are bursting with blossoms and knitted hearts in the springtime.
are bursting with blossoms and knitted hearts in the springtime.
by brooke thames
Competing in beauty pageants was far from Manya Saaraswat ’19’s mind until her junior year at Bucknell. The biology major was laser-focused on conducting Presidential Fellowship research on seabirds and charting a career path in medicine — a dream inspired by her parents, physicians who immigrated from India when she was 3.
“But after lots of encouragement from a friend,” Saaraswat entered the 2018 Miss New Jersey pageant. “I never expected to win second place or to win Miss New Jersey on my second run a year later,” says the Morganville, N.J., resident.
Competing in beauty pageants was far from Manya Saaraswat ’19’s mind until her junior year at Bucknell. The biology major was laser-focused on conducting Presidential Fellowship research on seabirds and charting a career path in medicine — a dream inspired by her parents, physicians who immigrated from India when she was 3.
“But after lots of encouragement from a friend,” Saaraswat entered the 2018 Miss New Jersey pageant. “I never expected to win second place or to win Miss New Jersey on my second run a year later,” says the Morganville, N.J., resident.
by Dave Allen ’06
A DJ since his teens, Sheldon Andrews ’03 — aka DJ Autograph — has moved from digging through crates of records in search of rare sounds to adopting the latest digital technology.
A native of Jamaica — birthplace of DJing as an art form — Andrews built his skills on a foundation of classical training, and at Bucknell he regularly provided music for parties and other events. He credits fellow DJ James Hollins ’01 for teaching him “how to read a crowd and how to program an evening.”
A DJ since his teens, Sheldon Andrews ’03 — aka DJ Autograph — has moved from digging through crates of records in search of rare sounds to adopting the latest digital technology.
A native of Jamaica — birthplace of DJing as an art form — Andrews built his skills on a foundation of classical training, and at Bucknell he regularly provided music for parties and other events. He credits fellow DJ James Hollins ’01 for teaching him “how to read a crowd and how to program an evening.”
Margate City, N.J.
Lexington, Va.
In Memoriam: Professor John Kirkland’s brilliant history lectures were so popular in the late 1960s that his introductory class was scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday. I didn’t miss a class and can still see him with his pipe and hear his slight Texas accent.
Profile, Page 45: Phil Johnson ’70 and I shared an off-campus subterranean apartment when he was a junior and I was a senior. I was in awe of his quiet and reserved intellect. That year, he built a small harpsichord from a kit and taught himself to play it. He also was an usher at my wedding to Margaret “Peggy” Harris Lucke ’69, another theatre enthusiast and now author. Phil could have easily majored in three other areas, but we understood his genius when he was accepted by Harvard Law and Harvard Medical schools. His choice of patent law was a perfect blend of his biology major and law degree. After he joined Johnson & Johnson, we joked that they should change the name of the corporation to Johnson & Johnson & Johnson.
Hercules, Calif.
In the Winter 2021 issue I enjoyed your editor’s letter and President Bravman’s letter, and especially loved reading the in-depth article about the COVID pivot. The team of writers you assembled took pains to cite the myriad individuals and departments that worked long and hard to enable Bucknell to continue to offer an immersive, residential college experience in the fall semester. Classy. Kudos to everyone at Bucknell involved for demonstrating how to safely operate. Really top-notch journalism.
Arlington, Va.
Our younger daughter, Bonnie Corrie Estes ’86, is a high school French teacher in Statesville, N.C. I have enclosed one of her poems written while she was a student at Bucknell titled “I Love Bucknell.” I can imagine a lot of alums (and parents) could remember their love as they read her poem.
Southport, N.C.
I love Bucknell
For the inspiration she gives me
To think, and for the opportunities
She provides to make new friends.
I love Spring
Weekend,
When the cherry blossoms
Soften our moods in the Academic Quad,
And the bells serenade our swimming heads.
I love knowing
That I’m maturing;
And discovering who I am
What I believe in.
For what she stands for …
Higher education, excellence
And leadership.
I love
Knowing that my future
Will grow from the solid foundation
Built at Bucknell.
In The Last Million, David Nasaw ’67 recounts the plight of displaced persons.
magazine
Volume 14, Issue 2
Vice President For Communications
Heather Johns
Editor
Sherri Kimmel
Design
Amy Wells
Associate Editor
Matt Hughes
Class Notes Editor
Heidi Hormel
Contributors
Brad Tufts
Emily Paine
Brooke Thames
Bryan Wendell
Mike Ferlazzo
Editorial Assistant
Kim Faulk
Website
bucknell.edu/bmagazine
Contact
Email: bmagazine@bucknell.edu
Class Notes:
classnotes@bucknell.edu
Telephone: 570-577-3611
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Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Professor Katelyn Allers, physics & astronomy, and postdoctoral researcher Blake Pantoja observed the astronomical anomaly of the sort few have encountered before. The binary system, called Oph 98, was detected right after its birth in the young Ophiuchus star-forming region.
