Alumni Connections - No. 101 - Dec 2012

Acumen Fund: Robert van Zwieten, '96 (XP-65), has been appointed chief investment officer. Headquartered in New York, the nonprofit global venture firm addresses poverty in Africa and South Asia.

Aflac Inc.: J. Peter Kelso, '93, has joined as managing director, chief investments technology officer in the global investment division. The insurance giant is headquartered in Columbus, Georgia.

Aspect Software Inc.: Mihir Shah, '05, has been named vice president of corporate development. The Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based company provides software for the back offices of restaurants.

The Bancorp Inc.: John Chrystal, '84, has been appointed vice president and chief marketing officer. One of China's leading digital map and content companies, AutoNavi is based in Beijing.

Bank of America Corp.: Matthew Elliott, '97, has been named president for Michigan. Elliott also serves as global commercial banking market executive for middle market banking in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. The global bank is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina.

BIOMET 3i LLC: Juliet Johansson, '98, has been appointed senior vice president, global commercial business. The company makes dental implants and related products. It is headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

BNY Mellon Wealth Management: Robert Bernstein, '86, has joined as senior portfolio manager based in Century City, California. The wealth management firm is based in New York.

Capsilon Corp.: David Chen, '89, has joined as vice president of finance and administration. The San Francisco-based company offers cloud-based document sharing

Carroll University: Lynda Johnson, '91, has been named to a three-year term as trustee of the Waukesha, Wisconsin-based school. Johnson is assistant treasurer at Harley-Davidson Motor Co. in Milwaukee.

The Delaware Bay Company LLC: Leah Hartman, '87, has joined as director of research. The private investment company is based in New York.

Deloitte Consulting LLC: Shawn Snyder, '04, has been promoted to principal from senior manager. The firm is the consulting subsidiary of Deloitte LLC, a big four accounting firm based in New York.

Digilant: Margaret Wells, '84, has joined as senior vice president of marketing at the Boston-based digital-marketing company.

Dunnhumby: Soyung Pak, '02, has joined as director, client solutions, in the New York office. The marketing services company is headquartered in Cincinnati.

Ernst & Young LLP: Wes Cornwell, '09, has joined as principal in the Midwest transfer pricing practice in Chicago. One of the big four accounting firms, it is headquartered in London.

Flack Steel Ltd.: David Feldstein, '12, has been named director of risk management. The steel company is based in Cleveland.

Fujitsu Technology Solutions: Maciej Wisniewski, '04 (EXP-9), has been named president, Poland, at the Tokyo-headquartered information technology company.

Hercules Technology Growth Capital Inc.: Derek Jensen, '03, has joined as director. Based in Palo Alto, California, the finance company makes loans to venture capital-backed technology and biotech companies.

Hewitt EnnisKnupp Inc.: John Thompson Jr., MA '97, MBA '02, has joined as partner and head of investment solutions. The investment advisory firm, an Aon PLC company, is based in Chicago.

Hunton and Williams LLP: Ronald Rubin, '85, has joined as partner in the bankruptcy, restructuring, and creditors' rights practice in the Washington office. The law firm has offices around the world.

IBS DataFort: Michal Cupa, '99 (EXP-4), has been named president. The Moscow firm runs a center for outsourcing data in Russia and is a subsidiary of IBS Group, a software development and information technology company serving Central and Eastern Europe. DataFort is being developed as a cloud provider.

Ipsen Inc.: Kenneth Maher, '96, has been named vice president of finance. The biotech company has global headquarters in Paris and US headquarters in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

Lazard Ltd.: Andrew Alper, AB '80, MBA '81, has been named to the board of directors at the financial advisory and asset management firm. The company has offices around the world, and is listed in Hamilton, Bermuda. Alper is a private investor and former Goldman Sachs executive who had served as president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation and chairman of the New York City Industrial Development Agency.

Li & Fung Ltd.: Edward Lam, '97, has been appointed CFO. The multinational consumer goods company is based in Hong Kong.

Mackenzie Institutional: Susan Small, '89, has joined as senior vice president, global consultant relations. The Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based investment management company focuses on institutions.

Metropolitan Real Estate Equity Management LLC: Beth-Anne Flynn, '89, has been elected partner. Flynn is managing director in the firm's Boston office. The New York- based global firm manages investments in private real estate portfolios for institutions and wealthy individuals.

