LAURELS

SANDHURST MILITARY GRAD First Lieutenant PETER E. COLOMBO, A08, is the twelfth U.S. Army officer to graduate from Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. After graduating magna cum laude from Tufts with degrees in international relations and Spanish, he studied civil-military relations in El Salvador on a Fulbright Scholarship. He enlisted in the army in June 2011, graduating second in his class from Officer Candidate School five months later. Sandhurst, which also trained princes William and Harry, awarded Colombo the Brunei Prize for academic excellence. Now he’s training to be an Army Ranger, stationed at Fort Hood in Texas.

NEW ADVISORS ERIN C. CONATON, F95, former U.S. undersecretary of defense, has been appointed to the Board of Advisors to the Fletcher School. MARK D. GOODMAN, G94, chairman and CEO of Boyer Coffee Company in Denver, and LAURIE A. GABRIEL, J76, a university trustee, have joined the Board of Advisors to the School of Arts and Sciences.

GREEN FOR LIFE ANTHONY D. CORTESE, E68, E72, a seminal figure in advancing sustainability in higher education over a forty-year career, received the Environmental Protection Agency’s Lifetime Achievement Award in June. He is a cofounder of Second Nature, a Boston-based organization that promotes a sustainable society through higher education; he was the organization’s president for two decades and is now a senior fellow. A Tufts trustee, Cortese was the university’s first dean of environmental programs, and in 1989 founded the Tufts Environmental Literacy Institute, which helped integrate environmental perspectives into more than 175 courses. He is also a former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. Cortese was also tapped to receive an honorary doctorate during the dedication ceremony for SUNY Oswego’s Richard S. Shineman Center for Science, Engineering, and Innovation.

HALL OF FAME SAILOR DAVE CURTIS, E69, A07P, the seven-time Etchells World Champion and two-time Rolex Yachtsman of the Year, will be inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame on October 27 in Annapolis, Maryland. A two-time Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association All-American at Tufts, Curtis went on to a career as a sailmaker known for his fast sails.

SPORTS MEDICINE HEAD WILLIAM W. DEXTER, a professor of family medicine at Tufts and founder and director of the sports medicine program at Maine Medical Center, is the new president of the American College of Sports Medicine, which has 50,000 members in more than seventy countries.

LITERACY ADVOCATES STEVEN KOLTAI, A76, F78, managing director of Koltai & Company and former chair of the Literacy Network of Greater Los Angeles, and MARYANNE WOLF, the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and director of Tufts’ Center for Reading and Language Research, have been named to the advisory board for the new Library of Congress Literacy Awards. The awards will be conferred for the first time in October to recognize outstanding achievements in literacy. At Tufts, Koltai serves on the boards of the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and the Gordon Institute’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Program.

CHILD-HEALTH ADVOCATES CHIE KOTAKE and ELIZABETH SHUEY, both doctoral candidates in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, have received Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being. They are two of only fifteen recipients nationally. The fellowships, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, are designed to foster leadership in policies to enhance child development and reduce child maltreatment. Kotake’s research focuses on the relationship between parents’ mental health and the development of young children facing adversity. Shuey is studying immigrant families’ child-care constraints and preferences.

PEN LITERARY AWARDS JILL LEPORE, J87, a Harvard historian and staff writer for The New Yorker, was the runner-up for the PEN Literary Awards Diamonstein-Spielvogel Prize for her book The Story of America (Princeton University Press), in which she examines American origin stories, from John Smith’s account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural address.

HEAD OF EPA GINA McCARTHY, G81, was appointed administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this summer. She has devoted her thirty-year career to environmental issues at the state and local levels. Before President Obama appointed her assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation in 2009, she had been commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

AMBASSADOR NOMINEES President Obama has nominated BRIAN A. NICHOLS, A87, as the next U.S. ambassador to Peru and MICHAEL A. HAMMER, F87, as the new ambassador to Chile. Both men are career Foreign Service officers. Nichols is principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs at the State Department. He has had postings in Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, and El Salvador. Hammer is assistant secretary for public affairs at State. From 2009 to 2011, he was special assistant to the president, senior director for press and communications, and National Security Council spokesperson at the White House. Since joining the Foreign Service in 1988, Hammer has served in Bolivia, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark.

WHITE HOUSE STAFFER The new special assistant to President Obama and communications director for First Lady Michelle Obama is MARIA CRISTINA GONZALEZ NOGUERA, J97. She had been global vice president for corporate communications at Estée Lauder.

GREAT WAR COMMISSION LIBBY H. O’CONNELL, J76, the chief historian and a senior vice president at A+E Television—she developed the History Channel’s veterans outreach initiative—has been appointed to the World War I Centennial Commission by President Obama. The group will develop plans for commemorating the Great War through programs and other events that will run through 2019.

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED EDITOR CHRIS STONE, A91, the son of a career newspaperman, has been named managing editor of Sports Illustrated. After earning his graduate degree from Columbia University School of Journalism in 1992, he took an entry-level job with SI as a fact-checker. Now he leads the day-to-day operations of the magazine, which has a circulation of more than three million. He oversaw the May 6, 2013, issue, in which the NBA’s Jason Collins came out as the first openly gay male athlete to play for a professional U.S. team. Stone appeared on the CBS news program Face the Nation to talk about the ways in which Collins’ announcement resonated with readers.

PEW SCHOLAR QIAOBING XU, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts, has been named a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The program, past winners of which have included Nobel laureates and MacArthur fellows, funds talented researchers in the life sciences. Xu will receive $240,000 over four years for his research on biomedical applications of nanotechnology. He is trying to repurpose tendon fibers to create tubular blood vessel grafts that could be used in repairing rotator cuffs, regenerating nerves, or treating vascular disease.