2011 Alumnus of the Year: Daniel C. Ulmer Jr.

After a 40-year banking career, Dan Ulmer retired in 1994 as the chairman and CEO of PNC Bank, Kentucky. He currently is chairman and an owner of the Louisville Bats baseball franchise, as well as an owner-investor in several local small businesses.

Dan Ulmer has served as chairmen of the Board of Trustees for Minor Leaugue Baseball. In addition, he served as chairman of the Metro United Way Fund Drive, Louisville Central Area, Operation Brightside, Norton healthcare, and numerous other community agencies. Mr. Ulmer is a former chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Louisville, a former member of the University of Kentucky’s Board of Trustees, and a past chairman of the Kentucky State Fair Board. He served on the boards of Louisville Fund for the Arts, Regional Airport Authority, Metro Parks, Chamber of Commerce, and Metropolitan Sewer District. He is a current member of the Golf Magazine Rating Panel and serves on the Louisville Arena authority.

In 1982, Dan Ulmer was chosen Man-of-the-Year by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and Man-of-the-Year in 1983 by the Better Business Bureau/Advertising Club of Louisville. He is the recipient of the 2004 Catholic School Alumni Award. In 2009, he was indicted into the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame, and in 2010, he was inducted in the Junior Achievement Hall of Fame.

Mr. Ulmer is a Louisville native. He is a graduate of Flaget High School, the University of Louisville, Rutgers University School of Banking, and Stanford University Executive Program. A former Naval officer, he has three children and five grandchildren.

2011 Alumni Fellows

College of Arts and Sciences
Angela Ford

Angela Ford grew up in Louisville and received her degree in political science, cum laude, from the University of Louisville in 1982. She was elected as the first female student government president in the state. After graduation, she attended law school at Northern Kentucky University for two years and then moved to Lexington where she completed law school at the University of Kentucky. In law school she was the first student to be appointed to the Council on Higher Education. She developed a passion for health care while working as an intern at Humana in Louisville and continued working in the health care field after finishing law school.

After Brereton Jones became governor, Angela was appointed as the first female General Counsel for the Cabinet for Human Resources and focused on health care issues, including fraud in the Medicaid program. She represented the Attorney General and Governor in lawsuits related to medical services.

In her private practice, Angela has handled a number of controversial cases, including a lawsuit against the Diocese of Covington for the sexual abuse of minors. Nearly seven years ago, she filed the largest case of her career and uncovered one of the biggest thefts in US history. The case against a group of lawyers who stole over $64 million from their own clients is still winding its way through the courts. To date, 2 of the lawyers are in prison, 3 have been disbarred by our Supreme Court and recommendations for the disbarment of 3 others are pending before the Supreme Court.

The case has been the subject of articles and editorials in newspapers and legal publications throughout the country and was featured on American Greed, a program on CNBC. Angela was named one of the 10 Lawyers of the Year by Lawyers USA in 2009.

College of Business
Robinson S. Brown, III

Robinson S. Brown III (Robbie) represents a very special breed of College of Business supporters: those who have reconnected with the college as a result of exceptional academic experiences enjoyed by their offspring.

When Robbie’s son Robinson IV participated and excelled in the college’s signature Entrepreneurship MBA program—including winning regional business plan competitions as part of a MBA student team—Robbie and his wife Libby took the lead in generating support and sponsorship for the college to host a national business plan competition. His daughter, Polly, is also a graduate of the program. Today the competition they helped spark—The UofL Brown-Forman Cardinal Challenge—is recognized as one of the nation’s finest new business concept competitions, and is a qualifying event to the international ‘Super Bowl’ of competitions, the Venture Labs Investment Competition (formerly Moot Corp.) They and other members of the Brown family continue to support the competition, which is now in its fourth year.

Due in part to their participation in the Cardinal Challenge and subsequent competitions, College of Business entrepreneurship students have since distinguished themselves in international competitions, regularly sharing honors with the finest entrepreneurial programs in the world.

In addition to his participation in the entrepreneurship program, Robbie—a two-degree graduate of the college—is involved in several local business start-ups and also focuses his giving and time on Prodigal Ministries, a second-chance program for prison inmates. He retired from Brown-Forman Corporation in 2006 after 40 years. His quiet manner and unassuming generosity belie the significance of his support and the tenacity of his commitments.

School of Dentistry
Robert McGuinn, D.M.D.

Dr. Robert McGuinn received his under-graduate degree from Northern Arizona University in 1967. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps., he received his D.D.M. from the University of Louisville School of Dentistry in 1974. Dr. McGuin established a dental practice in Cumming, Georgia.

