Profiles of excellence
It’s been another exciting and productive year for LAS alumni, and each year the LAS Alumni Association and the dean of the College of LAS select past graduates to receive LAS Alumni Achievement awards, the LAS Outstanding Young Alumni Award, the LAS Humanitarian Award, and the LAS Quadrangle Award.
The following alumni were this year’s recipients. Check back soon for longer and more detailed profiles of each winner in conjunction with the publication of the next LAS News magazine this spring.
David Kranz, PhD ’82, Microbiology
LAS Alumni Achievement Award
David Kranz developed a love for biology as a child outdoors during family vacations in Wisconsin. Today the Illinois professor of biochemistry still fishes in Wisconsin, but he also co-created a technology that makes it possible to fish through millions of mutant molecules to find one that can combat disease.
He has also found ways to mobilize the body’s immune system to battle cancer.
Kranz focuses on therapies that use the body’s T cell receptors—critical to the immune system’s response to foreign invaders. His lab was the first to engineer T cell receptors with a therapeutic potential, and two highly successful start-up companies resulted from this and other work. Read more about David Kranz.
Christina Brodbeck, BA ’01, History
LAS Outstanding Young Alumni Award
As a girl growing up near Chicago, Christina Brodbeck was business-savvy before she even knew what the word “entrepreneur” meant. But she never predicted she would be one of the earliest team members of a small startup company called YouTube.
After all, she had graduated from Illinois with a bachelor’s degree in history, specializing in Russian and Eastern European history. But she says the flexibility and freedom of an LAS degree, coupled with connections developed during her undergraduate years, changed her life completely.
She now pursues her life’s passion, which is designing and investing in startup companies in the San Francisco Bay area. Read more about Christina Brodbeck.
Ted Brown, Professor Emeritus, Chemistry
Audrey Brown, BA ’89, Religious Studies
LAS Quadrangle Award
Ted Brown remembers one day in the late 1980s when the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois was under construction. Brown went into the large atrium space with Arnold and Mabel Beckman, the couple that had donated $40 million for the institute.
Mabel Beckman looked around exclaimed, in stunned delight, “Oh Arnie, what are we doing?”
“They were both so full of enthusiasm,” said Brown, who served as the Beckman Institute’s first director. The Beckmans inspired Brown and his wife Audrey to also become givers. The Browns established two endowments—one to support undergraduates from all LAS departments and the other to help chemistry undergrads. Read more about Audrey and Ted Brown.
Tom Cycyota, BS ’80, Biology
LAS Alumni Humanitarian Award
A teenage girl named Kacey nearly lost her right arm at the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, but because of donated human tissue that came from AlloSource in Centennial, Colo., this woman—now 35-years-old—tells people she has two arms to hug her four children.
“That’s the power of what AlloSource is all about,” said Thomas Cycyota, president and CEO of the company. AlloSource is one of the largest tissue banks in the country, using human tissue from generous donors to create approximately 250,000 transplantable allografts (human-to-human transplants) each year.
“We deal with a sacred gift because the donor is somebody’s loved one,” Cycyota said. Read more about Tom Cycyota.
Guy Padbury, MS ’85, PhD ’88, Biochemistry
LAS Alumni Achievement Award
Guy Padbury’s work for the Upjohn pharmaceutical company hit close to home when his father was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Padbury’s team with Upjohn did the metabolism research on a molecule that went on to become the drug Actof, which helped to control his father’s diabetes, along with changes in diet and exercise.
This experience made Padbury see how the drugs he worked on “were actually touching people first hand. And that perspective really enriches your motivation.”
Padbury has played a leading role in getting to market a host of therapeutic drugs that treat everything from bacterial infections, HIV, and heart disease to Parkinson’s, osteoporosis, and diabetes. Read more about Guy Padbury.
Darsh Wasan, BS ’60, Chemical Engineering
LAS Alumni Achievement Award
In 1947, a Muslim friend warned Darsh Wasan, then 8, and his parents to escape their village because, as part of a Hindu minority in what’s now Pakistan, they were targeted to be killed. Wasan vividly remembers seeing dead bodies on train platforms as they escaped to India.
In India, Wasan’s house had no electricity, so he would study under the streetlights. This passion for learning brought him to Illinois, where he received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1960 and then blossomed as a researcher and administrator at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He is now vice president of international affairs at IIT and the Motorola professor of chemical engineering. Read more about Darsh Wasan.
