Alumni Stories

“Having early access to research at age 19 changed my life,” said Sarah Martinez Roth ’11. She graduated from Colby with a degree in biology and completed a Ph.D. in tumor biology at the Georgetown Lombardi Cancer Center. Martinez Roth now works as a senior scientist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a Boston-based biotech company the Boston Globe recently described as “the brightest star” in the city’s biotech community. Her job involves developing novel biomarkers for treatments for sickle cell disease, a blood disorder that disproportionately affects African Americans and people of color.

Brian O’Halloran ’93 began working in the front office of the Boston Red Sox in 2002, when he was an unpaid intern. In 2019 he was named the major league baseball club’s general manager. He’s principally involved in finding, signing, and retaining players who can help the Sox win, and he’s so good at contract negotiations that his nickname is Bulldog. But even the sports agents who negotiate against O’Halloran seem to like this humble, understated executive.

Uzoma “Zo” Orchingwa ’14 always carries a reminder of life’s unfairness: a photo of his seventh-grade basketball team. Despite playing the same sport and attending the same Connecticut school, their varying circumstances led them down significantly different paths. Of the nine boys in that photograph, four were eventually incarcerated.

In the vibrant food scene of London, Josephine Liang ’14 noticed one thing: the containers. Big or small, paper or plastic, black or white, she uniformly saw them as waste. “The biggest source of waste in our personal life was the waste we gathered whenever we went out for lunch,” said Liang. “We decided we wanted to do something about it.” Liang cofounded CauliBox, the “UK’s first tech-enabled reusable lunchbox scheme.” Through the CauliBox app, Londoners can borrow a box from participating locations. After using them, customers drop off the boxes at Cauli kiosks. So far, they have more than 1,000 users and 10,000 boxes in circulation.

As CEO of Forbes, Mike Federle ’81 gets a front-row seat to stories about the most successful people and companies of our time. Growing up in Waterville as one of nine kids, he never expected to run a $630-million media business from his home in Freeport, Maine. When he arrived on Colby’s campus his junior year as an English major, he only knew one thing: He loved to write. “I literally walked up the street, since I lived on Mayflower Hill,” said Federle. “It gave me a great perspective, and what I loved about Colby was how close you could get to the professors — how caring and interested they were. If you were interested, they were interested.”

Rural America is in trouble with its health. Fortunately, Traci Marquis-Eydman ’92, M.D., FAAFP is there to help. “Twenty percent of the U.S. population lives in rural communities, but only 11 percent of physicians practice in them,” she said. She knows that increasing their numbers requires more med students and resident physicians to train in the rural areas. When they do, they tend to practice there. Marquis-Eydman’s efforts to make this happen led to Northern Maine Medical Center in Fort Kent being named as one of the nation’s Top 20 Rural Community Hospitals for three years in a row.