UVM Stories : About UVM : University of Vermont

UVM Stories

Students who start small businesses and break new ground; professors who inspire in the classroom and in their fields of research; alums who change the world at work. At UVM, inspiring stories are everywhere. Take a closer look...

Chris Walters '96

Chief Operating Officer, The Weather Channel

While still a student at the UVM School of Business Administration, Chris Walters '96 worked in the corporate offices of Bruegger’s Bagels. This experience proved to be one of a few jobs that poised him to take over as COO for The Weather Channel, overseeing the technology, finance, legal, research and human resource teams. ...
Alexandra Arnsten

Environmental sciences major, worked summers in Greenland and Norway

A chance meeting at a Christmas party helped Alexandra Arnsten nail two summer research jobs during her time at UVM. "I met someone who was the leader in a research company (the Norwegian Institute for Air Research). By the end of the night, we were talking about possible flight times for me to fly to Greenland that summer." ...
John Voight

Professor of mathematics, cryptography researcher

It used to be just generals, presidents and criminals who wanted to encrypt secrets. Now it's a necessity for anyone who wants some privacy on their phone, and math theorist John Voight is advancing today's science of secrecy. ...
Pramodita Sharma

Professor of entrepreneurship and family business

"No wise person would ever work for a salary." Those were business professor Pramodita Sharma's grandfather's words of warning when she told him of her decision to pursue a career in education. To her grandfather, being one's own boss and staying in their family business in northern India were the keys to a good life. ...
Ralph Rogers

Natural resources ecology major, interned as NGO director in Madagascar

Ralph Rogers, natural resources ecology major, has a knack for finding unique opportunities and jumping in with both feet. When choosing a university, Rogers knew he wanted to study abroad (UVM is 5th in the nation among public doctoral universities for study abroad participation). ...
Cristina Mazzoni

Professor of Italian, chair of Romance Languages and Linguistics

Cristina Mazzoni, Italian professor and chair of Romance Languages and Linguistics explains how she’s been fortunate to indulge in melding her personal, pedagogical and scholarly interests in cooking and Italian food culture as they relate to literature: “I see a connection between instructions on how to cook and the ways I teach my students how to read something,” she says. ...
Brent Summers '12

Former Vermont Cynic editor-in-chief, New York Times contributor

Former Vermont Cynic Editor-in-Chief Brent Summers published his first solo effort on The New York Times website just after his tenure with the Cynic ended. His story “Campus Divestment Fight Resonates in the East” appeared on the Times’ environmental themed Green Blog. This was the second time in weeks that Summers’ work appeared in some version of the Times. ...
Sasha Fisher '10

Co-founder, MicroGrants non-profit

Just a few years post-graduation, alumna Sasha Fisher '10 has wasted no time putting her self-designed "human security" major to use. Spark MicroGrants, the non-profit she's co-founded, has already helped humans in eastern Africa achieve security of one kind or another, by funding projects to improve access to education, clean water, healthcare, food and more. ...
Jason Fish

Business major, mergers and acquisitions intern, Ernst and Young

For business students like Jason Fish, the decision to spend the summer working at a local restaurant or outdoor camp no longer seems like a viable option. Not if they intend to compete for coveted corporate jobs against the thousands of other business school students flooding the job market come graduation ...
Luis Vivanco

Professor of anthropology, Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award winner

In the dimly lit landing, near Vivanco’s office in the Anthropology Department, stands a strange bicycle. It looks like a cross between a mountain bike, a tandem, a rickshaw, and a kitchen appliance. The latter because of the long extending aluminum rack on the rear of the bike where a geared plastic housing connects to the rear wheel. In the housing sits a blender, filled with bananas and strawberries. ...
Aimee Shen

Assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics

Aimee Shen, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics is in good company. Shen was among twenty-two of the nation’s most innovative young researchers to be named a 2012 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. She joins a prestigious community that includes Nobel Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, and recipients of the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award. ...
Nicholas Wilkie

Medical student

Imagine you’re a physician with a disaster-relief group. You’ve bounced over bad roads to get to a remote cholera clinic, leaving behind Internet and cell-tower access. You keep careful medical records of patients by typing the information into your shirt-pocket smartphone. ...
Tuna Snider

Professor of theatre, director of UVM's world-recognized Lawrence Debate Union

At the high point of their 2012 season, UVM's Lawrence Debate Union was ranked seventh in the world by the International Debate Education Association, just behind Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale and ahead of the likes of the London School of Economics, Harvard and Stanford. This success is thanks in large part to the debate union's director Professor Alfred “Tuna” Snider, an international icon in the field. ...
Junru Wu

Professor of physics

A big cargo ship docks in the United States about every six minutes carrying cargo from potentially any port on the planet. Unfortunately, these ships also often unload invasive species...But Junru Wu, a physicist at the University of Vermont, has invented a promising new approach: blast them to death with sound. ...
Akol Aguek ’05, G’11

Master’s student in international affairs and social policy, Harvard

Akol Aguek ’05 G’11 was one of Sudan’s "Lost Boys," a generation of young men displaced by brutality and civil war in their homeland. Aguek described the experience of being one of thousands fleeing across forest, desert, and river. "You are running for your life!" ...
Hillary Laggis

DREAM program student mentor

Centennial Woods is usually a quiet refuge, a serene bit of forest hidden within busy Burlington. But today, squeals and screeches bounce off the maple trees and rise up through the pines. It's the sound of kids having fun in the woods on a cooling September afternoon. The afternoon is, in part, the organizational work of UVM junior Hillary Laggis, student mentor for the DREAM program. ...
Peter Dodds

Associate professor, mathematics and statistics

There's a cynicism with news people that most news is bad and the worst news gets the big story on the front page. So one might expect the New York Times to contain, on average, more negative and unhappy types of words — like “war,” “ funeral,” “cancer,” “murder” — than positive, happy ones — like “love,” “peace” and “hero.” But new research shows just the opposite. ...