1990s
35th Reunion: Oct. 24-26
Scott Gladstone, P’23, has left his 30-year law career to become associate director of the New England office of the American Jewish Committee. He is a longtime member of the AJC New England board.
In August 2024, Barbie Scharf-Zeldes became Bubbe Barbie (aka BB) with the birth of her first grandchild, Case Archer Zeldes. Barbie is a judge for Bexar County (Texas) Probate Court No. 3.
Mike Schmidt, vice chair of law firm Cozen O’Connor’s national labor and employment practice, has been named one of Lawdragon’s 500 Leading Corporate Employment Lawyers for the fourth consecutive year.
Laurie McMillan’s book “Slut Narratives in Popular Culture” was published by Routledge in August 2024.
Charley Sumner is a member of the Democratic City Committee in Woburn, Massachusetts, working in support of progressive legislation and candidates. He’s helping to organize a Jewish/Israeli employee resource group at Harvard University, where he is a senior program manager in human resources.
In August 2024, William Friedman earned a master’s in political science from the University of Chicago, his fourth postgraduate degree (he also has an MBA, a JD and an LLM). In October 2024, he became section chief of regulatory rulemaking at the Office of Regulatory Policy in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
Adrian Kirkland is director, grants and compliance, at Goodwill North Central Texas.
Peter Nickowitz teaches humanities at NYU and screenwriting at Barnard College. He co-wrote the 2023 feature film “Our Son” — about a gay couple with an 8-year-old son who file for divorce — which played the national and international festival circuit.
Amanda Trigg, a practice leader at law firm Cohn Lifland, is a national vice president at the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a selective association of leaders in the U.S. family-law field. In November 2024, she received the AAML’s Fellow of the Year award.
Wendy Weiss and husband Larry ’91 live in Haworth, New Jersey, where they raised sons Jacob, Ethan and Adam. Wendy is communications director at From Numbers to Names, which identifies unnamed faces in Holocaust photography through the use of AI. Larry is managing director/head of trading at Instinet, a global financial securities service.
Tobi Printz-Platnick is a partner consultant at Capacity Partners, a firm that provides strategic-planning and fundraising consulting services to nonprofit organizations.
Alastair Bor left the small cannabis-industry startup where he worked for nearly six years for a job at the Reserve Bank of Australia. “From growing the green to printing the green,” he writes.
Rachel Loonin Steinerman, P’26, was interviewed in the book “This Is Your Song, Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity.” In addition, the Phish yarmulke Rachel’s lifestyle brand Whole Phamily sells was featured in an episode of the Netflix show “Jewish Matchmaking.”
New Jersey resident Nuphar Rozen-Adler is celebrating 20 years at medtech firm Becton, Dickinson and Co., where he is director, global public health.
Steven Safran and wife Yael, GSAS EdM’24, have a daughter at Northeastern University and a son at Syracuse.
30th Reunion: Oct. 24-26
Brigid Howe is the president of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Council of PTAs and the executive director of Nonprofit Montgomery, an alliance of leaders of nonprofit organizations.
Benjamin Shatzky is a partner at NYC law firm Fabiani, Cohen & Hall. Daughter Sophia is a first-year at Boston University.
In 2024, 22 years after founding the RAIN Group, a sales training company, Mike Schultz sold it to Horizon Capital, a private equity firm.
Sascha Demerjian is the executive director and co-founder of the Grief House (www.griefhouse.org), a group that helps foster the metabolism of grief from all kinds of loss, through support and events that happen both in person (in Atlanta and Portland, Oregon) and online. Sascha and husband Peter Demerjian ’96 have a 15-year-old daughter.
Rachel Reiner, director of audience engagement at the Broadway League, is the executive director of the Jimmy Awards/National High School Musical Theatre Awards, often called “the Tony Awards for teenagers.” Last year’s ceremony was hosted by Josh Groban at Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre.
Alexander P. Heckler was named one of Florida’s 500 Most Influential Business Leaders by Florida Trend magazine. He is the founder and managing partner of LSN Partners, a bipartisan consulting firm in Miami, and a member of the Sandy Hook Promise board of directors.
In July 2024, Umanga Pandey, IBS MA’99, and Kavita Srinivasan moved from Nepal to Victoria, British Columbia, with their two kids (10 and 5). They say they would love to connect with any Brandeisians in the area.
Rob Seidner, Heller MBA’03, and Debbie Schmidt report their teenage son, Wesley Seidner, is the author of the independently published book “K for Kosher,” which details how Wesley’s quest to learn more about Jewish baseball players helped him find his Jewish identity.
Phil Meer is chief executive officer at Boston-based SciShield, a software development company that seeks to mitigate risk in science. He previously served as CEO of PatientKeeper, an IT company in Waltham. Phil lives with his wife, Jennifer Singer Meer, and their three children in West Hartford, Connecticut.
Rachel Poretsky writes, “I am coming up on 12 years as a faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I am a microbial ecologist studying bacteria and viruses of environmental and public health importance. In my nonwork life, I am a bike/walk/transit advocate, the mom of two daughters and the wife of one husband.”
Erik Sylvin is a thoracic surgeon at Holy Cross Medical Group, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. As a member of the Brandeis varsity baseball team, he played in four NCAA tournaments.