n recent years, liberal arts colleges and universities have seen a distinct shift toward students wanting to major in and pursue careers in STEM; this has been aided by the seismic shifts in knowledge exploding in STEM fields and a marketplace that pays bigger salaries, at least in the beginning, for people with STEM skills. As a liberal arts faculty devoted to multidisciplinary work, Vassar faculty have adapted by enhancing academic advising (e.g., pushing students to take wild-card courses outside their major interests); reducing credit hours needed for a major, enabling students to double-major, often combining STEM with humanities, language, arts, and social-science courses of study; and creating new multidisciplinary paths that integrate STEM and social sciences or humanities (e.g., Science, Technology, and Society; Data Science and Society; Cognitive Science; and Environmental Studies).

With the advent of AI, all bets are off. It seems that some STEM entry-level jobs may be replaced by AI. Instead of privileging coding or data-analysis skills, employers may be looking for the ability to integrate multiple disciplines, to think outside the box, and to anticipate problems and create solutions—all central to the education and curricular innovations for which Vassar is known. In particular, the multidisciplinary approach—crossing boundaries and finding new perspectives on old problems—may be most valued. This is vintage Vassar. Think Grace Hopper, Vera Rubin, Frances “Sissy” Farenthold, Urvashi Vaid, Anthony Bourdain, and many more.

How are we leveraging AI? To the extent that students, faculty, and staff are experimenting with generative AI in their everyday work, the College is actively pursuing ways to help them do so safely and responsibly—without putting Vassar data at risk. Researchers are using AI to record and transcribe qualitative data and to more quickly perform routine coding tasks. Faculty members in Cognitive Science have trained an AI on the same readings that are assigned to introductory students. Students then, as part of an assignment, must interrogate and evaluate the performance of the AI. Faculty across the College are considering new approaches to assessing knowledge and skills gained—from blue-book written exams to oral exams to integrative and creative individual and group projects. In short, the AI revolution is making us think and innovate, and that is good for higher education.

It is not all rosy. AI presents a whole new set of ethical, social, economic, political, and cultural dilemmas and challenges—issues that cannot be avoided and will impact our collective futures. This is the environment in which liberal arts best thrives: one that has opportunity, uncertainty, and the ability to create anew. Vassar students, faculty, and administrators are navigating these advances in education with openness and courage so that we can experiment, revise, and refine our work to meet the moment, as Vassar always does.

obert K. Brigham, Professor of History on the Shirley Esker Boskey Chair, is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Vietnam War. He has written several books about the conflict, including a blistering indictment of the role of then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger in prolonging the war.

Part of the book takes readers on Brigham’s journey to discovering his father’s identity 17 years after his death in 2001. But since both he and Atwell had been part of the nation’s adoption and foster care systems, where many children endured physical and sexual abuse, much of the narrative examines the nexus between poverty and these systems in post-World War II America. Brigham said some of his aunts and uncles were abused while in foster care.

Brigham will be speaking about these issues for several months when he embarks on a book tour starting in April that will take him to bookstores, colleges and universities, and Vassar clubs in 25 states. He expects some of the questions he will be fielding will dredge up difficult memories, but he hopes the book will lead to substantive changes in America’s adoption and foster care systems.

Specifically, Brigham would like to see laws enacted that require birth certificates for adoptees and for medical records of the adoptees’ families to be made accessible so the adoptees can become aware of possible medical issues later in their lives.

“The book tour will be painful at times,” Brigham added. “Making all this public will not be easy, but this is bigger than me.” —Larry Hertz

Younghan Chen ’29
Cavalcade

Younghan Chen ’29
Shimmering

Comprising more than 500 items, the Schlosser collection features all 40 issues of the abolitionist weekly The National Era in which Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first serialized in 1851, plus the 1852 first edition of the printed book and Stowe’s handwritten manuscripts. Advertisements, ceramic plates, and other memorabilia round out the collection.

Schlosser, a descendant of one of Stowe’s 10 siblings (one of whom was a Vassar trustee), said she chose her alma mater to receive the collection because of her enduring fondness for the College, where she had an “absolutely splendid” experience as an art history major, and because of Vassar’s unique approach to allowing undergraduates access to its Archives and Special Collections.

“This is one of the greatest acquisitions for the Archives and Special Collections Library during my 25-year career here,” noted Vassar’s Head of Special Collections and College Historian Ronald Patkus. “We are extremely grateful for this wonderful gift. As the largest and most important collection of this kind in private hands, it will add considerably to Vassar’s holdings and provide an outstanding resource for teaching and research.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe intended Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a rallying cry against slavery in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The book became a cultural phenomenon the likes of which had never been seen before, with printing presses running 24 hours a day to meet the demand. Later, some stage adaptations, particularly in the South, complicated the book’s legacy by changing the story in order to thwart Stowe’s abolitionist message.

