso ’72 “are fitting right in with the seniors at Stone Creek in Ocala, Florida, who still think that they are 35.” They have had a few urgent care visits: a broken rib from when Meg fell off her motor scooter and a boot for a torn calf muscle from playing

pickleball. In May, Meg and Mario went to the Dominican Republic for the wedding of their son Mike, a lawyer with the federal government, to Astrid Pineda, a recipient of a PhD from Columbia University who works at the World Bank. // After nine months of physical therapy, Laurie Loughlin is still recovering from permanent and severe back injuries suffered when her car hit a freshly installed liquid cushion speed bump. Motorists had no warning about its existence. As a seasoned civic advocate, Laurie wrote to state and local governments to ask them to start installing signs indicating that liquid speed bumps are ahead, to stop installing cushion speed bumps, and to remove liquid speed bumps. // In April, Kathy Connor visited New York City. The primary event was for Kathy and Suzy Berry Slattery to see Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello. Both actors impressed them with their outstanding live performances. Kathy is settling in after downsizing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Suzy finished a year as a maternity leave replacement teacher of 7th- and 8th-grade social studies at School of the Holy Child in Rye, New York. Although Suzy retired from teaching four years ago, she missed teaching and had a great year. // Congratulations to Vance Bonner on “celebrating 50 years of the Vance Stance!” Vance enjoys the summer in Frederick, Maryland, as an adjunct professor at Frederick Community College. She has been reaching more students in Bend, Oregon, where she lives the rest of the year. Please contact Vance if you wish to take a class from her in Frederick next summer. // After seven years of not seeing each other, Penny Price Nachtman and Meg Barres Alonso had a wonderful catch-up at lunch in Orlando, Florida. Penny came east from California to see her sister in Florida and met Meg halfway between both residences. // Nancy Brouillard McKenzie NC’72, MEd’75, writes that her county just made local buses free to ride. Nancy remembers that more than 50 years ago in an American Studies urban planning course, Mimi Santini-Ritt proposed that same idea to reduce transportation gridlock. Class correspondent: Nancy Brouillard McKenzie // mckenzie20817@comcast.net

1973

Chris Mulvey Kessel is still teaching, which should not be a surprise to those who know her. She teaches pathophysiology, advanced pharmacology, advanced pathophysiology, and advanced health assessment classes at Thomas Edison State University. She has also designed courses for the college. When she’s not teaching, Chris continues to take dance classes, sing in her church choir, babysit her four grandchildren, and play pickleball. If you are in the Quad Cities, come by for a game. Class correspondent: Patricia DiPillo // perseus813@aol.com

1974

John C. Lane announces his imminent retirement from the practice of law after 45 years. “See you at Blue Shutters! Don’t call me, I won’t call you,” he writes. // Marty Kofman writes that Boston College has amazing resources on faith and the Church in times of polarization. If you have not had a chance to read the “Journeying in Faith Amid Polarization” issue of C21 Resources, published by the Church in the 21st Century Center, Marty encourages you to do so; he says it has “world-changing possibilities.” He wonders if “maybe as a class we can bring this to another level,” and reflects that it might be of interest to Pope Leo XIV. // Mark Gibney shares the news that his former roommate Donald R. Ryan has written a definitive biography of Colonel William Prescott, who was a hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown 250 years ago. Colonel William Prescott: Heroic Commander of the Battle of Bunker Hill is available now. Congratulations, Donald! Class correspondents: Jane Crimlisk // crimliskp@gmail.com and Patricia McNabb Evans // patricia.mcnabb.evans@gmail.com

1975

Dr. Jim Riviere ’75, MS’76, has now been retired as an emeritus distinguished professor from North Carolina State University and Kansas State University for a decade. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and recently published a book titled Zero – Much to Do About Nothing? It summarizes his career in food safety and biomathematics and the complexities of

having to define what “zero” and “nothing” mean in the sciences. // Joseph “Junior” Renton looks forward to doing the dive shows again at the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. He writes that he survived the loss of his first wife to cancer, his battle with prostate cancer, a heart attack in New Zealand, and two hip replacements, and he “has now survived his 50th Reunion celebration at BC.” He reconnected with residents of Mod 32A and members of the Gold Key Society and Alpha Phi Omega. He also reconnected with his cocaptain of the cheerleading squad, Janette Racicot ’75, MBA’79. Joe and his wife, Diana, live in Leland, North Carolina, 30 minutes from his son and grandkids. // Edward Fitzgerald attended his 50th class Reunion alongside his son Sean ’00, who was celebrating his 25th Reunion. It was a truly special moment to share together. He was honored to receive the Golden Eagle pin from Fr. Leahy at the investiture luncheon. In a moment full of meaning, he proudly showed Fr. Leahy the BC class ring of his father, Joseph J. Fitzgerald ’49, MS’51; it was a ring that Joseph wore with great emotion and pride. They are now a “Triple Eagle” family, spanning three generations of BC graduates. // Shawn Sheehy attended the Class of 1975 Reunion events with his wife, Caroline Rocha Sheehy ’23, who is a realtor, and several classmates from Greater Boston: Paul Conroy, Greg Sullivan, Richard Rigazio, Patty and Ray “Jack” Livingstone, Doreen Flynn Trahon, Mary Pat Kilcullen, Kathleen Banen Magee,

Dollie Di Pesa, Donna O’Reilly Matteodo, Susan Darveau Murphy, Vincent Quealy, Kathleen Ring Corcoran, and Terese “Teri” and William “Bill” Donovan. In addition, while at Reunion, Shawn saw the following people: Mary Conway, Tricia Hoover, Mary Kane, Hellas Assad, Kathie Cantwell McCarthy, Charles Pattavina, Jayne Saperstein Mehne, John Halcovich, Kevin Short, Nancy O’Connor and Dennis McCleary ’74, and Francis Rocket ’80 // Mary Rose Noonan Delaney writes that she had a wonderful 50th Reunion. The music, food, and friends made it special! She is busy each day watching her nine grandkids. One just started at the University of New Hampshire this fall, two are at Arlington Catholic High School, one is at Waltham High School, and the other five are in elementary school. Mary Rose’s husband hasn’t retired yet. He still enjoys going to work at the Delaney & Delaney law office with two of their sons. Her daughter works at Watertown Savings Bank. Mary Rose hopes everyone stays well so they can meet at their 55th Reunion! // Mary Kane had a great time at Reunion, so much so that she and Kathleen Sullivan have decided to return for a home game at the Heights this fall. They hope many of their classmates will also attend Homecoming, which is the weekend of October 18. Please let one of them know if you are coming and they will try to organize a tailgate beforehand. // Dr. Joseph Jay Cigna is teaching exercise physiology to students in the health science program at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science (MCPHS), and a new and exciting human biology class at Framingham State University. He was a full- and part-time professor to several local universities as well as a practicing physical therapist for over 30 years. He is only teaching now as part of his “retirement plan.” He was thrilled to see many colleagues and friends at the 50th Golden Eagle Reunion. // “Pickleball,” a short story written by Tom Anderson, MA’75, appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. His story “Arowana” will appear in the Fall 2025 issue of the Bellevue Literary Review // Hellas Assad is still glowing from the joy of the unforgettable 50th Reunion! It was a

Memories from 35 Years Ago

The Second Annual Boston College Club of New York Sports Night Banquet December 10, 1990, Southgate Tower Hotel, New York City

The Southgate Tower Hotel was owned by Dan Denihan ’69. Patricia Santangelo, the first president of the Boston College Club of New York, initiated the sports banquets in 1987 by organizing a meeting with Mark Mulvoy; Lesley Visser; and Sean Orr ’76, Peat Marwick Main & Co. The first event was held on October 25, 1989, at the New York Athletic Club, after they and other volunteers reached out to BC graduates in sports fields, former BC student-athletes who went on to work in professional sports, BC Athletics administrators and coaches, and BC alumni contributors. Each of the five sports banquets was attended

by hundreds of alumni and Mark Mulvoy was the master of ceremonies at all of them. He was essential to their success.

The Boston College Club of New York, Inc., was incorporated in 1984 after merging two New York–based alumni groups: the Manhattan Business Group of Boston College and the Boston College Young Alumni Club of New York. Throughout the club’s history, thousands of alumni attended and volunteered at the sports banquets, career networking nights, business luncheons, receptions, social and sports activities, and fundraisers—

and some of these events continue to be organized by the Boston College New York City Chapter. Athan Crist started the club’s Inner City Scholarships in 1992, which supported several students. In 1988 and 1993, the club, together with Harris Publishing and the University, published 200-page hardcover directories of alumni in the New York metropolitan area to facilitate networking. The club’s career networking nights also became part of the BC Alumni Association’s Mid-Career Services Committee for many years.

