Distinguished Alumnus and Physician Jessie J. Hanna, LC’07, Provides Support in the Battle Against Cancer, in Memory of His Brother
Physician and pediatric cancer researcher Jessie J. Hanna, LC’07, was honored as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus in 2013.
In 2007 Hanna founded the Sean Hanna Foundation in honor of his brother. Sean died on April 28, 2007, at age 20, after fighting cancer for most of his life. The nonprofit foundation assists families and organizations battling cancer and is a lifeline of support for various institutions, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
In 2014 Hanna earned a doctor of medicine degree from Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Research for pediatric cancer is drastically underfunded, making it a “second-class disease,” Hanna wrote in a co-authored 2011 commentary in The Einstein Journal of Biology and Medicine. In addition to his other medical research interests, Hanna is working with the Rwandan ambassador to the United Nations to create a hospital in Rwanda focusing on pediatric cancer.
Hanna has also been active with Jessie’s Wish, The Blood Center of New Jersey, Sigma Phi Epsilon and church groups. Among Hanna’s many awards, he has received scholarships from the dean’s office of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and from the National Arab American Medical Association.
As an undergraduate student, he received Rutgers’ Spirit of Service Award in 2006, and in 2010 was honored with the Rutgers Excellence in Alumni Leadership Edward J. Bloustein Award, recognizing community service outside the university.
In 2007, he represented New Jersey as the recipient of the Jefferson Award, the highest national honor for public service, according to a 2014 profile from Rutgers Today.
Video (2 minutes): Hanna discusses his career and his brother’s legacy. Open the video in a new window.
Distinguished Alumna Ndidiamaka N. Amutah-Onukagha, LC’03, Works to Improve the Health of Women, Babies and Disadvantaged Communities
Ndidiamaka (Ndidi) N. Amutah-Onukagha, LC’03, was honored in 2013 as a Distinguished Alumna of Livingston College at Rutgers University.
Dr. Amutah-Onukagha has been an assistant professor at Tufts University’s School of Medicine, Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, since July 2017. In this capacity her research focuses on adverse birth outcomes for women of color, HIV/AIDS and women of color in an urban context, and community-based participatory research.
She had previously served as an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Services, Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences, at Montclair State University, and was a fellow of the Research Education Institute for Diverse Scholars from 2013-2015.
Dr. Amutah-Onukagha completed her dissertation focused on infant mortality in Washington, DC, and it specifically examined neighborhood level disadvantage, social determinants of health, and race/ethnicity as predictors of infant mortality.
Her research interests include health disparities, reproductive health, infant mortality and HIV/AIDS in ethnic minority populations.
Dr. Amutah-Onukagha has worked as a researcher in community-based research settings in a variety of areas including maternal and child health, health disparities, and HIV/AIDS.
She has published and presented in the area of HIV/AIDS and infant mortality in urban communities.
She also has served as president of the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues and a director of The Women’s Collective, a nonprofit social service agency for women of color who are infected or affected by HIV/AIDS in Washington, DC.
Video (2 minutes, 3 seconds): Amutah-Onukagha discusses her career and the cultural opportunities she experienced at Livingston College. Open the video in a new window.
Photos: (top) Courtesy of Amutah-Onukagha; (bottom) From the 2003 Livingston College yearbook, Diversity: Roots of Knowledge, Volume XIII.
Distinguished Alumnus Nicholas Ferroni, LC’03, Mentors by Shining a Light on History
Educator and historian Nicholas Ferroni, LC’03, was honored as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus in 2013.
Ferroni has received national attention for his unique and innovative methodology in successfully mentoring and reaching contemporary and urban students, and has been featured in various academic and scholarly journals.
Ferroni, a former actor turned teacher, writer and host, was recently named one of the 100 most influential people in America for his commitment to education reform as well as developing a “Teach the Truth” campaign to incorporate more minority figures and groups into the high school social studies curriculum.
Ferroni was also named one of Men’s Fitness magazine’s “25 Fittest Men in the World,” “The Man of Appeal” by Rutgers magazine, and “The Sexiest Teacher Alive” by People magazine. As of 2021 Ferroni is a history teacher at Union High School in Union, New Jersey.
He has written for HuffPost about education, diversity, and his pride in New Jersey, among other issues.
Ferroni has said that since he can’t do history, he teaches it.
His activism inside the classroom, in the media, and online, though, promises to change the history of those he teaches.
