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Summary

Professional diplomat with strong managerial, analytical, interpersonal, and writing skills. Self-
starter, entrepreneurial, and creative.

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Foreign Service Office: September 2009-Present 

Washington, DC

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President/Founder:

Kerr Consulting, LLC

June 2005 – August 2009 (4 years 3 months)Ivoryton, CT

Founded campaign consulting firm retained by major political party to assist more than 100 local town party committees and candidates for local, state, and federal office with database management, voter targeting, and website management services. Managed all aspects of running company.

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The George Washington University

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), International Relations and Affairs

Special Honors: Cum Laude

2004-2009

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Beijing Foreign Studies University: 2008

Beijing University of Business and Economics: 2008

 

Public Diplomacy Officer/Deputy Cultural Affairs Officer - US Embassy Basilia, Brazil: Starting October 2014:

Managed large portion of US$10 million dollar budget and oversaw U.S. Government media and public affairs outreach in nine states, including by maintaining relations with governors, mayors, and other senior officials from those states, as well as journalists and civil society actors. Oversaw country-wide professional exchange programs and engagement with past participants of U.S. Government-funded academic and professional exchange programs.

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American Citizen Services Chief Consular Officer - U.S. Consulate General Chengdu China: April 2010-April 2012

Managed all aspects of U.S. citizen section at consulate, including by leading on sensitive cases involving arrests, deaths, kidnappings, and medical evacuations. Provided political and economic analysis regarding issues in southwest China and processed more than 17,000 non-immigrant visas for Chinese nationals visiting the United States.

Walter Kerr - Class of 2004

Richard Bernstein - Class of 1962

Born: 1944-05-05, New York NY

Education: BA University of Connecticut

MA Harvard University

Occupation: Jounalism, Columnist, Author

Notable Credit(s): The International Herald Tribune, The NY Times, Time

Spouse: Zhongmei Li

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In 1973, Bernstein joined the staff of Time magazine tasked with writing about Asia. In 1979, he opened the magazine's first bureau in the People's Republic of China and served as the first Beijing bureau chief. In 1982, he accepted a position with the The New York Times where he served as the United Nations Bureau Chief, Paris Bureau Chief, National Cultural Correspondent, book critic,[3] and Berlin Bureau Chief

Published Works

From the Center of the Earth: The Search for the Truth About China (1982)

Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French (1990)

Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future(1994)

The Coming Conflict with China (1997), with Ross. H. Munro

Ultimate Journey: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment (2001)

Out of the Blue: The Story of September 11, 2001, from Jihad to Ground Zero (2002)

The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters (2009)

A Girl Named Faithful Plum: The Story of a Dancer from China and How She Achieved Her Dream (2012)

Daniel P. Friedman - Class of 1962

Donald M. Berwick (born 1946) is the outgoing Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Prior to his work in the administration, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement[1] a not-for-profit organization helping to lead the improvement of health care throughout the world. On July 7, 2010, Barack Obama appointed Berwick to serve as the Administrator of CMS through a recess appointment. On December 2, 2011, he left the position because it was clear that Republicans in the Congress would not allow a vote to confirm him.

Berwick has studied the management of health care systems, with emphasis on using scientific methods and evidence-based medicine and comparative effectiveness research to improve the tradeoff among quality, safety and costs.[2][3][4] Among IHI's projects are online courses for health care professionals for reducing Clostridium difficile infections, lowering the number of heart failure readmissions or managing advanced disease and palliative care.[5]

Berwick said that 20-30% of health spending is "waste" with no benefit to patients, because of overtreatment, failure to coordinate care, administrative complexity and fraud, and that part of this problem was because of CMS regulations.[6]

Berwick's critics have cited his statements about the need for health care to redistribute resources from the rich to the poor and his favorable statements about the British health service. They quote Berwick as saying, "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care - the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open."[7] [8]

Berwick said that Republicans had "distorted" his meaning: "My point is that someone, like your health insurance company, is going to limit what you can get. That's the way it's set up. The government, unlike many private health insurance plans, is working in the daylight. That's a strength."[6]

For political reasons, the Obama administration made Berwick stay evasive and avoid defending his past statements on the British health service, spending caps and high-technogy care.[6]

Critics point to statements such as this: "Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional."[9][10]

In March Berwick announced he would join the Center for American Progress as a Senior Fellow. [11]

 

Biography

Berwick graduated from Nathan Hale-Ray High School in Moodus, Connecticut. Berwick graduated with a B.A. from Harvard College, and received an M.P.P. from John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed his medical residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston.

