Alumni Profiles

Alumni have achieved in many fields, including business, education, law, medicine, science and the arts.  The alumni newspaper, From the Hill, features many of these graduates in its Profile column.  

TEACHER
Martha Dye ’98                               
Teacher’s Journey
PROFILE (December 2004)

As a child in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia, Martha Dye dreamed of becoming a teacher.  But those dreams went on hold for many years when the local school system closed its doors in 1959 rather than comply with a court order to desegregate.

 Fifty years ago, the historic Brown v. Education decision by the U. S. Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal doctrine,” and required the desegregation of schools across America; however, it did not set a date by which this should be done.  She was 12 years old when her school closed, and it had a profound impact on her life.

 “Besides my own anxiety about what was happening,” she recalls, “I saw and felt the anxiety and concern of the faces of my parents and the parents of my friends.  There were many questions in my mind, but I didn’t want to burden my parents with them.  I had enjoyed school so much and wanted to become a teacher, but if I didn’t have an education, I wouldn’t be able to fulfill my dreams.

 “I don’t hold any anger, hate or hostility toward anyone for deferring my dreams because that would be a waste of energy.  It was and is a part of my life that left a lasting impression on me as a child, and I’m sure it had some role in who I am today.”

 Perhaps her greatest motivator and inspiration was Miss Dorothy Brown, one of her elementary teachers.  “She had a very warm and caring personality.  She was supportive and patient with all of her students…and made each of us feel special.”

 When schools reopened in five years, Dye had already left her small community.  Years later, she moved to New Haven, taking night classes to get her high school diploma, all the while juggling a full-time job and family life.  It would not be the last time she handled such a demanding schedule.  She went on to Gateway Community College and eventually to Albertus, where, at age 53, she received her bachelor’s degree in 1998 through the Accelerated Degree Program/Continuing Education.

 An acquaintance suggested Albertus.  When Dye stopped at the College, the first person she met was Kathy Reilly, then at Albertus as a member of the Continuing Education staff.  “She was very professional, informative and answered all my questions.

 “As I sat in the office filling out forms, I was able to observe the coming and goings of other students and the interactions between them and the office staff; I was very impressed and couldn’t wait to start my classes.  My overall experience at Albertus was very positive, and I have encouraged other working adults who were thinking of furthering their education to check it out,” she says.

 For the past 21 years, Dye has been head teacher at Yale-New Haven Hospital Day Care, where she implements a curriculum that is developmentally appropriate and meets the needs of each child.  She also worked as a teacher with the New Haven Board of Education’s Head Start program, the Child Development Unit of the Yale Child Study Center and other programs.

 Despite a long and arduous educational journey, Martha Dye says that she does not consider herself a role model for anyone.  “But every chance that I have, I stress the importance of obtaining a good education and encourage young people to stay in school.  I let them know that if they need help with their homework to give me a call.  I make sure that I ask them about school and listen to them.”
 
Miss Dorothy Brown, teacher of Prince Edward County, would be proud. 

For Rich Freeth arguing a case in a New York City courtroom is much like singing his own songs in small clubs—it all depends on language.

This Albertus English major started freshman year thinking about majoring in business.  “I chose English because I love language and literature,” he says.  “As it turned out, it was a good choice.  My English background has served me quite well both as an attorney and as a songwriter.”

Music has been part of Freeth’s life for a long time.  “Any musician will tell you that playing is an addiction.  I started my habit in junior high school, playing in all types of bands.”  He remembers putting together groups just for fun, sometimes even getting recruited to play at school functions.  “I played at the party for the opening of the Athletic Center with my friend and classmate Alain Villafranca, and at the 1990 graduation ceremony.”  His playing took him beyond the campus to gigs with rock bands in the New Haven area, and he won the make rock category in a national Talent America contest. He still has a band, the squibs, but lately he has been a solo act, playing guitar and singing his own songs.  Right now he is recording material for a CD.

Freeth’s interest in the law stems from his love of words.  Shortly after graduation from Albertus, he worked for a large organization, “where I was the low guy, working for the president, who was an attorney,” Freeth recalls.  “It turned out I was one of the few people who really hit it off with him because we both loved to discuss the etymologies of words.  He showed me how truly vital words are to law, and that words are the coin of the realm in legal practice.  So my major led to my career, but in an indirect way.”

