Their Honors is Ours
2023 Alumni Awards
By Jeremy Ohmes
Their Honors is Ours
2023 Alumni Awards
By Jeremy Ohmes
Every year the University of Illinois Chicago Alumni Association proudly recognizes a few of our remarkable UIC alumni. These individuals have achieved extraordinary success in their respective fields and have made notable contributions to their communities.
Each of these alumni come from different disciplines: endodontics, genetics, orthodontics, physical therapy, social work and oral sciences. But what binds them together is their UIC experience and their commitment to meaningful change. These achievers, humanitarians and rising stars embody their alma mater’s commitment to create a better world for all. The UIC community is honored to call them alumni.
Every year the University of Illinois Chicago Alumni Association proudly recognizes a few of our remarkable UIC alumni. These individuals have achieved extraordinary success in their respective fields and have made notable contributions to their communities.
Each of these alumni come from different disciplines: endodontics, genetics, orthodontics, physical therapy, social work and oral sciences. But what binds them together is their UIC experience and their commitment to meaningful change. These achievers, humanitarians and rising stars embody their alma mater’s commitment to create a better world for all. The UIC community is honored to call them alumni.
Rising Star Award
Jenifer Nyhuis
MSW ’12, Social Work
Jane Addams College of Social Work
How are good leaders made? For Jenifer Nyhuis, it is a combination of education and experience — with a healthy dose of the unexpected.
Only five years after graduating from the UIC Jane Addams College of Social Work (JACSW), Nyhuis became CEO of the behavioral health hospital, Aurora Vista del Mar — at the age of 34.
Three years later, she was recruited to lead Havenwyck Hospital in Auburn Hills, Michigan, and oversee three other behavioral health hospitals throughout the state.
She attributes her meteoric rise through the ranks of the health care field to the people skills she learned at UIC.
The alumna says, “A lot of leading is just focusing on people and advocating for their needs. Those fundamentals are often overlooked, and UIC helped instill in me those values of dignity, respect and looking at that whole-person perspective.”
During her social work studies, Nyhuis interned for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, mostly working with LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness and advocating for state funding to address the crisis.
The legendary JACSW field instructor Barbara Coats recognized Nyhuis’ leadership abilities and helped her secure a director position with the Salvation Army Head Start childcare program. In that role, the 29-year-old Nyhuis oversaw several teams in all areas of social, disabilities and mental health services — creating positive changes in the organizational culture and in turn fostering positive outcomes for Head Start clients.
Those experiences set the stage for the UIC alumna’s transition to behavioral health care and prepared her for two unexpected life-changing challenges.
Six months after Nyhuis became the CEO of Aurora Vista del Mar hospital in Ventura, California, the catastrophic Thomas Fire blazed through the community.
Embers and ash fell around the hospital. When she called 911, Nyhuis was told there were no first responders available to help.
She took decisive action and personally led the evacuation of all 70 patients and 25 staff members. No one was injured, and the patients were safely placed in other hospitals; however, half of Vista del Mar was destroyed.
Nyhuis helped reopen the hospital within 10 months, an accomplishment that earned her a Distinguished Service Award from the California Hospital Association and Woman of the Year from the California Senate.
Two years later, Nyhuis would lead the same hospital through another once-in-a-lifetime challenge, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, as she leads a state-wide health care community, she calls on her learning, growth and transformational moments to bring compassion and attention to the people who count on her most.
Rising Star Award
Kaitrin Kramer
PhD ’14, Oral Sciences
College of Dentistry
A hallmark of UIC alumni is the ability to see the humans behind data.
Dr. Kaitrin Kramer embodies this characteristic — continually building upon her scientific expertise and research with the understanding that real people exist within the numbers.
As a clinician-scientist, Kramer brings this empathy into every facet of her career, from the classroom to the laboratory to the hospital room. During her six years at UIC studying for her PhD, she focused on cancer biology research. She and her team studied breast cancer and its relationship with the genes that help prevent cancer.
This project ignited her passion for research.
However, an interaction with a breast cancer survivor during Kramer's first year at UIC made her realize her work serves a greater purpose.
She recalls, "I'm telling a woman all about my research, and she said, 'That's great. How are you going to prevent me from having breast cancer again, or my daughter from having breast cancer?' It still gives me chills. She put everything that I think about from that day forward into the perspective of the person I'm trying to help."
