Class Correspondent

William Cember reports daughter Nicole graduated from Cornell’s College of Human Ecology and son Kenny moved to the Kansas City area. The whole Cember family reunited in February for a cruise out of Miami. Oren Cohen, a leading authority on the development of drugs for the treatment of infectious diseases, joined Viamet Pharmaceuticals as chief medical officer. Previously, he was senior vice president and chief medical officer at Quintiles. Penny Culliton is department head for English, art and music at Mascenic Regional High School, in New Ipswich, N.H., where she has taught English since 1990. She and her husband have a circa-1845 homestead in nearby Temple. Darrell Gaskin, P’18, an expert in health-care disparities, was promoted to full professor at Johns Hopkins University and elected chair of the board of directors of AcademyHealth, the national association of health-services researchers. Ari Jaffe, P’15, and wife Marlyn are pleased to announce the marriage of their eldest daughter, Sarah ’15, to Daniel Kasdan ’13. Sarah teaches at Yeshivat Noam, and Daniel is working on his simcha at Yeshiva University. Ari and Marlyn report they have mostly recovered from the very fun wedding but still can’t get over the fact that the couple lives in New York. Dave Kantor marked his 10th year working as a software engineer at IBM. A founding member of the Brandeis Jazz Ensemble in 1980, he is delighted the ensemble is still going strong. Dave plays drums in Jazz Echo, a combo that has released three albums. He and his wife, Laura Salomons ’85, have four sons: Alec, who is severely disabled and medically fragile; Adam, a rising senior in the UMass Amherst Honors College; Dean, who just graduated from high school; and Ethan, a rising high-school sophomore. Daniel Kern has joined TFC Financial, a Boston-based wealth-management firm, as chief investment strategist. He had been president and chief investment officer at Advisor Partners. He and his wife, Darlene, are happy to be living in Boston full time after living in both Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area for the past couple of years. Risa Levine is a member of the finance committee for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Emanuel Lowi is communications officer at La Fédération des Coopératives du Nouveau-Québec, in Montreal. Luigi Pacifico, an invasive cardiologist, received the 2015 Teacher of the Year Award from the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine Fellowship Program at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts. Chris Rhomberg co-authored “The Runaway Production Complex? The Film Industry as a Driver of Urban Economic Revitalization in the United States,” an article that appeared in the September 2015 issue of the scholarly journal City and Community. An associate professor of sociology at Fordham University, Chris was recently elected chair of the labor and labor movements section of the American Sociological Association. Rosemary Rodriguez’s feature film “Silver Skies,” which she directed and wrote, is completing its festival run. The film won the Audience Award in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Glenn Wolkenfeld teaches biology at Berkeley (California) High School, where he is also the co-coordinator for professional development and co-lead teacher of the science department. In 2014, Glenn was Berkeley’s Teacher of the Year. His rap, blues and folk-music videos, designed for teaching high-school and college-level biology, surpassed 5.3 million views on YouTube, and his channel has more than 33,000 subscribers. Glenn has launched an interactive website for learning biology (www.sciencemusicvideos.com) and is a co-creator of the qwizcards.com interactive-learning platform.

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