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Robert M. La Follette
School of Public Affairs
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706

Telephone: 608.262.3581
Fax: 608.265.3233

Last updated:
August 18, 2011

Alumni and Friends: La Follette Notes: Fall 2008

News from alumni and friends

It's a Small World of Baby Bobs

Five La Follette School alumni collect their children from the same child care center near Madison’s Capitol Square. From left, Donna Wong, 1994, holds Ilan while her son Ari sits next to his buddy Tamirat, whose father, Brian Solomon graduated in 1992. Karina Silver, 2006, holds Jacob; Carrie Schneck, 2007, holds Abigail; and Alison Bergum, 2005, holds Simon. Bergum is with the university’s Population Health Institute. The others work for the State: Wong and Schneck for Health Services; Silver for the Budget Office. Solomon is at Workforce Development and serves on the Madison Common Council. Wong’s husband, Abe Rabinowitz, 2000, is with the Veterans Administration. The children get to play.

1980s

Working on the wild side

Jonathan S. Drake, 1987, received his Ph.D. in wildlife science from from the University of Washington College of Forest Resources. He continues to work as a research fisheries biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service in Seattle, where he focuses on species listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Grant Huber, 1985, left his position of senior policy advisor with the Wisconsin Senate in January 2007 and accepted a position with the University of Wisconsin System Administration. As a special assistant for communications and external relations, he communicates UW System policy positions to numerous internal and external groups, and he represents the UW System at the State Capitol and elsewhere on a full range of issues affecting public higher education in Wisconsin.

John Norquist, 1988, will receive the 2008 award for Professional Excellence from the Ed Bacon Foundation in recognition of his extensive career focusing on the built environment. The foundation gives the honor to an outstanding national figure who has advocated for excellence in urban development, planning and design. He will receive the award in December in Philadelphia.

1990s

Ayana (Wayne) Bembry, 1998, has formed her own management consulting group, P4 Solutions LLC. The company's tagline is “People. Processes. Programs. Projects. Defined.” P4 Solutions offers innovative business transformation and program/project management solutions for public and private organizations.

Chicago Transit Authority pension trustee and Chief of Staff Theresa E. Mintle, 1991, reports the CTA completed the sale of $2 billion in pension funding bonds for the pension trust and the newly created health-care trust in August.

Ben Paulos, 1997, is director of the renewable power program at the Energy Foundation in San Francisco, where he has worked since 2000. The foundation promotes clean energy policy in the United States and China. His wife Mary passed away in 2005 from pancreatic cancer. Their son, Jerome, turned 4 in September. Ben remarried in 2007, and he and his wife Jess have a baby daughter, Georgia.

1994 grad Frances Huntley-Cooper, left, was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, August 25-28. She was a pledged delegate for Senator Barack Obama and one of 92 delegates. She says this was her third national convention but the most memorable and historic during her lifetime. Huntley-Cooper is the worker’s compensation administrator for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. With her, from left, are Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing Secretary Celia Jackson, DWD Secretary Roberta Gassman, Wisconsin State Senator Lena Taylor and Madison community leader Mary Lang Sollinger.

Service in Afghanistan

As a U.S. Army colonel, Darrel Branhagen, 1974, was chief liaison officer to the Karzai government and its 32 ministries for the military coalition in Afghanistan, and he was director of the Civil Military Coordination Center in Kabul. He now is counsel with Siemens Corporation.

Alum applies La Follette lessons

Shigeaki Kamo, first from right, visits with customs officials from the United States, Canada and Japan at the U.S.-Canada border at Niagara Falls. Since graduating from the La Follette School in 2002, Kamo has held several positions with Japan’s Ministry of Finance. As deputy director for the Customs Clearance Division, he was in charge of planning policy for border enforcement for goods that infringe intellectual property rights. He reports that when he is dealing with international issues, his U.S. counterparts have been customs officials and trade representatives, with whom he gets along well. “Every time I had one of those interactions, it reminded me of the policy implications I learned about at La Follette,” he says.

