Class Acts
Hubbard Award for Philanthropy
Craig ’73 and Linda ’71 Rydin
But during that time, they kept tabs on the place: They always enjoyed reading their alumni magazine, and so when a staff member from UNH Advancement reached out, they took the call. And then she showed them what they had known all along: that the current-day version of their alma mater was just as special, sacred, supportive and important as it had been to them as undergrads.
That’s when they reengaged with UNH, they say, and that was when the relationship began between the state’s flagship university and the best and brightest students from New Hampshire’s North Country — thanks to the Rydins’ generosity.
When they first arrived at UNH as freshmen in the late 1960s, Craig and Linda made the massive adjustment to life on a college campus from their small industrial city of Berlin in northern New Hampshire. They thrived through that transition, and their UNH experiences opened doors that would likely not have been accessible otherwise, leading to great personal rewards and professional successes.
But their story is not unique — because they didn’t want it to be. For nearly two decades, their generosity has made it possible for deserving students to follow directly in their footsteps.
Craig and Linda have made giving back to UNH and their hometown a fundamental element of their lives. They established the Craig W. ’73 and Linda Labnon Rydin ’71 Scholarship Fund and the Rydin Family Scholarship Fund, both of which provide support to students with financial need from Berlin and nearby Coos County towns, as well as the Ralph “Navy” Labnon Hospitality Management Scholarship Fund — named for Linda’s father — to provide support to students majoring in hospitality management.
To date, nearly 100 students have benefited from their philanthropy. More than half of those students received financial support from a Rydin scholarship for their entire four years at UNH.
It was paramount to Craig and Linda that their philanthropic efforts connect UNH and the Berlin community to give students in a challenged economic environment the same opportunities they had. Many of the Berlin students who receive scholarship support wouldn’t be able to attend college without it.
Their love for their alma mater runs deep. As Linda says, the impact UNH had on her breaks down into three categories: education, friendship and sports. As a history major, she recalls that a favorite professor was David Foster Long, “who was an exceptional instructor — almost performing like an actor.” She recalls lifelong friends she made among the 11 girls on the ground floor of Randall Hall and, of course, the fan camaraderie at UNH hockey games on the winter weekends.
Craig, a political science major, says his freshman year was challenging. “I really struggled, but I made it through,” he says, after learning how to study, how to be independent and how to be responsible for his own actions. Like his wife, he recounts the lifelong friendships that started in his freshman dorm and in the fraternity house as a brother in ATO.
Both carried those connections and lessons learned into adulthood.
“I learned how to interact and socialize with people from different places; some of my social skills and interpersonal skills probably came from that early learning,” says Craig.
Since reconnecting with their alma mater, they’ve become deeply involved in the philanthropy that benefits UNH students and programs. Craig served on the UNH Foundation Board from 2009 to 2019 and is a director emeritus. While on the board, he served on a variety of committees, and has been a judge for the Paul J. Holloway Prize Competition three times. He was also among the first Foundation Board members to make a significant underwriting gift to The (603) Challenge when it launched a decade ago. The challenge has since grown into UNH’s signature annual fundraiser and just celebrated its 10th year by raising a record-setting $3.2 million.
But it’s the ability to make a difference for students from the place that they grew up that continues to energize them the most, especially for their hometown.
“You know, when we were growing up, there was the Miller Brown Company, and Converse Rubber had a big plant. Most of my friends’ parents worked at the mills, making a hundred bucks a week,” says Linda. Things are even harder now in the area since the mills are gone, she says. “We have two prisons in Berlin and about half of the students are on free lunch, so that’s all really hard.”
Both say they are proud of the partnerships they’ve forged with UNH and the high school administrators in the North Country — and they see the benefits of a UNH degree, beyond simply individual success.
“We have a lot of connectivity to the state, and certainly we understand that UNH, being the iconic school that it is, is key to the success of the state of New Hampshire economically and educationally, so being partnered with UNH and these schools is just very meaningful to us,” says Craig.