New York City
Ensuring food safety amid a pandemic is a top concern for restaurant owners like Kevin Takarada ’02. After reopening this summer after New York City’s COVID-19 lockdown, Takarada turned to Bucknell engineers to help maximize cleanliness and customer peace of mind at his fast casual sushi restaurants in Central Park South and Grand Central Station.
Lewisburg, Pa.
For two years, Kendall Jansen ’21 mentored K-12 students in Lewisburg-area affordable-housing communities through the Bucknell Buddies program. When Bucknell’s transition to remote learning brought an abrupt end to those meet-ups last spring, Jansen didn’t dwell on the separation for long; she got to work.
Bucknell Professor Benjamin Wheatley, mechanical engineering, witnessed these clashes while studying for his doctorate at Colorado State University in the Rockies. It sparked his curiosity. If such violent collisions cause concussions and even life-threatening injuries in humans, he wondered, how can sheep avoid such trauma?
That’s no longer good enough.
“Good intentions don’t get us there,” says Denelle Brown, associate dean of students for diversity & inclusion. “We need to provide folks with the basics of how we work together across differences — how we navigate difficult issues, how we engage in creating equity and hold one another accountable for carrying out our institutional values.”
Green’s magisterial, encyclopedic and fresh account eradicates an old canard — Hegelian and Western in its origins — that “Africa has no history.” Focusing on an era before and after the Atlantic slave trade, the book references records that explore the dynamism of political change in West Africa in response to the economic and political inequalities of the slave-trade era. One potent takeaway from A Fistful of Shells is that finding sources for writing about these earlier periods of African history is not an insurmountable problem.
Award-winning author and MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow Saidiya Hartman excavates the lives of Black girls and women who were in open rebellion in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. A love song to the wayward, this powerful book interprets the world as these young Black women did. Hartman’s beautiful work compels us to learn from what these women know.
Rowe’s groundbreaking monographic study marks an attempt to uncover a past that is both shrouded and in plain sight. Centering on the African Diaspora and blackness, the author pushes us to displace the centrality of Europeans in the global “Christianization” that unfolded throughout the early modern world. Rowe’s marvelous archival sources about and visual iconogra-phies of Black saints prove that they did provide channels for deep spiritual expression, protection, cultural and linguistic preservation, and acts of profound creativity.
STUDENTS TAKING neuroethics consider ethical, medical, legal and social implications that arise from recent advances in our ability to understand, predict and change human behavior.
Advances in neuroscience during the last few decades have provided new options for altering human behavior by modifying the brain’s structure and function. Institutions centered on law and criminal justice, national defense, economics and business, as well as clinical settings, have embraced some of these advances, leaving us to consider whether such interventions are right or wrong, good or bad.
A FLAT OVAL is where Rayven Sample ’24 feels most at home. When racing, he’s fueled by the support of those around him and an unwavering determination to fulfill promises he’s made.
These are the invisible forces pulling him through each turn and straightaway of a 400-meter race.
And it’s what gives him momentum off the track, where each step builds on the one before. Rather than stopping to daydream about reaching the Paralympic Games this August in Tokyo, Sample keeps accelerating toward the next track meet with his Bucknell teammates.
Anxiety serves as an important adaptive skill to prepare us for challenges, but it can get out of hand. Psychology major Melissa Milanak ’03 helps business executives and other professionals better understand anxiety, stress and sleep so they can improve their performance and quality of life. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with Psychological Assessment Resources, an executive consultant and an associate professor in the Medical University of South Carolina Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences.
shade shy of Feb. 5., the exact date of Bucknell’s 175th anniversary, the University was once again on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s legislative agenda.
On a frosty Feb. 3, Sen. Gene Yaw ’65, P’15 introduced a Senate Congratulatory Resolution in the ornate Harrisburg statehouse where Gov. Francis Shunk signed the original charter 175 years earlier.
“Since 1846, Bucknell University has pushed the boundaries of undergraduate education and actively shaped the world outside Lewisburg,” Yaw said. “As a Bucknell student myself, I had the opportunity to experience firsthand this university where liberal arts and professional programs complement each other. Bucknell educates students for a lifetime of critical thinking and strong leadership, and I am honored today to recognize the institution on this significant milestone.”