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Bill Cosh, 1993, is now a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

Matthew Weber, 1997, has started a Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan in urban and regional planning. “I will be focusing on planning and policy initiatives to address issues particular to shrinking cities (e.g. Detroit),” he says. “Please set aside a professor position for me at La Follette. I’ll be there in four years (I hope!).” He holds a dual degree in law and public affairs.

2000s

Ellen (Wuennenberg) Gruby, 2005, is now an associate consultant with Euromonitor International in Chicago. Euromonitor offers high-level market intelligence on various industries and provides macroeconomic data on countries and consumers. As part of the consulting and custom projects team, she researches and analyzes markets, industry trends and products.

Melissa Schmidt is back in Wisconsin after clerking for the New Haven (Connecticut) Superior Court for two years. She earned a dual degree in public affairs and law in 2006. Now an attorney with the Wisconsin Joint Legislative Council, she staffs the Special Study Committee on High Risk Juvenile Offenders and the Special Study Committee on School Safety. She interned with the Legislative Council in 2005 while a student at La Follette, having won the Bonnie Reese Women in Government Scholarship.

Another Baby Bob

Laura Miner, class of 2002, reports baby Oliver was born to her and her husband, Paul, on September 28. "We're all doing well here in Chicago," Miner reports.

Katie (Davis) Herrem, 2008, and her Wisconsin Center for Education Research teammates will present their research at the American Evaluation Association conference in Denver in November. “I worked on this project for a little over two years while I was a graduate student, so I am very excited that I get to be a part of presenting our work to a national audience of professional evaluators.” She is now an analyst with the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau.

Natalie (Walleser) Solverson, 2005, married fellow Badger Karl Solverson on August 30. She works at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse in the Admissions Office, where she is primarily responsible for the recruitment of non-resident students.

The wedding of Trisha Schmid, 2004, to Franz Helchinger in July in Milwaukee brought together La Follette School alumni from several classes. Carrie Hoback, 2005, was a bridesmaid, while Anna Niles, 2004, Chad Ruppel, 2004, Trevor Pelot, 2003, and Krista Willing, 2008, attended. Trisha Helchinger started working
for Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold’s Washington, D.C., office in March and is responsible for issues related to women’s health.

Friends

The American Political Science Association presented Judith Hicks Stiehm the Frank Goodnow Award in August. The award is for scholars who have made outstanding contributions to the development of the political science profession. A member of the advisory Board of Governors the La Follette School shares with the Department of Political Science, she is professor of political science at Florida International University. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1957 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which honored her with a distinguished alumni award in 2006.

Judge Angela Bartell retired from the Dane County Circuit Court in February. She now offers mediation and arbitration services through Bartell Dispute Services in the areas of business, financial, corporate, insurance, personal injury, family and general litigation.

Carrie Schneck, 2007, is co-author of an article forthcoming in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. She wrote “A Multi-Site Cluster Randomized Field Trial of Open Court Reading” with Geoffrey D. Borman and N. Maritza Dowling of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. On the home front, Schneck and her husband, Mike, are the proud parents of Abigail Magdalene Schneck, born March 1, nine days after Schneck attended the Madison reception for La Follette School alumni and friends.

Louisa (Kennedy) Kuljurgis, 2007, married Philip Kuljurgis in August in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They live in Washington, D.C.

Joe Fontaine, 2008, is engaged to Kaelin Butch. They plan to marry May 23 in their shared hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Bai Linh Hoang, 2006, is enrolled in the political science Ph.D. program at University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Her fields will be political theory, public law and American politics, with an emphasis on the values and ethics that shape domestic policymaking and implementation.

Byron Dorgan, chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, selected Heidi J. Frechette, 2003, to be senior counsel to the majority in December 2007. Her work for the committee includes drafting and managing major American Indian bills regarding housing, health care and education.

2006 classmates Karyn Kriz and Roberto Dall’Asta got married on May 24. They met and started dating during new student orientation in 2004.

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Contents of La Follette Notes, Fall 2008

PDF of La Follette Notes, Fall 2008