The thank-you letters they receive from students, says Linda, “give you chills” because of the students’ genuine messages of gratitude. Adds Craig, “What’s important to us is that they have a head start in life they may not have had otherwise.”
Diversity Hall of Fame 2024 Inductee
Xiomara Albán DeLobato ’10
“He was the only representative of color that I ever met throughout my entire college search process,” says DeLobato. “He literally made me feel so seen and so heard; from that first interaction he made me feel and truly believe that I am meant for greatness.”
Nevertheless, when she arrived in Durham for her first year, she admits she experienced culture shock.
“Throughout my childhood … we were always in a very multicultural, supportive community,” DeLobato says of growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts. “When I went to UNH, I was like, wow, I’ve never been among this many white peers before.”
But she also found an environment where she realized that she could thrive and grow.
“I saw UNH as a place where I could make my mark, where I could really learn from other peers in a community that was very different from where I grew up,” says the Spanish and international affairs major. “I saw very quickly that I was one out of 900 students of color at a 20,000-person school. But I saw there was a lot of impact that I could have from my perspective.”
DeLobato soon co-founded the Delta Xi Phi Multicultural Sorority.
“That was one of the best things I could have done for myself, for the community, for my peers and for future Delta Xi Phi sisters who were looking for that community, a multicultural, multidimensional, multiconnected and multi-intersected space to celebrate women, but to also bring in allies in creating that space of solidarity and social justice,” she says.
DeLobato played an active role in the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OMSA), the CONNECT Program and the Diversity Support Coalition. She says she greatly benefited from the support she received from individuals such as the late Roger M. Beattie, special assistant to the vice provost for enrollment management; Randy Schroeder, former associate director of the university’s TRIO Student Support Services; and Ellen Semran, former associate director of OMSA.
“Randy truly looked out for us to make sure that we had resources at our fingertips to be competitive in the classroom and within our student organizations in the campus community at large. Ellen was the associate director of LGBTQ advocacy … for me as a lesbian Latina woman, I was able to step into OMSA and be my authentic self without any judgment, without any negativity.”
Now serving as vice president and chief of staff for the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council, DeLobato works to promote economic growth while advocating for expanded opportunities for marginalized communities. Her vision of a more equitable and prosperous future underscores her belief in the power of inclusion.
Her parents created that passion in her, she says, and her mentors, sisters and teachers, as well as her wife and young son, have helped her build upon it.
She says her parents’ determination laid the foundation for her perseverance and ambition. “They embarked on their journey to this country in pursuit of the American Dream, and I carry their belief in my bones.”
Award of Excellence for Outstanding Achievement
Dr. Robert Barish ’75
The guts to seize that and numerous other opportunities would define a career in which Barish has established himself as a decorated medical professional and tireless fighter for humanitarian causes.
During his career, he would spend 24 years at the University of Maryland, where he was dubbed the “founding father of emergency medicine” for building a nationally recognized program. He has since held leadership roles at Louisiana State University, as chancellor of the LSU Health Sciences Center from 2009 to 2015 and at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he’s been the vice chancellor for health affairs since 2015.
He was recognized with the Award of Excellence for Outstanding Achievement last fall. The award was established in 2005 to honor a UNH graduate for significant accomplishments in business or professional life or for public service to their community, state or nation.
His success, he said at the Evening of Distinction event, can be traced back to his experiences at UNH.
“I wasn’t supposed to go to medical school; it wasn’t until coming to UNH that I became serious about my studies.” Although he was a zoology major, he decided to interview with internship recruiters who were visiting campus from the then-new Walt Disney World — despite his lack of any hospitality coursework or interest, he thought it would be a good chance to brush up on his interview skills.
Leaving the interview, he “figured the recruiters got a good laugh” and that he had no chance of hearing from them again.
