Profile

On a hot summer day in August 1946, Davis “Dave” Scott walked across campus from his dorm room in Langan to audition for the Grinnell College band.

The young French horn player from Mendota, Illinois, was more than a little intimidated. The windows were wide open in the old music building, says Scott, “and I heard this beautiful music coming out, and I literally got cold feet. I thought, ‘I can’t play the horn that good,’ so I turned tail and went back to Langan and stuck my horn in the closet.”

Scott went on to have a successful career — both at Grinnell and then as a speech pathology professor, retiring from Minnesota State University, Moorhead — but he rarely touched his French horn.

Nearly six decades later at age 80, Scott decided to give horn-playing another shot and joined the Fargo-Moorhead Golden Notes Band for seniors. Today at age 95, he belongs to three bands. With practices weekly and gigs every other week, music keeps Scott busy.

“When I picked up the horn again, I regretted all of a sudden that I didn’t go into the music building at Grinnell and try my best,” Scott says. “For the past 15 years, music has been a big part of my life.”

One of Irma McClaurin’s most treasured possessions is a set of slightly tattered volumes of poetry she wrote as a child. “My mother saved them,” she says. “I thought they’d been lost.”
McClaurin says the books illustrate how the ephemera of our lives are often worth preserving.

In February, McClaurin visited Grinnell as a Mellon Foundation Humanities in Action alumna scholar in residence. She delivered a Scholars’ Convocation, led a Community Friday seminar, made in-class presentations, and more.

McClaurin also collaborated with students to envision plans for a possible future archive of the Black Experience at Grinnell. In 2016, she established the Black Feminist Archives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which includes her own archives.

“There is an urgent need to lift up Black women,” McClaurin writes. “This act of preserving Black women’s lives is the responsibility of all of us, if we desire a complete history that will reflect the full range of the events and people who have shaped this country.”

Originally from Chicago, McClaurin graduated from Grinnell with a degree in American studies. She later earned MFA (English/creative writing), MA, and PhD degrees (both in anthropology) from the University of Massachusetts. Grinnell honored McClaurin with an honorary Doctor of Social Studies degree and an Alumni Award in 2023.

An acclaimed poet, during her career McClaurin also held faculty positions at Grinnell and two other universities (both tenured) and served as president of Shaw University. Other roles have included Black feminist activist, philanthropist, consultant, federal employee, and chief diversity officer.

“I’m hoping that what I start here, which is documenting and excavating the Black Experience at Grinnell, becomes a real thing that is tangible so that I can say, ‘Well, I helped to get that started. That came out of the work that I was doing as part of my presence on campus.’”

There are plenty of book workshops out there for writers. But Amy Goldmacher recently held a “book work-ship.”

A book coach, writer, and anthropologist, Goldmacher organized a Craft and Publishing Voyage aboard the Queen Mary 2 this spring while it crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

Goldmacher’s interest in literature dates to her days as a Grinnell student, and her passion for the written word has never waned. She’s discovered unique ways to scratch that itch throughout her career.

After college, Goldmacher’s first job was with an academic publishing company. “I loved being engaged with books and wanted to become an editor working with authors and shepherding books to publication,” she says. She started as an editorial assistant and moved into marketing and then sales.

In 2013, Goldmacher started her own consulting business as a workplace anthropologist, doing qualitative and ethnographic research interviewing and observing individuals and groups and then discovering actionable patterns in the resulting data.

Goldmacher’s experiences writing and publishing a memoir, co-writing and publishing an anthropology textbook, and working in the publishing industry provide the backdrop for her current work as a nonfiction book and proposal coach, assisting others in learning the ins and outs of getting their works written and published.

Participating in an externship while she was a Grinnell student helped Miranda Thomas ’17 confirm her interest in veterinary medicine. Now a veterinarian herself, Thomas returned to the externship program as a mentor last spring to help a current Grinnell student explore the field of veterinary medicine.

During externships, students participate in short-term job shadowing with Grinnell alumni over spring break. Externship experiences help students gain firsthand experience with potential career paths and make professional connections.

Thomas had been interested in veterinary medicine since middle school, and as a second-year student in 2015, the Center for Careers, Life, and Service matched her with Sara Mathews ’82, who owned and operated a small animal hospital in Florida.

Eight years later, Thomas served as a host, welcoming Regan Reedy ’26 to extern with her at an exotic animal veterinarian office.

“When I registered to host an externship student, it felt a bit ‘full circle’,” Thomas says. “I was able to explore this field during my time at Grinnell and then share that opportunity with my visiting student now that I am into my career. We were super busy with patients, coordinating with veterinary technicians and other doctors in the hospital, but also chatted about how I use my learning from Grinnell to problem solve and communicate clearly with pet owners and my coworkers.”

Recently, three Grinnell alumni with expertise in alternative dispute resolution joined other specialists in the field to offer hands-on training in mediation and conflict resolution skills to students. These on-campus interactions provided an insider’s look at career opportunities.
“Mediation is a much more useful and satisfying way to resolve a dispute,” says Gary Doernhoefer ’79. “In litigation it is winner take all, one side wins, one side loses. Mediation lends itself to more nuanced, creative outcomes that preserve relationships.”

A short class and career panel were organized by faculty and staff in Grinnell’s Peace and Conflict Studies concentration, which allows students across all majors to focus on the root causes of violence and conflict and study strategies for bridge-building.

Doernhoefer, Jed Melnick ’94, Amy Gernon ’94, and Alyson Carrel from Northwestern University presented a “Careers in Alternative Dispute Resolution and Mediation” panel discussion.

Melnick says students were exposed to “a set of skills related to communication taught against the backdrop of conflict resolution” that can help in every facet of their lives. “Active listening, empathy, creative problem solving, expanding the pie, are all skills that are valuable in friendships, relationships, business dealings, and life in general.” Melnick says. In addition, “they heard how those conflict resolution skills can be utilized in their careers in a variety of ways — whether they are in the field of conflict resolution or not.”