Dr. McGuinn is a unique individual and alumnus who contributes to the lives of individuals seeking futures as oral health care providers. In addition, he has embraced and supported with his own talent and resources providing oral health care to the underserved by participating in international service and learning programs in such venues as: the United Nations Refugee Camps in Hong Kong, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Haiti. While still active in the military reserves, he started the joint Army Indian Reservation Dental Programs. He is the recipient of the ADA Overseas Volunteer Award
Furthermore, he is a strong supporter and participant along with last year’s Alumni Fellow, Dr. William Collins, in similar outreach programs within the Commonwealth of Kentucky and other venues in Appalachia. Recognizing that being underserved and lacking access to care is not a rural phenomenon, Dr. McGuinn helped establish, support, and provide free oral health care for individuals in the cities of Athens and Greensboro in Georgia.

Dr. McGuinn has always supported the UofL School of Dentistry. In addition to supporting the development and construction of the dental school’s Innovative Simulation Clinic, he and his wife, Penny, have created and are funding endowments to provide scholarships for students from the state of Georgia; an annual cash award to a faculty member who has excelled in teaching; and annual funding to support dental students benefiting from educational programs at the nationally recognized Hinman Society in Atlanta. Most recently, Dr. McGuinn was a key member and advocate of the committee to support renovation and renewal of the dental school facility.

College of Education & Human Development
Maj. Kent Solheim

Maj. Kent Solheim received his B.S. in Occupational Training and Development in 2002 and his M.S. in Human Resource Education in 2008 from the University. He has served in the United States Army for the last 16 years. He earned a Silver Star in Iraq for his bravery during Operation Volcano II, the successful mission to capture a senior leader of the infamous Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army. He saved dozens of lives during the operation, but in the process lost his right leg.
He has also been awarded a Bronze Star Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters, Purple Heart Medal, two Meritorious Service Medals, and Army Commendation Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters.
Since his injury, Maj. Solheim has remained on active duty and has redeployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom for his sixth combat tour.

He and a fellow Green Beret participated in 12 Hours of Santos, an ultra endurance mountain bike challenge to raise funds for Special Operations Warrior Foundation (SOWF). He accomplished this with a prosthetic leg. They raised a total of $14,000, which was $4,000 above their intended goal.

Special note about SOWF, the Foundation provides college educations for the children of special operations personnel from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps who fall in combat or training operations. SOWF also provides support for families so they can travel to be at the bedside of a severely wounded loved one. Kent Solheim was a recipient of SOWF, so this was his way of giving back.

J.B. Speed School of Engineering
Yung T. Nguyen

Yung Nguyen (pron: young win) was born and grew up in Saigon, Vietnam. After the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975, Mr. Nguyen endured several years under the harsh political system imposed by the Communist regime. Mr. Nguyen escaped to the U.S. to pursue the American dream, but the refugee’s journey was difficult, dramatic and dangerous.

In 1980, Mr. Nguyen found a Cambodian guide to smuggle him to safe refuge in Thailand. He traveled on foot and bike through the jungles of Cambodia. Mr. Nguyen was the only member of his group to arrive safely in Thailand.

After almost two years in various refugee camps in Southeast Asia, Mr. Nguyen arrived in America with literally nothing, not even shoes on his feet. He made his home in Louisville, where his uncle, a former pilot in the South Vietnamese air force, had settled earlier. Mr. Nguyen’s first job in this country was washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant in Louisville.

Mr. Nguyen furthered his education while attending Jefferson Community College and the University of Louisville. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1986, a master’s degree in computer science in 1988, and a master’s degree in mathematics in 1990. Mr. Nguyen worked for a decade at Electronic Systems USA as a software designer, project manager, and in his last position there as engineering department manager.

In 1993, a young Louisville woman was shot to death by a former boyfriend. He had been jailed for raping and assaulting her weeks before, but was released on bond without her knowledge. When Mr. Nguyen and his business partner, Mike Davis, heard about Mary Byron’s murder, they decided to start the VINE Company to develop and market an automated computer system to give crime victims access to offender information 24 hours a day and automatically notify them by phone, pager, email, or fax upon an offender's release.

In five years, the VINE Company grew to 100 employees, who shared the founders’ strong sense of purpose—helping victims of crime. The victim notification technology is now in use in more than 1200 counties in 36 states and in Canadian provinces. Mr. Nguyen and his partner at VINE shared an Ernst & Young 1997 Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Mr. Nguyen also won the 1998 Founder’s Award from the Advanced Technology Council of Louisville, and several other honors from the University of Louisville.

