UNH The Magazine of the University of New Hampshire | Summer 2022
Contents
Departments
Editor-in-Chief
Michelle Morrissey ’97
Writing
Larry Clow ’12G
Krysten Godfrey Maddocks ’96
Jim Graham
Karen Hammond ’64
Debbie Kane
Allen Lessels
Michelle Morrissey ’97
Copy Editing
Monica Hamilton
Keith Testa
Content Contributors
Keith Testa
Susan Dumais
Beth Potier
Photography
Béatrice de Géa
Jeremy Gasowski
China Wong ‘18
Designer
Lilly Pereira / aldeia.design.com
UNH Magazine
c/o Michelle Morrissey ’97
Elliott Alumni Center
9 Edgewood Road, Durham, NH 03824
alumni.editor@unh.edu
Publication Board of Directors
James W. Dean Jr.
President, University of New Hampshire
Debbie Dutton
Vice President, Advancement
Susan Entz ’08G
Associate Vice President,
Alumni Association
Bridget Stewart ’96
President, UNH Alumni Association
On the Cover: More than 2,700 students embarked on their next big adventures after celebrating their success at Commencement 2022. See coverage.
COVER PHOTO BY Jeremy Gasowski
© 2022, University of New Hampshire. Readers may send feedback, news items and email address changes to alumni.editor@unh.edu.
Back home again
Three years as roommates, a lifetime as friends, here I am with Erica (Fricklas) Freve ’97 (right). I had no idea on this day of our own Commencement that I’d be back home at UNH some 25 years later.
A FEW days after I graduated from UNH, I started my first job as a newspaper reporter in Maryland. At the time, I couldn’t wait to leave New Hampshire. I was tired of living in one place for so long (growing up as a military kid, I was used to moving around a lot), weary of the cold and dark winters, ready for something different.
Six months later, I couldn’t wait to move back. And I did — first as a journalist in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, and finally really back home in 2014, to work at UNH.
This past June, in covering Reunion for this edition of UNH Magazine, I asked attendees throughout the weekend a simple question: “What motivated you to come back to UNH?”
Their answers had a common theme: This is home. Some admitted to crying at hearing the T-Hall bells for the first time in years. Others enjoyed looking themselves up in printed student directories from decades ago. They wanted to catch up with fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, see how the campus has changed in the last 25, 40 or 55 years, or revel in how much had stayed just the same.
Extraordinary times
We have certainly been through extraordinary times together.
The pandemic has impacted virtually every aspect of life on our campuses, in our communities, within our families and at our workplaces. It arrived as the nation’s higher education institutions, including UNH, were already grappling with challenges, including a declining population of high school students, increased competition and rising costs. It felt like a perfect storm at times.
Yet, as this fall approaches, UNH is emerging stronger, more vibrant and relevant than ever — both as a university and as a connected Wildcat community. In fact, I believe our incoming students could not pick a better time to attend New Hampshire’s flagship university.
Current
See more coverage.
Watching war, from a world away
“All I did was text my family, ‘Are you alive?’ and then I would text another sibling, ‘Are you alive?!’” recalls Babin. “I was so scared not knowing what to do.”
Originally from Kyiv, Babin was anxiously awaiting word from her family still living in the region — her parents, four siblings, and their families, 18 people in all, nine adults and nine children under the age of 15.
She finally heard: They were safe, but scared. In the coming days the fighting escalated, and as the world’s attention turned toward Ukraine, Babin’s attention was on her family and friends in crisis.
“In those first 10 days, I came into work to distract myself, but all I could think about was my family. I remember I would put on my coat, close my door in my office and lay on the floor here and just cry all the time, in solidarity with those in the bomb shelters in Ukraine,” she recalls.
Babin shared her story during a webinar in March hosted by the College of Liberal Arts. While Kurk Dorsey (History department chair and professor) and Alynna Lyon and Jen Spindel (political science department professors) gave context to the conflict, it was Babin’s emotional first-person account that personalized the war for those in virtual attendance.
Cats’ Cupboard
The newly opened Cats’ Cupboard, a food pantry exclusively for students, is hoping to close that gap.
