Class Correspondent

Greetings, fellow alumni! I hope everyone enjoyed their second post-Brandeis year. Jeremy Karp and I just moved to Pittsburgh, where Jeremy’s beginning a PhD in algorithms, combinatorics and optimization at Carnegie Mellon. If you’re around Pittsburgh, look us up! Feel free to inform me of your own life events (marriages, births, graduations and so on) anytime, and I’ll send them on to the magazine.

Emily Griffin was promoted to audience services manager at the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, the nation’s oldest continuously running music organization. Garrett Nada writes, “In May, I graduated from George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs with an MA in Middle East studies. My concentration was conflict and conflict resolution.” Miriam Nachum, IBS MA’11, and Shai Posner were married on June 12 at the Chart House in Weehawken, N.J. Leila Alciere ’09 and Alex Parks were married in August in Look Park in Florence, Mass. Alex writes, “We met when I was a sophomore and she was 
a junior, and we’ve been together ever since.” Nick Brown works as a music 
specialist/concert producer at the Library of Congress. Geoffrey Cohen teaches English at the Medical University of Montpellier/Nîmes in southern France. Julian Agin-Liebes writes, “Big news in my life is that I am now attending the Medical School for International Health, which is in Beer-Sheva, Israel, and will be here for the next four years. I am slowly adjusting to life in the desert.” The URL for Julian’s blog is mideastmed.tumblr.com. Ben Serby began an MA/MPhil/PhD in history at Columbia this fall. Elisette Weiss writes, “I’m happily employed as a project coordinator at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research institute that is part of the University of California, San Francisco.” Mariah Rich graduated in May with an MS from the Harvard School of Public Health in the Department of Society, Human Development and Health, with a concentration in obesity epidemiology and prevention. Emily Frost writes, “This December, I will finish my service with the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso. As a community health development worker, I’ve been living in a small village of 1,300 people with no electricity or running water. I work at the local health clinic, train nurses and plan community outreach programs. Though I’ve enjoyed my time in West Africa, I am looking forward to returning home.” Derek Strykowski spent the summer working as a teaching assistant at Princeton University’s Summer Institute for the Gifted. Talia Salzberg and Jeff Horowitz are engaged and will be married in June 2013 in Denver. They are both working toward master’s degrees in clinical social work from Simmons College in Boston. Liz Setren is pursuing a PhD in economics at MIT after working at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Shani Suskewicz and Motti Perlman were married in September in New Jersey. Seth Coburn and Marnina Cowan were engaged in August. Seth is following a family tradition of marrying Brandeis alumnae; his brother Avi ’04 is married to Shayna Skelley ’06, and his brother Brian ’07 married Lindsey Saunders ’07 in September. Seth’s parents, David ’73 and Phyllis ’75, are both Brandeis alumni. Seth is pursuing a master’s of science in food policy and applied nutrition at Tufts, and Marnina is enrolled in a master’s program in international public health at Boston University. Max Fischlowitz-Roberts is engaged to his girlfriend of six 
years, Alli Gold, a 2010 graduate of American University. They are planning a summer 2013 wedding. Benjamin Sacks and Samantha Lakin ’08 were engaged on 
July 4. Benjamin completed two years as a Teach for America corps member at a Philadelphia school, and is continuing to teach high-school math at the same school this year. Samantha completed a Fulbright in Switzerland before beginning a master’s program in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts. Hannah Vickers married Mark Carson in a small ceremony on Sept. 6 in the groom’s hometown of Perth, Australia. She writes, “We currently live in the southern suburbs of Perth, and look forward to celebrating with friends and family when we next visit America.” In August, Lauren Elias and Johnnie McQuarley, MFA’11, played Shakespeare’s famous star-crossed lovers in “Romeo and Juliet,” produced by Boston’s Happy Medium Theatre Company. Yi-Xian Li was profiled in a recent issue of Beijing’s Agenda magazine. She serves as strategy and research coordinator in the sales strategy department at Sina Weibo, China’s largest and most influential social network, which has more than 324 million registered users. She works with companies to help them market their brands to Sina Weibo users. Daniel Servando Chavez was awarded a Fulbright grant to study architectural lighting design at the Royal Institute of Technology in Haninge, Sweden, for the 2012-13 academic year.
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