Brad Dellenbaugh '72 Brown University '76 Sailing Director, New York Yacht Club, Newport, RI Chief Umpire, America's Cup After graduating from Brown, I was at Hotchkiss for four years. I taught art and architecture and coached soccer, skiing and sailing. I had planned to go from there to architecture school, but at that time the field was pretty depressed. Instead I got involved with Dave Perry in a sailing campaign aiming at the 1984 Olympics and started coaching the sailing team at Brown, while also running sailing clinics and doing a lot of freelance artwork. After 10 years at Brown and two more Olympic campaigns, I went to Annapolis to coach the offshore sailing team at the U.S. Naval Academy, sort of following my wife-to-be who was working in D.C. We were there for 13 years.  My racing and coaching fed my interest in the rules of sailing and I am now one of the world's leading experts, having become an international judge and umpire in the 1990’s. Umpiring in sailing started in 1987 after the America's Cup in Australia was crippled by protests that took all night to resolve. The umpire boat follows the boats closely as they race to make direct rulings on the water when rules incidents happen. I was an umpire at the 31st America's Cup in New Zealand for six months during the challenge series and finals in 2002-2003 (and even got to ride on the back of the boats in some of the races) and became the Chief Umpire in Spain in 2006-2007. I came to the New York Yacht Club (working at the Newport, RI club house) in 2005 and although I have a regatta to run in Newport nearly every weekend from late spring to early fall, I still get to travel around the world a bit with my umpiring. I did not start sailing until I was fourteen as my brother David was such a star, and I wanted to find my own interests. But as soon as I began, I got the bug. It's great that GFA has such a strong sailing team now. It wasn't an option when I was a student. I was in the first GFA class to graduate boys. It was fun being such a small group -- the graduating class was just 21 students. I remember scoring two goals with a taped ankle in my first game on the soccer team and jumped in to learn lacrosse (and play attack) in the spring. In the winter, I raced a couple of times with the ski team, but probably the most fun was playing center on the basketball team (at 5’10”!).  Ed Denes had a great sense of gamesmanship. He used each of us on the basketball team very strategically.  None of us was a great player (well, except for Dawson and Bronco) but we did remarkably well as a team because of Ed's tactics. I learned from him that there are different ways to approach things, different ways to handle situations--and I don't just mean sports. I learned to appreciate the importance of tactics from Ed Denes. The way people solve and even anticipate problems really defines who they are. So as a person and as a professional, I still feel like I owe a lot to Ed Denes. My wife Lissy and I live in Portsmouth R.I. with our two children. Spencer is ten and Clara is five and they are both gradually getting into sailing.

	Craig Lieberman '89 University of Richmond '93 - B.A., International Studies University of Sydney '95 - M.A., International Relations Founder and President, 34° Crispbread GFA and the support of the faculty and coaches gave me a confidence I would not otherwise have had.  While at GFA I played varsity soccer, basketball, tennis and baseball. Where else would I have been able to play on four varsity teams? I recently came to campus and saw the new tennis courts and baseball diamond and was really impressed. I don't think I was someone who would have "lived up to his potential," as they say, had I not had the GFA experience. GFA gave me the confidence to travel and to take risks -- risks like the challenge of starting my own business.  I loved GFA. We had a great class -- it was a senior class of only 38 and we are still in touch more than 20 years later.   In college I did a junior year abroad in Amsterdam and also interned at the US embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. I spent six months in Brazil before going to graduate school in Australia. GFA's World Perspectives Program sounds great. I think it's wonderful that students are encouraged to travel in high school! While at graduate school in Australia I fell in love with good food and particularly with Australian crispbread crackers. When I realized after my return that they didn't exist in the states, I began to import the crackers and then in 2008 switched to manufacturing them in Boulder County, CO. The name 34° refers to the latitude of Sydney. Our crackers are sold throughout the U.S. and Canada in places like Whole Foods, Balducci’s, The Fresh Market and Wegmans. We are committed to donating 1% of the crackers we bake. Beginning with our first contribution in February 2011, we will make a quarterly donation of 300,000+ whole grain crackers to the Food Bank of the Rockies’ “Children’s Totes of Hope” program. Tote bags filled with 8-9 pounds of nutritious kid-friendly food are distributed to children on Fridays to take home over the weekend. For many of these children in Colorado and Wyoming, the totes are their main source of food on Saturday and Sunday.  So not only are our crackers good for you, they are doing good as well.  "Each for All" carries on!

