Brandeis Magazine

After 20 years of running a leadership-management firm in Bangkok, Jum Phot Chuasai has decided to “retire” and become a senior adviser to the company. He serves as honorary secretary of the Siam Society and is secretary general of the Fund for Classical Music Promotion. He splits his time between Bangkok and Geneva. Scott Edelman retired from the U.S. diplomatic service following a 35-year career focused on the Middle East, which also included assignments in Eastern Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. He attends and occasionally speaks at foreign-policy think-tank events in the Washington, D.C., area, and spends more time with his wife, Aylin, and their 8-year-old son, Eytan. Carol Schaffer Goldin has taught English at the Open University of Israel for 12 years and is active with her congregation in the Tel Aviv area. She and her partner of 11 years, Reuven van Saxen, enjoy sailing. She has two sons. Kenneth Gorfinkle and his wife, Doris Ullendorff, have a psychotherapy practice, Common Sense Therapy, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They specialize in caring for children and adults with chronic medical conditions, and offer treatment for anxiety and mood disorders. Kenneth is also scientific director at the Betes Organization, which presents theater, puppetry and other kinds of programming for people with diabetes. Nahma Nadich serves as associate director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, where she has worked for 16 years after a first career as a clinical social worker. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband, David, another social worker. Their two adult daughters both work in the field of special education. Nahma is still close friends with Marcy (Bloom) Davidson ’77 and Amy (Weiner) Willinsky. Deborah Nason is a freelance business journalist who writes regularly for the financial-adviser hub of CNBC.com. She is also an adjunct professor at Post University’s Baldrige School of Business. David Perlin joined the new scientific advisory board at Sideromics, a pharmaceutical company developing anti-microbial compounds to treat and prevent infectious diseases. David serves as executive director of the Rutgers-New Jersey Medical School’s Public Health Research Institute, a 73-year-old specialized center for global infectious-diseases research. Renee Robin reports from the Bay Area that her career as an environmental attorney morphed into a senior positon at SunPower about eight years ago. She has helped develop solar-power projects in the United States and Latin America, and also works on policy implementation. Her husband, Scott McCreary, works in a similar field. Their two grown sons, Aaron and Miles, have returned to the Bay Area. Aaron is a financial adviser specializing in impact investments and venture capital, and Miles is a passionate chef, baker and food-policy activist. Renee writes, “The dinner-table conversation at our house ranges from the Warriors, to food policy, to climate change, to the best artisan bread. How Berkeley is that?” Terry Schneier joined AgnewBrusavich in Torrance, California, as a litigation attorney. She represents plaintiffs in elder-abuse and -neglect cases. Janet Smith returned to the Boston area to work as assistant director of marketing at Boston University’s College of Engineering. She lives in Watertown, Massachusetts, where she has assembled a household of global visitors, and she’s enjoying rediscovering New England after 24 years in New York state. Her daughter, Natalie, is a sophomore at BU. Janet attended her first Brandeis Reunion with the Class of ’73 three years ago and rediscovered old friends who still feel like family. Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for the past four years, was profiled in a story in The New York Times. Gary, who grew up in Houston’s Braeswood section — his father was a popular local bandleader — interned at the museum in the mid-1970s. Mary Helan Turner and her husband, Keith, own the Friendly Crossways Retreat Center, a youth hostel in Harvard, Massachusetts. They lived for many years in Hawaii, where Mary Helan raced outrigger canoes and bicycles, and Keith traveled the world, filming underwater and in the air, to make natural-history documentaries for National Geographic and the BBC.