For more information about the mediation initiative, email Susan Kriegel.

Vanessa Harris ’76 received the prestigious Leaders for a New Chicago Award last summer for the profound impact that Harris’ organization, the Strategy for Access Foundation, has made in producing short videos celebrating and informing Chicago’s vast disability community.

As someone living with disabilities, both visible and invisible, Harris says that creative solutions have been a critical life skill.

“I’ve always been a problem solver because I’ve always had disabilities, and they lead me to come up with solutions that other people may not,” Harris says. “Many people with disabilities have to do the same thing because no one is looking out for them.”

Harris had been prepared to pursue a PhD in the mid-2010s, however the faculty member Harris had hoped to work with withdrew funding without notice. Soon after, Harris’ doctor said, “Vanessa, go and do something else for a few weeks. Do not think about this.” That something else turned out to be a documentary film class at the Hyde Park Arts Center. “And here I am 120 videos later,” Harris says.

Several Grinnell students and alumni have interned at Strategy for Access, including Elizabeth Zerez ’22 and Abby Lynch ’24. Harris is hopeful more Grinnellians might be interested in getting involved as interns, volunteers, board members, or in some other capacity.

For many people, the only message they’ve ever seen frosted on a cake is “Happy Birthday.” But for Becca Rea-Tucker ’15, cakes are a medium for sharing political messages.

One scroll through Rea-Tucker’s Instagram, @thesweetfeminist, shows decadent desserts bedecked with political slogans and empowering messages for her followers, such as “I’m proud of you,” “Hello, I’m vegan,” and “Pro-abortion forever.”

Combining her cakes with her politics wasn’t always on Rea-Tucker’s agenda. She credits her interest in baking to her grandmother, from whom she first learned to bake. Rea-Tucker went on to hone her cooking skills while living in Food House at Grinnell.

A year after graduation, Rea-Tucker and a roommate started a food blog. “It was mostly just for me in the beginning, but then it snowballed, and very quickly got much bigger than I anticipated,” says Rea-Tucker. “I found a great community that way.”

In April, Rea-Tucker returned to campus to offer several baking presentations. During Baking with Becca, students joined her for a cake workshop in the Marcus Family Global Kitchen. Students decorated cakes with political messages, and Rea-Tucker talked about processing feelings through baking.

“I loved seeing so much enthusiasm for a feminist approach to baking,” she says.

“What does ag science have to do with pandemic public health?” That’s what Doane Chilcoat ’93 found himself asking in 2020 amid news of COVID-19 outbreaks. As it turns out, the link between the two lay in Chilcoat’s area of expertise — molecular genetics.

“Genetic screening is pretty much the same in humans as it is in plants,” he says.

A Grinnell biology graduate, Chilcoat led a large research and development group at Corteva Agriscience in Johnston, Iowa. At the outset of the pandemic, Iowa’s PCR testing capacity was inadequate to effectively track the COVID-19 virus. Chilcoat and his colleagues wondered if Corteva’s expertise in largescale genetic screening could help meet the demand.

In April 2020, the Corteva team began to provide rapid, low-cost COVID-19 testing to MercyOne health facilities. A testing program run through Corteva also helped allow small cohorts of Grinnell students to return to campus.

What came next was even more unprecedented than an agriscience company doing health care — the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contacted the Corteva team. The foundation wanted to support programs that used automation and robotics to test at a high scale.

“The volume of molecular testing in agriculture biotech industry is greater than that in health care, historically,” Chilcoat explains. “So Corteva was more prepared for the massive scale of genetic testing that a pandemic response demanded.”

By nearly any measure, Eugenia Corrales ’87 isn’t your typical CEO. By Silicon Valley standards, she’s an absolute rarity.

Female and Hispanic, Corrales was born and raised in Costa Rica. She has had leadership roles at tech giants Hewlett-Packard and Cisco, started and sold her own company, and has been called in to help several startups grow and flourish.

In recent years she’s been at the helm of Nefeli Networks, a California-based cloud network management company.

“The advantage of small companies is that you have a very big impact,” she says. “Every day you come in, it matters, and I really enjoy that. I like feeling that all that energy and effort I put in is impactful. I think I’ll do startups for the rest of my career.”

A physics major at Grinnell, Corrales cites her mentors Charlie Duke and Bob Cadmus, professors emeriti of physics. “They were wonderful teachers and they helped me prepare for graduate school,” says Corrales. She also credits her tutorial adviser, Roberta Atwell, professor emerita of education, as another important influence. “I’d go back to her when things were rough, and she would pump me up and help me take on the world.”

After Bailey Dann ’17 graduated from Grinnell, she returned to Fort Hall, Idaho, intending to take the summer to plan next steps for pursuing a teaching career. But soon into this process, her phone rang. It was the principal of Chief Taghee Elementary, a Shoshone language dual-immersion charter school.

Dann, who is from the Shoshone-Bannock tribes, only knew a few Shoshone phrases yet agreed to work as a Shoshone language teacher.

“Our language has not been spoken in my family in the last four decades except in little bits and pieces here and there,” Dann says. “One of my gifts is language learning, and I’ve been fortunate to be able to gain fluency in Shoshone by learning from elders in our community.”

Currently, Dann is pursuing a master’s in linguistic anthropology from Idaho State University.

Her graduate thesis is focused on an accessible curriculum guide for Indigenous language teaching and planning.

“A guide like this doesn’t exist within my community,” she says. “I’m applying specific methods and theories that envelop the whole learner. A big part of my project is letting others know they are not alone. It is intensive work, but we are here. It takes an entire community to bring back a language.