	Oliver Pursche '89 Bentley College '92 President, Gary Goldberg Financial Services I am President of Gary Goldberg Financial Services in Suffern, NY, one of the top boutique money management firms in the country. People are surprised to learn that in 1984, when I moved to Connecticut from Belgium, I could not speak a word of English. After two years working with a tutor in public school I came to GFA, for tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades. I do partly attribute my success to intangible things I learned at GFA. We always had to stand up when an adult entered the room and even though I don't necessarily still do that, there is an underlying courtesy we learned that is still part of who I am today. I also learned at GFA to never "burn bridges" and number both former employers and former clients as good friends. I adapted to the uniform of jacket and tie at GFA and have enjoyed dressing well ever since. I learned teamwork and fair play on the basketball court and lacrosse fields and find they translate into the working world.   I went to Bentley University in Waltham, MA and graduated in 1992 with a degree in Business and Finance; a year early because with no family in the States -- my parents had moved back to Germany -- I just kept taking courses until I finished. My parents paid tuition, room and board for college, but in lieu of an allowance, promised to match any money I made. That continued until my father was forced to renegotiate to fairer terms -- fairer to him! After graduation, I talked my way from a stock-room job at Staples into a sales position for business machines. My manager's brother liked the sound of this entrepreneurial flair and hired me as a stock broker for his Boston firm. A different kind of stock! I moved around to such firms as Paine Webber in Westport and Neuberger Berman in New York. Gary Goldberg the individual as well as the Gary Goldberg firm were among my clients. Goldberg hired me six years ago and named me president in August 2010. I remember some funny moments at GFA, like the Senior Prank when we cut an old VW bug in half and left the front half in the courtyard and the back half on the front lawn. And the Junior class trip to DC: while the group was being treated to a private tour inside the White House, I reached into my front inside pocket to touch my new Walkman and suddenly was surrounded by drawn guns. Quite a thrill for Mr. Denes! I have fond memories of him as well as of O.J. Burns and Coach Groves, among others. I now live in Fairfield with my wife Virginia and three dogs.

	Cornelia A. Dellenbaugh '66 University of Pennsylvania '70 University of California Los Angeles '83 - M.S., Public Health Senior Programmer / Analyst, Preventive Medicine, Mt. Sinai Medical School Global sailor Cornelia Dellenbaugh knew she wanted to sail around the world. When she was in 7th grade, she read about an early Peace Corps volunteer who built a boat for a fishing village and another for himself which he sailed home. While in the Peace Corps herself in Thailand, she ordered a ferro-cement boat (common after the '70s oil crisis) to sail back to the States. She first got interested in disease while in Thailand. The sail home took from June 1st until August 4th the next year. We sailed out of the Gulf of Siam, then from Singapore to Bali, to northern Australia, and then across the Indian Ocean to South Africa. From South Africa we sailed straight to the Caribbean where family members joined us, and made our way back to the states, pulling into Southport Harbor to quite a welcoming committee. I got a masters degree in public health at UCLA focusing on occupational and environmental issues and worked at Mt. Sinai for five years in the 80s. I decided to adopt, so opted to do programming for pharmaceutical firms rather than pursue a PhD. (When a firm had a drug that was ready, I would work up the data needed to submit an application to the FDA.) I adopted Burgut from Russia--he is thirteen now. He is Siberian, actually Buryat, from north of Mongolia. I came back to Mt. Sinai about a year ago.  Our team is focusing on environmental health, following 25,000 people who worked on the clean up at Ground Zero, looking at long-term effects of that exposure.    As the oldest, I got to choose our new school, so when I picked Laycock all four of us came. We had seventeen in our graduating class, huge compared to the Class of 1965, who were only six! I was in the singing groups and all the plays and was one of the Yearbook editors. Sports were not my thing (except for skiing and sailing.) Mr. Denes came during our junior year. Janice Plotkin's parents hired him to tutor her because she was failing math but he made it all make sense to her. The school was so impressed that they hired him, but made sure he married his fiancée first--he was a very young man. During our senior year a group of us took Calculus with him but only Nadine Goodenow and I took Physics-- it was just the three of us. We would deal with whatever we had to study early in the week and then talk about everything under the sun. I always did well in math but don't think I could have advanced as far as I did without Mr. Denes. I will always be grateful to him.

