Journalist Richard Engel, '96, is the 2011 recipient of the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity, given by the Los Angeles Press Club and the Pearl family in honor of their son. Pearl, '85, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was slain in Pakistan in 2002. Our 2008 profile of Engel chronicled his journey from neophyte freelancer learning Arabic in the streets of Cairo to veteran Iraq war reporter and then chief correspondent for NBC News.
Two decades after his last feature film came out, indie director Monte Hellman's latest, Road to Nowhere (2010), screened in New York and Los Angeles theaters in June, and earlier in Hellman retrospectives in both cities. Hellman, '51, was awarded a Special Lion for Overall Work at the Venice Film Festival last fall. His earlier works, including Two-Lane Blacktop, became cult classics, but Hellman has always been an outlier, as he describes in our 2003 interview and more recently.
PGA Golfer Notah Begay III, '94, believes in using his name and resources for the community good. In April, his NB3 Foundation stepped up a campaign against Type 2 diabetes, burgeoning among Native American youth. "The thing that drives me most is that it's preventable," Begay, who is of Navajo and Pueblo ancestry, told a radio audience.
The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award in the public interest category this year for an article by surgeon and writer Atul Gawande, '87. The piece, "Letting Go", describes end-of-life issues for patients, doctors and caregivers; Gawande has a contract from Metropolitan to expand it into his 4th book.
Joe Chen, MBA '99, one of China's Internet pioneers, is CEO of Renren, known as "China's Facebook." It went public on the New York Stock Exchange in early May, one of the first social media companies to do so.
