Young Alumni Circle Award

The Alumni Board created the Young Alumni Circle Award in 2008 to recognize the achievements of an alumna or alumnus in his or her discipline who graduated no more than fifteen years ago, who embodies the qualities expressed by the MacDuffie circle: Community, Integrity, Respect, Creativity, Leadership, and Excellence.

Nancy Tulathimutte Skehan ’98 was the first alumna to receive this Award for her work as a physician in third-world countries and for the singular honors she has received in her short career. She was the first UMass Medical School student to receive the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Fellowship for the Lambaréné Program and was also named a Massachusetts Medical Society Scholar.

Michael Lauzon Wins 2009 Young Alumni Circle Award

The Alumni Board is very pleased to announce Michael Lauzon ’96 as the second Young Alumni Award recipient. Following MacDuffie, Michael attended Harvey Mudd College, graduating with honors in Mathematics in 2000 for his senior thesis on tomography -- the reconstruction of images based on x-ray data. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2005 from Brown University.

At Brown, he earned the excellence in teaching award from the Math department and attended a series of professional development workshops for new professors. At the same time, he published three papers in the areas of harmonic analysis, operator theory and probability.

He was a visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College 2005-2006, where he inspired math students in the Courant Institute with his creative and dynamic approaches to teaching. In 2006 he took a position as an applied research mathematician with the U.S. Department of Defense.