While earning her doctorate at UIC, Kramer also finished dental school at the University of Michigan, commuting back and forth between Chicago and Ann Arbor.
While cancer biology and dentistry may seem like an unlikely connection, Kramer points out that understanding the molecular processes of cancer overlaps a lot with developmental processes.
Always up for the next challenge, she turned her attention to a post-doctorate at Michigan where she focused on craniofacial development and then an orthodontics residency at Ohio State University.
Her research related to the mechanism behind craniosynostosis, meaning premature fusion of skull bones, and hypophosphatasia, an inherited disease which causes skeletal defects and is associated with a number of craniofacial and dental problems, including premature loss of teeth.
This inspired her to pursue a fellowship in craniofacial orthodontics at the University of Michigan.
Today she bridges the gap between bench and bedside in her role at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, treating children with cleft lip, cleft palate and other craniofacial differences.
Every day brings new challenges, and every day she calls on the lessons in patient care she learned at UIC.
She says, "I love helping my patients get to a place where they feel empowered and to use the training and skills I have acquired to help my patients reach their goals.
Alumni Achievement Award
James Gutmann
Advanced Certificate ’72,
Endodontics College of Dentistry
In a specialized field such as endodontics, there are only a few rock stars. Dr. James Gutmann is one of them.
An internationally renowned endodontist, Gutmann understands the inside of our teeth like few others, and he has dedicated his life to sharing that knowledge with others.
At age 29, Gutmann was appointed chair at the University of Maryland. He served as a tenured professor, department chair, graduate program director and professor emeritus at Texas A&M’s Baylor College of Dentistry. He has presented more than 800 lectures in 55 countries on six continents; he has authored or co-authored more than 400 articles and three textbooks.
His work has been recognized with an honorary professorship at Wuhan University, an honorary fellowship in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens.
In addition, he served as president of the American Association of Endodontists and received its two highest honors — the Edgar D. Coolidge Award and the I.B. Bender Lifetime Educator Award. He is presently Editor of the Journal of the History of Dentistry.
Gutmann attributes much of his success to his education at UIC, where he was one of the early graduates of the Clinical Specialty Program in Endodontics.
The budding endodontist was attracted to UIC’s focus on biological principles, not just technical know-how.
“You had to be able to explain treatments scientifically,” he notes. “It wasn’t just, ‘I achieved this goal clinically and that’s it.’ UIC asked you to go much further than that.”
His UIC mentors continually challenged and raised the bar for their students — an approach that Gutmann has carried forth through his more than five decades of teaching, writing and lecturing.
He says, “Whomever you’re mentoring, give them a chance to be more than they ever thought they could be. Important people had that impact on me and maybe that’s why I have achieved at the level I’ve achieved.”
Alumni Achievement Award
Rodney Rothstein
BS ’69, Biological Sciences
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Rodney Rothstein knows a lot about yeast; however, he is neither a baker nor brewmeister. He’s an internationally renowned expert on yeast genetics.
Why yeast? Saccharomyces cerevisiae, baker’s or brewer’s yeast, is one of the simplest single-celled organisms with a nucleus that contains DNA packaged in chromosomes (a eukaryote).
Yeast was the first eukaryote to have its genome sequenced, and yeast possess many of the cellular components that are found in humans. In fact, more than 20% of human genes known to mediate disease have counterparts in yeast.
In other words, studying yeast can provide important insights into diseases ranging from cancer to coronavirus infections.
Rothstein says, “It’s a very simple system and a great model organism for understanding basic genetics that apply to humans as well.”
After graduating from UIC, Rothstein focused on how DNA is repaired after it is broken — a process essential for preserving genome integrity in all organisms. He developed a one-step method of “knocking out” yeast genes to learn their function.
This gene-editing method has since been successfully applied to either remove or insert DNA sequences into specific positions within the genome of many other organisms, including human cells.
He used this technique to create yeast strains to identify and isolate genes important for genome stability and the cellular repair of DNA breaks.
Rothstein notes, “These mutant yeast strains allow us to study the DNA damage response, which is fundamental to cancer and aging.”
In 2009, Rothstein was awarded the Genetics Society of America’s Edward Novitski Prize, which recognizes the highest levels of creativity and ingenuity in solving significant problems in genetics research. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is a professor of genetics and development at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons, where he has mentored the next generation of geneticists since 1984.
Rothstein credits his time at UIC for nurturing his interest in genetics, especially his classes with the influential biologist Eliot Spiess. UIC fostered his curiosity and provided the foundation for his lifelong passion.
