Lauren Vilardo '11 has joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest (JVC) for a one year full time volunteer service.  Vilardo is one of 138 Jesuit Volunteers serving 24 communities in five states.  In her second year with JVC Northwest, Vilardo will be stationed at the Tundra Women's Coalition in Bethel, AK, where she will assist teenage girls who are affiliated with a domestic violence shelter.

Co-founder of Threadmatcher Inc., Kevin St. John '06 recently received a scholarship to present at the prestigious DEMO conference in Santa Clara, California.  The success of the company and their innovative fashion website, Threadmatcher.com, prompted the invitation, followed by coverage in VentureBeat.

On May 1, Sourcebooks released I Love Charts: The Book by Jason Oberholtzer '08 and Cody Westphal '08.  The book is a collection of the best previously unpublished charts from their blog I Love Charts, which was created in 2009 and has grown to 100,000 followers on Tumblr and a half a million views a month. The Huffington Post ranked the blog first on their list of "33 Tumblogs You Need to Follow" and the New York Observer called it one of the "100 funniest Tumblrs…ever."

This May, Just World Books published Watches Without Time: An American Soldier in Afghanistan by U.S. Army Capt. Matt Zeller '04.  The book is a collection of the letters and emails Zeller sent to family and friends during the eight months he spent as an embedded combat adviser with the Afghan security forces in Ghazni, Afghanistan during 2008.

Alice Popejoy '09, who will be a doctoral student in the Public Health Genetics Program at the University of Washington School of Public Health in Seattle this fall, has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship for genetics and bioethics research.

The New York Times Green blog has featured an article about a panther project that Caitlin Jacobs '07, a graduate student at the University of Florida, is helping to research. Ranchers in south Florida have begun reporting that panthers are now preying on their calves. In Spring 2011 several calves were documented and confirmed to be killed by panthers.

In late 2011, researchers including Jacobs began tagging calves in an effort to collect evidence to substantiate the claims; the Florida panther had been all but extinct in the 1970s.

Celine Geiger '04 has written her first full episode for NBC Universal's Syfy channel's series Being Human. The series is an adaptation of the British show of the same name and focuses on three roommates—a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost—who attempt to lead normal human lives in Boston.

In "A Cheese Board That Names Names," the New York Times recently featured Sean Tice '06 and his company Brooklyn Slate in their Dining & Wine section.  Brooklyn Slate is a collaborative effort between Tice and Kristy Hadeka that began after the two visited her family's slate quarry in upstate New York in 2009.  They brought home a few pieces to use as all-purpose boards and gifted some to friends.  The slate was so popular that they decided to start their own business.

On Feb. 20, TIME's Techland blog published "Polling and Social Media Collide with 'Social Polling'" by Olivia B. Waxman '11.  The article discusses a new form of polling which, instead of surveying a random sample of the population, polls users online on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.  The questions posed generally focus on current events but can often be more fun that those presented in traditional polls. After a fundraiser at New York's Apollo Theater where President Obama sang "Let's Stay Together," Poll Position asked Americans whether they thought he was a better president or singer.

Lachlan Markay '09 spoke Monday, Feb. 13 as part of The Heritage Foundation panel on "President Obama's Unconstitutional 'Recess' Appointments." The event focused on President Obama's recent appointments of one member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and three members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and sought to "examine the implications of the President's power grab, the logical results if future presidents followed suit, and the remedies that lie with Congress to restore the proper separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government."