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/classnotes.

NC 1975

weekend filled with excitement, laughter, and cherished memories, and it was highlighted by the joy of reconnecting with old friends and meeting new classmates. She offers a heartfelt thankyou to Mary Kay Sparicio and Sean Morrow, and every member of the Reunion team. Their dedication, meticulous attention to detail, and warm, welcoming presence made all the difference, she writes. The event was spirited and truly special! Class correspondent: Hellas M. Assad // hellasdamas@hotmail.com

Karen Foley Freeman writes that it was a wonderful weekend celebrating the Newton College 50th Reunion. There was a great showing, as 56 classmates, along with 17 spouses and partners, attended the various events over the course of the weekend. Caryl Forristall came the farthest distance from Redlands, California, followed closely by Anna Stocklein Frankel from Colorado and Posey Holland Griffin from Iowa. Donna Stimpson arrived from Connecticut with camera in hand and continuously snapped photos throughout the weekend, so Karen hopes she will be able to share them. Barbara Callahan Saldarriaga, with her husband, Juan, at the controls, flew in from the Jersey Shore with Rita Carbone Ciocca NC’75, MBA’77. Karen writes that it was great to see Kathy Joyce Coffey NC’75, JD’78; Ann Brennan; Laurie Lawless Orr with her husband Dennis ’75; and Cathy LoConto Lucey. Pam McNaughton D’Ambrosio drove to the Cape to pick up Mary Stevens McDermott and Susan Monahan Callahan, who arrived together! There are so many others to acknowledge, Karen says. She also notes that “it’s fair to say that we all look like no time has passed since we first arrived at Newton!” The special time at Reunion began with Friday’s Golden Investiture and Luncheon,

where attendees received a 50thanniversary Newton College of the Sacred Heart pin, and where Jo Ann Hilliard Holland, class president, presented Fr. Leahy with the class gift, a rendering of Barat House by John Steczynski, now proudly hanging in Barat. For those who were unable to attend the 50th Reunion, an email was sent out with links to Reunion photos, “de la”’s talk, Fr. Casey’s Mass and homily, as well as information on the Giving Fund, which supports the care of the elder sisters of the Society of the Sacred Heart. If you did not receive this email, please let Karen know and she will send you this information. Karen thanks everyone who made the 50th so memorable! // Margaret “Margi” Caputo shares these thoughts on the 50th Reunion: “Inviting Sr. Fran de la Chappelle was so ’on point.’ I can’t imagine marking our 50th without her! We are so fortunate she is alive, thriving, and busy at age 85 … may we all be so lucky.” She says that all of her classmates looked beautiful, and given the intimate setting, you couldn’t help but bump into somebody and start chatting, which made it even better! Lastly, Margi expresses gratitude for the somber yet elegant reminder of deceased classmates. Class correspondent: Karen Foley Freeman // karenfoleyfreeman@gmail.com

1976

50th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026

Mark Sullivan retired to Sarasota, Florida. He had a hip replaced in February, which he should have done two years ago. It is

now the third year of his wife’s debilitating healthcare battles. // Bob Fredericks retired after a career of more than 40 years in newspapers as a reporter and editor, starting at the Bridgeport Post, his hometown paper, before retiring as a senior writer at the New York Post. He splits his time between Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Narragansett, Rhode Island, with his partner Cindy Simoneau, chair of the journalism department at Southern Connecticut State University. He is loving the coastal southern New England life.

1979

Sophia Luk married Michael Brenner, and their combined families of four children and six grandchildren live in New York, Michigan, Maryland, and Quebec. Their youngest daughter, Stephanie, has just completed her PhD in school psychology. Sophia and Mike are committed to supporting educational endeavors and enjoy playing golf and bridge. Sophia just registered for a BC lifelong learning book club. She offers a big shout-out to the Class of ’79! Class correspondent: Peter J. Bagley // peter@peterbagley.com

1980

Kevin Murphy retired from Bloomberg L.P. after 25 years in enterprise data sales. He is enjoying the next phase of life with his grandson Charlie, who was born in April 2025. Kevin expects Charlie to join him and his son Sean ’14 as BC alumni— he’d be in the Class of 2047! Class correspondent: Michele Nadeem-Baker // michele.nadeem@gmail.com

1981

45th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026

Kathy Aicher and Shane Ventura ’80 recently completed the 500-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain. Their pilgrimage took approximately five weeks to walk the entire route over a three-year span. // Eileen Pearson Carlson retired in April and is working on her certification to be a career coach (part-time). She plans to travel more and continue to be a snowbird between Chicago and Florida. Her daughter, Megan, is 32 and an electrical engineer. // Peter del Vecchio, JD’81, writes that it has been an eventful year, having served as interim chief legal officer for T1 Energy (formerly Freyr

1982

Battery), a New York Stock Exchange–listed company, which purchased the US assets of Trina Solar, a Tier 1 Chinese solar manufacturing company. Separately, he is growing Mainsail Renewables, a battery and data center project development company. // At age 22, Kate Ryan Herman; Judy McVeigh Pluta; Ellen Caulo ’81, JD’84; and Chris Cincotta Simeone spent a month backpacking through Europe with a Eurail pass, staying in youth hostels. Now, 44 years later, at age 66, they just completed a 200-mile bike ride from Bruges, Belgium, to Amsterdam. They biked through pastoral towns and fishing villages for several days along the North Sea and slept in a boat at night. It was a great adventure at age 22. It was a grand victory at age 66!

Class correspondent: Alison Mitchell McKee // amckee81@aol.com

Beth Eckel retired as executive vice president and chief marketing and corporate communications officer of the Washington Trust Company. She was recognized on the Nasdaq MarketSite billboard in Times Square. She looks forward to traveling in retirement. // Tom Cahalane of Sandy Hook, Connecticut, recently retired from Perdue Farms after 25 years of service. Tom successfully held numerous sales positions within the organization. In July of 2024, Tom and his wife, Lisa, welcomed their first two grandchildren: Sophie, daughter of Kevin ’11, MBA’19, and his wife, Eleanor; and Bridget, daughter of Ryan ’14 and his wife, Sarah. In retirement, Tom looks forward to spending time with his two adorable granddaughters. // Ken Kavanagh retired as director of athletics at Florida Gulf Coast University after 15 years and a collective 40-plus years within intercollegiate athletics. He still resides in Fort Myers with his bride, Mary. In June, he was inducted into the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics Hall of Fame at the association’s annual convention in Orlando. // Class of 1982 Mod 8B residents gathered for a reunion in Brooklyn in April. In attendance were Kevin Mulcahy; John Valpey; Mark Reardon; John Haltmaier; Bruce Chipkin; and Dave Gleason ’82,

MA’87 (honorary Mod member). They all brought photos and mementos from their BC days and recalled many great lifelong memories. // After 40-plus years of teaching, Mary McAleer O’Brien retired in June. She started her career teaching at St. Mary Elementary School in South Boston and then at St. Brendan School in Dorchester. Eventually, Mary joined Boston Public Schools and taught at the Early Learning Center East, Edward Everett Elementary School, Louis B. Agassiz Elementary School, and Dr. William W. Henderson Inclusion School. Mary taught second grade for most of her career and STEAM for the last three years. She will miss being in the classroom and is looking forward to retirement. Class correspondent: Mary O’Brien // maryobrien14@comcast.net

1983

Christopher P. Harvey ’83, JD’86, is a partner in the Boston office of Dechert LLP, a global law firm where he serves as global co-chair of the firm’s 200-lawyer financial services group. Chris represents asset managers and investment funds in a wide variety of corporate, transactional, and regulatory matters. He also is a member of the firm’s management committee. Chris and Christine Melville Harvey will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary next year. They have two sons, James M. Harvey ’13 and Edward C. Harvey. // Mod 15A roommates Kelly

McDonald Lyman, Colleen Foley, Paula Healy English, Betsy Crowley Frederick, Marianne McDonald Thompson, minus Alissa Katz Whiteman, plus A.T. Castillo and his mighty dog Rider, caught up in Asheville, North Carolina, in June for a Mod reunion. They are thankful for pre–social media college memories captured only by bad photography, the thrill of recalling former classmates’ names, and frequent bathroom breaks! Most of all, they are thankful for each other. // Vin Brienze just came back from the Miraval Berkshires Resort and Spa in Lennox, Massachusetts. He enjoyed peace of mind and tranquility—a must for Boston College alums. // Loretta Charron is happy to report that, after 43 successful and satisfying years in the financial services industry, she has retired from Baird. In retirement, she is looking forward to doing what she wants to do, when she wants to do it, including spending time in her second home in Kona, Hawaii, reading for fun (not finance), and traveling the world. She just got back from the Netherlands and Belgium, and Japan is next. She is traveling the US (she only has two states left unvisited). She also looks forward to spending quality time with her life partner, Barry, and three fur kids, Jack (a lab), Walter (a golden), and Portia (a spoo). // John Mullin passed away October 4, 2024, after a three-year battle with cancer. Gathering at St. Anne’s church in Garden City, New York, were

Steve de Groot; Charlie Hayes; George Fischer; Fred Gilgun ’83, JD’86; Scott Peterson; Anne O’Connor ’84, JD’89, and Hugh McCrory ’83, JD’86; Colette and Tom Fay; Charlotte Arnold; Stevra Stappas; Sarah Lahr Fitzsimons; Mary Frances Greene; and Anne Lewis. John’s wife, Patti ’85, delivered a beautiful eulogy. To view a video tribute, go to: bit.ly/bcjohnmullin.