Berwick began his career as a pediatrician at Harvard Community Health Plan; in 1983 he became the plan's first Vice President of Quality-of-Care Measurement.[12] In that position, Berwick investigated quality control measures in other industries such as aeronautics and manufacturing and considered their application in health care settings.[citation needed] From 1987-1991, Berwick was co-founder and Co-Principal Investigator for the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Health Care, designed to explore opportunities for quality improvement in health care. Based on this work, Berwick left Harvard Community Health Plan in 1989 and co-founded the IHI (Institute for Healthcare Improvement).

Berwick is Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Health Care Policy in the Department of Pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.[13]He is also a pediatrician, Adjunct Staff in the Department of Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston, and a Consultant in Pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the IHI works to accelerate improvement by building the will for change, cultivating promising concepts for improving patient care, and helping health care systems put those ideas into action. Employing a staff of approximately 100 people and maintaining partnerships with hundreds of faculty members, IHI offers programs that aim to improve the lives of patients, the health of communities, and the satisfaction of the health care workforce. The IHI's work is funded primarily through fee-based programs and services, and also through the support of foundations, companies, and individuals. IHI provides program scholarships, research and development, professional education, and initiatives in developing countries.

IHI's vision for health care is an adaptation from the Institute of Medicine's six improvement aims for the health care system: care that is safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable:[14]

  • No Needless Deaths

  • No Needless Pain or Suffering

  • No Helplessness in Those Served or Serving

  • No Unwanted Waiting

  • No Waste

  • No One Left Out

Berwick has published over 129 articles in professional journals on health care policy, decision analysis, technology assessment, and health care quality management. He is the co-author of several books, including Cholesterol, Children, and Heart Disease: an Analysis of Alternatives (1980), Curing Health Care (1990), and New Rules: Regulation, Markets and the Quality of American Health Care (1996).

Nomination and controversy

On April 19, 2010, Dr. Berwick was nominated to be Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which oversees the two federal programs.[15]

An editorial wrote that his policy ideas could cut health care costs.[16]Conservatives[not in citation given] criticized Berwick, based on comments he made about health care being, by definition, redistribution of wealth, rationing care with "our eyes open" and complete lives system.[17]

Berwick advocates cutting health costs by adopting some of the approaches of Great Britain's National Health Services (NHS) and its National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). NICE evaluates the costs and effectiveness of medical therapy that is covered by the NHS as guidance for local authorities to decide what to cover. Mark McClellan, who served in the Bush administration, also advocated adopting some of NICE's methods.[18]

Conservative critics claim that "NICE decides which healthcare people will get and which they won't."[19] Philip Klein in The American Spectatordubbed him "Obama’s Rationing Man."[20] The chairman of NICE called these statements "outrageous lies."[21]

Senator John F. Kerry defended Berwick against "phony assertions" and accused Republicans of trying "to crank up the attack machine and make his nomination a distorted referendum on reform."[22] Former Speaker Newt Gingrich has historically been a Republican supporter of Berwick, however, writing an op-ed in the Washington Post in August 2000 praising Berwick's work.[23]

Berwick was installed by recess appointment on July 7, 2010 before confirmation hearings were scheduled by the Democratic-controlled Senate committee.[24] Dr. Berwick could thus serve until the summer of 2011 without a Senate approval. The White House had talked up the possibility of a re-nomination through the fall of 2010; on January 26, 2011, the President re-nominated Dr. Berwick. On March 4, 2011, 42 US Senators wrote the White House and asked for the nomination to be withdrawn. The signers of the letter broke along partisan lines as all were Republicans.