	Sarah Kleinhandler '90 Boston University '94 Deputy Supervising Superintendent, Office of School Development, City of New York  I love the job and New York. This is like getting the picture from 30,000 feet -- seeing the future of all these schools. I have a staff of thirteen, growing to twenty next year. Our office works with schools that are identified under No Child Left Behind as 'in need of improvement' at varying degrees, as well as those schools identified as 'persistently lowest achieving,' as compared to the spectrum of high-performing schools. The targeted interventions that I oversee and my staff implements in these identified schools helps to uncover the root causes of why schools are not meeting targets in English language arts, mathematics and graduation rate. We look at indicators around curriculum, teaching and learning, collection analysis and use of data, professional development, school leadership, District support and infrastructure for student success. These findings lead to recommendations that help to inform the Chancellor’s decision for school improvement. We use a lot of data to inform decision-making. My work with principals and their schools is around building capacity to enable them to improve and sustain student achievement. I and my staff work with upwards of 300 schools. From Boston University, I went to NYU for a master's in education and then taught English at Louis D. Brandeis High School on the Upper West Side for five years. It was a "scan school," which means that the kids had to go through metal detectors every day. It was hard -- they gave me, the new teacher, the kids who came to school directly from incarceration. While I was there, I got my master's in administration from Hunter College and became the Assistant Principal of Supervision at Life Sciences Secondary School in Manhattan, supervising all content areas for five years. Then the Department of Education hired me to become a regional literacy specialist for more than 200 schools, and after a year they asked me to be the director of school improvement. My mother was a teacher. I used to play school and I always wanted to teach. GFA made me want to help struggling kids. I came from public school to GFA for 11th and 12th grades and I could tell that the students who had been there longer had a much stronger foundation than I did. This experience made me determined to work in education to help others do well. It is important for an educator to recognize that not everybody learns at the same pace or through the same modality. Somebody might be a great writer but terrible at math and that's okay. The trick is to look at changing your practice to meet the need of the youngster. I live with my husband Aaron and daughter Lila in Brooklyn. Lila was just born in October and has been a wonderful exciting addition to our lives.

	Grant Picarillo '03 New York University '07 Harvard University School of Public Health '12 Returned U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer Since the fall of 2010 I have been a studying Public Health Policy and Management as a graduate student at Harvard. By researching innovative policy solutions to address health disparities that disproportionately impact lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, I’m looking to work within the nexus of civil rights, social justice and public health improvement. The readjustment back to student life has been both a challenge and a thrill. Regardless, I know I will soon miss academia upon the completion of my masters program in spring 2012. Prior to my graduate level studies, I served as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer for 2 years in rural Guatemala. My daily efforts focused on leading community workshops on HIV/AIDS prevention, “sex-ed” and sexual diversity, family planning, values, and self-esteem. Far from being in a "9-5" job, I was able to share my culture, beliefs, opinions and many smiles with Guatemalans day in and day out. To this day, I look back fondly upon my time at GFA. For one, Mrs. Morrison’s Spanish classes have paid off more than I ever thought possible. Furthermore, the self-confidence to challenge personal limits – a characteristic acquired at GFA - has empowered me to succeed in and enjoy the subsequent chapters of my life. While I have another year and a half in Boston, a recent research trip to Chile has me dreaming of moving back to Latin America post-graduation. Having a legally recognized marriage in Argentina, drinking good South American wine and oh yeah…working, doesn’t sound so bad, now does it? Grant would be happy to talk with any GFA alumni. Get in touch with the Office of Alumni Relations at alumni@gfacademy.org for contact information. Pictured above, Grant addresses a GFA Spanish class in 2009.

