Humanities Baccalaureate celebrates graduating students - 06/03/05

COLUMBUS – Elizabeth Aston Mily, an Ohio State graduate who has become a managing director of Goldman, Sachs & Co., will be the featured speaker at the 11th annual College of Humanities Baccalaureate. The annual celebration of achievements of the college's graduating students begins at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday (6/11) at 131 Hitchcock Hall, 2070 Neil Ave. The event is free and open to the public.

After earning a bachelor's degree in German and history with honors and distinction, Mily was a Fulbright scholar to the universities of Hamburg and Cologne, Germany, in 1991 and earned an M.S. degree, magna cum laude, in foreign service from the Georgetown University of School of Foreign Service in 1993. That year she joined Goldman, Sachs & Co. as a corporate finance analyst; she was the first non-European to receive an offer at a starting level to work in Frankfurt, Germany, with Goldman, Sachs. Mily moved to London in 1995 and helped establish the European healthcare group. Today, as a managing director, she is responsible for various diversified healthcare companies and manages the Life Sciences and Diagnostics business. An active alumna of Ohio State, Mily is a member of the Fulbright Association, a patron of the Metropolitan Opera, and an active master's rower with a club in Rutherford, N.J.

During the Baccalaureate ceremony, Humanities alumni Julia Keller (Chicago 60611 and Columbus 43215) and Thomas Lennon (London, Ontario, Canada N6A 3K7) will receive the Humanities Alumni Society (HUMAS) Alumni Awards of Distinction.

Keller, who earned a Ph.D. in English, has enjoyed a successful career in journalism. Her journalistic career was capped this spring, when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She joined the Chicago Tribune as its cultural critic in 1989, after 17 years at the Columbus Dispatch. While reporting for the Dispatch, she earned first place in Arts Reporting from the Ohio Associated Press for a story on children and television. She also received first place in the Ohio Humanities Council Essay Contest in 1997. At the Chicago Tribune, Keller was a finalist for the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Non-Deadline Writing in 2005, and in 2004, she won a first-place Peter Lisagor Award for science writing. She also received a prestigious Nieman Fellowship, which provides a year at Harvard University to study in any of Harvard's colleges. Keller studied technologies of literacy in hopes of assessing how television and computers are affecting traditional literacy.

Lennon earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy after receiving a bachelor's degree from Manhattan College in New York. He also studied at the Universitè de Paris. Lennon has been a faculty member at the University of Western Ontario since 1968, where he has published five books, the most recent in 2003. He has also edited or co-edited another six books. He has also published 58 articles in scholarly journals and other volumes; another 12 are forthcoming. He also has published 30 reviews and given 76 lecture presentations at venues around the world. He is working on a book-length manuscript on the philosophy of Descartes.

HUMAS also will present its Outstanding Student Award to Nicole DeGreg (Cincinnati 45248), a major in Spanish and International Studies. She has received numerous honors, including being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and being named a National Merit Scholar. She will graduate summa cum laude with honors in the liberal arts and plans to work with AmeriCorps in Austin before entering graduate school.