Class correspondents: Cynthia J. Bocko // cindybocko@hotmail.com and Marianne Lescher // malescher@aol.com

1984

Ann Baker, PhD’84, passed away at the Adelaide Center in Newton, Massachusetts, on May 30, after a long struggle with dementia. She served as principal of the Campus School at Boston College, was a director of special education in Cape Cod as well as a counselor and therapist, and later became an ordained Buddhist priest at the San Francisco Zen Center. // Maine has a new Eagle! Lila McCain and husband Peter Beaman recently moved from Newton, Massachusetts, to Cumberland, Maine. They are looking forward to sailing up the Maine coast and enjoying all the state has to offer. // Michael Wong enjoys fostering dogs for the Brandywine Valley SPCA, a no-kill shelter that supports over 20,000 animals annually in the Greater Philadelphia area. He looks forward to connecting with other local BC alums in

the area who are interested in walking dogs at the shelter and/or fostering. Mike can be reached at wong8@wharton.upenn.edu. // After 30 years of emergency medicine practice, Tom Egger retired from his physician group, Emergency Physicians Professional Association, in March 2021. Tom’s youngest son, Matthew (24), is fluent in Mandarin and currently lives in Oslo, getting a master’s in peace and war studies. His eldest son, Maj. Thomas (32), retired on June 1 from the Marine Forces Special Operations Command. Andrew (29) is also a captain in the US Marine Corps and flies the F-35 Lightning II, the world’s most advanced stealth fifthgeneration fighter jet. // Juliette Dacey Fay’s eighth novel came out in August, published by Simon & Schuster. The Harvey Girls follows two young women who work as waitresses at the Grand Canyon in the 1920s. Juliette and her husband, Tom Fay ’83, live in Wayland, Massachusetts, and are celebrating their 35th anniversary this year. // Laurence Aucella, MEd’84, wrote a book titled Journey Through Time: The Catholic Church and Christian Initiation.

Class correspondent: Carol A. McConnell // bc1984notes@optimum.net

PMC 1985

Abby Flythe is so proud of her daughter Anne, who graduated magna cum laude from Christopher Newport University with a bachelor of science in business administration, with a concentration in marketing and leadership studies. She

is currently working for three galleries, creating websites, cataloging collections, and handling print advertising and social media accounts. Abby is getting ready for the yearly buying trip to New Mexico for her family business. Learn more at abbykentflythefineart.com.

1986

40th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026 Laura Sullivan Bakosh cofounded InnerExplorer.com and InnerExplorerInstitute.org to buffer the biological and cognitive impacts of stress through daily mindfulness practice in PK–12 classrooms. In just five to 10 minutes a day, students regulate their emotions and behavior, think more clearly, and enhance their well-being and academic success. It is used in 4,000 schools, reaching over two million students; however, there are over 50 million who would benefit. Join us and be the change! lbakosh@innerexplorer.org // Mike Hickey, MDiv’86, will be seeing his eighth book published by the end of this year. This time the publisher will be Bloomsbury Press. The title is Real Presence: The Sacramentality of the Present Moment. It will be listed at Amazon or available on order from any independent bookstore. Class correspondent: Leenie Kelley // leeniekelley@hotmail.com

1987

Justine Cunningham Franklin, Michele Rossi Quinn, Siobhan Lawlor, and Julie Fissinger walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain together in June as a collective celebration of their milestone

60th birthdays! // David Gallant, MA’87, is associate director of undergraduate advising at Suffolk University and has been teaching a first-year seminar titled The Beatles: Here, There and Everywhere for the last 20 years. He encourages his fellow Eagles to check out his podcast, Get Back to the Beatles, on the Boston Podcast Network (pod617.com).

1989

Michael O’Loughlin was very pleased to participate in a recent global day of service with his family (Margot O’Loughlin ’21, Michael O’Loughlin, and Lauryn Weber) and Boston College students and alumni at Cradles to Crayons in Newtonville. Cradles to Crayons seeks to address clothing insecurity in Massachusetts. They all enjoyed the day very much. // After serving 17 years at St. Francis of Assisi parish in New York City, Fr. Brian Smail recently transferred to St. Anthony Shrine in Boston. He was born in the Boston area, so it’s like coming home for him. Fr. Brian looks forward to making a visit to Boston College, which he says gave him some of the best memories of his life from his years there. // Mark Canno is living in West Harrison, New York. He is running tennis and sports facilities in Greenburgh and Armonk. He is still coaching varsity golf at his former high school after 21 years. He is married, with three kids who have now all graduated. Mark is still in touch with Tony McNamara (based in Wilton, Connecticut, and Jupiter, Florida), Chris Manning (based in Acton, Massachusetts,

Class Notes // Weddings

Samantha Cohen ’12 to Fraser Christie, 12/7/2024 // Eagles in attendance: Nancy Jacobson ’76 and Lou Cohen ’76; Lisa Kasper ’75 and Paul Centofanti ’75; Jim Breece, PhD’82; Bobby Banahan ’12; Riley Sullivan ’12; Maggie Fairchild Ciaglia ’12; Katya Wheelwright Wilson ’12; Erika Giovanniello ’12; and Cyrus Kapadia ’12

Katie Cutting ’14 to Jake Cappiello, 5/17/2025

Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon to Jonathan Mott ’14, 6/14/2025

Victoria Nguyen to Eric Phung ’14, 10/26/2024 // 12 Eagles in attendance

Christine Wu ’14 to Christopher Rec, 8/3/2024

Megan Clarke ’15 to Brian Hartnett, 8/17/2024 // 20+ Eagles in attendance, with TJ Hartnett ’18 as best man and Annie Weber Lizzul ’15 as matron of honor

Emily Carranza ’17 to Brendan Begley ’18, 10/18/2024

Katie Babbin ’18 to Mark Garbino, 6/21/2025 // Multiple generations of Eagles in attendance

Lucy Alexander ’19 to William LaHera ’18, 4/3/2024 // Eagles in attendance: Austin Matus ’19 and Joe Iole ’06

Lily Feinberg ’19 to Eric Slosky ’19, 10/5/2024 // Eagles in attendance: Louise Nessralla ’19, Tess Murphy ’19, Charlotte LeBarron ’19, Thomas Kotopoulos ’19, Benjamin Acosta ’19, Daniel Weinbaum ’19, Nicholas Bergeron ’19, Igor Shcherbakovskiy ’19, Nathaniel Houston ’19, Abigail Dirlam ’19, Alexandra Magee ’19, and Cameron Desmond ’19

Nicole Maloof ’19 to William Twomey ’19, 6/28/2025

Christine Flatley ’22 to Matthew Cronin, 5/25/2025 // Several Eagles in attendance

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/classnotes.

and Cape Cod), James Didden (based in Morristown, New Jersey), and Rob Lordi (based in Dover, Massachusetts). They get together for golf over the summer and the occasional BC game in the fall.

PMC 1989

Lori Mann Brightman participated in a small impromptu reunion for the Class of 1989. They gathered at the Newport, Rhode Island, home of Jessica Gordon Ryan and had lunch at Castle Hill. Included were Denise Hoff Diorio, Shaun Harrigan Pomposello, Jessica Gordon Ryan, Sandy Pirruccio Pires, and Jennifer Connors. Lori hopes other classmates will join them in October in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, at the family home of Eleanor Phelps. They are planning to see Tracy Chapin Maher and Missy Whalen Ranieri. Reach out for details!