	David Capodilupo '79 The College of Wooster '83 Executive Director of International Programs and Master of Science in Management Studies, MIT Sloan School of Management Restorer of Tibetan palaces and the prototype Boeing 727 I started at MIT in 2002 and became the Executive Director of the MBA program at MIT Sloan. MIT was interested in selecting business people to work with academics in managing the business school, an interesting concept. One dean noticed that I had started a company focusing on restoring Tibetan Palaces (Potala and Lhasa) along with my success as a Senior Vice President at Putnam Investments. I’d like to think it differentiated my candidacy. I took a trading position at Putnam Investments in 1984 after I graduated from college. I grew with the company and ended up as Senior Vice President in the 401(k) division managing sales, investments and marketing, for clients such as MCI, Revlon, Abbott Laboratories and Alaska Airlines. I had been at Putnam Investments for 17 years, was about to turn 40, and felt I hadn't experienced enough of the world outside of the financial industry. So, I joined some friends, who worked for the Discovery Channel, planning a documentary on Tibet, and traveled with them. We met the manager of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, who wanted help with restoration for tourism. (The Potala Palace was the chief residence of the Dalai Lama until 1959.) With two partners, I started my first company, Aspen Concepts, LLC., working with the Chinese Government and engineers for palace restoration. We held our meetings in China, flying into China and communicating through translators: Tibetan to Chinese to English and back and forth. Alas, we ran the company for three years succumbing to unstable financial markets and uncertain regulations resulting post 9/11. However, the experience of starting a company was worth it – I suggest everyone should try it. About the plane, I venture twice a year to work with the engineers restoring the prototype Boeing 727 at Boeing Field in Seattle. I always loved planes ever since I was little. Our parents used to fly us to the islands every year. I found a 1975 photo of our family standing in front of a plane and used the registration number to look for that plane. It took four years to find it -- the engineers were using it for the restoration of the first 727. I met the engineers and offered my services and passion. The work involves cockpit, flaps, spoilers, landing gear and transponder replacement. The FAA makes sure we keep logs since we are all going to fly the plane to Boeing's Museum of Flight in Seattle. Should be a big news event. A good feeling to restore something for future generations to enjoy. I served 3 years as Executive Director of Sloan's MBA program until Fidelity Investments asked me to join them as a Senior Vice President in the Brokerage Division. I kept in touch with MIT Sloan, was appointed on their Executive Board, and returned in 2009 as Senior Director in the International Programs Office and the Master of Science in Management Studies MBA. I love establishing new deals, working with selected schools around the globe, helping with MBA course work, researching visiting faculty, developing executive education programs and lecture series. I am currently working with business schools in Russia, Istanbul, India and Portugal and will be developing a free-standing MIT Sloan office in Santiago, Chile. GFA? I had left a large boarding school, in upper Connecticut, transferring in 1977. The size of the classes, the faculty, the grounds and tossing a lacrosse ball at Burying Hill Beach made me realize I had found a unique place. To this day, my feelings remain.

	Abigail Johnson Dodge '76 Boston University Cookbook author & pastry chef I have a crazy, wonderful and delicious job -- I make up dessert recipes for a living. Sure, in the ‘real’ world, I’m known as a pastry chef, cookbook author, food writer and instructor, but the reality of my job is that I get paid to play around in the kitchen, concocting recipes and then writing, talking and teaching about them to groups and audiences across the country in a variety of media. I’ve studied on three different continents, worked under super star chefs and held editorial posts and contributed to over five dozen cookbooks, publications, blogs and websites focusing on baking and family cooking. I’ve also written 7 cookbooks, edited and contributed to an additional ten, filmed commercial and web baking videos, along with appearing regularly on TV & radio and teaching cooking classes. But, before all that, I was a student at GFA in the bicentennial class of 1976. I treasure my classmates and all the memories built together but it’s the faculty that shaped me most. Granted, they took me along kicking and screaming but I’m grateful they did. Cheers to the many that paved my way. GFA Faculty taught me to: value my words and choose them wisely, be myself and not follow others blindly and think ‘outside the box’ – I mean, really, a GFA alum turns pastry chef? My newest book, Desserts 4 Today - Flavorful Desserts Made With Just 4 Ingredients came out this fall and I'm currently working on my next dessert/baking cookbook to be published by The Taunton Press in fall 2012.