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The Grinnell College Alumni Council selected 13 remarkable Grinnellians to receive Alumni Awards during Alumni Assembly at Reunion. Nominated by their classmates and peers, this year’s recipients distinguished themselves by embodying the College’s mission of lifetime learning and service.

Alumni Award Honorees

Front row (l-r):

• Alan Cohen ’72
• Samuel Sellers ’00
• Rhonda Stuart ’86
• Jim Lowry ’61
• Ron Gault ’62

Back row (l-r):

• Katherine “Kit” Wall ’77
• Jodie Levin-Epstein ’72
• Karmi Anna Mattson ’97
• Kate Stephan Villers ’61
• Sherry Davis Gupta ’88
• Dick Knapp ’76

Not pictured:

• Rebecca Quirk ‘86
• Julian Zebot ’00

Darrell Scott ’87 never dreamed that he’d be a basketball coach. The Gary, Indiana, native played ball at Grinnell College, but armed with a chemistry degree and a desire to teach, he figured his hoops days were behind him.

In 1990, Scott volunteered as a men’s assistant coach at South Suburban Community College in South Holland, Illinois. “I hadn’t coached before, but I needed to fill that competitive drive and since I couldn’t play, the only way to do it was coaching,” he says. Two years later, he became the school’s women’s coach.

In 2020, Scott retired after 28 seasons from the only head coaching job he’s ever held. That same year, he was inducted into the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. He brought six women’s teams to the national tournament, coached 12 National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) All-Americans, was inducted into the NJCAA Region IV Hall of Fame in 2016, and reached a milestone 500th win in 2018.

What he loved most about coaching was the players. “Bringing in kids when people questioned their drive, commitment, and their dedication to the game and getting these young ladies to buy into a system and a team was incredibly rewarding,” he says.

Photo: Darrell Scott, center, is joined by his mother-in-law, Barbara Townsend, left, and his wife, Kimberly Townsend-Scott ’88, at a family dinner.
 

For Sam Harris ’58, watching the Russians attack Ukraine took him back to September 1939 when Nazi planes ripped apart his Polish village, changing his life forever. He was just 4 years old.

“It’s happening all over again,” Harris says. He survived the Nazi camps because his sisters hid him and stole food for him. Their love kept him alive.

As a Grinnellian, Harris was well-equipped for a lifetime of contributing to the greater good. Vocal Holocaust deniers inspired him to write a children’s book, Sammy: Child Survivor of the Holocaust, and he now speaks to groups of all ages about what he endured

He also worked tirelessly to build a world-class Holocaust museum in Skokie, Illinois. Today, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center draws tens of thousands of visitors every year — many of them schoolchildren — with the mission of preventing future genocides.

In March, Harris received the museum’s Survivor Legacy Award. More than 1,000 attended the awards banquet, including former President George W. Bush and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

“It’s a magnificent honor,” Harris says. COVID-19 concerns prevented him from attending but granddaughter Jessica Kreamer accepted the award for him.

“She wants to carry the torch,” Harris says. “This is what makes me happy.”

For Valencia Alvarez ’20, the journey from her hometown of Yucaipa, California, to Grinnell was notable for several reasons. She was the first in her family to attend college, it was the first time she had traveled by plane, and Iowa was the farthest she’d ever been from home.

By the time Alvarez graduated, she was a Fulbright Scholar who had visited more than a half dozen countries to study immigration and global health issues through the College’s Institute for Global Engagement (IGE).

“As part of the Global Learning Program, we learned about education within migrant communities, talked to border patrol agents about security and policies, spoke to migrants about their experiences, and visited Greece and Germany at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis,” she says.

In September 2021, Alvarez traveled to Mexico to help students learn English and focus on empowering girls through soccer. Once that is completed, she will use a Stouffer Fellowship to earn her master’s in public health, then hopes to work as a public health provider helping immigrant and vulnerable communities.

“As long as you’re able to open your mind to the world, you’re able to learn a lot about yourself and the world in the process,” she says.

Heather Benning ’96 never thought she would be part of conversations that decided the course of the NCAA basketball tournament and other collegiate sports championships.

In a volunteering journey that started when she was soccer coach at Grinnell College 18 years prior, Benning was part of the team that guided the country’s largest collegiate amateur sports organization through the pandemic. A member of the NCAA board of governors and chair of the Division III Management Council, Benning helped tackle sport cancellations; return to competition; student-athlete eligibility; name, image, and likeness; and a bevy of other substantial issues.

It was exhilarating and exhausting.

“It was an excellent professional opportunity to be at the table during a crisis,” Benning says. “I got to hear how the pandemic was affecting different institutions and conferences and take part in unprecedented discussion about how to move forward with college sports during a pandemic.”

Benning has served as executive director of the Midwest Conference since March 2014. She oversees the administration of 18 varsity sports and is the conference’s chief administrator on financial, compliance, and operational matters.