To his surprise, he was offered a position at Disney World. “I did it; I worked at Crystal Palace as a chef, there at the luau, wearing a grass skirt and a lei,” he recalled, laughing. “Thank goodness we didn’t have any cell phones back then.”
Despite the funny visual, Barish is serious about the impact of that internship: It made him a standout among his other med-school applicant peers, with one senior attending physician at Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem even pointing it out to Barish as the thing that made him a memorable applicant.
“The internship gave me insight into customer service, and therefore patient satisfaction,” he explained. “That formative education wouldn’t have happened anywhere else. Although UNH is not known as a pre-med factory, I can tell you it indeed fostered a great sense of compassion and curiosity that is essential to developing lifelong learners committed to making a difference,” he told the audience. “Without a doubt, I never would have become a physician if I didn’t attend UNH.”
Barish has exhibited a lifelong commitment to public service and providing aid to those most in need. During his residency in New York City, he was on the frontlines of providing emergency medical care to AIDS patients in the early days of the epidemic. In 1979, Barish interrupted his residency to provide medical treatment to refugees at camps in Somalia.
He later served in Bosnia/Herzegovina during the conflict there and on a Native American reservation in Minnesota. While at the University of Maryland, Barish joined the Air National Guard, where he was a lieutenant colonel and served as a flight surgeon. In 2005, he helped lead a medical regiment that delivered emergency care to more than 6,000 Hurricane Katrina victims.
It’s a resume that more than speaks for itself, which seems fine with Barish, as he remains humble about his work. “I really think in those situations, I got more out of it than I gave back,” he says.
Pettee Medal Recipient
Carol Shea-Porter ’75 ’79G
“I’m very proud of the fact that we had all volunteers on our first campaign — everybody from the top down was a volunteer. Which makes it somewhat of a miracle, right?” she quips.
That viewpoint highlights one of the significant reasons Shea-Porter was such a successful public servant and tireless advocate for the people of the Granite State throughout her career, which included three stints in Congress serving New Hampshire’s 1st District. Despite any personal accolades, her focus always remained steadfastly on the people — of her state and on her staff.
She remains proud of the fact that she never accepted corporate political action committee (PAC) or D.C. lobbyist money. Some of her greatest successes came in fighting to support the needs of veterans, seniors and working-class citizens of New Hampshire. Among the causes she championed are the advancement of equal rights, access to affordable health care for all, public education and the fight for cleaner air and water in the Granite State.
“One of the things I used to say was that I was in Congress for the bottom 99% of us, and I still feel passionate about that,” Shea-Porter says.
She was recognized with the Charles Holmes Pettee Medal last fall from the university. The award, established in 1940, recognizes “individuals who exhibit the rare devotion to service” that Pettee, who served the university for 62 years as professor and dean until his death in 1938, was known for. It is given to “a resident or former resident of the state in recognition of outstanding accomplishment or distinguished service in any form to the state, the nation or the world.”
Shea-Porter is particularly proud of her work on several committees in Congress, including the Education Labor Committee, the Armed Services Committee and the Natural Resources Committee. She would also serve as an advocate and supporter of the Affordable Care Act, and she founded the Asthma and Allergy Caucus and co-chaired the Mental Health and Addiction Caucus.
She was born in New York City, but graduated from Oyster River High School here in Durham in 1971. She says her parents always told their children that part of their responsibility in the world was to care for each other.
“It wasn’t until coming to the university that you understood your place in the world and the power that you have,” she recalls.
Her daughter, Kathleen Shea-Porter, said that, at heart, her mom is still a social worker to her core. “The job to her was never about the glamour; it was always about making sure the people of New Hampshire got the representation they could have in Congress.”
Retired from public life these days, the elder Shea-Porter has advice for young voters — and she uses her own first-time voting experience as a teachable moment. Her first election was in 1972, Republican Richard Nixon facing off against Democratic Senator George McGovern. She voted for McGovern, who won just 38% of the popular vote to Nixon’s 61%.