1990

Andy Sriubas was appointed to the Nano Dimension board of directors. He is a veteran commercial executive and former chief commercial officer at OUTFRONT Media, where he led digital transformation, strategic partnerships, and new revenue generation. Previously, he was an investment banker with JPMorgan, UBS, and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Andy is located in South Carolina. // Andrew McAleer’s collection of classic British mysteries, A Casebook of Crime: Thrilling Adventures from the Golden Age of Mystery, reached the Amazon bestseller list, and his story “The Singular Case of the Bandaged Bobby” was

selected to appear in the 2025 best private eye stories of the year. // Ann Buelow and Bryan Dumais were thrilled to see their daughter Katy ’25 graduate from BC in May. Their son Brady is following his brother Robby’s lead and attending Clemson University this fall. Bryan and Ann live in Westwood, Massachusetts, and will continue their tradition of holding BC tailgates in the fall with Tara Haskell and Tom Kilgarriff. They welcome all to stop by! The October 11 BC vs. Clemson game at the Heights will be a big one for the Dumais family! // Missy Campbell Reid ’90, MEd’94, wrote the following reflections on Reunion: “How fun was our 35th Reunion? It was so great to see classmates under the tent that Saturday night, and of course, to hear

about all of the events our classmates did over the course of the weekend and see pictures on social media! Everyone looks fantastic. The rain did not stop us, and I was reminded of our graduation that was moved indoors due to downpours! It is what we do. Hoping to see an even bigger turnout for our 40th in 2030. PS: The Class of 1990 still has it! Even though we were asked to leave the lobby of our hotel, that didn’t deter our Reunion pregame, which continued [upstairs].”

Class correspondent: Missy Campbell Reid // MissyCReid1@comcast.net

1991

35th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026

Katie Kinsella Murphy and fellow Class of 1991 alums travel within the US and

beyond every three to five years. This year, they traveled to Sonoma County, California! The group includes Suzanne O’Halloran; Kelly Sullivan Ross ’91, MSW’92; Nicole Deragon von Dohlen; Katie Strecker Saville; Maureen Tarbell Chase; Sandy Radula McGuire; Maureen Mahoney; Kim Krovitz McCullom; Kim McCabe; Christina Gabriel; Tina Lyons Cerrito ’91, JD’96; Karen McCarthy Andrew; Bernadette McCarthy; Beth Cronin Murphy PMC’91; Candice Kirklies Imwalle; and Rebecca Cudd Geier Class correspondents: Peggy Morin Bruno // pegmb@comcast.net and Leslie Poole Petit // lpetit@dominicanacademy.org

1992

On May 17, Jason Greene graduated from Memphis Theological Seminary and received his doctorate of ministry in educational leadership. His dissertation is entitled “They Call Me Mister: The Educational and Social Impact of the Black Male Educator.” // Patrick Poljan and his wife, Andrea, joined Valeria and Sixto Ferro, Dave Decker ’91, Marc Munz, Marc Wall, and Chuck Otis ’90 in Queens to celebrate the high school graduation of Michael Shoule’s son. This summer, they also met up for golf and lake life at Torch Lake, Michigan. // In June, Hillside A62 roommates reunited in Ireland to visit Alexandra “Pindy” Childs McKee in Ballyshannon. Elizabeth Spillane Gujral, Erica Waldron Wynocker, Jennifer Parent, Katie Gillespie LaManna, and Laura Selfors

1993

Jennifer and Jeff Buyak, MS’01, have another Eagle in their family: their son, Jeffrey Buyak ’25! Class correspondent: Laura Beck // laurabeckcahoon@gmail.com

1994

Nerre Shruiah, JD’94, writes that First Citizens Wealth has launched a podcast providing business and personal planning advice for entrepreneurs. Nerre is cohost, along with Ann Lucchesi. The podcast, Building More Than Business, is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music. Class correspondent: Nancy E. Drane // nancydrane@aol.com

1995

enjoyed staying in Pindy’s home, Éalú Farraige (Sea Escape), in Donegal, and visiting Galway, Lough Erne, and Westport. The trip ended with a memorable pub crawl in Dublin. // JW Hampton, Michael Shoule’s family’s fourth-generation logistics company, is celebrating its 160th anniversary. Michael is the coauthor of My Daddy Loves Boston College Football, and he also coauthored children’s books about Alabama, Clemson, Florida, Michigan, and Michigan State football, with more titles coming. Another of his books, I Love Going to the Bronx Zoo, continues to be a hit during author visits at local elementary schools. Class correspondent: Katie Boulos-Gildea // kbgildea@yahoo.com

Charlie Kline graduated from the Evening College under Fr. Woods. He enjoyed reading University Advancement’s article “You Had to Be There: An Oral History of Live Music at the Heights.” It brought to mind the fact that he saw Della Reese in the original football stadium in 1962, when Charlie’s friend Charlie Robak ’64 was a student at BC. // Patricia J. Fanning, MA’79, PhD’95, has just published her most recent book, “A Most Infamous Young Swindler”: The Short Tragic Life of Thomas Langrel Harris, published by Rock Street Press. Last year, she was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) for her 50

years of service to local history and the community of Norwood, Massachusetts. Patricia is professor emerita of sociology at Bridgewater State University and the author of several books. // Lauren Preston, MBA’95, is pleased to announce her recent appointment as chief customer services officer at Central Hudson Gas and Electric in New York.

Class correspondent: Kevin McKeon // kevin.mckeon@ridgewaypartners.us

1996

30th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026

John Hardt, MA’97, PhD’05; Marielle Frigge, O.S.B., PhD’92; and Dr. David Belde, MA’96, collaborated this fall on Avera Health’s Leaders in Ministry Renewal retreat. John and Sr. Marielle gave keynote addresses and David

facilitated the experience for executive leaders. The retreat centered on discernment and the pace of decisionmaking in corporate healthcare. // Founder and chief investment officer Ivan Illán has expanded his firm’s global macro investment strategies (via Aligne Wealth Advisors Investment Management [AWAIM®], a Securities and Exchange Commission–registered investment advisor) to a newly licensed company, AWAIM (HK) LIMITED, under approval from Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission. Ivan relocated from AWAIM’s Los Angeles headquarters to Hong Kong full-time in September, and he will support the operational expansion there for the next few years. // Michael Harlan, O.F.M., MA’96, recently relocated from New York City to San Diego, where he was appointed assistant vice president for academic affairs with the Franciscan School of Theology at the University of San Diego. Br. Michael is a professed member of the Franciscan Friars of the US Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

1997

Rolando Tomás Infante was recently appointed as the public information officer for the New York City region at the New York State Department of Transportation. He previously spent nearly two decades in management roles at both Con Edison and PSEG Long Island. After a lifetime in New York City, in 2022, he moved with his wife, Tara, and two young sons, Tomás (12) and Daniel (9), to Locust

Valley. // Interior Designer Elise Morrissey was showcased in the June issue of Western Art & Architecture Magazine. The focus of the article was a custom-built ranch she designed in Colorado, and the project also made the cover of the issue! Elise’s design firm, Morrissey Saypol Interiors, is based in Massachusetts and Connecticut. // Peter Folan ’97, MEd’98, writes that after 11 incredible years leading Catholic Memorial School in Boston, he is excited to be named the head of school at Dexter Southfield School in Brookline. He will be the fifth head of the school in its hundred-year history. Peter and his wife, Karlyn Marini Folan ’97, MEd’99, are overjoyed that their oldest, Tommy, is joining the Carroll School and the Boston College Class of 2029 this fall. He is a third-generation Eagle, as his grandmother was a 1956 nursing graduate. Class correspondent: Margo Gillespie // margogillespie@gmail.com

1998

Alfredo de Quesada returned to his native Puerto Rico in February 2020. After finishing a successful world premiere of Two Wolves and a Lamb at the Triad Stage in Greensboro, North Carolina, he shot six films back home. He starred in Los Reyes de la Salsa as Richie Ray, and the film won second place for the audience’s choice award at the 2024 Chicago Latino Film Festival. His latest film, Un Día de Mayo, premiered at the Chicago Latino Film Festival in April 2025. Class correspondent: Mistie P. Lucht // hohudson@yahoo.com

