The Circumnavigators Travel-Study Grant provides an unbelievably unique opportunity for a student to travel around the world exploring the research project of their choosing. Over the years, students have studied everything from educational empowerment to puppet theater, and so we wanted to see what everyone has been up to since their big trip. Not surprisingly, they have accomplished a ton of amazing things!
| Elizabeth Larsen | 2014 | Elizabeth graduated in June 2015 and has spent the summer in Guatemala working on a research project looking at rural diabetes care in Mayan populations. She will return to work as a consultant at McKinsey and Company for a year or two before beginning her MD at Feinberg School of Medicine. |
| Catherine Althaus | 2013 | Since graduating in 2014, Catherine has lived in Ecuador as Program Director for Manna Project International focusing on community development initiatives. |
| Kevin Short | 2012 | Kevin lives in New York where he is on the media and communications team at the Population Council, a global health and human rights NGO that focuses on HIV, reproductive health, and other issues at the intersection of poverty, gender, and youth. |
| Ben Shorofsky | 2011 | Ben is back in Chicago working as a technical associate for a local non-profit organization called the Delta Institute. They work to find market based solutions to environmental issues within the Great Lakes basin. They primarily work in the areas of renewable energy, ecosystem health, and waste minimization. |
| Meixi Ng | 2010 | Meixi founded an organization called FiftyFold (fiftyfold.org) that works in Singapore (where she is from), Thailand, and Indonesia to build a movement and community of educators who design learning that dignifies and empowers students as thinkers and as people working in underperforming and under-resourced schools and communities. They were nominated as one of Asia’s 100 disruptive innovators in the Purpose Economy. She has just completed her first year of a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences and Human Development at the University of Washington in Seattle. |
| Sam McAleese | 2009 | Sam is in his third year at Georgetown School of Medicine. In addition to being Secretary of the DC Chapter of the Circumnavigator’s Club, he continues to work on public safety issues within hospitals and public policy (recently lobbying on Capitol Hill about antibiotic resistance and agriculture. |
| Harris Sockel | 2008 | Harris lives in New York working on reforming the public education system. He works at Springpoint that helps school districts launch new, innovative high schools. Their goal is to “re-make” schools for students in large urban areas, creating personalized and technology-based schools that allow students to complete courses at their own pace. |
| Chris Ahern | 2007 | Chris is finishing up his Ph.D. at Penn and is about to start a joint post-doctoral research position in Linguistics and Biology (also at Penn). |
| Alex Robbins | 2006 | Alex recently completed his Ph.D. and is starting a positon at Emory University teaching the history of 19th and 20th century philosophy. |
| Susannah Cunningham | 2005 | She must be travelling somewhere! |
| Sarah Rose Graber | 2004 | Sarah Rose continues to be a prolific and sought-after theater artist. She has just moved to Scotland where she is taking up residency with a company there. |
| Dan Hoyle | 2002 | Dan lives in New York where he has a successful career as a writer and actor. Last spring his show The Real Americans ran Off-Broadway while another of his plays Game On has a run the San Jose Repertory Theater. He is touring his one man show Each and Every Thing San Francisco before bringing it back to New York in the fall. |
| Alex Ortolani | 2000 | Alex recently took a job as a PR Manager for the job search company, Indeed; he will be working with the company’s team of economists on labor reports and commentary. He lives in new York with his wife and son, and he continues to write fiction, run, and visit Northwestern once a year as a member of the alumni editorial board. |