George Korson was an unlikely folklorist. A Ukrainian Jew who immigrated to America as a child, he grew up poor in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Unable to afford college, yet bright and hard-working enough to forge a successful career as a newspaper reporter, he traded on a brief association with Bucknell to advance his standing as a folk-music eminence. Now, 85 years after he led a Bucknell festival that showcased the music and culture of coal miners, Conestoga wagoners, canal boatsmen and more, the University is rediscovering Korson and his work in the coal region.
Korson was drawn to the music of coal country while chronicling the lives of Schuylkill County miners for the Pottsville Republican. Taken with their stories and songs, he did a deep dive into the folklore of the mines — and never came up for air.
t’s been six years since Bucknell forged a community partnership with the coal region, including the towns of Shamokin, Mahanoy City and Mount Carmel. The Coal Region Field Station (CRFS), which houses a variety of cross-disciplinary classes, student/faculty research projects and volunteer opportunities, has furthered community revitalization efforts in this distressed region and fostered pride in the past.In the last few years, says Place Studies Program Director Shaunna Barnhart, “There is more happening in the arts and storytelling realm, so it’s a legitimate narrative to weave that the ongoing CRFS work is part of George Korson’s legacy.”
She points out two projects led by Department of Art & Art History faculty: “There’s a photo documentary book that Tulu Bayar’s students produced through the Mellon Confounding Problems grant and an ethnographic magazine that Eddy Lopez’s students published.”
No Longer Strangers: Visual Stories from the Coal Region, created by Bayar’s students, features current and historical photos of local families and the towns of Mount Carmel and Shamokin. The magazine, Centralia, features student photos and oral histories with former residents of the coal town, which was rendered uninhabitable by an underground mine fire.
by David Driver
illustration by Jane Brooks
t was just a simple comment at a routine basketball practice her junior year, but it led Suné Swart ’17’s mind on a transatlantic flight. That day, then-assistant coach Martina Wood “told me I had the perfect body type to play overseas,” says Swart, a 6-foot-3-inch center. Swart took the remark seriously, as Wood had played college ball at powerhouse North Carolina and for pro teams in Europe and the Middle East.
After graduating with a computer science degree, Swart headed for Spain, where she’s now in her fourth season with a pro women’s basketball league. In Ferrol, a city of about 66,000 near the Atlantic Ocean in the country’s northwest, she shares an apartment with two American teammates.
Swart is just one of several recent Bucknell graduates adjusting to new cultures while living out their pro dreams overseas.
Kaitlyn Slagus ’19 played in Ireland in 2019-20, while Stephen Brown ’18 now plays for a club in France and Nana Foulland ’18 competes for a team in Italy. Other Bison stars have also trod the international courts in recent years: Zach Thomas ’18 (Ukraine in 2019-20), Cameron Ayers ’14 (Poland in 2019-20) and Kimbal Mackenzie ’19 (Spain in 2019-20).
“When you’re the American [player], you are expected to do it all,” says Slagus, now the head girls’ coach at her alma mater, Belle Vernon High near Pittsburgh. “At times it was a lot of pressure. But my Bucknell coach [Wood] told me, ‘You always played with pressure.’ I was the biggest girl on the team in terms of height.”
Kyle Harper, a University of Oklahoma classics professor, made this powerful statement in a Feb. 15 New York Times op-ed, comparing the pandemic and political turmoil that occurred in the ancient Roman reign of Commodus to our present time. During this turbulent moment in the world’s — and our own — history, I also can’t help making comparisons to challenges other Bucknell presidents faced.
That photo, and the myth it symbolizes, was on Nasaw’s mind during the seven years he spent researching and writing his latest book — a complex and wide-ranging departure from his three prior best-selling biographies of Joseph Kennedy, Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst.
Although the United States provided housing and food in Germany for the million displaced persons (D.P.s) — Jewish concentration camp survivors, Polish forced laborers and natives of Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — they were not welcome here.
“I hope one thing that readers take away is that there is a strain in American politics, society and culture that fears immigrants, fears difference,” Nasaw says. “Even though they were white and European and, for the most part, Christian, we didn’t let the displaced persons into this country because we feared them.
It’s a mindset that Kevin Nephew ’85 carries into every interaction, every day.
As the new president and CEO of the Seneca Gaming Corp., Nephew oversees 2,700 employees at Seneca Gaming’s three casinos, located in Niagara Falls, Buffalo and Salamanca, N.Y. He’s the first Seneca Nation member to lead the corporation in its 18-year history.
But even from his new post atop the org chart, Nephew, a sociology major, doesn’t see himself as any taller than before.
I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on May 21, 2020, with my twin brother, Zac, and arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge on New Year’s Eve, raising $13,000 for Heart-to-Heart International’s COVID-relief efforts in the process.
Penn National Gaming, the company where I had spent 20 months completing a management-rotational program, offered me a promotion in the spring. However, industry-wide shutdowns from the coronavirus led to the furloughing of my positions as well as Zac’s post at MGM.