2000

Gregory T. Angelo has accepted an appointment by President Trump as deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In this role, Mr. Angelo manages the federal government’s health care communications with a portfolio that includes the CDC, FDA, and NIH, in addition to the core communications at HHS. Mr. Angelo served in the first Trump Administration as press secretary for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. // Founded by Patrick McNamara, MBA’00, a registered certified financial planner at Claro Advisors, TaxSavingStrategies.com addresses a common pain point: many taxpayers overpay due to a lack of understanding about how their investment income is taxed. // Auston Habershaw’s latest novel, If Wishes Were Retail, a comic fantasy about a genie opening a shop that sells wishes in a failing suburban mall, released on June 17 from Tachyon Publications. This marks Auston’s fifth published novel, following up the epic fantasy series The Saga of the Redeemed, released between 2015 and 2019. You can follow his writing career at his website, aahabershaw.com, or find his books anywhere fine books are sold. // David Petrelli was named a CMA Foundation Music Teacher of Excellence for 2025. Awarded to only 30 teachers nationwide, the CMA Foundation award honors music educators who “demonstrate teaching excellence, create positive learning environments, and make a

lasting impact in their communities.” This is the second consecutive year Petrelli has been recognized with this honor. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife, Victoria, and their daughters, Alexa and Evie. For more information, visit cmafoundation.org. // Liz Perry Williamson, MEd’00, writes that it has been such a thrill to see BC through her son’s eyes! Her son Holden ’28 just finished his sophomore year, studying human-centered engineering and finance. He has gotten involved in a bunch of organizations and has loved every minute at BC. He even ran the Boston Marathon with one of his roommates this year. The greeting he received running through campus literally carried him through to the finish. Liz is so thankful he is at BC and having such an amazing experience!

Class correspondent: Kate Pescatore // katepescatore@hotmail.com

2001

25th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026

Jeff Harvey, Esq., Community Legal Services CEO, was named to the 2025 Florida Trend Legal Elite Notable Managing Partners list. Now in its third year, the list recognizes Florida’s top managing partners and legal leaders who guide their firms strategically while making a positive impact on both the legal profession and their communities. Class correspondent: Sandi Kanne // bcbubbly@hotmail.com

2002

Lauren Cortinas joined Helios Education Foundation as senior vice president of

Class Notes // Baby Eagles

Lauren Bennett ’05 and Rajal Patel, Charlotte, 3/20/2025

Susanna Dawson ’05 and Scotty Kipfer, Charlie, 5/4/2025

Amanda Sindel-Keswick ’06 and Jason Stockmann, Arthur Cole, 12/15/2024

Christine Allen ’08, Sophie Rose, 8/23/2024

Jenn Unter Mahoney ’08, JD’11, Oliver James, 8/1/2024

Mary Taber McCarthy ’08, Ronan James, 10/14/2024

Abigail Hasebroock Mousel ’08, MAT’10, Millie Cate, 8/23/2024

Vanessa Careiro Ross ’08, Corrine Grace, 7/6/2025

Jessica Schram ’08, MA’09, and Conor McAuliffe, Sophie, 11/13/2024

Rosa Maribel Colorado ’11 and Gabriel Sikarov, JD’16, Lucas, 1/23/2025

Kristen Volinski ’14 and Brian Fishman ’13, JD’16, Maeve, 10/29/2024

Devon Denihan ’16 and Henry O’Hern ’16, Henry O’Hern V, 9/19/2024

communications. With a background spanning Fortune 500 public relations, marketing, nonprofit management, business development, government, and education, she joins Helios to reignite her passion for education and ensure broad community awareness and support for the organization’s mission and vision. Class correspondent: Suzanne Harte // suzanneharte@yahoo.com

2004

Megan Murphy Clifton is now director of advancement at Island School on Kauai, in Hawaii. If classmates find themselves on the Garden Isle, please reach out! // Stefanie Foster Brown’s debut picture book, to be published by Denene Millner Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, is now available for preorder anywhere books are sold. My Heart Speaks Kriolu is the story of a young girl on a walk with her grandfather, who has a vision impairment. Though the young girl doesn’t speak Kriolu, the language of her heritage, she discovers how to transcend language and connect with her culture using all of her senses. // Jim Hauser, MBA’04, has just joined law firm Fenwick & West as partner in the firm’s executive compensation and employee benefits practice. He is based in the firm’s Boston office. Class correspondents: Allie Weiskopf // allieweiskopf@gmail.com and Elizabeth Abbott Wenger // lizabbott@gmail.com

2005

Tony Hales writes that his classmate Dr. Stephanie Cizek merits a major

shout-out. As a pediatric and adolescent gynecologist at Stanford University, she is leading clinics, spearheading innovative surgeries, teaching, and advancing understanding at the intersection of a number of areas, including oncology, malformations, rare conditions, intersex care, and more. Her friends are astounded by her expertise and her dedication to a collaborative and affirming approach to health for her patients and their caregivers. Class correspondents: Justin Barrasso // jbarrasso@gmail.com and Joe Bowden // joe.bowden@gmail.com

2006

20th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026

David Sipala has been working as a foot and ankle surgeon over the last 10 years since graduating from residency right near BC, at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center (Boston Medical Center - Brighton). He recently was appointed the residency program director at St. E’s. “It feels good to come home,” he writes. // Steve Bewley, MBA’06, was promoted to chief executive officer of Guidelight, a leader in evidence-based mental health care. With a career dedicated to improving mental health care, Bewley brings extensive experience in operational leadership, scaling behavioral health services, and ensuring high-quality care for clients. // Leila Amineddoleh, JD’06, joined Tarter Krinsky & Drogin as a partner to launch its art law group. She was previously profiled in Boston College Magazine for her work on looted artwork.

Class correspondent: Cristina Conciatori // cristina.conciatori@gmail.com

2007

Gaby Mier is proud to announce the launch of her new architecture firm, WITH., which focuses on sustainable spaces and human health and wellness in design. Gaby is scheduled to present at the Texas Society of Architects 2025 Conference in Dallas. She is based in Austin. Class correspondent: Lauren Bagnell // lauren.faherty@gmail.com

2008

Jodi-Ann Burey published her first book, Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, on September 30 with Flatiron Books. // Abigail Pillitteri Seber, an educational writer and poet, has published her fifth book, Colors Beyond the Rainbow. It teaches colors to children up to age six. She wrote it

after noticing that lots of books teach the rainbow colors, but they leave out colors like white, black, brown, pink, and grey. You can now find the book on Amazon. // Matthew Robinson has joined the Minneapolis law firm Maslon LLP as a partner in its financial services group. He advises on the full spectrum of creditor remedies issues, including loan workouts, receiverships, foreclosures, and litigation. // Mod 38A roommates Jenn Unter Mahoney ’08, JD’11; Christine Allen ’08; Abigail Hasebroock Mousel ’08, MAT ’10; Mary Taber McCarthy ’08; and Vanessa Careiro Ross ’08 all welcomed babies in the past year. Class correspondent: Maura Tierney Murphy // mauraktierney@gmail.com

2009

Michelle “Mickey” Lyons, MA’09, who graduated with distinction from the Irish literature and culture program, has been nominated for a 2025 James Beard Award in Journalism. The award recognizes works that cover food- or drink-related content. Published last year in Punch, her article is titled “Detroit’s Third-Shift Bars Were a Lifeline. Now They’re a Dying Breed.” Class correspondent: Timothy Bates // tbates86@gmail.com

2010

Caysie Carter Harvey ’10, MEd’11, earned a doctor of education degree from Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. Dr. Harvey serves as the university associate Title VI and Title IX coordinator at

Harvard University. Dr. Harvey is married to fellow Eagle Kevin Harvey ’10, MA’13, MBA’16, and they have a three-year-old son, Maximilien. // Jeffrey Malanson, PhD’10, was promoted to associate vice president for student affairs at Williams College. Malanson started at Williams in July 2023 as senior associate dean for administration, finance, and strategy after 13 years at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he most recently served as associate professor of history and special assistant to the chancellor for strategic initiatives. Class correspondents: John Clifford // clifford.jr@gmail.com and Kathryn Phillips // Katyelphillips@gmail.com

2011

15th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026

Christina Cipriano, PhD’11, released her first book, Be Unapologetically Impatient: The Mindset Required to Change the Way We Do Things. Anchored in her oldest son’s rare disease journey, the book weaves together decades of scientific evidence and infectious storytelling to illuminate and interrupt conventions across education, medicine, and industry, teaching readers to promote justice every day. Dr. Cipriano describes her book as an actionable love letter for a generation. #BeUnapologeticallyImpatient.