Also nudging Freeth toward a law degree was his love of books, which he began collecting at an early age.  “By chance, while I was at Albertus, I acquired a book that was a synopsis of American law, and during my senior year I started to read it and became so engrossed I sat down and read the entire book.  It gave cases, and then discussed the legal principles involved.”

Today he works mainly in civil litigation, but also handles real estate transactions, wills, trusts and estates, entertainment law and international transactions.  He is a graduate of the University of Miami Law School.

 “I love practicing law, and find it fascinating and stimulating.  I keep writing songs, and also find that fascinating and stimulating.  Both endeavors can be frustrating, so sometimes I seek respite from one in the other.  I know that if I won the Lotto tomorrow I’d still try to keep doing both.”

ARCHITECT
Terry Hudak ’84
Passion for Design
PROFILE  (August 2006)

When Terry Hudak was a communications major at Albertus, she was intrigued by the potential of new media.  At the time, she recalls, cable television was new, and “I was optimistic about its potential to allow greater accessibility to mass media by voices that had been left out of traditional media.”
 
After graduation, Hudak joined a local cable station, where she produced, shot and edited local programming.  In 1990 she went to work for Whittle Communications in New York City, creating graphics for Channel One News, a  daily news broadcast for eight million middle and high school students across the country—controversial because the broadcasts included commercials.

 “Controversy aside,” she says, “the program was at the heart of my particular interest: to expose students to what was happening in the world at large and to open up discussion on what was happening in their world, for example, topics like pregnancy, AIDS, addiction and teen suicide.” 

 Hudak eventually decided that she wanted to become an architect, a career that would combine her community-based interests with her passion for art and design. She remembers the tremendous impact on her of an Albertus course--“The City and The Self,” which combined first-year writing, humanities and history requirements with an exploration of New Haven’s urban plan and architecture.  “I fell in love with the poetry I saw in the designs of Louis Kahn’s buildings for the Yale Center for British Art and for the Yale Art Gallery,” she says.

In 1994--10 years after graduating from Albertus-- she began studying for a professional master’s degree in architecture at SCI-Arc the Southern California Institute of Architecture. 

Now back in New York City, Hudak is an architect with Kohn, Pedersen and Fox, an international firm specializing in large-scale urban projects.   She is working on an office tower, hotel and condominium in Toronto.  “All three of these projects take advantage of recent advances in building technology that will provide ‘green benefits.’ ”

Terry Hudak’s path to architecture was not a straight line, but more like the twists and turns of her own designs…and well worth the journey.

Her media is mixed; her palette includes wires, yarn, faceless dolls, light bulbs, shoelaces and rubber bands.  Sheila Pepe defines the contemporary artist.

 Last season was a banner one for her.  There were solo shows at Colgate University, the Weatherspoon Art Museum of the University of North Carolina and the Susan Inglette Gallery in downtown Manhattan, as well as group shows in Brooklyn, Boston and Philadelphia.  Add to that, wining the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the prestigious monetary prize awarded every two years to emerging American artists.  The award, says sponsor the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, goes to “artists whose work shows promise, but who have not yet received widespread cultural and commercial recognition.”

 “I teach quite a bit,” she says.  “Last year I was at Bard College, RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) and Virginia Commonwealth University as a visiting artist. I still give my students Ben Shahn to read—Sr. Thoma Swanson’s senior project reading assignment at Albertus.”  On her schedule for next year:  RISD and Pratt Institute.

 After graduation from Albertus, Pepe received a B.F.A. in ceramics from the Massachusetts College of Art.  “That really opened up my world in many ways,” she says.  “After that I spent years finding my place in the arts—most of the time at Smith College Museum of Art, considering a career as a museum conservator or curator.  Eventually I knew I had to choose the studio full time.  I began working more diligently, exhibiting in Massachusetts, and then hit a wall in my understanding of my own work.”  At this point, Pepe went back to school and in 1995 received an M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  She also was a Bunting Fellow at the now-Radcliffe Institute.

 Pepe describes her work as “a hybrid of drawing and sculptural interests.”  The New Yorker in a listing of her show at the Inglette Gallery said: “The artist spins (okay, crochets) sprawling webs in room-size installations made of everyday materials, in this case black and white shoelaces.  The webs cast intricate shadows on the walls….”  Her works are large; a 20’ x 100’ x 24’ piece is not unusual.