The values of scholarship and scientific investigation, and of one’s personal ability to make the necessary commitments to the pursuit of excellence, are not always apparent to undergraduates.
Rothstein emphasizes that “the faculty at UIC conveyed that message and inspired me to pursue my rewarding career in genetics.”
Humanitarian Award
Marie Jarrell
BS ’87, Physical Therapy
College of Applied Health Sciences
Helping others is at the heart of everything Marie Jarrell does.
Helping an amputee improve strength and movement. Helping a cancer patient run their first marathon. Helping a struggling family pay their rent.
Through her many professional and personal roles, Jarrell is always putting the needs of others first — whether it’s as a physical therapist, a volunteer endurance training coach or a founder of a grassroots charity.
“I’m a helper. That’s just who I am,” she says.
This propensity toward compassion and giving is one of the main reasons Jarrell chose UIC for her undergraduate studies.
She knew she wanted to pursue a degree in physical therapy, and in addition to UIC’s science and research-based program, the College of Applied Health Sciences emphasizes the humanity involved with physical therapy.
During the application interview, UIC professors presented Jarrell with a situation where she is working with an injured child who will never walk again.
The mother asks, “When will my child walk?” They asked Jarrell how she would approach that scenario.
“My answer was you have to use a combination of honesty and empathy,” she remembers. “That’s what UIC appreciated, and that’s why I was drawn to it.”
For more than 30 years, she has worked as a physical therapist in just about every clinical setting. Her helping nature eventually led Jarrell to two major charitable activities in her life.
In 2003, she became highly involved as a long-distance athlete and volunteer with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training, which fundraises for cancer research through endurance events.
She has raised more than $100,000, and since 2008, she has been a training coach, helping hundreds of athletes raise money and train for their first marathon, half-marathon or triathlon.
Jarrell says, “Team In Training provided me with an education in fundraising. And it gave me a family of giving people who helped me realize my dream of starting my own charity.”
That charity is the Sunbow Foundation, a grassroots effort to help others in need with small acts of kindness.
“With the foundation, I call on my community of friends to be that sunshine to end the rain and to bring some relief to people who are going through a hard time,” says Jarrell.
From providing daycare funds for a mother going through chemotherapy to paying taxes that kept a family from losing their home to buying a prom dress for a young woman who otherwise couldn’t afford to go to prom, the Sunbow Foundation helps people lift a burden with small, yet significant acts of support.
The UIC alumna says, “It’s not a huge gift, it’s not the universe, but it’s like a million dollars to someone who really needs it.”
Jarrell’s many forms of humanitarianism embody the UIC spirit of service to others and demonstrate that every act of generosity, no matter how big or small, can have a meaningful impact.
Distinguished Service Award
Barry Booth
BS ’82, Dentistry; MS ’84 Orthodontics;
DDS ’86, Dentistry College of Dentistry
Dr. Barry Booth has created thousands of smiles over the course of his 35-year dental career.
There are the beautiful, healthy smiles that are the result of his quality orthodontic treatment and care. And, there are smiles of deep gratitude that exist because of his generosity and service to those in need.
As an orthodontic specialist in Homer Glen, Illinois, since 1986, Booth founded Smile for a Lifetime of Southwest Chicagoland, which provides orthodontic scholarships to underprivileged youth in need of braces or other dental care.
The patients, between the ages of 11 and 19, must follow the treatment plan and be willing to complete 10 hours of community service as a way to “give back to the community that gave them this opportunity.”
Booth credits his time at UIC and the school’s focus on service as an inspiration for his own philanthropy.
He says, “UIC gave me opportunities to help underserved patient populations, and I found the experience highly rewarding.”
After acquiring a DDS and MS from the UIC College of Dentistry, Booth joined a surgical orthodontic team at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, treating accident and trauma victims as well as patients with congenital dental deformities.
He also started his own private practice.
Over the years, Booth has given back to UIC in countless ways. As a board member of the Orthodontic Alumni Association of Illinois, he helped fundraise for the complete rehabilitation of the UIC Department of Orthodontics.
His leadership has allowed residents in the department to treat more adolescent and adult patients in the Chicago area. Booth has also mentored many UIC orthodontic residents, providing advice and insight as they enter into their professional work.
Recently retired from his orthodontic practice, the UIC alumnus plans to keep giving back to his community and making more smiles along the way.
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