Alumni Accolades January 2015

2013 Scholars Madison Pfaff and Kassra Homaifar were Masters of Ceremonies at the TEDxUNC Talks last week. Kavita Shukla (2002), inventor of Fresh Paper and CEO of Fenugreen, spoke during the conference and Karsten Coates (2012) performed.

Angelo Volandes (1989) recently published a book, The Conversation: A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-life Care. The book is a part memoir and part guide about how American medicine fails patients with serious illness and offers a better approach to improve how Americans live as well as possible for as long as possible. Angelo hopes that it will help translate the intangible complexities of medicine into clear terms so that patients and their families can be empowered and informed when making decisions about how they want to be cared for.

Scott Jennings (1996) was selected as a Bingham Fellow as part of a leadership program of the Leadership Louisville Center. The fellowship seeks to better understand how government works and build a collaborative network to improve how cities partner with state government.

We are excited to share that 3 Coca-Cola Scholars have been selected as part of Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2015:

Neil Chheda (2004), part of the Venture Capital group, is Co-founder of Romulus Capital, a company keen to invest in early-stage start-ups. Their portfolio includes companies such as ScholarLocker, Gyft, and Soundtracker.

Jason Shah (2007), named to the Consumer Tech group, is the Founder of Do.com, a company that helps people run productive meetings. Do.com allows attendees to create visual timelines for meetings, provides a shared canvas for attendees to keep notes, and sends automatic meeting summaries.

Sara Volz (2013), listed in the Energy group, won the top $100,000 award in the 2013 Intel Science Talent Search after conducting an experiment that prompted algae to increase oil production which resulted in creating a powerful alternative to energy from fossil fuel. Look what Sara is up to at MIT in this video created by Intel. Fun fact: Eric Chen (2014) won the top award in 2014 for his research about new treatments for influenza!

Philip McAdoo (1989), former Broadway star of Lion King and Rent, has been chosen to participate in the 2015 Junior Theater Festival on January 16-18, 2015, at the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta.

Raygan Sylvester (2014) was selected to be on the State Farm Youth Advisory Board. These young people will be responsible for dispersing $5 million in grant money to applying nonprofits. Raygan is pictured from when she received a $2,500 grant from State Farm for her nonprofit Think SAFE (Seatbelts Are For Everyone).

Chris Dzurick (2011) was hired in September 2014 as the state director of Missouri FBLA-PBL (Future Business Leaders of America-Phi Beta Lambda) within the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. This places him in charge of approving new and reactivating chapters, working with advisers on membership and recruitment, helping to organize dozens of local conferences, and planning a multi-day state conference of leadership workshops, competitive events and keynotes for members at all levels of the organization.

Alex Dzurick (2008) recently became a published author with his chapter “Water and energy: Essential to the urban landscape” in the e-book Urban Environmental Education, published by Cornell University, EECapacity, and the North American Association for Environmental Education. This project brought together local environmental education experts from urban areas across the country to contribute chapters focusing on educational issues of concern to urban environments.

Both Elise Stefanik (2002) and Ben Sasse (1990) were sworn in last week to their new positions in Congress and the Senate. Read about their election in our November post.