“My volunteer roles with the NCAA helped me feel really grounded when I would have conversations in the Midwest Conference about what we were going to do as a league,” Benning says.

Sisters Nancy Welch Barnby ’61 and Jill Welch ’64 said they never felt under pressure to attend Grinnell College. It was just an expectation that they never questioned.

“When we started thinking about college, there was never a question of where my sister and I would apply,” Jill Welch says. “We slept and ate Grinnell from the time we knew what a college was.”

The Grinnell tradition began when Hazel Wilson 1906 married Carl Wright 1905. All four of their children (Margaret Wright Gleysteen ’32, Janet Wright Welch ’34, Catharine Wright Carns ’38 and James “Bob” Wright ’44) attended Grinnell. From this generation, all but one of Nancy and Jill’s aunts and uncles are also Grinnell alumni.

With the arrival of Lucy Hartley ’25, Jill’s granddaughter, on campus for fall 2021 classes, there are now five generations of Grinnellians in the family. When her great-aunt learned of Lucy’s college choice, she mailed a symbolic gift to her — Nancy’s Honor G sweater.

“When I decided on Grinnell, my grandmother was so excited,” Lucy recalls. “It was the height of the pandemic, so we were on Facetime. I was glad that I got to see the look on her face.”

Born and raised in Nepal, Suyog Shrestha ’06 knew early on that he wanted to study physics in the United States; and in the summer of 2002, he came to Grinnell. Now a particle physicist, he’s been working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), just outside Geneva, Switzerland, for the past decade.

“CERN’s like a big Grinnell but dedicated to physics,” says Shrestha. “It’s a Disneyland for physicists, very diverse and international.”

Shrestha describes his research as “finding new laws of nature.” The overarching goal of his research is to understand the fundamental constituents of the universe. His work has practical applications in data science, supercomputing, nuclear medicine, medical imaging, and radiation therapy for cancer.

Shrestha was also part of a team that convinced Nepal government officials to invest more in basic science. He helped form a partnership between CERN and Nepal to provide an exchange of technology and knowledge — including the donation of 200 extremely powerful computer servers to a university in Nepal.

“We do a kind of on-the-road program in Nepal for villages, schools, colleges, and cities, to bring a flavor of the research we do,” he says. —

When racing was shut down by the pandemic, Neil Martin ’99 didn’t stop. He did dozens of 26.2-mile training runs, the equivalent of 57 marathons in a row. That’s one every weekend.

Martin is clinical director of radiation oncology and co-director of the Prostate Cancer Center at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center in Boston. Running was a stress reliever at an incredibly stressful time.

“All of a sudden we had to figure out how to keep seeing patients and keep the staff safe,” he says. “In the early days, it was really emotionally fraught.”

And so began the streak. The first April weekend, Martin took on the Boston Marathon course a bit slower than he wanted, so he decided to aim faster for the next weekend. He would run with a friend or two and soon running 26.2 miles on an early Saturday morning felt normal.

“That state of really concentrating and pushing and working at something is really appealing to me,” explains Martin. “There are periods where you are sort of in flow and it feels effortless, and there are long periods where it’s hard, and you’re telling your body to keep going.”

During his Grinnell student days, Kyle Parker ’17 found himself either asking basketball teammates to cut his hair or trying to navigate his full schedule and find transportation to get to a barbershop in Des Moines.

Eventually, he reached out to his Des Moines barber and asked if he would come to Grinnell to provide haircuts. The result was overwhelmingly positive — the clients were multiple, and the barber’s travel and time were well-compensated.

Parker knew he was onto something. That year, he founded ClipDart, an on-demand mobile barber service for people who do not have reliable access to barbershop services that focus on their specific hair care needs.

“For Black and Latino people, part of our culture is our hair. Our barbers can be therapists. They provide safe havens in the community,” he explains. “Some people know their barbers as well as they know their parents. When you go away from that, you feel like a part of yourself is missing.”

After the pandemic halted his professional basketball career in Germany last year, Parker returned to the United States and launched an app for ClipDart. The service has resulted in a new way to do business for barbers and a boost in positive self-esteem for clients, he says.

As he worked to adjust his everyday life to the new realities created by COVID-19, Josh Blue ’01 faced one of the tougher challenges posed by the pandemic: how to ensure young students continue to learn amid drastically altered learning environments. And for an added layer of difficulty, he did it in a city that has no shortage of educational expectations.

“Hong Kong is fast-paced and highly driven, and expectations are incredibly high,” Blue says. “Trying to find a system that would work for us, that was manageable, and that would appease parents was the real challenge.”

Blue, head of primary at Discovery College Hong Kong, says international schools in Hong Kong operate much like U.S. schools, and the language of instruction is English. A major difference comes in the diversity of the student body in Hong Kong, with many students’ families coming from abroad, creating a greater mix of language backgrounds.

“I definitely think that Grinnell helped encourage a global mindset,” he says, “and instilled the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice — the heart of being international-minded