2012

Pilar Ortiz is running for Boston City Council District 9, driven by a long-term dedication to community involvement that began during her time as a student. Her campaign focuses on strengthening

neighborhood bonds, promoting intergenerational engagement, creating opportunities for young people in Allston-Brighton, and advocating for accountable governance and increased resident participation. ortizforboston.com. // Sabrina Caldwell graduated with her PhD in education from New York University in May. In August, she joined the University of South Alabama as an assistant professor of social studies education. // Michael Brill, a pediatric cancer survivor, is now dedicating his life to giving back through Ronald McDonald House New York (RMH-NY). Diagnosed at age nine in 1999, Michael made a full recovery and today serves as chair of RMH-NY’s board of associates, leading a 30-plusmember board that drives fundraising and community initiatives. He’s also a VP at Goldman Sachs, where he applies his expertise to help RMH-NY advance its mission. // Adam Drufke, MBA’12, joined IFS as vice president of product management for energy and utilities. Headquartered in Sweden, IFS is the world’s leading provider of industrial AI and enterprise software for hardcore businesses that service, power, and protect our planet. // Maggie Goodman is a teacher on Long Island and recently donated her kidney to a colleague. She has gotten significant media attention and has credited BC for inspiring her. Class correspondent: Riley Sullivan // sullivan.riley.o@gmail.com

2013

In May 2025, Rayana Grace graduated from the Tufts University department of urban and environmental policy and planning with a master’s of public policy degree. Upon acceptance into the program, she was named a Neighborhood Fellow for her community work. This fellowship covered her tuition while she obtained her degree. // Frank Murray, JD’13, has joined Miami boutique Stumphauzer Kolaya Nadler & Sloman, PLLC, as a partner. Class correspondent: Bryanna Robertson // bryanna.mahony@gmail.com

2014

Michael Vaglica recently joined the Boston office of Ogletree Deakins as an associate. He represents employers

in state and federal courts, as well as administrative agencies, on a wide range of employment-related matters, including allegations of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination. He earned a JD from the Boston University School of Law. // Lauren Milo ’14, MA’22, took her private practice, Lost Girl Therapy, abroad to London, where she’s embracing the rom-com life in Notting Hill as she completes a fiction writing course at Curtis Brown.

2015

Nate Fisher has cowritten a critically acclaimed independent baseball buddy film that debuted recently in Boston and other cities across the country. The film, Eephus (named after a slow pitch designed to confuse the batter), is a story about male bonding as the guys prepare for the demise of their beloved old field, which

is being demolished for the site of a new school. The film has gotten rave reviews at the Cannes and New York film festivals. // Emily Rella has joined People magazine as the food editor for both digital and print. She will be overseeing and leading the vertical on all food and beverage content for the publication. // David Corbie, climate justice manager for Harris County, Texas, helped pass the county’s first-ever climate justice plan on April 10. Harris County is the third-largest county in the United States. The plan will serve as a roadmap for addressing climate justice issues for communities in the Greater Houston area. // Danielle Dybbro earned a JD from Santa Clara University School of Law. She earned a certificate in public interest and social justice law by working in an international human rights clinic, completing pro bono hours, and taking elective courses in various legal topics such as immigration law, environmental law, and the law of armed conflict. She also traveled to Washington, DC, and Bali, Indonesia, to compete in international humanitarian law competitions hosted by the Red Cross.

Class correspondent: Victoria Mariconti // victoria.mariconti@gmail.com

2016

10th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026

Racquel MacDonald-Ciambelli, former BC track athlete, has spent five years coaching Revere High School’s girls’ indoor/outdoor track teams. Under her

leadership, the program grew to 80 athletes, stayed undefeated for two seasons (including 28 meets), and broke 16 school records this year. Her athletes earned 18 Greater Boston League All-Star honors, and she’s been named coach of the year three times. Racquel inspires with kindness, trust, and belief, driving her team to excellence.

2017

Casey Grace Murtagh, theatre major, recently served as producer on Dexter: Resurrection, which premiered in July on Paramount+ with Showtime. She also produced the film Absolution, starring Liam Neeson, and season two of AMC’s The Walking Dead: Dead City. The BC

theatre program provided her with a foundation in project management and creative collaboration that has proven invaluable in television and film, she writes. // Beatriz Thomas, MEd’17, a history teacher at Somerville High School, was recently named a 2026 Massachusetts Teacher of the Year finalist. She is being recognized for “making a positive impact on student learning and well-being; using student-centered, innovative approaches to teaching and learning; and demonstrating leadership within and beyond the classroom.” This process has gone from nomination to a video entry of her philosophy and classroom instruction, and most recently, a classroom visit from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. // Fr. Steve Lundrigan, ThM’17, earned a PsyD in clinical psychology and in 2023 was appointed Pastor of St. Columba Parish in Paxton, Massachusetts, and chaplain of Anna Maria College. In 2024, he was appointed dean of mission at Anna Maria while remaining college chaplain and pastor of St. Columba. In addition to his duties at the parish and college, Fr. Steve provides counseling and ministry to at-risk individuals in the nearby city of Worcester. // Antuan Ilgit, STD’17, was appointed by the Holy Father as apostolic administrator of the Apostolic Vicariate of Anatolia in Türkiye. The Jesuit, who earned a degree in moral theology from BC, had also been appointed by Pope Francis in November 2023 as titular bishop of Tubernuca and auxiliary bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of Anatolia. Fr. Ilgit

is also the spokesperson for the Turkish Bishops’ Conference. Class correspondent: Joshua Beauregard // joshuab136@gmail.com

2019

Kiran Khosla is running the 2025 NYC Marathon with the New York Road Runners’ Team Climate. After many laps around the Res, she’s now running for forest conservation and the well-being of communities. She earned her MPH at Boston University and has published research on air quality and Covid communications. She now works in sustainability and education, driven by the belief that small steps—together—can lead to enduring change. She is grateful for the smiles shared with friends and professors at BC! // Ned Melanson, JD’19, is running for Cambridge City Council this year and hopes to meet fellow Eagles living north of the Charles!

2021

5th Reunion, May 29–31, 2026 Jordyn Zimmerman, MEd’21, was named in the first-ever Forbes Accessibility 100 list, recognizing the biggest innovators and impact-makers in accessibility.

2022

Emma Foley is building out multimedia production at National Review and contributing to the Conservateur. As the Conservateur’s main features columnist, Emma has interviewed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Live Action’s

Lila Rose, and Fox News anchor Dana Perino. // Reid Jewett Smith, PhD’22, has been awarded a research fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School’s CarrRyan Center for Human Rights. Reid’s fellowship is supported by Disability:IN, where she serves as the vice president of research and policy.

2023

Fiddle player Andrew Caden and flute player Conor McDonagh released their first CD, titled Across the Atlantic. The CD focuses on Sligo traditional music on both sides of the Atlantic. Andrew is a former All-Ireland champion, and in his senior year at BC he was invited to play with the Boston Pops at Pops on the Heights. Andrew currently resides full-time in Dublin, Ireland, and works at the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA).

2024

Leah McNeil donated bone marrow in August 2023 to Kayce Moose, who was diagnosed with paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH) in February of that year. Federal regulation requires they remain anonymous for at least one year following the transplant. The pair met each other for the first time at the April 23 Red Sox/Mariners baseball game. Leah’s donation and their introduction was facilitated by the Gift of Life Marrow Registry.

Leaders Among Us

New BCAA Board members

This past summer, four Eagles joined the Boston College Alumni Association (BCAA) Board of Directors, while another two were elevated to the role of vice president. In partnership with the Office of University Advancement, the Alumni Board advises on programs and activities that deepen alumni engagement, while furthering the University’s Jesuit, Catholic values and commitment to service.