 Priority is always to “create an awareness of sensory experience and how we understand what we see and feel.  My work is a suggestion that ‘thinking playfulness’ –and imagination—is common to us all and a critical part of our lives,” Pepe says.

 She points out that “artistically my influences are a contradictory lot: Eva Hesse and Judy Chicago, Jackson Pollack and Claes Oldenburg.  And while the small and rare art world is a main source of inspiration, equally strong is the deli that my parents ran in New Jersey while I was growing up.”

“It’s a wonderful tome to be in intellectual property law, particularly in the emerging field of biotechnology,” says Andrea Cimino Walsh, an attorney with the Hartford firm of McCormick, Paulding & Huber.
 
Intellectual property law focuses on, for example, copyrights, patents, trademarks and other exclusive rights to intellectual capital.
 
“The law is constantly changing, and the work is never mundane.  I love what I am doing and believe that Albertus gave me a sound foundation.”

 Walsh majored in chemistry and minored in biology at Albertus.  “I was impressed with all my professors at Albertus, but one in particular, Sister Lisa Jessel, had a special impact on me,” she remembers.  “She was my German professor and really instilled in me the powers of organization and a work ethic that has stayed with me all my life.”

 While at Albertus, Walsh’s goal was a career in medical research, and so she decided to seek a Ph.D. upon graduation.  She enrolled in a program at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and later transferred to the University of California, trading rugged winters for Santa Barbara sunshine.  In 1984 Walsh earned a doctorate in biochemistry and took a job as a senior patent editor at Chemical Abstracts.

 Her next move was to Abbott Laboratories in Chicago.  It was there, as a patent information scientist, that she was drawn to intellectual property law cases and decided to go to law school. 
“It took me four years to get my degree at night from John Marshall Law School.  I worked full time at Abbott and attended school four nights a week and Saturdays,” she says.  She received her J.D. in 1994.

Come September, she’ll be back in the classroom on Friday nights and Saturdays; she has enrolled in Rensselaer at Hartford’s weekend M.B.A. program.

 During the past 10 years Walsh has worked in various aspects of intellectual property law at some of the world’s leading multi-national pharmaceutical and agricultural companies.

 “I’ve had some very interesting cases, for example, litigation involving the National Institutes of Health and the Institut Pasteur.  Abbott was the exclusive licensee of the NIH gene product that encoded the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV.  Our opponent was Chiron, the exclusive licensee of the Institut Pasteur’s very similar gene product.  I attended depositions of key scientists on both sides and attempted to decipher the scientific and technical data for the patent trial lawyers.  Since this was such a new area of both law and science, it was tremendously challenging to be part of the team.”

 Walsh also was part of a case concerning the first genetically-engineered corn product marketed in the U.S.  “This included directing and supporting nine ongoing multi-party patent infringement suits at the same time,” she recalls.

 “I was traveling a great deal and had to keep management in the U.S. and Switzerland up to date.  With the help of information technologists, we devised a secure web site to keep management on both continents informed on the progress of the legal battles as well as update on new business acquisitions.”

 Prior to joining the staff of McCormick, Paulding & Huber, where she specializes in the chemical, pharmaceutical and biotechnological arts, Walsh had always worked in the corporate world.  “I find working in a law firm stimulating and challenging,” she says.  “My firm is very people-oriented, and they care for their employees as well as their clients.  I am learning something new and exciting every day.”

UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATOR
Janet Wozenski  ’68
Road to Abidjan
PROFILE (December 2005)

The road to Abidjan, a port city in the West African nation of Cote d’Ivoire, has been a circuitous route for Janet Wozenski.

 At Albertus, this biology major, who once considered a career in medicine, found that she was inspired most by the professional women of the faculty. “I still remember Sr. Mary Urban’s vivid description of her Ph.D. defense at Yale,” she says.

 After graduation she worked as a lab assistant in the physiology department at Yale Medical School.  Her peripatetic life began when she headed to the west coast for graduate school at Oregon State University, earning a master’s degree in food science and a Ph.D. in nutrition and biochemistry.  She also has a master’s in education from the College of New Jersey through a distance education program.

 A registered dietitian, Wozenski moved back east to the University of New Hampshire, where she taught nutrition and dietetics for a year.

