2018 Alumni Achievement Awards

Knox celebrated the 181st anniversary of its founding with the presentation of Alumni Achievement Awards at the 2018 Founders Day Convocation on Friday, February 16, in the Muelder Room, Seymour Library.

Receiving 2018 awards were, pictured above from left: Harvey Sadow '68, ceramic artist;  Greg Duick '68, cardiologist; Stephen Herzog '09, international security; and Steve Gibson '88, social activist.

2018 Recipients 

Greg Duick '68
Citation presented by John Heyer '68

Greg Duick graduated from Knox College in 1968 and from Loyola University, Stritch School of Medicine-Chicago, in 1972. He completed his postgraduate medical internship, internal medicine residency, and cardiology fellowship at the Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Medical Center. He and his wife, Peggy, moved to Wichita in 1977 to begin private practice. He was Chairman of the Department of Cardiology at Via Christi at St. Francis for 20 years.

In 1999, he co-founded Kansas Heart Hospital, the first totally independent heart hospital anywhere in the United States. Greg and his co-founders were frustrated with the hospitals' inability to get things done and a lack of input from physicians on administration. They wanted to ensure there was still a place that could support a patient-centered approach to medicine, even as the health insurance landscape was making the practice of medicine more restrictive. As reported in a 2006 article from Time Magazine titled "The Hospital Wars," Kansas Heart "triggered a cascade"; at the time of the report, five other doctor-owned hospitals had opened in Wichita.

Greg served as CEO of the 54-bed hospital from 1999 to 2003. After 33 years in medicine, he retired from his cardiology practice and took on a larger role as president of the Kansas Heart Hospital, while also retaining his title as chairman. His duties as president include corporate leadership, working with regulatory agencies, and developing relationships with physicians and hospitals in rural areas.

In 2016, Medicare adopted a new Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating System and released is first ever rankings. Kansas Heart Hospital achieved the highest 5 star ranking and was ranked #88 out of 3,662 hospitals in the U.S., impressive considering the hospital is not affiliated with a tertiary care center or a university-proof that the hospital continues to focus on patients and families.

Greg served as a member of the Knox Board of Trustees from 1992 through 1996. In 1999, he joined alumni friends in establishing the Billy W. Geer Research Fund, which generates more than $5,000 annually for faculty and students to purchase equipment to further their research endeavors.

Steve Gibson '88
Citation presented by Duane Oldfield, Associate Professor of Politial Science

Steve Gibson graduated from Knox College in 1988, and went on to earn a master's degree in social work from St. Louis University. He left St. Louis, moved to San Francisco, and helped change the conversation about HIV.

Steve worked for many years as a community organizer at the STOP AIDS Project. The AIDS crisis had devastated cities like New York and San Francisco. More were living longer, but many were still dying. In 2003, Steve founded Magnet, the first integrated sexual health services and community center.  At its inception, Magnet not only provided free sexual health services, it was also a community space that hosted art receptions, massages, and acupuncture. Initially under University of California San Francisco, the organization started with five staff members and no volunteers. Designed to serve 1,000 clients annually, that program now serves  10,000 and operates through the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Magnet provides integrated HIV and STI services and affirms sexuality without blaming or shaming. This model for sexual health has become internationally recognized and inspired similar centers in Peru, Spain, France, Australia, and India. Steve shared the success of Magnet's trailblazing nurse-led pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) program at the 2015 HIV Prevention Conference. The program started in November 2014 as a pilot program for people at risk of HIV but expanded into a full-fledged PrEP health program with almost 700 men screened.

After nearly 13 years as director of Magnet, Steve announced in the spring of 2016 that he would resign to become the HIV Prevention Branch Chief at the State Office of AIDS in Sacramento. San Francisco AIDS Foundation Vice President James Loduca said, "Steve has had a tremendous impact on our work and our community. We are collectively healthier and stronger because of his leadership. He leaves behind an incredible legacy, and I can't wait to see what he does in his next role!"