“It didn’t work out, and I was devastated. A lot of us were. People worked so hard for change, and change didn’t come; it was rejected,” she recalls.
But that rejection of a particular race should never turn people away from being actively involved.
“It’s hard to stay with it,” she says. “But you have so many opportunities to change your corner of the world. I say hang in there; it takes time to see your life’s path and to recognize that you’re really part of a tapestry. You might not see the whole thing, but don’t be discouraged; work on your corner.
“The key is to always have hope. If there’s something that bothers you or some injustice that you just cannot accept, change it, work on it, organize your friends and neighbors,” she says. “Do whatever you can, because you never know when you are going to be the one that gets it done.”
Alumni Meritorious Service Award
Brad Aiken ’65 ’78G
Among his many contributions to the university since graduating in 1965, he was part of the small group of donors instrumental in the installation of the Wildcat statue outside of the Whittemore Center almost 20 years ago. The statue has become a campus symbol; it serves as a photo backdrop for students and alumni and created a new tradition of students patting its nose for good luck. In terms of UNH spirit, it doesn’t get much more iconic than that.
He even brought some of that pride with him when he and his wife, Judy, moved to Florida several years ago. Prominently displayed in his home office is a tabletop replica of the Wildcat statue, gifted to him after he spearheaded fundraising efforts that brought in more than $1.2 million for his class of 1965’s 50th Reunion.
Aiken received the Alumni Meritorious Service Award, conferred upon a UNH graduate who renders meritorious service to the university or its alumni organizations through faithful and continued effort in maintaining class or other alumni organizations, through active participation in alumni or university affairs and/or by assisting and expanding the usefulness, influence and prestige of the university.
He fits that definition well. He earned both his undergraduate degree in zoology and his MBA at UNH and never lost his connection to the university. When he retired in 2004 after more than three decades at BAE Systems, he and Judy moved to Durham to be closer to campus and regularly attended student performances and sporting events. In 2010, a UNH Magazine article noted that Aiken had missed only two Homecomings — both due to military service — in roughly 40 years.
He served on the Alumni Association Board of Directors from 2006 to 2015. Among his many philanthropic contributions to UNH, he and Judy established the Bradley ’65 ’78G & Judith Aiken Endowed Scholarship Fund for students with financial need. The pair have also created a bequest to support future members of the UNH football team. They were among just over a dozen donors who fully funded the construction of the Watkins Center for Student-Athlete Excellence, and helped rally donors for the construction of Wildcat Stadium.
As a high-schooler in Manchester, he knew he wanted to be the first in his family to attend college, despite the financial obstacles in his way. “I just made up my mind that I was going to do it. I found a way to find financial support and keep my debt low,” Aiken told the audience at the Evening of Distinction event. His experience with financial support while an undergrad was part of the reason he wanted to give back to today’s students through scholarships.
He shared further his experience graduating in 1965, with the push on for a possible Vietnam War draft. He enlisted and returned from Army service in 1968, when he started working in defense contracts, thanks to his top-secret clearance gained through his military experience.
Aiken may have been the first in his family to attend college, but he started a Wildcat tradition. Both daughters graduated from UNH (daughter Kathleen also has her master’s from UNH), as did his nephew. And when his granddaughter arrived as a first-year student, she was assigned to Room 201 in Alexander Hall — the very same room Aiken lived in as a freshman.
It’s a full-circle moment for a man who has held UNH dear for some 60 years. “You can’t help but be impressed with what a beautiful place it is,” Aiken says. “There’s something special going on behind all of those bricks.”
Diversity Hall of Fame 2024 Inductee
Timothy Poisson ’92
“I could see what careers were available to me and what my peers wanted to pursue, and it helped push me into working in nonprofit and education spaces,” says Poisson, who majored in business administration. “Then, of course, I ended up with an internship at a museum in Portsmouth, all through UNH.”
Poisson minored in history, and a class he took during his first semester remains an enduring influence on his life and career.
