A series of serendipitous events led Larry Cervi (EDUC '58) to found the University of Pittsburgh’s Golden Girls in 1975.
“As a child, I broke my wrists in a fall. For therapy, I had to twist sticks, which eventually morphed into batons—which I eventually learned to twirl,” said Cervi in a 2022 interview with Pitt Magazine.
During her tenure as president of the Pitt Alumni Association (PAA), Valerie Njie spent much of her time and energy telling the Pitt story — highlighting to alumni, students and the broader community the best parts of the University.
Njie (EDUC ’71) remains an active member of the PAA, continuing to support and highlight the accomplishments of Pitt and its outstanding alumni. But in summer 2024, she turned her focus to telling her own story and, in doing so, became one of a handful of Pitt affiliates helping to launch a unique oral history project, “Voices of History.”
Bryce Rabideau, the Director of the Bluegrass Ensemble and a mandolin instructor in the Department of Music at the Dietrich School, recently appeared on KDKA’s Talk Pittsburgh with his band Buffalo Rose. The band, along with Rabideau, performed their single “Solid Ground.” After the performance, they talked about their love for Pittsburgh and how they came together as a band.
Gene Team 2025 has officially come to a close. The summer program began on June 23 and was open to all Pittsburgh-area high school students who completed at least one high school-level biology class. Becky Gonda, a teaching associate professor and Director of Outreach in the Department of Biological Sciences, is the head of the Gene Team.
This May, Pitt’s Comparative Sign Language global experience took off to Edinburgh, Scotland, with 15 students and two faculty members.
The two-week program was “voice-off” — no spoken English — creating a rare opportunity for students to expand their linguistic and cultural fluency in a multilingual signed environment. Students relied instead on their background of American Sign Language (ASL) and engaging deeply with British Sign Language (BSL), the primary language of the host country.
Marina von Neumann Whitman, a former faculty member in the Department of Economics, has passed away. Whitman began as an instructor at Pitt in 1962 and became a Distinguished Public Service Professor of Economics in 1973. She became one of the highest-ranking women in corporate America while working at General Motors and was also the first woman to serve on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Whitman was 90.
It’s a typical rainy day in Pennsylvania, but that hasn’t deterred any of the students in the Experiencing Architecture: Fallingwater Summer Design Studio. In fact, the rain has let up enough that one of the students, Claudia Engfer, has suggested walking to Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece, Fallingwater, from their current residence.
