The Heinz College Alumni Association Board is pleased to announce the recipients of the first Heinz College Alumni Association Awards. The Board was truly inspired by the quality of all the nominations, and was reminded yet again of the outstanding achievements of our alumni.
The awards will be given out at the Heinz College Summer Welcome Receptions to be held in Chicago, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh.
Please join us in congratulating these outstanding alumni!
Emily Eelman, MSPPM 2005
Alumni Awards Committee, Heinz College Alumni Association Board
Meritorious Service Award
Jon Williams (MSPPM 1987)
Jon D. Williams, a principal with Deloitte Consulting, LLP, has been a champion for partnering with Heinz College and Carnegie Mellon University during his 20+ year tenure with the firm. He has been and remains an integral part of Heinz College’s relationship with Deloitte Consulting. Jon views Heinz graduates as a valuable asset, and often times joins the Deloitte Consulting on-campus recruiting team for student presentations and interviews.
Running for many years now, Jon helped establish the annual Deloitte Consulting Case Competition at Heinz College. This competition offers students a mini-camp on the Deloitte consultant experience and is often a Heinz College highlight for students.
Continuing his advocacy for Heinz, Jon enthusiastically endorsed the college’s co-location of public policy and information systems programs, and the subsequent unique academic experiences it affords. Because of this, Deloitte Consulting was one of the first firms to hire students from all Heinz programs, and Deloitte’s balanced approach to recruiting and hiring has helped increase the reputations of all programs at the College.
In addition, Jon is a member of the Heinz College Dean’s Advisory Council. In this role, Jon provides high-level strategic feedback to the Dean, and assists the college build its resource, visibility and networks.
Distinguished Alumni Award
Jacques M. Jean (MSPPM 1999)
Jacques M Jean is originally from Haiti and left his native country immediately after high school to pursue higher education abroad. He is the founder of Universal Learning Centre (ULC) a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization focused on providing learning materials and access to information within developing countries. Much like public libraries in industrialized nations, ULC aims to establish a system of resource centers accessible to all people. Via ULC, Jacques inspires respect for life-long learning, citizenship, and civic participation by realizing his lifelong dream of bringing quality educational tools to his native country.
Jacques is also an accomplished business professional having over 17 years of experience, most notably a ten-year tenure at Honeywell International, where his positions included Strategic Planning Manager of Automation Control Solutions, International IT Manager for the Consumer Product Group, Senior Manager of New Business Development, and Interim Director of Products and Services. He is currently spearheading the Invensys Corporate IT Application and the Global Infrastructure Service Effectiveness at Invensys, a London-based global technology group supplying solutions, software, services and equipment to monitor, control and automate processes in a wide range of environments and across almost every sector.
His nominator writes that Jacques “has an unwavering spirit for assisting those in developing countries and helping to provide educational resources and learning opportunities to people who might not otherwise have this opportunity.” That unwavering spirit drove the opening of the first public library and learning center in Pilate, Haiti with 25,000 books donated by the Parliament Foundation of Quebec. Because of the success the organization had with Jacques at the helm, ULC will be opening its second and third library learning centers in the summer of 2012. Jacques entices talented individuals to join him in his mission with his infectious magnetism and determination.
Outstanding Young Alumni Awards
Cary McQueen Morrow (MAM 2003)
Cary is Board Secretary and Executive Director of Art with Impact, a non-profit organization whose mission is to connect people to global issues through art and media and provide opportunities to share their voices and time in meaningful ways. Cary co-founded Art With Impact in late 2010 with the vision of becoming a premiere resource for socially conscious people to find films about the issues they care about, and opportunities for becoming involved.
Prior to founding Art With Impact, Cary served as the Director of Grassroots Empowerment, Worldwide for EthnoGraphic Media, where she led the development of distribution and grassroots activism campaigns for documentary films including “Miss HIV,” a film about African solutions to the AIDS epidemic, and “Little Town of Bethlehem” about the non-violence movement in Israel and Palestine.
Cary earned her masters in arts management (MAM) from Carnegie Mellon, graduating in 2003. Following graduation she was hired as the Marketing Director at the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA. In 2005 she returned to CMU where she was hired as the Director of Projects and Sales at the Center for Arts Management and Technology (CAMT) at Heinz College. Six months later she was promoted to Executive Director. Cary was instrumental in the expansion of CAMT's national profile as a thought leader at the intersection of arts management and technology. She established and developed the "Technology in the Arts" brand, which continues to highlight Heinz College's unique contribution to the arts management field, nationwide. She also served as a Systems Synthesis faculty advisor, and was a guest lecturer for the MAM program on research, arts management and internet technology. She's has stayed well-connected to the staff, faculty and students of the MAM program - from hiring MAM interns to helping with the initial planning stages of the 25th Anniversary of the MAM program.
Justin Sosne (MS-DC, 2009)
Justin Sosne participated as a member of the inaugural class of the Heinz MS-DC program, a program designed to bring students to Washington to launch impactful public interest careers. Since graduating, Justin has served as Special Assistant to Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer, at the U.S. Department of State, where he has leveraged his Heinz experience to help advance U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s commitment to improving rights and opportunities for women and girls around the world.
His responsibilities include directly advising the Ambassador on policy matters, developing innovative programs and public-private partnerships, and managing relationships with senior decision-makers in the U.S. government and abroad. His work has contributed to: the creation and launch of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, an innovative public-private partnership designed to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change by addressing the challenge of indoor air pollution (September 2010); the design and execution of the Central Asia and Afghanistan Women's Economic Symposium (Kyrgyzstan, July 2011); which brought together over 100 women leaders from throughout the region to share ideas and best practices for overcoming barriers to women’s economic participation; the formation of a Memorandum of Understanding on Human Trafficking between the U.S. and Ukraine, signed by Secretary Clinton (February 2011); the creation and launch of the Community of Democracies’ Working Group on Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality (Lithuania, April 2010); the formation and expansion of U.S. policy on women and climate change; and the development of the Secretary's agenda on youth.