“To think about 19th-century American culture, you have to be able to contend with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in all of its messiness,” said Vassar Assistant Professor of English Blevin Shelnutt, who teaches Stowe’s novel at Vassar as an example of the sentimental literary tradition shaped by 19th-century women authors. “I feel really lucky to have this kind of proximity to a collection of this magnitude and importance for 19th-century American culture,” she said.

—Kimberly Schaye

Research has shown that support from community members and leaders, as well as public and private agencies, can lead to sustainable improvements in young men’s lives. MBK Ambassadors lead community projects and serve as role models in their communities. The MBK Alliance’s work is rooted in key life milestones that research shows are especially predictive of later success, and where interventions can have the greatest impact. Toler is focused on one particular milestone: reading at grade level by third grade. He aims to close the literacy gap in Newark, New Jersey, by urging kids to read using innovative community programming.

“I have been involved with the MBK Alliance for about a year now, and it has been a powerful experience,” said Toler. “I chose to concentrate so closely on literacy/reading because establishing it as a habit has massive positive implications for the other five milestones of development intended to close opportunity gaps for boys and young men of color.” He aims to “meet young men of color where they are and normalize a culture of ‘reading to learn’ outside of traditional school settings.

“Through this ambassadorship, I aim to empower boys and young men of color to become peacebuilders within their own communities while also expanding my understanding of leadership and social entrepreneurship by applying both the hard and soft skills I have developed throughout my four years at Vassar,” Toler said.

—Nandini Likki ’25

Last semester, Office of Sustainability student interns and students in Professor Mary Ann Cunningham’s Introduction to Environmental Science course set out to determine how much energy was being used in the Bridge building where they were taking class. They used ICO Vision, software developed by ICO Energy and Engineering, to research and interpret energy data.

Professor Michael Roth, Research Associate and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, designed the three-hour lab for Cunningham’s course and measured the wattage of batteries and solar PV panels with students. “The electricity data from ICO Vision enabled students to work with real hourly data from the building they were physically sitting in, directly connecting the lab to real-world sustainability applications on campus,” he said.

The data will allow the Office of Sustainability and Facilities Operations to identify areas of the campus that consume excessive power.—Nandini Likki ’25

During the annual event, they presented their work and learned about advances in their fields. The day after the meetings concluded, nearly 300 mathematical sciences professionals and students from 46 states participated in a direct-action advocacy campaign, #MathSciOnTheHill, calling for continued funding and support for the mathematical sciences. Participants met with senators and the staff of congressional representatives to emphasize the critical importance of sustaining robust federal support for mathematical sciences research.

“Research in the mathematical sciences is the bedrock underlying nearly all innovations in science, technology, and engineering,” noted Professor of Mathematics Ben Lotto, who participated in #MathSciOnTheHill alongside Vassar Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics Charles Steinhorn. “Recent developments in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cybersecurity, and advanced manufacturing all rely in a fundamental way on mathematics, statistics, and data science. Investments in research made by federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Departments of Energy, Defense, Education, and Health and Human Services have historically paid off through breakthroughs in these and many other fields.”

Lotto and other participants cautioned representatives about the potentially devastating consequences of proposed budget cuts to these federal agencies.—Elizabeth Randolph

assar’s 2025 fall sports season was one of the best in the College’s history, as four teams won league titles, two others qualified for their conference championship games, and seven student-athletes earned All-American status.

Michelle Walsh, Director of Athletics and Physical Education, said, “I am incredibly proud of our fall teams and look forward to many more successes in winter and spring. We are experiencing an unprecedented time of success among our teams that is significantly raising the bar on how we define ‘on the field’ success at Vassar while remaining committed to our core values of student-athlete learning and a high-quality experience.”

Here’s a brief look at how these fall-season success stories unfolded:

The women’s cross country team finished the regular season, earning the Liberty League Championship on November 1 on the campus of St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. It was the team’s third straight Liberty League championship. Haley Schoenegge ’27 finished second overall in a 101-runner field in the 6k race to earn All Liberty League First Team honors. Anika Mueller-Hickler ’26 and Adelaide Nyhan ’27 finished fourth and fifth, respectively, also gaining spots on the All Liberty League First Team. The team followed up that performance with a school-best 10th-place finish in the NCAA Division III Championships on November 22 in Spartanburg, SC. Schoenegge finished 15th overall in the 291-runner field to earn All-American honors for the second straight year. Mueller-Hickler finished 95th, a career-best in the national championship race.

