Category Archives: Alumni

Alumnus Receives John V. Bergen Award

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. –Illinois Wesleyan University alumnus Charles Hawker received the John V. Bergen Award at the annual Clinical & Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) Leadership Conference March 23 in Baltimore.

The 1962 graduate earned the award for his unique and significant contributions that have advanced the organizational directives and objectives of CLSI. Hawker, who has worked for ARUP Laboratories for 18 years, is currently the scientific director responsible for automation & special projects. He is also an adjunct professor of Pathology at the University of Utah’s Department of Pathology.

ARUP Laboratories is a leading national reference laboratory and an enterprise of the University of Utah and its Department of Pathology. The company offers tests specializing in high esoteric molecular assays and serves clients across the United States. It is also a worldwide leader in innovative laboratory research and development.

Alumnus Wayne Messmer Recognized for Lifetime of Excellence

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.- Known as “The Voice of Wrigley Field,” Wayne Messmer, a 1972 graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University, was one of four people inducted into the 2010 Signature Sinfonian class of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia on July 7.

Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, which is the oldest and largest music fraternity for men, recognizes alumni members who have achieved a high standard of accomplishment in their field or profession.

Daniel Krueger, director of alumni engagement for the fraternity, says “While Phi Mu Alpha is a music fraternity, we have members whose professional accomplishments continue within and beyond the field of music. The Signature Sinfonian award recognizes these members for a lifetime of excellence. It is truly an honor to have… Messmer represent the ideals of our fraternity through his personal and professional accomplishments.”

Messmer, of Glenview, Ill., is the public address announcer for the Chicago Cubs. He sings The Star-Spangled Banner before Cubs games. Messmer also sings prior to many Chicago Wolves American Hockey League games and is part owner of the Chicago Wolves. And, for many years, he sang for the Chicago Blackhawks, Chicago White Sox and Chicago Sting.

Recent Graduate Earns Prestigious Fellowship in Washington, D.C.

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Recent Illinois Wesleyan University graduate Charlie Sell of Wauconda, Ill., has been admitted into the prestigious James H. Dunn Memorial Fellowship Program.

The Fellowship will take Sell to Washington D.C. where he will act as a liaison between the federal government and the governor’s office for the state of Illinois. Several Dunn Fellows are chosen each year to work at offices in Springfield and Chicago, but only one fellow is slated to work in the three-person Washington, D.C. office. This is the second year in a row that an Illinois Wesleyan graduate has secured the Washington, D.C. slot. Illinois Wesleyan 2009 alumna Christine Gibbs was honored with the fellowship last year.

Sell, a 2010 graduate with a degree in political science, will be a full-time employee of the Illinois state government for the next year. “The office serves as a point of contact between state-level government and the federal government,” said Sell. “My job will be to help communicate with the governor’s office and see they get the information they need to help the state.” Sell said the office keeps close track of information on topics such as jobs, health care and the stimulus package.

According to Illinois Wesleyan University Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science James Simeone, the D.C. fellowship is bestowed upon top students from the state. “This is a very competitive and very coveted prize for students of political science,” he said.

Alumni Forge Careers in Emerging Media

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – E-blast, pay-per-click, tweet, update, blog – all of these are tools of social media marketers, a job that didn’t even exist 10 years ago. Now many people, including some Illinois Wesleyan University alumni, are using the Internet and e-communications as an integral part of their careers.

“Honestly, I didn’t even know this area existed when I was studying in school,” said Kyle Brigham, a senior search marketing manager at L2T Media in Chicago, an agency that specializes in helping businesses market through online media. Brigham said he planned for a career in media marketing after graduating from Illinois Wesleyan in 2006 with a major in business administration and a minor in music. Though he began as a promotions director for a local radio station, he was soon offered a job with L2T Media, where he assists clients in setting up and managing profiles on Internet-based media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. “I was looking for something big,” he said.

Social media marketing is an expanding field. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a continued growth in public relations, especially with the emergence of social media. Social media sites, like Facebook, boast millions of users, which means millions of people for businesses and organizations to reach.

Alumna Makes International Opera Debut

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Elementary music teacher by day, international opera star on the weekend.

Welcome to the whirlwind life of 2001 Illinois Wesleyan University graduate Sarah Sipll, who recently made her international opera debut in Mazatlan and Culiacan, Mexico. The debut, which occurred Friday, May 7, 2010, was a Wagner Gala concert with the Orqesta Sinfonica Sinaloa des las Artes.

Sipll, an instrumental music education major at IWU, earned her spot in the opera after placing second in the 2009 Concurso di Canto Sinaloa Vocal Competition in Culiacan, Mexico. The opportunity occurred after nine years of studying opera nights and weekends while juggling her full-time job teaching music at an elementary school in the Chicago-land area.