Steve has left an impact on college campuses as well. As a Knox student, he helped organize the first "Denim Day," an effort to raise awareness and acceptance of the experiences of gay men and women on campus. And at St. Louis University, he founded a campus LGBT group.

Harvey Sadow '68
Citation presented by Mark Holmes, Associate Professor and Chair of Art

Harvey Sadow graduated from Knox College in 1968, and went on to earn both a master of arts and master of fine arts degree from the School of Art and Art History at The University of Iowa. He is a leading innovator in the ceramic arts and has exhibited his work to consistently rave reviews both in the U.S. and abroad.

Upon the completion of his graduate studies, Harvey taught at Millikin University and University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. After seven years of full-time teaching, he made the decision to leave academia, intent on learning more about studio practice and the mechanics of the art world.

Using techniques that he developed in graduate school and during his teaching years, Harvey began to vastly alter the techniques used in classical Japanese raku firing and 20th-century North American practices. He developed shock-resistant and extremely plastic clay bodies that allowed him to hyper-expand spherical shapes into thin, tensely balanced objects. Harvey also pioneered the use of multiple-firing and sandblasting techniques in order to revise previously fired works, creating a personal vocabulary of form and surface that became immediately identifiable as his own.

Harvey's work has appeared in more than 100 juried and invitational exhibitions, and he has held numerous solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. The William Benton Museum of Art mounted his first major retrospective exhibition covering 20 years entitled, Harvey Sadow: Toward A Vessel Aesthetic.

In 1994, a vessel from his Ground Zero Series was chosen for inclusion in The White House Collection of American Crafts. His work is included in the permanent collections of dozens of museums, including Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and The International Museum of Ceramic Art in China, among others. He is also represented in the permanent collections of corporate collections including The World Bank and The Bureau of National Affairs in Washington, D.C.

Harvey was program chair for ceramics and sculpture at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach and the founding director of the Paducah School of Art and Design. At age 71, he is in the construction stage of a new studio, nearly quadrupling his workspace in order to build new kilns and produce new work in several media.

Stephen Herzog '09
Citation presented by Scott Offutt '09

Stephen Herzog graduated from Knox College in 2009 with honors in international relations. He went on to earn an M.A. with honors in security studies from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and an M.A. and M.Phil. in political science from Yale University. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale, focused on international security: nuclear weapons proliferation, arms control, and domestic sources of foreign policy.

His research draws on elite interviewing, archival studies, and survey experiments. He is a fellow of the Yale Project on Japan's Politics and Diplomacy and a nonresident Worldwide Support for Development-Handa Fellow at the Pacific Forum, Center for Strategic and International Studies. As an academic, Stephen regularly interacts with governments and participates in track-II diplomatic dialogues around the world dealing with nuclear security issues. He has worked, researched, and traveled in more than 80 countries.

Prior to his Ph.D. studies, Stephen was a U.S. government specialist dealing with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. He ran a scientific engagement program for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. In this capacity, he led U.S. technical delegations of government and university seismologists across the Caucasus, Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The team provided capacity-building training to help countries develop analytical capabilities to monitor nuclear testing in North Korea and beyond. The same data used to detect nuclear tests can also be used for earthquake hazard mitigation, tsunami warning, and other civil-scientific applications. Stephen's role was not to promote a political agenda or even encourage treaty ratification, instead working with his team to strengthen the global infrastructure to detect and deter nuclear weapons testing, as well as to mitigate various geophysical hazards.

Stephen has also been a research associate and Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty specialist with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington (established by former Manhattan Project scientists) and a Nuclear Security Fellow at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil. He has published journal articles, book chapters, policy reports, and op-ed commentaries.

When finished with his Ph.D., he plans to be a professor working on policy-relevant research related to nuclear arms control, deterrence, and proliferation.

Click here to view previous Alumni Achievement Award Recipients.