His continuing lessons to his students include:
- Advocating for the LGBT community;
- Conducting a social experiment to teach about the underrepresentation of women in Congress;
- Organizing a crowdfunding campaign to help a student and his family recover from a housing crisis.
“Most teachers, including myself, see our students as our ‘kids,’ ” Ferroni told People in 2018. “They are not just students to us, and we care as much about their success in life as their success in class.”
Follow Nicholas Ferroni on Twitter.
Videos: (Center) Ferroni discusses his career and passions. (Bottom) Ferroni’s acceptance video. Or open the videos in a new window.
Professor Carey McWilliams Brought Political Philosophy to Life for Students; Honored with Livingston Legacy Award
Wilson Carey McWilliams (1933–2005), known as Carey, was posthumously honored in 2015 with the Livingston Legacy Award for his role as a distinguished political scientist throughout most of Livingston College’s history.
McWilliams was a political scientist at Livingston College and Rutgers University for 35 years.
McWilliams was born in Santa Monica, California. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1955, then served in the 11th Airborne Division of the United States Army from 1955–1961. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees at the same university. He was also active in the early stages of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the student activist group SLATE.
Prior to teaching at Rutgers he taught at Oberlin College and Brooklyn College. He was also a visiting professor at Yale University, Harvard University and Haverford College. He came to Yale in spring 1969 with a timely and provocative seminar on “American Radical Thought.”
McWilliams was the recipient of the John Witherspoon Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities, conferred by the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, and also served as a Vice-President of the American Political Science Association.
McWilliams was the author of several books, including The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973, University of California Press), for which he won the National Historical Society prize in 1974. In this book, McWilliams argued that there was an “alternative tradition” to the dominant liberal tradition in America, which he variously traced through the thought of the Puritans, the Anti-Federalists, and various major and minor literary figures such as Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Ellison. He argued that this tradition drew philosophical inspiration from ancient Greek and Christian sources manifested in an emphasis upon community and fraternity, which was properly the means to achieving a form of civic liberty. McWilliams was also a prolific essayist.
(You may also open the video in a new window.)
At the 2015 Livingston Legacy Award presentation, Patrick Deneen, a student of McWilliams at the undergraduate and graduate levels, remembered him as a friend and “about the best teacher and finest human this institution ever had the fortune to call its own.”
After her father’s death, Susan McWilliams spoke to Rutgers students about her father’s love for Rutgers and his great interest in his students’ lives.
Leonard M. Klepner, a Livingston College 1972 graduate, also wrote about McWilliams’ friendship and mentorship.
The Livingston College Distinguished Alumni and Livingston Legacy Awards are held approximately every two years by the Livingston Alumni Association of Rutgers University. The 2015 celebration was held Tuesday, November 10 at the Rutgers Club in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Carey McWilliams Loved Rutgers and Took Joy in Sharing in His Students’ Lives: A Daughter’s Tribute
Distinguished Alumnus Robert Bertrand, LC’01, Broadcast Engineer, Reimagined Radio at Rutgers
Robert P. Bertrand, honored in 2015 as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus, is the Chief Technology Officer at WAMU-FM 88.5, the National Public Radio station in Washington, D.C.
Before joining WAMU, Bertrand served for more than five years as the Market Chief Engineer for CBS Radio New York. He oversaw the technical operations of four FM and three AM radio stations, in addition to the CBS Sports Radio Network until January 2016.
At CBS Radio, Bertrand led a team of 20 broadcast engineering and IT pros supporting the more than 500 people who comprise these operations, including 35 studios and 40 news production workstations. Prior to taking the chief role in December 2010, Bertrand served as a broadcast engineer for WCBS 880 for five years.
Bertrand began his commercial radio career at Greater Media’s WCTC and WMGQ in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he discovered his passion for broadcast engineering.
A 2001 graduate of Livingston College, Bertrand spent his college career to build a new radio station at Rutgers University, a joint venture with Piscataway High School. That station, 90.3 FM The Core, first broadcast in 2000.
Today it is the largest student organization at Rutgers and continues to develop new talent among the high school and college students it serves. For almost a decade after graduating, Bertrand continued to advise The Core and served as its chief engineer.
For Bertrand, Livingston College was a place for “forgotten misfits … a place for people who didn’t think that everything else in the world was OK.” And he felt right at home there, he tells us in the embedded video (2 minutes, 20 seconds). (Open the video in a new window.)