 Wozenski has been in Africa since 1978—mostly in Cote d’Ivoire, but two years in Cameroon; when her husband, a director at the African Development Bank, was the regional representative in Zimbabwe for three years, she traveled back and forth from Abidjan.  Her focus always has been on primary health care and education. In Abidjan, she’s worked as a pediatric dietitian, instructor in food safety and dietetics at a professional hotel training school and teacher of math and information technology at the International Community School. 

 Today, Wozenski is director of student services at the International University of Grand-Bassam.  “This is a startup university,” she explains.  “It’s an outgrowth of a decade-long partnership between the government of Cote d’Ivoire and Georgia State University.”

The International University of Grand-Bassam is based on an American model and all classes are in English.  Part of its mission is to promote cross-cultural understanding, intercultural dialogue and principles of non-violence, peace and conflict resolution.

 “The most challenging projects here are the same as the most rewarding,” she notes.  “They always involve people and learning.  Figuring out how best to share cultures is layered on academic progress.” 

 One of Wozenski’s newest involvements has brought her back to Albertus—via e-mail.  She participates in ACAN, the Albertus Career Advising Network, sponsored by the Office of Career Services and the Albertus Alumni Association.  She helps mentor undergraduates in the program by responding to their questions about health care careers and opportunities abroad. 

 After nearly 30 years in Africa, Wozenski strongly believes that to learn about ourselves, “we must get to know people who are different from us.  We need to walk in their shoes, feel their pain and share our own.
 
“Africa is an example of a frontier, a place where individuals can make a difference.  The Fund for Peace in July of this year labeled Cote d’Ivoire the most fragile and dangerous country in the world.  We should approach this as a potential for action, not as a lost cause.”

Many youngsters want to become doctors; but few know with such certainty—and at such an early age—as Jacqueline Noonan.  She was five when she has a ruptured appendix and nearly died.  From then on, she knew that a doctor’s life was what she wanted.  Today, Noonan is professor emerita of pediatrics at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine.

Noonan majored in chemistry at Albertus, and still values the excellent liberal arts education she received here.  She went on to the University of Vermont Medical School.  “Cardiology interested me from the time of medical school,” she recalls.  “I also was inspired during my pediatric residency by an excellent pediatric cardiologist.”  When she arrived at the University of Kentucky in 1961 as assistant professor of pediatric cardiology, she found a home where all of her interests meshed.

Noonan served at Kentucky as professor pediatrics (cardiology) for nearly 30 years—18 as chair of the department—and since 1999 as professor emerita.  24-page curriculum vitae attests to a medical career marked by many “firsts.”  She is, for example, the first woman to chair the American Academy of Pediatrics’ cardiology section, to receive the Distinguished Professor Alumni Award from the University of Kentucky and the Century Club Award as an outstanding graduate of the University of Vermont.

 “Perhaps being named the first woman to chair a department at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine has meant the most to me,” she says.

It was early in her career, at  the University of Iowa as a new faculty member, that she began a clinical research project—on possible causes of congenital heart disease—that would continue throughout her years in Kentucky and bring her an international reputation.  “During that initial study,” she says, “I noticed that many children with congenital heart disease had other non-cardiac anomalies; I identified nine children who had similar facial expressions characteristic of a pathological condition and who tended to have chest deformities and short stature.  They also had pulmonary stenosis—or narrowing of the pulmonary valve.”  When she presented her findings at a research meeting there was considerable discussion about the new syndrome.

Moving to Kentucky, she continued her project, identifying another 10 patients and reporting her findings in 1968.  It was soon after this that Noonan Syndrome became officially recognized.  Today, Noonan Syndrome is one of the most common syndromes associated with congenital heart disease.  St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London is recognized as the leading international center for Noonan Syndrome research.

For more than 40 years, Noonan has been seeing children in regional heart clinics in eastern Kentucky, and she continues to do so now that she is retired.  These children have suspected heart problems and are sent to the clinics for evaluation.  The clinics also follow children who have been seen at the University of Kentucky’s cardiology clinic.  Says Noonan, “We are able to have good follow-up by seeing patients near their homes rather than having them make a long trip to Lexington.”

Reflecting on what she describes as a very fulfilling career, Noonan says she feels blessed to continue to do what she loves to do.  “Although I ‘retired’ at age 70 in 1998, I am living my bonus years seeing patients, teaching, doing clinical research and publishing.  There is still some time left for travel, community activities and work with my church.