Mitek Systems Inc.: Bruce Hansen, '85, has been named to the board of directors as an independent director. The mobile imaging software company is based in San Diego. Hansen is founder and former chair and CEO of ID Analytics, a consumer risk management company also based in San Diego.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Jeffrey Binder, '03 (XP-72), has been appointed associate laboratory director for nuclear science and engineering. Run by the US Department of Energy, the laboratory is based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Pan-American Life Insurance Group: Carlos Roberto Aldana, '04, has been named vice president, corporate development. The insurance and financial services company was founded in New Orleans.

Pepco Holdings Inc.: Kevin McGowan, '91, has moved to vice president, regulatory affairs, from vice president and treasurer. Through its subsidiaries the Washington, DC-based energy company provides electricity and natural gas to Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Washington, DC.

Press Ganey Associates Inc.: Eileen Kamerick, JD '84, MBA '93, has been named CFO. The South Bend, Indiana-based company offers analysis and consulting for health-care organizations.

Rosetta: Jay Lichtenstein, '99, has been promoted to managing partner. He is coleader of the firm's marketing strategy and insights group. The marketing and consulting company is headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey. It is an independent brand in the Publicis Groupe of global agencies.

Royal Bank America: Robert Kuehl, '76, has been promoted to the newly created position of chief administrative officer from CFO. The bank is a division of Royal Bancshares of Pennsylvania Inc., which is based in Narberth, Pennsylvania.

Situs: Kenneth Segal, '92, has been appointed managing director and head of the bank and loan advisory business. The company advises on commercial real estate loans and has corporate headquarters in Houston.

Tessera Technologies Inc.: Rick Neely, '80, has been named executive vice president and CFO. Based in San Jose, California, the information technology company develops miniaturization technologies and products for next-generation electronic devices.

True Drinks Inc.: Timothy Lane, '77, has been appointed chairman of the company, which recently merged with Bazi International Inc. Based in Irvine, California, True Drinks markets AquaBall, a vitamin-enhanced water for children.

University of Rochester: David Klein, '72, has joined as special advisor to the senior vice president and CEO of the university medical center. He also will serve as a professor in the department of public health sciences. The university is located in western New York.

YMCA of the USA: Kate Coleman, MBA '78, MLA '98, has been promoted to executive vice president, chief strategy/investment officer, from senior vice president, chief strategy and marketing officer, and director of the strategic initiatives fund. The national resource office for YMCA's across the United States is located in Chicago.

David Adelman, AB '89, MBA '90,has been named to Institutional Investor's All-America Research Team Hall of Fame for 2012. Adelman is following in his father's footsteps. Lawrence Adelman was an equity researcher at Dean Witter Reynolds and was named to the All-America Research Team 28 times between 1978 and 1996, said the magazine's October 15 article announcing this year's honorees. "My father was by far my most significant mentor," Adelman said. "We worked together very closely for many years and, simply put, he taught me how to be an analyst." Adelman has made the All-America team 16 times since 1997, ten of them in first place, and leading the tobacco sector every year since 2003. He has been "generally bullish" throughout "an extended period of very complicated and high-stakes litigation" within the tobacco industry, he said.

Chicago-based ACM Partners LLC brings a fresh approach to a "stale industry," proclaims the headline of a PRWeb story picked up by SFGate on November 5. "We do what can't be done!" said Margaret Bogenrief, MBA '07, MPP '07, one of the partners. "Sometimes that means helping a startup maintain its growth trajectory, helping a private equity backed company trim costs to maximize profitability, or restructuring a troubled company and steering it to the least bad outcome." She and David Johnson, '07, said in the article that most turnaround firms rely on old techniques that create more failures than successes. "We undo the damage done by our competition, avoiding the same mistakes," Johnson said.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses can learn how to take advantage of "crowdfunding," which means raising capital from individual investors, by reading The JOBS Act: Crowdfunding for Small Businesses and Startups by William Cunningham, AM '82, MBA '83. Congress passed The JOBS Act in April. "Investment expert William Michael Cunningham shows how the new law will enable you to use the internet to raise significant amounts of capital funding for your start-up," said a PRWeb article picked up by SFGate on October 11. "After discussing briefly the development and implementation of the law, what it means, and how it will impact the business start-up marketplace, he delivers the nuts and bolts of how to take advantage of the JOBS Act to access new sources of capital for your small business or start-up."