Photos: (top) Courtesy of Bertrand; (bottom) From the 2001 Livingston College yearbook, Diversity: Making Connections, Volume XI .
Distinguished Alumna Deborah Stokes, LC’74: Livingston College Fostered Art and Social Justice
Deborah L. Stokes, honored in 2015 as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumna, has served as the Curator for Education, Head of K-12 and Teacher Programs with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art since 2008.
At the Smithsonian, Stokes oversees the development of educational programs, activities, and materials for diverse school audiences and teacher development. Stokes writes with an eye to multidisciplinary, cross-unit collaborative programming and has created family gallery guides integrating the arts with natural history, astronomy and environmental science in a series of exhibitions.
Before arriving at the Smithsonian, Stokes was appointed Visiting Professor in the Art History Department at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) teaching The Visual Art of Africa and Issues in Contemporary African Art. Stokes received her M.A. in Museum Studies at Columbia College Chicago, and worked as a Research Associate in the Anthropology Collections at the Field Museum in Chicago with a focus on African beadwork. She has published extensively in African arts.
Stokes’ work on the African continent has taken her to Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa and she continues to foster ideas of cross cultural collaboration with contemporary artists, curators, and educators both nationally and internationally.
In 2012, Stokes received the Pioneer Award from the Federal Government Distance Learning Association (FGDLA) in recognition of an individual for demonstrating initiative and leadership in the development and implementation of distance learning in the federal government.
In August 2013 her Distance Learning program was awarded the coveted Pinnacle Award from the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC). Stokes is currently serving a three-year term on the Advisory Board of Art Education, Journal of the National Art Education Association.
During her college tenure, Stokes found mentors in the Art and Art History programs at Livingston College who introduced her to the museum world in New York City. “Livingston College gave a foundation to the idea of social justice,” Stokes tells us in the embedded video. (You may also open the video in a new window.)
Also, check out an article documenting the “First Livingston Women’s [Art] Show” in 1972, at which Stokes exhibited paintings and a silk screen print.
Distinguished Alumnus Kenneth Cop, LC’95, Leads Diverse Rutgers Police Force
Kenneth B. Cop, honored in 2015 as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus, serves as the Executive Director of Public Safety and Chief of Rutgers University Police.
He oversees the administration and operation of all public safety services for Rutgers University, with approximately 500 employees under his command. Cop graduated from Livingston College (’95) with a Bachelor of Science in Administration of Justice, a minor in Sociology and a Criminology Certificate.
At Centenary College (’02), he earned a Master of Arts in Leadership and Public Administration. Additionally, he is a graduate of the FBI National Academy Class #254, the West Point Command and Leadership School, and the FBI Law Enforcement Executive Development Program.
Cop was hired as a Rutgers University Security Officer in 1995. He completed his basic police certification at the Ocean County Police Academy and started his law enforcement career as a Rutgers University Police Officer in 1997. He has been promoted to positions of increasing responsibilities during his career with Rutgers.
Livingston College’s motto of “Strength Through Diversity” is still alive in public safety at Rutgers, Cop tells us in the embedded video. (You may also open the video in a new window.)
In 2020 Rutgers Today interviewed Chief Cop. From the interview: “I just wanted to help others and keep people safe. … The sentiment was instinctual for me, something that I had always cared about. My decision to remain at Rutgers after I graduated is because I always viewed the university as home. So, keeping my home safe was a natural career progression.”
Journalism Panel
A Look Back at the Livingston College Journalism Legacy of Rutgers University and a Future Forecast
More than 100 alumni, students and faculty joined us on April 21, 2010, at the Livingston Student Center for “Journalism: Past, Present and Future,” an exciting panel discussion celebrating the history and impact of the Department of Journalism and Urban Communications and journalism programs at Livingston College and the School of Communication and Information.
Professors Jerome Aumente and Roger Cohen; along with Jim Simon and Rob Snyder, two Livingston 1970s journalism and urban communications majors; John Pavlik, the director of the Journalism Resources Institute; and John O’Brien, executive director of the New Jersey Press Association, participated in a lively discussion on the history of the journalism programs at Livingston College and Rutgers University, and a look at the current and future state of the journalism industry.
The program was co-sponsored by the School of Communication and Information Alumni Association and the Livingston Campus Dean of Student Life.
Photo (from left): Panelists Roger Cohen, Jim Simon, and Rob Snyder.