“The class looked at a very narrow slice of history — the U.S.-Japan side of World War II — and half the texts we read were written by American authors and the other half were written by Japanese authors,” says Poisson. “Looking at the same issue from two very different viewpoints has stuck with me. That was really the launching point of when I started writing more seriously … trying to impart another point of view on someone and get them to look at that way of seeing things.”
Meanwhile, Poisson, who started drawing strip comics at a young age, began drawing a comic strip in The New Hampshire student newspaper. But even as he flourished at UNH, Poisson wasn’t being completely true to himself.
“I was absolutely, incredibly, deeply closeted. I didn’t deal with it in any substantive way until after I finished school,” says Poisson. “However, the circle of friends that I developed at UNH, my close friends, was really how I started processing through it.”
Professionally, Poisson has held leadership roles in marketing and development at several universities, including MIT and Washington University in St. Louis. At the same time, he continued to develop his drawing and writing skills and use them to present more realistic portrayals of LGBTQIA+ characters.
He didn’t see realistic gay characters portrayed growing up; later, even as more gay characters were filtering into prominent mainstream entertainment, “I really didn’t see characters that reflected my life or experience,” he says.
Under the pen name Tim Fish, he created the comic book miniseries “Cavalcade of Boys” in 2006, which featured the lives and loves of several gay characters. Since then, he’s dedicated his artistic talents to sharing mainstream characters and storylines featuring LGBTQIA+ characters. He co-created and illustrated the graphic novel “Liebestrasse,” a queer love story set in early 1930s Germany. In 2022, as violence and hostility against LGBTQIA+ youth surged, Poisson launched the Young Adult webcomic “PLEASE SAY IT!” which was intended to counter the harmful narratives young LGBTQIA+ people were facing with a positive and affirming story.
“Asking for change from other people is a big request, and I think there’s power in entertainment, and certainly power in the medium of comics, to make change, even slowly,” says Poisson. “Not everyone is an academic. Not everyone can immerse themselves in really complex writing or conversation or thought, or maybe they don’t want to. This is really just, I think, a way for me to do my part in helping to foster the change I would like to see in humanity.”
Distinguished Entrepreneur Award
Joel Berman ’76
“People would ask me how I saw the company growing, and I would say I could see maybe 25 to 30 of us,” Berman says of Iatric Systems, founded in 1990 — a relatively small workforce for a software company.
Thanks in large part to Berman’s vision and leadership, the company quickly blew past that number, growing to as many as 330 employees. And it’s easy to understand why — in 2010, Iatric Systems was named one of the top 100 health care companies to work at in the country.
The company — which provides administrative and clinical software to hospitals in the U.S., Canada and the UK — was built on Berman’s entrepreneurial vision: finding solutions to critical problems the industry had yet to solve within the confines of a flexible and supportive work environment. He was ahead of his time in encouraging remote work, which led to happier and more engaged employees and “opened up a whole new world” by allowing him to recruit people from anywhere in the country.
Under Berman’s leadership, Iatric became a leader in its field, creating some of the industry’s top-rated software products. He sold the company in 2018, but has continued to share his passion for entrepreneurship with the next generation, joining UNH’s Peter T. Paul Entrepreneurship Center advisory board, where he has also served as a student entrepreneur mentor.
During his own undergraduate experience here, he was a dual major in geology and physics (“How did I end up in business?” he joked during the Evening of Distinction award ceremony last fall) before graduating and going on to earn his master’s in earth and planetary science from MIT.
It was at UNH that an experience in a physics course helped build the skills he would need later in life for professional success, he told the audience.
The course was Physics 407, taught by Professor Houston, with a lab taught by Professor St. Onge. The lab was tasked with collecting readings and analyzing them from air carts — “little cars that went back and forth on a bed of air like air hockey pucks,” he explained. They used a teletype machine, which to Berman was a state-of-the-art piece of technology.