Laura Cook ’10, M’11, a chemical engineering major and materials engineer for glass manufacturer Corning Inc., now holds a baton in the relay. As Corning ramps up its production of vials to contain this precious cargo, Cook is working not only to help meet a worldwide demand for more than 1 billion vials, but also to identify ways to accelerate critical stages of the race including vial manufacturing and fill/finish, where the drug is put into containers.
In January 2020, Lupton became one of 30 new inductees to the junior board of AsylumConnect, an innovative digital platform that helps persons fleeing LGBTQ persecution find refuge in Canada, Mexico and the United States. The website and mobile app feature robust search engines for locating LGBTQ- and immigrant-affirming resources and services, ranging from housing, nutrition and employment to medical and mental health.
An artist who works in an array of media that includes digital photography, sculpture and fabrics, Freeby entices viewers with objects that are beautiful and evocative in their abstraction. It’s only through subtle hints — a work’s title, a poem left on the gallery floor at the exhibition’s end — that the trauma buried beneath begins to emerge.
Today, Jacobs is the full-time CEO of Surprisingly Baked, an online store that offers customers decadent delights such as the aforementioned cookie, christened The OG Surprise, as well as the Fulla Frosting, a chocolate-chip cookie filled with funfetti vanilla frosting, the Salt Bae, a salted-caramel- stuffed chocolate cookie, and many more.
“The market for a product like this is crazier than it’s ever been before, so tackling this release has required an unprecedented amount of imagination and flexibility — especially doing it all remotely,” says Archer, an associate brand manager for Unilever
Marion Reynolds Green, Oct. 18, Ottawa Hills, Ohio
Nancy “Nan” Ireland Sholl P’70, Nov. 10, Peterborough, N.H.
Malesardi was an active trustee from 1972 through 1988 and was a generous donor whose gifts to the University supported scholarships and the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library. To commemorate those gifts, the University in 1988 named one of the Gateway Residence Center buildings Malesardi Hall.
In 2016, Malesardi was elected as a trustee emeritus. That same year, he and his wife, Doris, made a pledge of $20 million to support financial-aid endowment — then the single-largest pledge in University history. Malesardi and his wife soon after expanded their giving impact through the Malesardi Match, a commitment to match gifts of $100,000 or more for new or existing endowed scholarships with a $50,000 gift to fund the same scholarships. To date, the program has raised nearly $40 million from alumni, parents, corporations and friends of the University, for a cumulative total of nearly $60 million.
“Doris and I feel strongly that scholarships are the absolute best investment we could make in the future of young people as well as Bucknell,” Malesardi said at the program’s inception.
To commemorate these extraordinary commitments, in 2016 the University named the academic quad at the heart of campus Malesardi Quadrangle in the family’s honor.
Diblin was recruited to play basketball at Bucknell in 1936, the heart of the Great Depression. Thanks to the ingenuity and generosity of many Bucknell employees — in athletics, student housing and even President Arnaud Marts, who hired Diblin as his driver — he was able to earn the money to finance his education. According to another former Bucknell president, Gary Sojka H’09, the support Diblin received made a lasting impact: “Joe was always quick to point out that he began to fully understand the value of kindness when he was at Bucknell.”
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Other schools offer virtual tours where visitors drag their mouse to pan left and right. But Bucknell is one of the first universities to use an Oculus virtual reality headset to fully immerse prospective students in the visit experience.
Wearing a VR headset and holding a pair of controllers that act as hands, visitors can navigate through 10 virtual exhibits about Bucknell. Poke around a chemistry lab. Head to center court at Sojka Pavilion during a basketball game. Or — shh! — peek inside Bertrand Library as students study. You can also navigate the experience in a web browser without a headset.
At age 7 he would take apart calculators, clocks and printers just to see how they worked. By age 13, DAVID BERRY ’24 had moved on to disassembling — and reassembling —refrigerators, treadmills and televisions. In high school, he built hovercrafts, joined the robotics team and operated a side business repairing laptops, Roombas and Keurigs. Now the computer engineering major from Tunkhannock, Pa., has built a musical Tesla coil — a device that turns electric sparks into music.
At age 7 he would take apart calculators, clocks and printers just to see how they worked. By age 13, DAVID BERRY ’24 had moved on to disassembling — and reassembling —refrigerators, treadmills and televisions. In high school, he built hovercrafts, joined the robotics team and operated a side business repairing laptops, Roombas and Keurigs. Now the computer engineering major from Tunkhannock, Pa., has built a musical Tesla coil — a device that turns electric sparks into music.
photograph by EMILY PAINE
photograph by EMILY PAINE