In the NCAA Division III Men’s Cross Country Championship, also held November 22 in Spartanburg, SC, Sean Miller ’27 posted a 56th-place finish, the best for a Vassar runner in the event since the 2006 season.

The women’s rugby team continued its long tradition of excellence, defeating Fairfield University, 88-5, in the Tri-State Conference championship game and advancing to the Final Four of the National Collegiate Rugby tournament. The Brewers were edged by the United States Coast Guard Academy, 29-24, in the semifinals but rebounded to take third place, defeating the University of Binghamton, 73-0. Jude Robinson ’26 and Sophia Bailey ’26 were named All-Americans.

The men’s rugby team reached the Tri-State Conference finals with a 50-28 win over Maritime College on November 2, but fell to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, 31-24, in the championship game on November 9.

The women’s soccer team won its first league championship in school history, defeating Rochester Institute of Technology 1-0 in the finals of the league playoffs. Ava Holman ’29 scored the only goal of the game late in the first half, and goalkeeper Laura Shea ’28 posted her seventh shutout of the season. Vassar finished the season ranked 20th among all NCAA Division III teams. Forward Gianna Panarelli ’27 earned Third Team All-American status.

The men’s soccer team advanced to the finals of the league championship tournament before losing a hard-fought contest to Hobart College, the 16th-ranked team in the country, by a score of 2-1 on November 9. Midfielder Jared Fiske ’26 earned Third Team All-American honors.

The women’s volleyball team lost to Skidmore College in the first round of the league championship tournament on November 11, but outside hitter Maura McAusland ’27 was rewarded for an outstanding season by earning Third Team All-American status. —Larry Hertz

“It was an amazing day of support for Vassar student-athletes,” said Michelle Walsh, Director of Athletics and Physical Education. “Donor generosity plays an integral role in student-athletes striving for and achieving excellence in competition, in the classroom, and in their campus and local communities.”

Eighty percent of each gift to a team goes directly to that team, and the remaining 20 percent is allocated to the Department of Athletics and Physical Education for programs and equipment that benefit all student-athletes. Funds allocated to the teams enable them to acquire necessary equipment and take training and team-building trips to compete in other parts of the country—and, in some cases, other parts of the world.

“When we held our first Day of Giving nearly 10 years ago, we never envisioned this degree of interest and engagement that we have received from our alums, families, and friends,” said Walsh. “We remain deeply grateful for the tremendous support.” —Larry Hertz

Raphan and Fitzgerald plan to pursue careers in sports in some capacity when they graduate, and they’ve launched a student organization, the Vassar College Sports Business Association (VCSBA), to help others at the College with similar goals do the same. “We’ve been friends since we first arrived on campus, and shared our interest in sports-related careers,” said Raphan, “so we decided to find a way to create those conversations on campus.”

To engage others with similar interests, the VCSBA publishes a biweekly newsletter. A recent issue contained a story on a fledgling women’s basketball league that offers players a financial stake in their teams, and another on NBA star Steph Curry’s decision to dissolve his partnership with the Under Armour sports apparel company.

VCSBA also hosted a forum last fall on career opportunities in sports management. Panelists were Vassar alum Teddy Borgos ’24, a former Vassar soccer player now employed by an investment firm, Cedar Lane Capital; Rachel Walsh, Senior Vice President of Communications at Excel Sports Management, and Sean Gregory, a senior sports correspondent at Time magazine.

“About 30 students showed up for the event, and the panelists talked to them about ways of getting into the business,” Fitzgerald said.

VCSBA’s future plans include working with Vassar’s Career Education office to plan workshops on résumé writing and other topics for students who wish to pursue careers in the sports industry. Fitzgerald said he and Raphan are also working to recruit more student-athletes to join VCSBA. “We want to ensure this effort continues after we graduate next year,” he said. “Other colleges have such organizations, and we think it can really help students here shape their career plans.”—Larry Hertz

hen Alexa Mousley graduated from Vassar in 2020 and headed to Cambridge University to pursue her PhD, she was following the passion that first led her to major in neuroscience. As a Vassar student, Mousley was fascinated by brain connectivity and development, and she brought this fascination to her PhD studies, serving as lead author on a groundbreaking paper. Her discoveries could change the way scientists understand how physical connections in the brain form and develop at different stages of life.