“A core principle of this university is student well-being — food is a basic need, and this just connects us more as a community,” says Rochelle L’Italien, a registered dietician with UNH Dining who has helped manage the coordination and opening of the pantry. “I just go back to the idea that we are all Wildcats, and we look out for each other. I feel like this is an extension of that.”
To make the vision for a pantry a reality, the university provided seed money for infrastructure costs, and Cats’ Cupboard partnered with Gather, a Seacoast-area food pantry, to secure stock. Cats’ Cupboard has also received items from food drives coordinated by campus and community partners.
“One of the biggest things COVID has really shown us is that anybody can be food insecure, and not to judge a book by its cover,” says Paul Young of the N.H. Food Security AmeriCorps VISTA Project, who is involved with the pantry. “It’s about … making this a more relatable and understandable issue — that this could happen to any of us at any moment.” — Keith Testa
Style Time
RESEARCH BRIEFS
A UNH study on lightning reveals a key piece of evidence that’s eluded scientists since the days of Ben Franklin’s kite experiment: how lightning actually begins within a storm cloud. Chris Sterpka, a UNH Ph.D. student studying lightning physics, is the first author of the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, which could fundamentally shift the future of lightning research and ultimately improve the protection of humans and infrastructure from lightning strikes.
“This is the first time we can actually see lightning initiation in three dimensions and on such a small scale — these new data offer an increase in timing precision and accuracy over previous studies, which allowed us to image lightning with more detail,” Sterpka says.
TOP RANKING
The report, titled “The Women’s Power Gap at Elite Universities: Scaling the Ivory Tower,” was released in January by the Women’s Power Gap Initiative and the American Association of University Women.
UNH’s high ranking is due to its history of female presidents (three) and its representation of women in academic dean positions, as members of the president’s cabinet, and as tenured, full professors. Only 13 other research universities nationwide achieved the ‘leader’ status in the report; others were given rankings such as “almost there,” “work to do,” and “needs urgent action.” Read more: womenspowergap.org
RANKED
out of
schools for being a leader in the area of women in top positions.
Cows and Climate
Methane gas is a prominent contributor to global warming, and cows, who generally have a regular diet of hay and grain, release a steady stream of it through belching.
Now, UNH researchers are looking into how changing their bovine cuisine from hay to seaweed might change how much the average cow burps.
“Cattle is the second largest source of methane in the United States,” Andre Brito, associate professor of dairy cattle nutrition and management at UNH, told WBUR in a recent article. “The industry as a whole is very interested in results to mitigate methane.”
Prize Pooch
Record-breaker
This year’s challenge was the most successful in the event’s eight-year history, raising more than $3.2 million.
“There’s something about feeling like you’re part of a group that’s making a difference; there’s real power in that,” says Jackie Overton, director of UNH Annual Giving. “Philanthropy has been part of higher education’s culture for as long as colleges and universities have been around, and especially in New Hampshire. The UNH experience would be so different for our students if we didn’t have this support every year.”
More than 12,000 donors made a gift to the university during the five-day fundraising event. Another motivating factor is matching gifts: A group of (603) underwriters provide funds to allow individual donors to double their impact — so a $50 gift to the equine studies program becomes a $100 gift, thanks to the support of those underwriters.
MISSION
Harlan Spence
When I was a child, my family loaded into the old Chevy wagon and drove that rattletrap from Massachusetts to Cape Canaveral (Florida) to be there for the launch of the Saturn 5 moon rocket. I still get goose bumps thinking about it; it was just so utterly dramatic. Even though we were miles away, you had to kind of catch your breath as you watched. Even at 10 years old, I thought, ‘I want to do that.’
The HelioSwarm proposal was chosen by NASA over four other proposals. We’ve been deputy principal investigator on other NASA missions, but this puts us in lead position. This mission builds on UNH’s long history with heliophysics, and understanding solar turbulence will help us understand the Earth’s space environment, and how it affects our lives.
I’m most proud of being able to enable opportunities for others. I take great joy in looking at the careers of former students I’ve had the privilege to work with. I’m still connected with many of the undergrads I worked with as an assistant professor in the ’90s, and I’m proud that some of those I worked with as graduate students are in leadership positions on this mission.