James Stork, '87, has been named a Chicago Magazine Five Star Wealth Manager. Stork is cofounder and partner at Pinnacle Financial Group LLC in Western Springs, Illinois. This is the third time Stork has received the honor, according to an October 18 article in The Doings Western Springs. Stork has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and has been seen on the Nightly Business Report and CNN, the article said.

Jeffrey Elliott, '93
CEO
The VHS Collaborative
The Maynard, Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization offers online learning for kindergarten through 12th grade.

Richard Epstein, '86
President and CEO
Sonoma Orthopedic Products Inc.
The private medical device company is based in Santa Rosa, California.

John Farrimond, '03
President and CEO
Siskin Children's Institute
Farrimond takes over the top spot on January 2. The Chatanooga, Tennessee-based nonprofit organization provides education, outreach, health care, and research for children with special needs and their families.

Geoffrey Hoffman, '09
CEO
DHR International Inc.
Hoffman was promoted to CEO from chief operating officer at the Chicago-based executive search company.

Lourdes Josephine Yap, '77
President and CEO
Filinvest Land Inc.
Yap was promoted to CEO from director at the Manila, Philippines-based property developer.

Mark Hoplamazian, '89
President, Director, and CEO
Hyatt Corp.
Coming from a finance background, Hoplamazian took a unique approach in a service industry when he aimed to quantify results. This led him on a search to find the best way to survey customers with the ultimate goal of improving customer satisfaction, said an October 10 article in Knowledge@Wharton. He also sought employee input on the matter. "I was reminded of what may well be an apocryphal story about someone seeing a janitor at NASA and asking him what his job was," Hoplamazian said. "[The janitor] said, 'I am putting a man on the moon', which was, I feel, the right answer." In addition, Hoplamazian garnered valuable data when he began at Hyatt by trying out each job there, the article said.

When the economy hit the skids, Hoplamazian chose to keep paying employee bonuses, unlike other companies that instituted austerity programs. "My own principles and what we had committed ourselves and our people to were tested," he said. "But it had a gargantuan impact. You could see people knowing how serious you were about loyalty even in the face of challenge. What you demonstrate to others when you are pushed is what makes the difference in leadership. That one thing has [solidified] employee loyalty now that things have turned. It did not cost that much, and it showed that the leaders of the company were loyal when we needed to be."

Roxanne Martino, '88
CEO
Scott Schweighauser, '89
Chief Investment Officer
Aurora Investment Management LLC
Despite a high volatility, low return market, institutional investors should still be looking at how much they can put into hedge funds, Schweighauser said in September 3 article in Pensions & Investments. Martino said, "In some ways, market events are healthy because it compels people to recalibrate their approach to evaluating and managing risk in their portfolio." The article said the two "are confident in their ability to identify the top hedge fund talent and produce what investors need in this day and age - solid returns with low volatility." The company is finding investment opportunities in a portfolio it calls global macro. "Right now, the world is fraught with uncertainty and it has been for a while," Schweighauser said. "Our view is we want to emphasize managers that have a lot of flexibility to take advantage of the macroeconomic themes and trends that are in the market today and are likely to persist for quite a long period of time. We have a component in our portfolio called global macro that we increased and will continue to emphasize. And then, within macro we have different areas - emerging markets, commodities, traditional global macro, CTAs - so it's a very diversified approach. The principal advantage is they can move very quickly, can be long and short, and can be in all the major asset classes."

Elizabeth Shanahan, '01
Executive Director and CEO
Society of Women Engineers
Shanahan presented a keynote at the "FIRST Women in Science & Technology Forum" on November 2 in Manchester, New Hampshire. The forum aimed to reach young women and get them fired up about science, technology, engineering, and math, said an October 25 article in the Rock Hill (SC) Herald Online.

Bahar Wadia, '07 (XP-76)
President and CEO
UICO LLC
Wadia can spot a trend. The head of Elmhurst, Illinois-based touch screen technology company UICO saw that when iPhones became popular, people soon would be wanting touch screens in the workplace, said an October 8 article in Crain's Chicago Business. "We migrate to what we're comfortable with and too many people had iPhones in their pockets," Wadia said. Sure enough, his company's touch screens became in demand on a range of products, from McDonald's coffee machine control panels to oil rigs, boats, and farming equipment, the article said. Hyde Park Angels had come through with early funding for the company, the article said. "Bahar is really smart," said Bryan Johnson, '07 (XP-76), founder and chairman of online payments software start-up Braintree Inc. "He understood it all, and he knew the market. He hit the trend on touch screens."