He was fascinated with it, and spent an entire Saturday studying computer programming, trying to get a 20-line program to work, but with no success.
“I discovered one simple fact that day,” he recalled, before delivering the punchline to his story: “That input is spelled with an ‘n’ and not an ‘m.’”
The typo was what stopped the program from running successfully — and it made Berman think.
“What did this teach me about being an entrepreneur? Number one, I got up and did it. If there’s a problem you want to solve, or something you see that you want to do, get up and do it; try at least.”
Lesson two was that even when you encounter problems, stick with it. And the third lesson: follow your fun. “I was having fun that day,” he said of the problem-solving he did during that exercise.
When it comes to his career, despite his own humble early expectations, Berman’s achievements as an entrepreneur are significant — sparked in part by a philosophy rooted in the sharing of success.
“I never thought of people as employees,” Berman says. “I always felt that we were in business together and that if I did well, they did well.”
Diversity Hall of Fame 2024 Inductee
Glenn Delgado ’84
Those words became Delgado’s guiding principle throughout his life and career.
His father worked three jobs to send Delgado and siblings to Catholic school. As one of the few Black students in the school, Delgado remembers hearing white classmates make negative comments about some, but not all, people of color.
“I got to learn that routine very quickly, which kids were sincere and which ones weren’t sincere,” says Delgado. “One of the best attributes I ever got was figuring that stuff out.”
After high school, Delgado enlisted in the United States Air Force, where he became certified as an emergency medical technician and as a licensed practical nurse. He became interested in a career in health administration while serving at Pease Air Force Base; a leg injury he suffered in the Pease emergency room meant he couldn’t endure long hours of standing on duty as a nurse.
“One of my bosses said, ‘Why don’t you go into procurement? We’re building a new hospital and we have to buy everything for it,’” says Delgado. “‘You’re already an EMT, you’re already a nurse — you know what we need.’”
When he arrived at UNH and saw that he was among the few students of color, those skills of reading people honed when he was in Catholic school came in handy.
“There were 16 Black people on the campus and 15 of them were there on sports scholarships, so I was the only one there not on a sports scholarship,” says Delgado. “Kids would first always ask me, ‘What sport do you play?’ and when I would say ‘None,’ they would ask, ‘Well, why are you here?’ It was a very interesting time in my life, to put it mildly.”
In addition to the professional experience under his belt by the time Delgado enrolled at UNH, he was also married and had a son. As a health administration major, Delgado juggled a full class schedule from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. with a hospital job from 4 p.m. to midnight.
He says the lack of diversity on campus, coupled with his older age, sometimes made his experience isolating. Yet, moments of kindness helped him, including classmates babysitting his son and a professor allowing him to set up a playpen in class.
Upon graduation, Delgado realized he was weary of working in health administration. He was thumbing through a magazine in the UNH Career Center when he saw an ad for the Navy career internship program and decided to apply. He was accepted, and interned for the Department of the Navy at the General Electric plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. He eventually moved his family to Washington, D.C., to work at Naval Air Systems Command (NASC).
As the director of small business for NASC and later acting director of the Department of the Navy’s Office of Small Business Programs, Delgado oversaw major weapons system programs, serving as the procuring contracting officer for several military aircraft. He ensured that diversity was prioritized in procurement processes and that small businesses, particularly those from underserved communities, had opportunities to bid on Navy contracts.
Delgado was the recipient of several honors during his career, including the Superior Civilian Service Medal, two Department of the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Medals, the Presidential Rank Award, two NASA Outstanding Leadership Medals, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the Congressional Black Caucus Small Business Champion Living Legends Award.
When he became head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Office of Small Business Programs, he spearheaded efforts to provide small businesses with fair access to NASA contracts.
“The only way to really get to a good solution is to listen, blend in other perspectives and come out with something where you give buy-in for everybody,” says Delgado. “Because if everybody buys in and understands why and how that decision was made, you’ll get a lot further.”