What isn’t cool about this job, honestly? Actually, it sounds kind of goofy, but the coolest part is that moment when you’re standing in the grandstands with the countdown clock, and you’re about as close as you can get to a NASA launch, and then you see it go. I’ve driven overnight before to get to see that launch moment; once you watch one, you become sort of a launch junkie.
I think people think of space as completely vastly empty, and for the most part it is, but the materials that do fill it can be very powerful — magnetic fields and plasmas that act together in amazing ways. There’s a growing awareness of something going on that’s pretty interesting.
It’s the last unsolved problem of classical physics. Turbulence is so important in space because it takes energy in one form and puts it in another … in this case, it heats the plasma, which is what space is made of. We know it keeps cosmic plasma hot, we just don’t know how. HelioSwarm will unlock that mystery.
MISSION
Harlan Spence
When I was a child, my family loaded into the old Chevy wagon and drove that rattletrap from Massachusetts to Cape Canaveral (Florida) to be there for the launch of the Saturn 5 moon rocket. I still get goose bumps thinking about it; it was just so utterly dramatic. Even though we were miles away, you had to kind of catch your breath as you watched. Even at 10 years old, I thought, ‘I want to do that.’
The HelioSwarm proposal was chosen by NASA over four other proposals. We’ve been deputy principal investigator on other NASA missions, but this puts us in lead position. This mission builds on UNH’s long history with heliophysics, and understanding solar turbulence will help us understand the Earth’s space environment, and how it affects our lives.
I’m most proud of being able to enable opportunities for others. I take great joy in looking at the careers of former students I’ve had the privilege to work with. I’m still connected with many of the undergrads I worked with as an assistant professor in the ’90s, and I’m proud that some of those I worked with as graduate students are in leadership positions on this mission.
What isn’t cool about this job, honestly? Actually, it sounds kind of goofy, but the coolest part is that moment when you’re standing in the grandstands with the countdown clock, and you’re about as close as you can get to a NASA launch, and then you see it go. I’ve driven overnight before to get to see that launch moment; once you watch one, you become sort of a launch junkie.
I think people think of space as completely vastly empty, and for the most part it is, but the materials that do fill it can be very powerful — magnetic fields and plasmas that act together in amazing ways. There’s a growing awareness of something going on that’s pretty interesting.
It’s the last unsolved problem of classical physics. Turbulence is so important in space because it takes energy in one form and puts it in another … in this case, it heats the plasma, which is what space is made of. We know it keeps cosmic plasma hot, we just don’t know how. HelioSwarm will unlock that mystery.
Literary honor
“I wrote this book partly because I wanted to say the cosmos belongs to all of us,” she said in her speech at the awards ceremony in April in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported. “Y la lucha sigue,” she added: The fight continues.
— Compiled by Beth Potier, Michelle Morrissey
Words of Wisdom
Parents: Don’t worry about the degree so much that your child is going to choose. Students should choose a degree that they’re passionate about, and they can find a job anywhere.
Students: Wear a coat.
Parents: Your children are considered adults in the eyes of the university. Prepare to feel out of the loop sometimes but ignore the naysayers who tell you to let your kid figure it out on their own: They are still your kids and it’s OK to help.
New to Campus
Kirsten Corazzini is the new dean of the College of Health and Human Services (CHHS), succeeding Mike Ferrara, who retired from the position after leading the college for more than eight years.
Lucy Gilson will step into her new role as dean of the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics this month.
Kalle Matso will be the next director for the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership (PREP), a UNH-affiliated program focused on protecting the health of the state’s estuaries — where rivers meet the sea.
Alexis Simpson has joined UNH as the university’s new chaplain.
All Hail to Thee
UNH Commencement began its new normal this year, as nearly 3,000 undergrads and graduate students walked across the stage on Memorial Field during five different ceremonies. They shook hands with their dean, provost or president, slowed down for a snapshot and embarked on what their next adventure might be out in the real world.
The ceremonies, organized by UNH’s Alumni Relations team with input and support from campus partners, represented the continuation of a new tradition. Rather than host one university-wide ceremony in Wildcat Stadium, commencement was held over three days. The university made the change for several logistical and cost-savings reasons, but the biggest benefit is for families in the audience, who no longer have to show up several hours ahead of time to make sure they get a seat, and for graduates, who now get to hear their names read individually and walk across stage to receive their diplomas.