Visit bc.edu/alumniboard to learn more.

new vice presidents

Esther Chang, Esq., ’02, JD’07 Chicago, Illinois

Christina M. Sliwa ’93, MBA’00 Newton, Massachusetts

Veronica ChappelleMcNair ’83 Penns Grove, New Jersey

new members bc.edu/alumni

Ryan C. Farnan ’06 New York, New York

Susan P. Gallagher NC’69, P’00

Co-Chair, The Council of Past Presidents Hyannis Port, Massachusetts

Julia M.S. Ho ’17 New York, New York

1940s

Juliet Davis PMC’49

Donald McA’nulty ’49

1950s

Ellen Canning Alberding NC’51

Tom Costin ’51

Rosemary Merriman PMC’51

Pete Lupien ’52

Dick Tobin ’52

Theresa Bouthot MSW’53

John Callan ’53 JD’57

Joseph Coco ’53

Bill Emmons ’53

Dick Farrar ’53

Dottie Fullam ’53

Robert Greene PMC’53 MA’54

Paul Lockary ’53

Lou Maloof ’54

Joseph Jacobs ’55

Thomas Joyce ’55 MBA’66

Eugene McPherson ’55

Paul Murray ’55

Leonard Clark ’56

J. Albert Johnson JD’56

Vincent Kneizys ’56

Frederick Murtagh ’56

Carole Newman ’56

Jim Connolly ’57

Vincent Gallucci ’57 MEd’59

William Kelleher ’57

Carolyn Le Beau MEd’57

Carol McCurdy Regenauer NC’57

George Harrington ’58

Paul Kellen ’58

Joan Downing Lachance ’58

Marcel L’Esperance ’58

Robert Mahoney ’58

William Martel ’58

Frank McDonough ’58

Thomas Recupero ’58

Bernard Roderick ’58

Susan Fay Ryan NC’58

Suzanne Deschenes Whelan ’58

Catherine Houton Benedict ’59

Charles Carroll ’59 MA’60

Marigrace Filtzer ’59

Alfred Fuoroli MSW’59

David Land ’59

John MacDonald ’59

Robert Spence ’59

1960s

Allen Cail ’60

Sally Frisbie Campbell NC’60

Nancy McKay Campbell ’60

Thomas Casey ’60

Frederick Flaherty MA’60

Jean Grady ’60 MS’66

Theresa Gwozdz ’60

John Harney ’60

Robert Kelley ’60

Paul MacArthur ’60

Francis Manning ’60

Barry Murphy ’60

Peggy Nathan PMC’60

Anthony Penna ’60

Madelene Proulx MEd’60

David Russo ’60

John Conroy ’61 JD’64

John Cosco ’61

John Danehy ’61

Mary Brady Guthormsen ’61

Martin Kelly ’61

Judith Czarnecki McCusker ’61

Susan Moore PMC’61

Raymond Neveu MA’61

James O’Brien ’61

Eligijus Suziedelis ’61

Kris Wildman Brennan NC’62

David Buckley ’62

Joseph Corcoran ’62

John Leccacorvi ’62

Michael Lynch ’62

Lawrence Markell JD’62

Carol Lavigne McGill MA’62

Barbara McKeon ’62

Jean McLerie PMC’62

Thomas Regan ’62

Sandra Roberts ’62

Dan Sullivan ’62

Christopher Sweeney Jr. ’62

Patricia Clark Trainor ’62

Forrest Barnes JD’63

Richard Bucheri ’63

David Carroll JD’63

Frank Galvin ’63

Mary Wynn Harney MA’63

Kathleen Harrington NC’63

John Hayes ’63

Rudy Kather MBA’63

John Lynch MBA’63

Thomas Peterson ’63

Mary Sposini ’63 MSW’65

Thomas Connolly ’64

Roy Corso ’64

Chris Eichner ’64

Edward Kavanaugh ’64

Michael Keady ’64

Ann Leonard MA’64

Bill Mitchelson ’64

John Rainville ’64

Edward Treacy ’64

Peggy Fahey Annett ’65

Edward Bloom JD’65

Richard Coalwell MA’65

Ed Duggan ’65

Ann Houlihan Faron MEd’65

Lewis Horton ’65

David Lyons ’65

Paul Lyons ’65

Frederick MacDonald ’65

Thomas Rayner ’65

John Regan ’65

Arland Richmond ’65 MAT’69 PhD’75

Patricia McEvoy Smith NC’65

Carl Uehlein JD’65

Claire Cloutier MA’66

Joe Duseau ’66

Carl Johnson ’66

Wilfred Kingsley MEd’66

Maureen Lyons ’66

Anne Glaser McCabe ’66

Seiko Mieczkowski MA’66

Richard Taylor ’66

Anne Lavoie Uva ’66 MA’68

John Buckley ’67

Louis Frank MA’67

Robert Galibois ’67

Ronald Gray MA’67

Frann Lichtenstein PMC’67

Lawrence Morris ’67

William Noonan ’67

Daniel Cotter ’68

Robert Downes JD’68

Gregory Ill ’68

William Jablon ’68

Paul Kisly ’68

Anthony Nadroski MEd’68

Elizabeth O’Leary Poirier ’68

Stephen Popoli ’68 MBA’70

Marvin Weaver ’68

Robert Bowers ’69

Toby Carney ’69

Fred Curran MEd’69

Justin Eringis ’69

John Moser MA’69

Caroline Muller PMC’69

Deborah Madison Nolan NC’69

Mary Troy ’69

John Walter ’69

1970s

Joe Agresta ’70

Bob Bouchard ’70

Jane Albano Castiglioni ’70 MA’04

Dave Coyle ’70

Enea Evangelista ’70

Jane Emerson Farrell ’70

David Kane ’70

Joseph Kelly ’70

Mark Killenbeck ’70

Ronald Nolin MA’70

John Rau ’70

Amy Yeaple-Hatch ’70

William Clauson JD’71

John Coneys ’71

George Drusano ’71

Raymond Frankovich MA’71

Anne Kenney ’71

Robin LaFleur ’71

William Leonard JD’71

Charles Morano ’71

Sarah Serino PMC’71

Thomas Sullivan ’71

Solomon Yas MBA’71

Pat Dahme ’72

Diane Delahanty ’72

Donna Suhadole Frugoli MEd’72

Alan LaBranche ’72

Susan Lind-Sinanian MEd’72

John McClain MSW’72

Nancy Smith Robinson ’72

Frederick Stack ’72

Lawrence Sullivan ’72 MEd’75

Marcia Andrews MEd’73

Peggy Beyer NC’73

Mark Grimes JD’73

Frank Hewett ’73

Scott Kamins MPH’73

Melvin Klayman MA’73

Stephen Miller ’73

Helen Reiskin MA’73

Michael Reynolds ’73

Sharon Frisbie ’74

Jack Hennessy ’74

Paul McDonald ’74

Carl O’Hara ’74

Robert Tait ’74

Jon Tobey ’74

Thomas Wilmott ’74

Robert Butterfield ’75

Annemarie Delaney MSW’75 PhD’82

Clare Giordano Fraumeni ’75

Stephen Gaudreau ’75

Patrick Griffin ’75

Jack Hamilton ’75

Mary Coyle Marchetti ’75

Douglas McGregor ’75

Wendy-Jo O’Neill PMC’75

Lawreen Heller Connors ’76

John Deshler ’76

Karen Clay McMahon

MSW’76

Samuel Slack ’76

Robert Casey ’77

Thomas Esposito ’77

Virginia Smith Hopkins MA’77

Mary McGowan CAES’77

John Riolo ’77

Richard Alton ’78

Stephen Jones ’78

Stephen Larrow ’78

Rosalie Ryan MA’78

Raymond Scannell MEd’78

Nancy Charves ’79

Martha Griffin MS’79

1980s

Celeste Kistler ’80

David Pluta ’80

Robert Sabelli ’80

David Wegiel ’80

Margaret Foley MSW’81

Marilyn McElaney ’81 MA’86

Michael Patella MA’81

Chris Weld JD’81

Alicia Sillars Comesano-Vila ’82

Andrea Goode ’82

Adrian Redmond ’82

Ann Baker PhD’83

Elaine McKenna ’83

James Tobin ’83

Megan Purcell Word ’83

John Beatty ’84

Jean Harrison McAllister ’84

Doris Sullivan MSW’84

Dov Yoffe ’85

Helen Zeqa ’85

Diane Abbott MEd’86

Edward Kelleher MEd’86

Barbara Lloyd ’86

Gregory Lynch ’86

Justine Hoffman ’87

Helen Rittenberg CAES’87

Peter Ruhlin JD’87

Michael Skelley PhD’87

David Donahue ’88

Christopher King ’88 MBA’01

Leslie Loomis PhD’88

Brett Chicko ’89

Robert Curley JD’89

Karen Dooley MS’89

Colleen Gilhooly LeClair ’89

Jerry McGowan ’89

Micaela Parsons ’89

1990s

Maggie Cretella ’90

Mark Dever ’90

Robert Powell ’90

COMMUNITY DEATHS

Mary-Margaret Rose CAES’90

Ruth Boulger MA’91

Mike LaRhette ’91

Joseph Farrell PhD’92

Jennifer Krinsky ’92

Anna Powell Milek ’92

Rick Robinson ’94

Jonathan MacDonald ’96

Emily Smith-Lee JD’96

Steven Odierno ’97

2000s

Michele DeMarco Wilkie ’04

Karen Brustman MEd’07

Jonathan Myers ’07

James Carr ’09

2010s

Kiarri Walton PMC’16

CORRECTION

The Summer 2025 edition of Fond Farewells mistakenly included Barbara Stella ’83. Barbara’s mother, Barbara A. Stella, died in 2024 and the incorrect record was updated. We regret the error.