After the 2000 presidential election recount controversy in Florida, Mr. Nguyen began to extensively research ways to resolve problems with voting machines. That work developed into his passion to lead the effort to make all precincts accessible to all voters. Mr. Nguyen invented the patented voting technology, called Inspire, and founded IVS, in 2002. IVS, LLC is a voting services company that specializes in accessible voting systems. IVS makes it easy and affordable for states and counties that use optical scan or other non-accessible voting systems to comply with new federal requirements for precinct-level accessibility.

Mr. Nguyen is the Founder and Chairman of Lac Viet, a non-profit program that provides after school and tutoring services to immigrant children and seeks to empower immigrant parents who speak limited English to get involved in their children’s education. He and his wife, Vu, also a Speed graduate and partner in IVS, have three children, and live in Louisville.

Louis D. Brandeis School of Law
Howard Fineman

Howard Fineman is Editorial Director of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group, the leadership team bringing the HuffPost's unique blend of news, commentary and reader engagement to all AOL content sites and 250 million users worldwide. He continues to report and write on politics for the Huffington Post main site.

A long time political reporter and commentator, Fineman serves as an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He is a regular on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and "Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell." He also appears on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," "Morning Joe," NBC's "Today Show" and the weekend NBC-syndicated "Chris Matthews Show."

Fineman joined The Huffington Post in October 2010 after many years as a reporter, columnist, editor and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief at Newsweek Magazine. When HuffPost was acquired by AOL in March 2011, Fineman was named Editorial Director of the new media group by Huffington Post founder and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington.

The author of scores of Newsweek cover stories and a Newsweek column called "Living Politics," Fineman's work also has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic. He has interviewed every major presidential candidate since 1985 as well as business and entertainment leaders and has appeared on most major news and commentary shows.

His book, The Thirteen American Arguments, was published by Random House in 2008 and was a national best seller. The paperback edition of the book, published in 2009, went to new printings in 2010 and is available in major bookstores or on Amazon.com. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Alumni Award from his professional alma mater, the Columbia Journalism School; an American Bar Association "Silver Gavel" Award; a New York Press Association "Headliner's Award; and Fineman's work helped Newsweek win three National Magazine Awards. In May 2011 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters by Colgate University, his college alma mater.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Colgate, Fineman earned an M.S from Columbia and a J.D. law degree from the University of Louisville during his years as a reporter with The Courier-Journal in Kentucky. He won a Watson Traveling Fellowship while at Colgate and a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship at Columbia.

Fineman is married to Washington attorney Amy L. Nathan. They are the parents of two children, Meredith and Nicholas.

School of Medicine
Dr. Larry Cook

Larry N. Cook, M.D., received his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Louisville and completed a neonatal fellowship following his pediatric residency at the University of Colorado Medical Center. A faculty member for 37 years, Dr. Cook is considered the "Father of Modern Neonatology" and served 20 years as the chief of UofL's division of neonatology, which grew to one of the largest neonatology programs in the country saving lives and caring for thousands of acutely ill newborns. He served as Chair of the Department of Pediatrics and Chief of Staff at Kosair Children's Hospital from 1994 until 2004 when he was appointed Executive Vice President for Health Affairs.

Under Dr. Cook's leadership the new UofL Health Care Outpatient Center opened where patients receive much of their ambulatory care from UofL Physicians; the Clinical and Translational Research building was constructed and opened with renovation of the School of Dentistry, relocation of the School of Public Health & Information Sciences, renovation of the School of Nursing, and planning for a new HSC Instructional Building. In addition, under his watch the expertise of UofL Physicians is available throughout the state and beyond through a network of robots that enable physicians at community hospitals to be in contact with UofL faculty, and services of UofL Physicians are more available to patients through the integration of multiple practice groups into one.

Dr. Cook is former President and Chairman of the School of Medicine's practice plan board and the Medical School Practice Association, and has helped guide the organization's evolution to UofL Physicians, the largest group of specialists and subspecialists in the region. He was instrumental in the development of University Health Care, Inc., a Medicaid managed care HMO, known as Passport, responsible for more than 165,000 insured in 16 counties and served as Chairman of the Board for 13 years.

School of Music
Terry S. Cravens

Terry Cravens, bass trombonist, earned performance degrees
from the University of Louisville, the Academy of Music in Vienna, and in 1972 completed doctoral studies at the University of Southern California.