Special awards
Retired businesswoman, environmental pioneer and benefactor of sustainability programs and social innovation programs at UNH, UNH Foundation board member, vice chair of Friends Forever International board.
Get Puzzled
Hey Jude!
Debbie Kane
portraits by
Jeremy Gasowski
Beyond Borders
Larry Clow ’12G
ILLUSTRATION BY
Paul Reid
Changing of the guard
Allen Lessels
Photography by
Jeremy Gasowski
Forward thinking
But don’t let any of that fool you. Knotweed is invasive and aggressive and, for those who know something about plants, an unwelcomed upcropping wherever it grows.
What’s worse, the destructive plant may be having negative effects on the fish, insects and other organisms that make up the ecosystem of the state’s smaller waterways.
Same old song
When she happened upon an article in a previous issue of UNH Magazine, she realized his musical talents went farther back than
her childhood.
Lamothe was a member of The Salamanders, an octet founded at UNH in the style of Yale’s Whiffenpoofs. They made their campus premiere during the 1951-52 school year, and Lamothe joined the following year, performing at several nearby schools and making a spring tour of UNH alumni clubs up and down the East Coast.
Denise Grady ’78G
“What stays with me most vividly are the people: their faces, their voices, their stories, the unexpected truths they revealed — sometimes after I put my notebook away — that shook or taught or humbled me, and reminded me that this beat is about much more than all the data I had tried to parse over the decades,” she wrote in her farewell column last June. “It is a window into the ways that illness and injury can shape people’s lives, and the tremendous differences that advances in medicine can make, for those who have access to them.”
An Evening of Distinction
The event marked the 80th anniversary of the Pettee Medal, named after Dean Charles Holmes Pettee, who served UNH for more than six decades as a professor and dean (Bill Nelson, a fifth-generation descendent of Pettee, was in the audience). It also marked the 20th anniversary of the Hubbard Award. Lynn Wiatrowski ’81, chair of the Hubbard Award Committee, served on the UNH Foundation Board of Directors with John Hubbard, who, along with other university leaders, conceived of the award to recognize philanthropy and service to UNH.
MARTIN KIMANI
You can watch his full speech here : bit.ly/3NxLwnb
He was watching CNN coverage of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a 100-day conflict in which roughly 800,000 Rwandans were killed. The conflict garnered international attention for its brutality against civilians, mostly the minority Tutsi people.
Because Rwanda is close to Kenya, dormmates were asking Kimani for his thoughts.
“I couldn’t, for the life of me, explain it,” Kimani recalls. The moment stuck with him, almost an embarrassment that he wasn’t more knowledgeable of the conflict, and that he couldn’t provide his peers with some insight on it.
Juxtaposing that tragedy was the May 1994 election of Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid activist, to the presidency of South Africa — the first non-white person to hold the position.
Kimani felt a call to action.
Reunited Again
“People got to experience everything their UNH experience was — and still is —all about: connections with old friends, reliving memories, and hopefully making some great new ones,” says Corena Garnas, associate director of alumni engagement and reunions. She, along with Phebe Moore, senior event specialist for reunions and engagement, plans and executes UNH’s reunion events: “Finally, we had the chance to be back together in person!” says Garnas.
Garnas and Moore credit class reunion volunteers who work throughout the year to plan events for their classmates. “It sounds cliché, but those volunteers really are why we can do this every year,” says Moore.
Marking A Milestone
“These are people who have been meaningful in your life, but I lost contact with so many over the years. The lesson is this: I don’t want to ever lose contact again,” he said.
And he’s committed to that goal of staying in touch.
“I have a friend who calls it ‘TL,’ meaning your time left,” says Knapp. “And during my TL, I’m going to maintain the connections with the people very important to me while I was at UNH.”
Nearly 200 alumni from the classes of 1970, 1971 and 1972 came out for their joint 50th reunion this June, marking the milestone by catching up with old friends, visiting favorite campus haunts, and supporting the next generation of Wildcats.