Published in November in Nature Communications, the paper “Topological turning points across the human lifespan” reveals five distinct stages of brain development from birth to late adulthood. To pinpoint these stages, Mousley gathered 4,000 MRI scans of individuals from infancy to age 90 from open data sets. By using machine learning to analyze the scans, they found patterns in the data that pointed to marked shifts in brain wiring around ages 9, 32, 66, and 83.

Throughout the childhood phase from birth to age nine, connections in the brain consolidate. The most active neuronal pathways grow stronger, while unused or weak connections are pruned. The next phase, adolescence, lasts until age 32, during which the brain’s communication networks are refined so information can move more quickly from one area to another. Mousley says this is the “only phase where the brain is becoming more efficient over time.”

After adolescence, connections begin to stabilize and efficiency decreases. Cognition and behavior are more consistent in the adult phase from age 32 to 66, but the brain’s networks begin to reorganize gradually during early aging, from about age 66 to age 83. By the time a person reaches late aging, the pathways in their brain have consolidated into specific regions that are more connected to themselves than to each other.

“So, there’s kind of this grouping thing where connectivity across the whole brain is weakening and there [are] these strong groups forming,” Mousley explains. “There [are] these hubs that are needed for lots of different paths.” Just as more airplanes pass through large central airports than smaller rural locations, the brain uses more of these hubs and fewer whole-brain connections to process information in late aging.

“Obviously I’m looking at over 4,000 brain scans, and so the time it took me to gather that together, to organize it, to set it all up—it was a long process.” That freedom to explore allowed Mousley to look at brain development in fresh ways that helped her pinpoint changes in connectivity.

The novel discoveries are earning Mousley and her team’s paper widespread recognition. The research has been featured in outlets like the BBC, the New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, and the Washington Post. The outpouring of interest surprised Mousley because researching the paper felt normal to her. Even her supervisor, Duncan Astle, Program Leader at Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, didn’t realize the research would get so much attention.

“He said something like, ‘Let’s just make a press release and see what happens,’” Mousley recalls.

While she’s happy that people are excited about her work, Mousley is quick to emphasize that the age ranges are averages based on broad, general patterns, not definitive numbers that apply to every person. She and her team also didn’t evaluate other factors like behavior or cognition; they only looked at the brain.

Still, Mousley hopes that understanding these changes in connectivity across the human lifespan could help predict problems with cognition and brain health, particularly the risk of developing mental health disorders in adolescence or dementia in early aging. She says the potential for future work in these areas is what excites her most about the project.

Mousley’s passion for neuroscience was clear during her time at Vassar. Over the course of two years working in Professor Hadley Bergstrom’s memory neuroscience lab, she played an instrumental role in several projects and co-authored three papers, which Bergstrom says is rare at other undergraduate institutions.

He recalled that “Alexa was just an outstanding, exceptional student. It’s amazing to be able to interact with all these talented students and to potentially have some kind of role or impact, however small it may be. It’s so rewarding for me.”

Mousley says her work with Bergstrom was fundamental to her understanding of science. “I owe Vassar so much. Really, the foundation of all my neuroscience experience, and also excitement, came from those experiences at Vassar.” —Theresa Houghton

“That’s been a theme I’ve been working with for a really long time,” said Gasteazoro, who made his first feature film just out of college with the help of a grant from Vassar. (That film is available on Amazon as Black Pearl [2008].)

“The Protector was informed by not only that first feature experience at Vassar, but also 20 years of being a commercial director and feeling like I had made a lot of beautiful work that didn’t really matter,” he said. The combination of a near-fatal snowboarding accident and the COVID pandemic brought Gasteazoro to a “big come to Jesus” moment that led him to ask, “What am I leaving behind?” It was time to make his passion project a reality. To do so, he mortgaged his house and then rounded up his Vassar friends. “We decided to double down and just do the thing in hopes of getting this important message out: that we can still make a difference and help to protect what is left for future generations,” he said. The results speak for themselves. “It was awesome” working with fellow alums, said Gasteazoro. It made it easy to trust in the cast and crew, because “everybody’s super smart and talented.”

Phyllis Klaus ’57, P’82, below, a therapist and social worker who helped establish the role of the doula in childbirth, was named to the Prenatal Sciences Research Institute 2025 Hall of Honor this past November. Said the institute on its website, “Some pioneers lead with a megaphone. Phyllis Klaus led with attention—the kind that notices a laboring woman’s breath, a newborn’s gaze, and the subtle shift in a room when someone feels truly safe. From hospital wards to international trainings, she transformed bedside observations into a worldwide standard of compassionate care: the doula.” Klaus is pictured with her husband Marshall.

his is such an important issue of VQ, showcasing alums who are doing extraordinary work. But this magazine can only feature a handful of our classmates and friends. What I know is that every one of us who is part of our Vassar alum community has chosen to apply our learning and knowledge in myriad ways that better our communities and make an impact on those close to us, or upon those we will never meet.

