Know Thyself Series

Travis Talmadge ’09 has a hot idea — bringing sauna and bathhouse culture, which has long existed in Scandinavia and Japan, to America. He co-founded Bathhouse, “a home for people to look, feel, and perform their very best.”

Connie Halporn K’78 fights both on the mat as a 6th degree judo black belt and in the nonprofit sphere as chair of the National Women’s Martial Arts Federation. Halporn’s judo journey began in high school and continued to blossom at Kirkland College, where she first started leading judo classes.

Victor Maldonado ’86 has no plans to retire from practicing immigration law anytime soon. In fact, he’s pushing himself harder than ever. Last summer, Maldonado swam the English Channel, a course considered the “Mt. Everest of Open Water Swimming” — and he’s not stopping there.

As a research hydrogeologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, Michelle Walvoord ’93 is forging new frontiers in studying the impact of changes and instability on groundwater.

Omar Reid ’80 gets around. As a school psychologist and president of the Black Mental Health Alliance of Massachusetts, he has visited schools across the state and worked with children for 40 years.

Consider the endangered dusky gopher frog. When threatened, the best this three-inch amphibian can do is cover its eyes with its hands. By 2002, its habitat had shrunk to only one or two ponds in Mississippi. It likely would have become extinct had Joe Pechmann ’76, a population ecologist at Western Carolina University, not come to the rescue.

For Katie Veasey ’17, golf is all about the greens — and we’re not talking about the putting area. As a golf sustainability consultant at WM, formerly Waste Management, she works with some of professional golf’s biggest tournaments to make their events eco-friendlier by reducing waste and carbon emissions.

Scott Kelsey ’93 is a vocal beneficiary — and architect — of compassionate communities. He’s the founder of Shareapy.com, a platform that connects people to therapeutic support from guided peer groups.

Fresh off his second term in the White House as U.S. secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack ’72 has joined the World Food Prize Foundation as CEO. The organization is devoted to driving transformative change in food security and sustainable agriculture.

When Tori Campbell Nelson ’86 talks, children listen. The co-founder and anchor of KidNuz, “a fun, fresh, first-of-its-kind kids’ podcast,” delivers age-appropriate news stories to her third- to sixth-grade audience five days a week.