Features

Spring 2020
Advocate for Good

Proactive Advocate

The genesis of a career that Jennifer Welch (LAW ’94) has spent the last three decades cultivating can be traced to the fax machine in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Chicago. Fresh out of college and working full-time at the organization, Welch vividly recalls that day in 1991 when she went to retrieve a fax—the ruling in Rust v. Sullivan, the case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the government was able to withhold Title X funds from family planning facilities that counseled patients on abortion. A realization suddenly hit her.
Fall 2019
When Life Happens

When Life Happens

It took two decades for Michael Retsky to realize that he had missed out on the “Wild West” era of physics. By the mid-1980s Retsky (PHYS ’61) had collected a series of patents related to electron microscope technology while working at Hewlett-Packard in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but he also came to recognize that the age of rapid discoveries and astonishing breakthroughs in his field had ended. For Retsky, the study of physics had matured, becoming a little less fun in the process.
Fall 2019

Bauhaus-Inspired Verve

Charlie Vinz (ARCH ’04), founder of the Adaptive Operations architecture studio, is building a reputation as a top restaurant architect, thanks to his work at culinary hot spots such as Chicago’s Parachute restaurant, whose chefs earned a 2019 James Beard Foundation Award. Yet Vinz isn’t drawn to restaurants per se as much as he is to working with fellow artists who see architecture as part of a larger creative vision. Chef-owned restaurants fit that bill.
Fall 2019
Unstoppable

Unstoppable

Beatrice Lumpkin (M.S. MT ’71), 101, will not stay still. The petite, gray-haired dynamo fusses over her visitors, pouring cups of golden oolong tea and serving a bowl of artfully arranged cookies and chocolate drops in the living room of her home in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. She whizzes into the kitchen, opening drawers, before stopping briefly for a photo while standing atop her balance board. She then takes her guests on a tour of her top-floor senior co-op with its 270-degree views overlooking the city and Lake Michigan.