Professor Michael Moore, of Mashpee, MA, on May 31, 2025. He was Associate Professor, Psychology and Neuroscience Department from 1977-2022.

Professor Richard Nielsen, of Newton Highlands, MA, on May 28, 2025. He was Professor, Carroll School of Management from 1980-2025.

Lee Pellegrini, of Framingham, MA, on August 19, 2025. He was Director, Photography, Office of University Communications from 1996-2025.

The “Fond Farewells” section is compiled from national obituary listings as well as from notifications submitted by friends and family of alumni. It consists of names of those whose deaths have been reported to us since the previous issue of Boston College Magazine. Please send information on deceased alumni to Advancement Information Systems, Cadigan Alumni Center, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 or to infoserv@bc.edu.

Parents Are Eagles, Too

How BC families stay connected to each other and the Heights.

“Boston College became part of our family in ways we never imagined when our son decided to call the Heights ‘home,’” says Wayne Bloom, P’22, ’24, ’27. He and his wife, Veronica, have had three out of their four children attend BC: Callahan ’24 followed in the footsteps of her brother, Aidan ’22, and Molly ’27 is working toward a doctoral degree in the Connell School’s nurse anesthesia program. “Through each of our children’s journeys at Boston College, we have come to identify with the Jesuit, Catholic mission of the University on an even deeper level,” Wayne continues.

Their own journey with the University began during Aidan’s freshman year, when they joined BC’s Parent Leadership Council (PLC), a group of more than 600 families who provide annual philanthropic support to BC. As members, they hosted firstyear summer sendoff events for incoming students and their families, supported financial aid, and, most recently, served as PLC co-chairs.

Like the Blooms, many BC parents want deeper involvement with the Heights. When Tyler ’28, the son of Mina Takayanagi, enrolled at Boston College, Mina, too, looked for ways to meet other parents and get involved. Joining the PLC has not only connected her with a broad network of families, but also keeps her engaged with campus life through regular updates from University leaders on issues that shape the student experience.

Whether they arrive with long-standing ties to BC or none at all, parents consistently discover ways to contribute to and connect with the University and build bonds with each other. Some get their start at the Family Weekend tailgate. Others connect through a Facebook group, a conversation during move-in, or the monthly parent and family newsletter from the Office of Student Affairs. However it begins, becoming a BC parent isn’t just about sending a child to college. It’s about stepping into a community that values showing up, supporting one another, and living out the University’s mission—together.

Hands-On and All-In

Angela and Abe Riera, P’17, ’19, ’24, were longtime volunteers in their children’s schools before any of them had enrolled at Boston College. Joining the PLC was a natural extension. “Our kids loved that we were involved,” Angela says. “We stayed active in their lives, we knew what they were learning, and we understood the University’s values.”

Like the Rieras, many parents are drawn to the PLC because it mirrors their own instincts to stay engaged and present. “We— like many of the parents we’ve met—are a hands-on kind of people,” says Anne Wargo, P’24, whose husband, Keith ’90, is a BC alum. That hands-on spirit led the Wargos to support both academic and athletic programs and to offer career advice to students at a luncheon hosted by BC’s Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics. “If we can help in planning or moving something forward, we’ll roll up our sleeves and lend a hand to see it through,” she says.

Although they live 3,000 miles from the Heights, California residents and selfdescribed BC superfans Hillary Weingast and Jeff Hyman, P’28, have found ways to stay close to campus. “We’ve always been hockey fans, but we started watching BC games religiously once Sierra was admitted,” says Jeff. “Now we watch simultaneously with her and we message with her throughout.”

They’ve also attended nearly 20 inperson and virtual parent programs since 2024. For them, being involved is a way to stay connected to the University and to their only child’s college experience. “We’re really close with Sierra,” says Hillary. “We’re interested in how she’s doing, where she is, and what she’s experiencing.”

From Early Introductions to Lifelong Community

Orientation often marks the first step for parents, offering a glimpse of what life will look like for their son or daughter on campus. Move-in day soon follows, with its mix of anticipation and the inevitable goodbye hugs.

Yet what begins as a departure quickly opens the possibilities to new opportunities to connect—with other families and with BC. From Family Weekend traditions to online chats, parents create their own rhythms of connection at Boston College. For Lourdes and Jaime-Alberto Pardo, P’19, ’22, ’24, ’29, that takes the shape of fall pig roasts in the Mods, a Miami tradition brought to Chestnut Hill.

Moments like these show that being a BC parent is about more than watching your student’s journey unfold. It’s about finding your own place at the Heights. Because you belong here, too.

Involved. Informed. Invested.

Boston College’s Parents

Leadership Council (PLC) is a diverse community of more than 600 families who are committed to advancing Boston College by serving as ambassadors and providing annual philanthropic support. Members share a common interest in strengthening BC’s mission to be a national leader in the liberal arts; to fulfill its Jesuit, Catholic mission of faith and service; to support student formation; and to seek solutions that directly address the world’s most urgent problems.

This year, Veronica and Wayne Bloom, P’22, ’24, ’27, concluded their term as PLC co-chairs. From their leadership, to their dedication, to their support of financial aid at BC, the Blooms embody what it means to guide with passion and purpose. “Serving as PLC co-chairs for the past two years has been a

true blessing, with the highlight being the relationships we were fortunate to build with so many PLC parents,” says Wayne. “As Eagle parents, giving back to such a special place has been incredibly meaningful as well.”

Over the summer, BC parents Allegra and Martin Kelly, P’26, ’28, began their term as PLC co-chairs. Originally from Australia and now based in New York, the Kellys bring global perspective, warmth, and enthusiasm for BC.

“From the moment we joined the PLC, our circle of support and information grew,” Allegra says. “We hope other parents will consider joining us in this thoughtful, generous, and engaged community.”

For more information on the PLC, visit bc.edu/plc

28

Summer sendoffs across the country in 2025

$46.7M

In parent giving in 2024–25

2,000+

Families attend Family Weekend in September

IN MEMORIAM

Lee Pellegrini

Our dear friend and colleague Lee Pellegrini passed away in August at the age of seventy-five. Though you may not recognize Lee’s name, you are likely quite familiar with his lovely photography, which helped to elevate this magazine for decades. Like the man himself, his pictures exuded nuance, wit, and above all, warmth.

As director of photography in the Office of University Communications, which we call OUC, Lee worked right up until the time of his passing. I came to know him during creative meetings to discuss magazine photo shoots. Over time, we struck up a friendship. During office gatherings we’d inevitably wind up chatting about summer vacation plans, or the delights of homemade shrimp cocktail, or the bewildering strangeness of high school reunions. He’d tell me about his beloved wife, our fellow OUC colleague Rosanne Lafiosca Pellegrini, and he’d inquire about my kids, my work, my hobbies, always asking the kinds of perceptive questions that let you know he was really listening. Occasionally, he’d offer a spot of advice. It’s a special thing to make a friend, and Lee had a way of making me feel special, too.

After Lee died, OUC published an article sharing the sad news with the rest of the University, and the office held a small ceremony to toast his memory. In reading that article and listening to the recollections of my coworkers, I was amazed to discover that there was nothing special at all about my friendship with Lee. It turned out that he was quietly making everyone else in the office feel just as I did: listened to, cared for, important. At the ceremony, person after person described how Lee would pull them aside to ask about their children, their hopes, their worries. He truly listened to them, too, and from time to time he’d offer a word of advice. Someone recalled how a coworker corrected them when they pointed out that Lee never had children. “No,” the coworker said, “we were his children.”

This magazine will miss Lee Pellegrini’s wonderful photography, four examples of which are presented on the opposite page, but not nearly as much as his many friends and colleagues will miss his counsel, his kindness, and his generosity of spirit.

—John Wolfson, editor

write the next chapter

Boston College is in a better place because of the energy, creativity, perseverance, and generosity of many Eagles through the years.

Following in the footsteps of those who helped build our University, Soaring Higher: The Campaign for Boston College is an opportunity for all Eagles to help BC realize its potential as the greatest Jesuit, Catholic university in America. With your support, it will grant an unmatched formative experience to all students. And its legacy will live on “’til the echoes ring again.”

Learn how you can be a part of Soaring Higher at campaign.bc.edu