He was a member of the Louisville Orchestra and the Kentucky Opera Association Orchestra from 1961-1965, the United States Military Academy Band, 1966-1969, Austin (Texas) Symphony, 1972-1976, and during the mid 1970s performed frequently with the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra. He is currently a member of the Pasadena Symphony, the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale Sinfonia.

He played over two hundred performances of the Phantom of the Opera musical at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles and has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under such notable conductors as Zubin Mehta, Carlos Maria Giulini, Erich Leinsdorf, Pierre Boulez, Andre Previn, Witold Lutoslawski, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. In May of 1991, he toured with the Los Angeles Philharmonic through Scotland, England, and Germany under the baton of Kurt Sanderling.

His background includes 22 first edition records with the Louisville Orchestra under Robert Whitney and recordings of Wagner's Die Walkure and Bruckner's Seventh Symphony with Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic. Additionally he can be heard on a recording of the Requiem by Mozart conducted by Istvan Kertesz, also with the Vienna Philharmonic (1965). During 1969 Cravens recorded several albums with the Los Angeles Brass Society conducted by Lester Remsen and in 1977 played on a direct disc Wagner album with Erich Leinsdorf and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

He has worked in every major studio in Los Angeles and can be heard in the music accompanying the Tiny Toons and Animaniac cartoon series. Dream Team, Battlestar Galactica, Cross Creek, Unfaithfully Yours, 2010, A Space Odyssey, Bound for Justice, Rocky V, and Rainman are a few examples of his work in film music.

Cravens was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin from 1972-1976. From 1976 to the present he has been Professor of Trombone at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. During 2006 he was the recipient of the Ramo Music Faculty Award for outstanding teaching. In addition to his trombone teaching responsibilities at USC he serves as Chairman of the Wind Brass and Percussion Department.

School of Nursing
Charlotte Ipsan

Charlotte Ipsan received her MS in nursing in 1998 from the University of Louisville, and with over 25 years experience in the nursing profession, she has distinguished herself as an outstanding practitioner, educator, and leader. Charlotte began her career as a neonatal nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Kosair Children’s Hospital. From there she went on to obtain her Master’s Degree and as a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner, managed the nurse practitioner staff for Neonatal Associates.

In 2005 Charlotte joined the University of Louisville School of Nursing faculty where she was responsible for didactic and clinical instruction and education of graduate students for neonatal nurse practitioners. In 2008, Charlotte received the graduate faculty of the year award. In 2009 Charlotte was named Vice President of Kosair Children’s Medical Center and in January of 2011 was promoted to System Vice President of Pediatric Services at Norton Healthcare/Kosair Children’s Hospital.
Through her scholarship, service, and leadership, Charlotte has made significant contributions to the university and the profession of nursing as a whole.

Kent School of Social Work
Dr. Alfonso Batres

Dr. Alfonso Batres is the Chief Officer in the Department of Veterans Affairs Readjustment Counseling Service proving services to combat veterans and their families through 300 national community based centers. Dr. Batres is considered an international pioneer and expert on developing programs for addressing the psycho- social sequelae of combat trauma with veterans and their families. His career has been dedicated to one important mission—addressing the readjustment needs of our Nation’s combat veterans and their families. He served his country in Vietnam then and as a disabled veteran continues his serve his country now through work with community based VA Vet Center Program for nearly three decades, starting in the field offices and heading the program since 1994.

He is a finalist for 2011 Service to America Medal, the highest award bestowed on a civil servant outside the government. “Dr. Batres has led the program to record levels of service provision over many years, “ said Dr. Robert Petzel, the VA Under Secretary for Health. More than 190,000 veterans and their family members visited the Vet Centers 1.2 million times in 2010 alone. Over 95 percent of all veterans surveyed not only reported outstanding satisfaction, but they would recommend the Vet Centers to fellow veterans and their families,” said Petzel. His program is the gold standard amongst government agencies as well as bench marked outside agencies in employee satisfaction. He received numerous recent awards; the Presidential Distinguished Service Rank Award for Senior Executives, the highest award that can be achieved within civil service, the Presidential Meritorious Service Rank Award, a Presidential Citation for saving veterans lives, and many others.

Alfonso received his MSSW from the Kent School of Social Work, University of Louisville in 1974 while employed at Ireland Army Hospital and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has held various academic appointments and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Medical and Clinical Psychology with the F. Edward Herbert School of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences.

He remains involved in volunteering with local agencies and enjoys time with his family. His son Al served in Iraq and resides in San Antonio along with his daughter Grace and is blessed with five grand children.