College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Top alumni

LAS recognizes alumni for outstanding achievements during Homecoming.
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will honor alumni at Homecoming with the Citation of Merit and the Distinguished Service Award.

The honors will be bestowed at a luncheon on Friday, Oct. 8, at noon in the Scheman Building. LAS will host an awards dinner for those and other College recipients later that evening in the Scheman Building.

The recipients and their awards include:

CITATION OF MERIT
Honors LAS distinguished alumni who have demonstrated outstanding achievement and received national or international recognition

Stephanie A. Burns
PhD 1982, Organic Chemistry
Midland, Michigan

Burns is president and CEO of Dow Corning Corporation. She joined Dow Corning in 1983 as a researcher, working on water-based and high-temperature elastomers. In subsequent years she has held several positions with Dow Corning including product development, marketing, and business management. For three years she served as director of women’s health issues and was a member of the company’s bankruptcy management team when it filed for reorganization in 1995.

Her first assignment outside the U.S. began in 1997 in Brussels, Belgium, as science and technology director for Europe. Two years later she became business director for life sciences and electronics, and in December 2000 she was named executive vice president and elected to Dow Corning’s board of directors.

Long Vo Nguyen
PhD 1975, Computer Science
McLean, Virginia

Long has been successful in not one career choice, but three. After receiving his Ph.D. from Iowa State, Long went on to have a successful career at IBM and then as a college professor at the University of Saigon and Georgetown University.

In 1985, Long established Pragmatics, Inc., a company that provides information technology solutions to the federal government and commercial firms. Pragmatics' goal to be a technologically-focused organization has led the company to successfully complete more than 170 projects for 60 different clients in the federal government and industry. Since 1997, Pragmatics has been the prime contractor for eight government contracts that total more than $5 billion.

Randall Wreghitt
BS 1978, Journalism
New York, New York

Broadway producer Wreghitt has become a fixture on the Great White Way.

Through his Iowa Boy Productions company, Wreghitt has produced an array of on- and off-Broadway shows, including the Tony Award-nominated dramas "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," "The Lonesome West," "Metamorphoses," "Hedda Gabler," and "Golda's Balcony." He won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Revival for producing "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," starring Gary Sinese.

This December, Wreghitt's latest production, the highly anticipated "Little Women: The Musical," will open on Broadway.

DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD
Honors alumni, staff and friends for outstanding service that furthers LAS' educational mission.

Thomas Phelps
BS 1959, Government
Elizabeth Phelps
Cota de Caza, California

Charles Manatt
BS 1958, Rural Sociology
Kathleen Manatt
BS 1958, Home Economics Education
Washington, D.C.

Each fall a world leader comes to campus to give the Phelps-Manatt Lecture in Political Science, a speaker series that focuses on significant developments that have occurred during the previous year in the area of international political economy . The lecture series, as well as the Manatt-Phelps Endowed Chair in International Political Economy in the Department of Political Science, has been founded by Thomas and Elizabeth Phelps and Charles and Kathleen Manatt. A former chair of the Democratic National Committee, Charles Manatt served as U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic from 1991-2001. Ambassador Manatt and his fellow ISU classmate Thomas Phelps founded the law firm now known as Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, in Los Angeles.