A Sweet Surprise
Maureen O’Brien ’16 ’17G and her boyfriend Sumer Panesar ’16 met when they were freshman at UNH but didn’t start officially dating until they were seniors. They’ve been together ever since, weathering four years of a long-distance relationship while Panesar was in dental school in Michigan, and O’Brien, an occupational therapist, was back home in Rhode Island. They’ve lived in Indiana now for about a year, where Panesar is completing his residency in orthodontics.
And since UNH is the place where they first met, it seemed fitting to Panesar, with the help of O’Brien’s friends, to do a surprise proposal during their reunion weekend this year.
Class Notes
Don Lamson ’48 on his homemade skis at age 12
1949
John Hubbard ’50
Career? As in, full-time work? For most of us, community service means an occasional volunteer experience, usually a one-off, something we do in our free time if we have free time. So, who could call it a career?
John Hubbard was that rare person who certainly could — his philanthropy and service to others indeed was his full-time vocation, and his passion. His ‘pay’ for this second career came in the form of gratitude from the generations of New Hampshire’s neediest children, the students, faculty and staff of his alma mater, and the residents of communities around the state who benefitted from his philanthropy over many decades.
Kate Freitas Sherwood ’97
Each of those students, and dozens more Dougan has come to know, is exactly the kind of student that Kate (Freitas) Sherwood ’97 would have helped. As a school counselor at Londonderry High School, she was one of those staff members who was there for every single kid — “from the valedictorian to the addict, and everyone in between,” according to her husband, and, as so many public school teachers and other staff end up doing, filling in the gaps of what a school can provide and what a particular student might need.
Edward Tillinghast
A UNH professor of zoology, Tillinghast was known for eclectic interests that included earthworms and chicken blood. The great joy of his academic life, however, was studying spiders. Black widows, brown recluses, tarantulas and barn spiders intrigued him, but his special interest was the black and yellow garden spider.
Bright Shall Thy Mem’ry Be: In Memoriam
- Elizabeth E. Anderson
Former Staff Member
February 24, 2022 - Alan D. Bean
Former Staff Member
December 20, 2021 - Jeffrey C. Haight
Former Faculty Member
January 20, 2022 - Joseph D. Murphy
Former Staff Member
April 12, 2022
- Elizabeth Williams Andrew ’47
March 24, 2022 - Anne Kargas Athans ’49
December 17, 2021 - Barbara Crane Barbee ’49
April 26, 2021 - Sharon Stepanian DiRubio ’48
November 26, 2021
- Mary Janet Mahoney Aliapoulios ’59
October 30, 2021 - Frances Legallee Barnes ’56
November 12, 2021 - Jere R. Beckman ’56, ’59G
October 11, 2021 - Marga Krook Betz ’56
November 17, 2021
- Richard W. Arey ’67
December 23, 2021 - Monte R. Badasarian ’67
November 16, 2021 - Emery E. Bassett Jr. ’61
December 29, 2021 - Clinton A. Bean ’67
February 11, 2022
- Kenneth G. Arndt ’71G
December 21, 2021 - Paul F. Asbell Jr. ’77, ’96G
December 14, 2021 - Peter J. Bascom ’79
December 16, 2021 - Elaine E. Bedard ’74G
December 15, 2021
- Christine A. Aitchison-Mattaini ’88, ’91
October 20, 2021 - Peter C. Andersen ’85
December 3, 2021 - Glenn R. Blanchard ’85G
January 23, 2022 - Susan Smith Carver ’82
December 8, 2021
- Brian D. Callahan ’99
April 1, 2022 - Melinda E. Carey ’96
March 20, 2022 - Joshua L. Carr ’93
January 4, 2022 - Brian W. Cross ’94G
October 13, 2021
- Seth A. Braga ’00
April 16, 2022 - Lauren D. Caldwell ’06
January 24, 2022 - William R. Cresswell ’02
February 14, 2022 - William F. Gladhill ’05G
April 14, 2022
- Michael P. Barr Jr. ’10
January 1, 2022 - Andrew E. Davis ’17
November 16, 2021 - April M. Gabrielle ’10, ’11G
January 15, 2021 - Taylor A. Kirk ’17
October 27, 2021
Matthew J. Pinault ’21
January 14, 2022
Parting Words: Reunion
REUNION PROPOSAL