Berwick resigned his position at CMS on December 2, 2011. [25] In a speech on Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011 in Orlando, Florida, at a meeting of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement , an organization he once led, the long-time patient-safety advocate gave a stirring account of his time in government service and the where he believes the future of healthcare is going. [26]

Awards and honors

Quotations

  • "Some is not a number. Soon is not a time." (slogan for IHI's completed 100K Lives Campaign, now slogan for IHI's 5 Million Lives Campaign in progress)[29][30]

  • "We are guests in our patients' lives; and we are their hosts when they come to us. Why should they, or we, expect anything less than the graciousness expected by guests and from hosts at their very best. Service is quality."[31]

  • "We are not hosts in our organizations so much as we are guests in our patients’ lives."[32]

  • "Some say that doctors and patients should now be partners in care. Not so, I think. In my view, we doctors are not our patients' partners; we are guests in our patients' lives. We are not hosts. We are not priests in a cathedral of technology."[33][34]

  • "You could have protected the wealthy and the well, instead of recognizing that sick people tend to be poorer and that poor people tend to be sicker and that any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must, MUST redistribute wealthfrom the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is, by definition, redistributional."[35]

The quote "What can you do by next Tuesday?" is frequently credited to Berwick but seems to have been coined by the authors of Improving Care for the End of Life: A Sourcebook for Health Care Managers and Clinicians, which they wrote under the IHI aegis.[36]

Selected publications

Donald Berick - Class of 1964

Daniel Paul Friedman (born 1944) is a professor of Computer Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research focuses on programming languages, and he is a prominent author in the field.

With David Wise, Friedman wrote a highly influential paper on lazy programming, specifically on lazy streams (ICALP 1976). The paper, entitled "Cons should not evaluate its arguments," [1] is one of the first publications pushing for the exploration of a programming style with potentially infinite data structures and a form of programming that employs no computational effects (though programs may diverge). Over the 1970s, Friedman and Wise explored the topic in depth and also considered extensions to the world of parallel computing.

In the 1980s, Friedman turned to the study of Scheme. He explored the use of macros for defining programming languages; with Kohlbecker, Felleisen, and Duba, he co-introduced the notion of 'hygienic macros' in a 1986 LFP paper that is still widely cited today.[2] With Haynes and Wand, he simultaneously studied the nature of continuation objects, their uses, and the possibilities of constraining them.[3] Following that, Friedman and Felleisen introduced a lambda calculus with continuations and control operators.[4] Their work has spawned work on semantics, connections between classical logic and computation, and practical extensions of continuations.

Friedman is also a prolific text book author. His first text book, The Little LISPer, dates back to 1974 and is still in print in its fourth edition, now called The Little Schemer (with Felleisen). Friedman and Felleisen wrote three more "little" books in the 1990s: The Little MLer, The Seasoned Schemer, and A Little Java, A Few Patterns.

Friedman is also the lead author of Essentials of Programming Languages, a text book on programming languages. As such, it changed the landscape of language text books in the 1980s, shifting the focus from surveys of languages to the study of principles via series of interpreters. Today's text books on this topic tend to follow this organization, though use operational semantics and type theory instead of interpreters. Like The Little LISPer, Essentials of Programming Languages is a long-living book and is in its third edition now.

Most recently, Friedman resumed work on his "Little" series with The Reasoned Schemer (with Byrd and Kiselyov), explaining logic programming via an extension of Scheme.

Ph.D. Educational Administration, University of Connecticut, (1980)

M.A. Educational Administration, University of Connecticut, (1978)

B.S. Social Studies Education, Boston University, (1974)

 

 

Professor of Educational Leadership

Emeritus Dean

 

Richard L. Schwab’s experience in education has spanned three decades, beginning with a job in Chelmsford, Mass. as an eighth grade history teacher. He went on to earn both a master’s degree and doctorate in educational administration at UConn, before spending 10 years on the education faculty at the University of New Hampshire. He spent the next eight years at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he served three years as head of its Department of Educational Administration, and then five years as Dean of the School of Education. In 1997, he returned to his alma mater to serve as Dean of the Neag School of Education.