This is the true gift of our Vassar community, and it has been my privilege and honor to have served as your AAVC president for the past four years. Although we find ourselves continually muddling through complicated times, I know that somehow, somewhere, Vassar people are shining the light for all of us.

Thank you for all that you do, and thank you for allowing me to play a small part in serving this amazing community. I am indebted to the AAVC Officers, Brian Farkas ’10, Tyrone Forman ’92, and Alisa Swire ’84, and the entire AAVC Board, for their support, thoughtfulness, and tireless commitment to all things Vassar. In my role I have had a symbiotic relationship with Lisa Tessler, Executive Director of the AAVC, who has been an amazing partner, and will also be stepping down this June. The relationship between the AAVC and the College is critical, and it has been a true pleasure to collaborate with our College President, Betsy Bradley, and Chair of the Board of Trustees, Sharon Chang ’84, in ensuring the vitality of our alum community.

I know that my successor and the AAVC Board will cast their own imprint on our community, in collaboration with Willa Vincitore ’92, our new Associate Vice President and AAVC Executive Director. I look very much forward to being a part of that.

Perhaps I will see some of you at Reunion, and I hope you will always bear in mind that ineffable bond created by Vassar that ties us together forevermore.

Take good care, and see you around,

n the first page of The Very Heart of It, Thomas Mallon, right, is talking with Rachel Kitzinger—both Vassar professors I’d admired—about a mutual friend. I feel a small thrill: They knew each other. By page 50, their friend was dead from AIDS.

It’s hard to overstate how much the specter of AIDS weighed on Professor Mallon during the years represented by this book. As a collection of his diaries in the 1980s and early 1990s, it represents in real time the pleasures, concerns, obsessions, small rivalries, and major triumphs of a writer, professor, and editor. I, too, am all those things, and have been for thirty years now.

I’ve stood in front of students while working for eight years on finishing my first book, sending queries, fielding rejections, basking in small signs of success. (I’ve never felt more in common with Professor Mallon than when he notes with minor delight that, standing in a campus library in Texas, he sees that his first novel has been checked out thirteen times.) I’ve taught through divorce and my mother dying young of lung cancer. The students had no idea. That’s not a failure—that’s the job. You show up. You read their work. You say to them, as Professor Mallon did to me, that I was a pretty good writer but I could be so much better. The rest stays private.

As a student, Vassar wasn’t just where I took classes—it was where I slept, ate, made friends, made and lost relationships, figured out who I wanted to be. As a professor, I know now that working at a college is a job, not an identity. That was especially true for Professor Mallon, who yearned to spend his time in New York City, writing, rather than reading our work, though he was unfailingly kind and incisive in his suggestions about our writing.

The diaries show what I couldn’t see: the literary anxieties (worrying his reviews weren’t good enough, that his novel wouldn’t sell), the romantic disappointments, the ever-present fear of AIDS. They also show him slowly detaching from his Vassar life, ultimately giving up the steady income and status of being a tenured professor to bet his future on making it as a writer.

In 1990, the year that I studied with him, Professor Mallon finally took an HIV test, after avoiding it for years. He waited for the results as he taught us about Joan Didion and Bruce Chatwin, and as he challenged me to write deeper, more meaningful stories—a moment he could not possibly remember but which altered the course of my work. He came home from Vassar to a phone call from his doctor. “You’re negative,” the doctor said. A couple of days later, he wrote in his diary, “Life is dazzlingly ordinary. I walk in disbelief.”

The last time I saw Professor Mallon, several years ago, he was speaking to a packed house at the country’s largest writing conference. The crowd was so big, and the line to sign his new book so long, that all I could do was wave in his direction after the talk and say, “Hi! I was your student at Vassar.” A minder hustled him to the book signing before I could tell whether he recognized me.

Reading his diaries now, it’s not the current Thomas Mallon I want to speak with. It’s the young professor from back then, who so thoughtfully read and commented on my writing, even though he was awash with his own concerns. Don’t worry, I want to say. Life, love, writing—it looks like it all turns out just fine.—Kevin Haworth ’92

Kevin Haworth is the author of five books, including the award-winning novel The Discontinuity of Small Things. He is Giles Writer-in-Residence at Penn State University.