Young Alum Wins New Scholarship for Study in China

If you've already earned a pilot's license, a black belt in kung fu, an undergraduate degree from UC Davis and a great spot in the tech industry, what's next? James Rizzo, 22, has answered by winning a prestigious new scholarship for a year's graduate study in Beijing at one of China's leading universities.

Voices of the Change Generation

Dominique Gebru ’12 is helping students discover and develop their leadership skills. A Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica, Gebru serves as the youth literacy adviser in a small, rural primary school in Trelawny Parish.

1998 - Darrell Doan

Darrell Doan (B.A., political science, ’98) — seven months into his new job as economic development director for the city of Elk Grove, was profiled in the Dec. 29, 2015, issue of the Elk Grove Citizen newspaper. Doan previously worked for the cities of Santa Cruz, San Jose, Baltimore and Alameda. After graduating from UC Davis he earned a master’s degree in city and regional planning at Rutgers University. He lives in Elk Grove with his wife, fellow Aggie Stephanie (Dodge), and sons Erik and Sean.

Raising a Born Leader

The bond between mother and daughter is easy to see. It is forged with respect and unconditional love—and laughter, lots of laughter.

1973 - Larry Keeton

Larry Keeton (B.A., political science, ’73) has retired after serving nearly a decade as director of the Kitsap County Department of Community Development in Port Orchard, Wash. Efforts overseen by Keeton to speed the county's review of permits for single-family homes earned his department awards from the National Association of Counties in 2013 and 2014. He told the Kitsap Sun newspaper that he plans to write military history mystery novels. Before before going into county administration, he spent 28 years in the Army, leaving as a colonel.

2009 - Willie Hiatt

Oxford University Press recently published a book by Willie Hiatt (Ph.D., history, ’09) — The Rarified Air of the Modern: Airplanes and Technological Modernity in the Andes. Based on his dissertation, The Rarified Air traces the development of Peruvian aviation. Hiatt is an associate professor of history at Long Island University’s Post Campus in Brookville, New York.

2011 - Steve Cote

Steve Cote (Ph.D., history, ’11) has published Oil and Nation: A History of Bolivia’s Petroleum Sector, the inaugural book in West Virginia University Press' new Energy and Society series. Oil and Nation places petroleum at the center of Bolivia’s contentious 20th-century history. Bolivia’s oil, Cote argues, instigated the largest war in Latin America in the 1900s, provoked the first nationalization of a major foreign company by a Latin American state, and shaped both the course and the consequences of Bolivia’s transformative National Revolution of 1952. Oil and natural gas continue to steer the country under the government of Evo Morales. Cote is an interpretive ranger for the National Park Service, stationed at Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay.

Tracking Down Real-life Private Detectives

John Walton, a distinguished professor emeritus of sociology, searched for the real-life private detectives who inspired crime fiction dating back 175 years and created a myth that rivaled the likes of Robin Hood. “This was a story that was meant not to be told,” he said of his latest book, The Legendary Detective: The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction.