Archive

Suzi Pearson, B.A. ’94, M.P.A. ’03, has worked her entire career at AWAIC, the state's largest women's shelter, where she is now executive director. Violence, she says, has become part of our lives in Alaska. "Let’s find a way to change that.”

With more than 100 spoken languages, Anchorage is among the country's most diverse cities. "It's a challenge in Anchorage," said Heather MacAlpine, director of the Office of Equal Opportunity. "I find that really exciting."

Douglas Baye loves his home country, Nigeria, but the swan song of continuing his education drew him to Anchorage, where he is taking project management classes at UAA, advocating for other international students through his student job, playing soccer and winning the respect of colleagues. Now, Douglas has received one of the Chancellor's Martin Luther King Jr. Student Appreciation Awards.

With three academic degrees and eight current athletic records, Karolin Anders is, to put it numerically, a first-rate student-athlete. This May, she'll earn a master's in English and hopes to compete at nationals for the fifth year in a row.

Wildlife geneticist Ora Russ, M.S. '15, turned her graduate thesis into an opportunity for Alaska when her research, identifying populations of little-understood Bering cisco, greenlit a commercial fishery on the Yukon River.

Katie O'Loughlin has a passion for theatre, dance and connecting with people in a way that helps them find fulfillment outside their workaday lives. She recently tried her skills as a director, designer and choreographer for the first time in UAA's production of 'Middle Ground.'

Chrisalyn Johnson and Leah Swiss have a lot in common: both sophomores, both Dimond High grads, both members of UAA's volleyball team, and both high-achieving students with Alaska-focused careers in mind.

Patti Truesdell, B.Ed. '02 — a recent BP Teacher of the Year recipient — is one of two teachers in Hope, where she teaches K-12 every day (with pancake breaks) in a nontraditional classroom perfect for this nontraditional education grad.

Making connections is Byron Lowe II's passion. The UAA senior shoulders a double major in management and marketing, interns with Anchorage School District and oversees callers and student shift leads for UAA's Phonathon.

Ana Tatafu was born in American Samoa and, at age 10, moved to Anchorage. Now, the first-generation college student—a CBPP Leadership Fellow protégé and Gilman scholarship winner—has studied in Mexico and is poised to earn her accounting degree this spring.