CLASS NOTES | FALL 2023 | 71 in 2019. As of May 2023, Francisca obtained her doctor of dental medicine and is now a general practice resident at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center. She is excited for the future to reveal how she will use her degrees. In the meantime, she is enjoying being back in NYC, finding time for comedy shows, travel, concerts and discovering new joys. ’16 Rachel Sholder, rachelsholder@ gmail.com In April, I bought my first home in Baltimore, Md., the city I’ve lived in since I left Lehigh. After graduating from Lehigh, Angela Lawrence attended graduate school. Since then, she learned that her passion is configuration management. She built a compressor configuration system at her company, PDC Machines, and was promoted to product configuration manager. Angela works with Lehigh alumni spanning different graduating classes. Angela met her husband, Alex, in 2019 and got married in September 2022. They currently reside in Pennsylvania with their rescue dog, Larry, and are about to close on their first home. ’17 Robert Hillman, robert.j.hillman1@ gmail.com Hello, Class of ’17, I hope you are all well and have had an opportunity to see the alma mater’s beautiful campus. If you have not had a chance to get back, like me, I recommend following some of the Lehigh Instagram accounts. Obviously @lehighu is the one to check out, with its wonderful pictures of events, campus and alumni, and clearly, there is an account for almost every group and sports team, which is great for keeping up with all the teams through the year. I also want to point you toward @lehighalumni, which showcases reunion-related stuff as well as promoting alumni, their careers and alumni gatherings from all over. I know we all get our alumni news from this article a few times a year, but if you want a steady stream of alumni content, check these out. While you are there, follow @lehigh2017reunion. They were very active before our five-year reunion in 2022 and will most likely have information for our 10-year reunion as we approach 2027. I had some alumni reach out to me since our last column. A big congratulations to Racquel Doherty and Jacob Smith, who got married on March 18, 2023, in Phoenix, Ariz. Their 10-year-long relationship started at Lehigh during the first week of classes—Racquel with a major in integrated business and engineering as well as industrial and systems engineering and Jacob with a major in mechanical engineering. Racquel was a member of Kappa Delta, worked at Taylor Gym and played club soccer, and Jacob was a member of Chi Phi and did research for the Tribology Lab. They currently live in Flagstaff, Ariz., and work in the medical device industry. Racquel is a lead product owner for Smith+Nephew, and Jacob is a product strategy project manager for WL Gore. Racquel let me know that you can find both of them on LinkedIn if you want to reach out. Their wedding had lots of Lehigh guests, and part of the wedding party were friends from Racquel’s freshman hall in M&M. Such an incredible story to share with everyone— congrats, you two! Additionally, congratulations to Benjamin Earl Pingrey, who graduated from UC Davis this past June, with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. He has accepted a position as a research engineer with the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), in Keyport, Wash. Congratulations and best of luck with your career! Please get in touch with me about whatever you want to share with our classmates. We would love to hear from you! Email me at robert.j. hillman1@gmail.com or find me on social medias: FB, IG, LI, X, txt and www. ’18 GUEST COLUMNIST: Sara Anderson, sya218@ alum.lehigh.edu Greetings, Class of ’18! Sara here with some updates post-graduation. We only have so much space to share it with all of you, so bear with me! To kick things off, I wanted to go over some of the highlights from the reunion, which took place the first weekend of June. Even though it has only been five years since graduation, I think many of us were craving coming back to campus to see the changes since we’ve been here, listen to President Helble speak about Lehigh’s future and also connect with one another in a way that is different from the “daily grind” … and it showed! There were two events that struck out to me as being well attended by the Class of 2018: the block party on the Hill and the class reunion celebration dinner. It was magical to see connections reignited since graduation at the reunion. I can’t wait to see what our 10-year reunion will look like! We are hoping for a big turnout, so be on the lookout for information regarding the 2028 reunion, but remember, you are always welcome back every year. With that, here are some classmate updates that I would like to share with everyone: Christian Hillegas is currently working on completing his Psy.D. in clinical psychology at Pace University and just started his externship program at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, where he works with patients of all ages as well as families. Danielle Christina Rucci graduated from the USC Keck School of Medicine Physician Assistant Program on May 11, 2023. She plans to live and work in the southern California area. Gustavo Grinsteins Planchart has been living in Colorado since graduation. He loves exploring nature and is always inviting friends to the Colorado area for activities like hiking and snowboarding. Currently, he is an artificial intelligence research engineer working on visualizing wildfire growth through software prediction pipelines, which I would say is rather timely. Ryan Loftus was recently promoted to SEO content manager at HackerRank, a B2B tech company and is living in Conshohocken, Pa. Chris Dallao has been living in North Carolina since graduation. Currently, he works as a supply chain analyst for TE Connectivity, dealing with suppliers on four continents and plans to pursue an MBA in the near future. By the time this has been published, many of you may have been promoted, made drastic career changes, decided to return to school, continue chugging along in your programs or may have even graduated. If there is anything to be said about the Class of 2018, it is that we continue to support one another beyond Lehigh, so send us your updates so we can continue to cheer you on! If you would like to be featured in the Alumni Bulletin Class of 2018 section at any time, please reach out. ’19 Alexis Parsells, lex. parsells@gmail.com and Claudia Cohen, claudiacohen10@gmail.com Matt Addessi graduated with a degree in computer science and business and was heavily involved in the Theta Xi fraternity, Finance Club
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