“I went to Culiacan thinking of it as another opportunity to sing for people,” said Sipll. “I had no idea I would advance to the finals, go on to win Second Place and be chosen to solo with the OSSLA and the Mexico City Philharmonic. It was quite an honor.”

According to reviews from Mexico, opera spectators in Mazatlan, Mexico felt the honor was theirs as they sat spellbound in the theater engulfed by Siplls voice, which rose and fell to the dramatic movements of the opera. Hector Guadado, a reviewer from Noroeste Mazatlan, described the voice of the young lead as “substantial and rich,” with the power to “assert itself over a large orchestra and reach bright high notes that impart a dark quality to her interpretation.”

Alumna Named New Registrar

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – An alumna of Illinois Wesleyan University has been selected to fill the position of Registrar. Leslie Betz will begin her duties on July 1, taking over for Jeffrey Frick, who has been named the dean and academic vice president at St. Norbert College, De Pere, Wis.

Betz joins Illinois Wesleyan after serving as the associate dean of the graduate school at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill.

After graduating from Illinois Wesleyan in 1993, Betz continued her education at Illinois State University (ISU), where she earned a master’s degree in business administration and a doctorate in educational administration.

Her career in higher education has included serving as the coordinator of development at Heartland Community College in Normal, and as the academic advisor and coordinator for the M.B.A Program at ISU. During her tenure at Bradley, she assisted in the development of new graduate programs such as the professional master’s degree of arts in “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, and math) education, and the master’s degree of science in quantitative finance.

New Chemistry Graduate Receives NSF Fellowship

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Recent Illinois Wesleyan University graduate Jennifer Faust has received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.

A chemistry major from Saint Louis, Mo., Faust graduated in May from Illinois Wesleyan, receiving both the David Bailey Prize in Chemistry and The Harold C. Hodges President’s Club Award.

The prestigious NSF fellowship recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in the U.S. and abroad. Faust will begin work toward a doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, next fall.

Ceramics and Painting on Display in Art Galleries

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The ceramics of Michael Schwegmann and the paintings of alumna Kay Seefeld will be displayed in Illinois Wesleyan University’s Merwin and Wakeley Galleries, respectively, from May 5 through May 26.

The galleries are located in the Joyce Eichhorn Ames School of Art Building (6 Ames Plaza West, Bloomington). The opening reception for both exhibitions will be held on Thursday, May 6 from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Alumnus Honored for Excellence in Research

Illinois Wesleyan University alumnus Eric Gardner recently received the 2010 Earl L. Warrick Award for Excellence in Research from Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU), where he is a professor of English. The award is given each year to one of SVSU’s 300 faculty members whose research maintains the highest quality over a period of time.

A 1989 graduate from Illinois Wesleyan with a degree in English, Gardner is known for his work on 19th-century African-American writers and activists. He is the author of Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2009), and has edited several books, including Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery (Toby Press, 2005), which explores the work of African-American playwrights like William Wells Brown and Pauline Hopkins; and Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (UP of Mississippi, 2007).

Biology Graduate Creating Bridges to Conservation with Web Site

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University alumnus Jeffrey Klemens is, in many ways, a translator. Not only does the 1998 biology graduate help coordinate and translate during an annual May Term course to Costa Rica, he also is the president of a conservation organization that helps researchers from different fields understand each other’s work.

“Researchers are a highly independent group,” said Klemens, who founded Investigadores del Área de Conservación Guanacaste (iACG) several years ago with the aim of helping to coordinate research work done in the Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), a national park in the northwest part of Costa Rica. “All of us speak our own language, and it’s the language of highly technical academic publications. It’s currently very difficult for conservation managers who want to extract information from the primary literature to do so, unless they’ve had fairly extensive scientific training.” Enter iACG, a Web site and database helping researchers working in the ACG. “I hope iACG can serve as a bridge between the community of researchers who work in the ACG and the rest of the park,” said Klemens.

Klemens’ interest in travel stems from his time at Illinois Wesleyan, where he took field courses that took him to Guyana in South America and to Australia. He first journeyed to Costa Rica in 1998 before beginning his doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania under world-renowned tropical ecologist Dan Jansen. “On that trip I conducted a study that was an extension of what I had been doing at IWU with migratory birds and pesticides,” said Klemens, who published his work along with Illinois Wesleyan Professor of Biology Given Harper, Professor of Chemistry and Associate Provost Jeff Frick, and several Illinois Wesleyan undergraduates, who conducted the lab work on campus.

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