During his 12 years as dean, Dr. Schwab worked with faculty to craft and implement a strategic plan to raise the quality of programs, research and scholarship, while moving the school toward its goal of becoming one of the top education schools in the country. The effort sparked the interest of Ray Neag, a UConn alum and successful entrepreneur, who decided to make what he called a “strategic investment” in the School and in public education. His $21 million gift to the School in 1999 was, at the time, the largest any school of education had ever received, and today remains the largest in UConn’s history.

Professor Schwab’s commitment to education reaches the national, regional and international levels. He is a member of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education and was recently presented with its Margaret B. Lindsey Award for Distinguished Research in Teacher Education. He teaches each summer at AACTE’s New Deans Institute and is past president of AACTE’s Connecticut chapter. He serves on the National Commission on Teaching America’s Future and has been elected to its board of directors. He is past president of the Council of Academic Deans for Research Education Institutions and has held leadership positions in numerous state and regional education organizations. He is a member of the New England Council of Presidents (NECOP) and has served as president and held several other offices of the Northeastern Educational Research Association. Since 2005, he has served on the Quality Assurance Team for Teacher Education in the state of Qatar, United Arab Emirates.

At the state level, Dr. Schwab serves on a task force appointed by the state legislature to overhaul the Connecticut Beginning Teacher Assessment process. He is a founding member of the Connecticut Alliance for CommPACT Schools, a historic collaborative involving the state’s two teachers unions, the three organizations representing school administrators and superintendents, and UConn’s Neag School of Education. The Alliance’s CommPACT school reform model, funded by the state, is currently being piloted in eight schools in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, New London, and Waterbury.

On campus, he has served as a member of the University Senate and has chaired searches for a number of administrative posts, including the deans of the School of Business and of the College of Continuing Studies, and for the new Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. He led the effort to expand technology capability and use across campus to enhance student learning, and co-chaired the University Master Planning Committee.

Over the years, Dr. Schwab has researched, presented and published on issues related to teacher preparation, teacher and administrator education reform, educational technology, and occupational stress and health in educational organizations; most recently, he collaborated with Neag faculty on the book, Portrait of a Profession: Teaching and Teachers in the 21st Century, for which he served as co-editor.

In 2006, he was honored by his undergraduate alma mater, Boston University, with the Ida M. Johnston Award for Outstanding Achievement and Service, and in 2008, received an award for Outstanding Service and Support from the Neag School of Education Alumni Society.

Richard Schwab - Class of 1970

East Haddam Woman Earns Kennedy Service Award

WASHINGTON (WTNH) — East Haddam resident Theresa Govert will be honored by Peace Corps Director Carrie Hessler-Redelet at the John F. Kennedy Serivce Awards in Washington D.C. on September 23rd. She will be one of six members of the Peace Crops to be honored for outstanding public service both here in the U.S. and abroad.

Govert began by serving in Botswana in August of 2013 a was a volunteer leader with a local gender affairs department and non-governmental organization. Currently, she splits time between organizing events focused on gender equality and working  to develop a beauty salon and spa that also provides an alternate employment opportunity for female workers.

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Before the Peace Corps, Govert graduated from the University of Connecticut with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and women, gender, and sexuality studies. It’s easy to see why she has chosen to become such an involved member of the Peace Corps as the daughter of two returned volunteers and being raised next to a training center in Kenya when she was younger.

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Over the last two years, Govert has used creative expression as a way to establish safes spaces for people to gather and discuss gender issues. Working with 15 communities in Botswana to participate in the One Billion Rising campaign to raise awareness about gender based violence.

“I am very proud to celebrate these exceptional members of the Peace Corps family,” said Director Hessler-Radelet. “To them, public service is a way of life and their dedication to promoting our mission of world peace and friendship is inspiring. No matter where they’re serving, the connections they forge and the difference they make in the lives of others exemplify the Peace Corps spirit.”

http://wtnh.com/2016/09/21/east-haddam-woman-earns-kennedy-service-award/

NOTABLE ALUMNI

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