Knox College Alumni Achievement Awards 2011

Knox College will honor four graduates -- a prominent ecologist, a leader in the field of public health care, a medical researcher with the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and the head of an orphanage in Africa -- with 2011 Alumni Achievement Awards. The awards will be presented at Knox's annual Founders Day Convocation, free and open to the public at 5 p.m., Friday, February 11, in the Muelder Reading Room, Seymour Library, on the Knox campus in Galesburg, Illinois.

Recipients of 2011 Alumni Achievement Awards are William Reiners, a 1959 Knox graduate, professor of botany at the University of Wyoming and noted researcher on ecological change; Valerie Cwik, a 1977 Knox graduate, physician, and executive vice president of research and medical director at the Muscular Dystrophy Association; and Peter Leibig, a 1973 Knox graduate, president and CEO of Clinica Family Health Services of Colorado. Due to a schedule conflict, Leibig is unable to attend the ceremony and will receive his award in 2012.

Recipient of the 2011 Young Alumni Achievement Award is 2003 Knox graduate Ross Kelly, who most recently served as co-director of Cornerstone Children's Home for orphaned, abandoned and neglected children in Sudan.

More about this year's Alumni Achievement Award Winners:

William Reiners '59
William Reiners began his long and distinguished career in ecology at Knox, where he studied at the college's Green Oaks biological field station and received a bachelor's degree in biology in 1959. He completed master's and doctoral degrees in botany at Rutgers University, which honored him with a 2007 Distinguished Alumnus award. Reiners taught at Rutgers and chaired the Department of Biological Science at Dartmouth College, before joining the faculty at the University of Wyoming in 1983. He won the University of Wyoming's 1993 Presidential Award for Scholarly Work and was named to the J.E. Warren Professorship of Energy and the Environment in 1996.

Reiners's research focuses on the nature of ecosystems and their response to disturbance and change. Most recently, he is the co-author with Jeffrey Lockwood of the book "Philosophical Foundations for the Practices of Ecology." Reiners is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Ecological Society of America, and he is included in the database of "highly cited researchers" by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Peter Leibig '73
Peter Leibig, who graduated from Knox with a degree in English literature in 1973, is president and CEO of Clinica Family Health Services, a group of federally funded community health centers in Colorado. When Leibig joined Clinica as executive director in 1987, the agency had just seven employees at one site and handled approximately 3,000 medical visits per year. Clinica now has four sites in the Denver-Boulder metropolitan area, net assets of more than $31 million, and a staff of 300 who provide nearly 40,000 medical visits per year.

Leibig has also worked as a rural health systems planner in Illinois and Colorado, administrator of a low-birthweight prevention project with the Colorado Department of Public Health, and chair of the Colorado Community Health Network. Leibig received the 2003 Community Healthcare Improvement Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and he was selected as a 2005 Pacesetter by the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper.

Valerie Cwik '77
A national expert in the diagnosis and treatment of neuromuscular diseases, Valerie Cwik is the executive vice president of research and medical director for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). Cwik graduated from Knox with a B.A. in biology in 1977 and received her M.D. from Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1985. After medical school, Cwik entered academia, teaching neurology and researching neuromuscular diseases at the University of Alberta in Canada and at the University of Arizona. Her research focused on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), muscular dystrophy, and peripheral neuropathy.

Cwik served as the director of the MDA/ALS Center at the University of Arizona, before joining the MDA in 2004. In her current role, she advises MDA's health care services and clinical research programs, interacts with the general public and medical community, and serves as chief media spokesperson for the association's research and health care services.

Ross Kelly '03
A creative writing major at Knox, Ross Kelly won several major student writing awards and graduated in 2003 with College Honors in theatre. He then taught art for two years at a rural elementary school in Arkansas. In 2005, just before he was to enter graduate school in film directing, he decided to work for a year on a documentary about Cornerstone Children's Home in southern Sudan, a church-operated safe haven for children who have been orphaned or abandoned during one of the longest civil wars on the African continent.

Kelly's blog, DeepSouthSudan, chronicles his work in Africa. In the first entry, in September 2005, he writes, "For the past month I've been living in the town of Nimule, which is deep in South Sudan... I'm making a documentary..." In 2006, he discontinued the film project so that he could fully devote himself to working at the home, eventually becoming its co-director. Planning to enter graduate school in theology, Kelly came back to the United States last October, after helping complete a new shelter at the home. His most recent blog entries from January 2011 narrate his desire to return to Sudan following this year's independence referendum: "You decide you probably couldn't live with yourself if you stayed in Kansas and watched from afar as South Sudan rises toward independence. You feel the need to experience this time with your people -- your second family -- in Nimule. And you feel the need to try to touch the pulse of a new nation being brought to life."

Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 45 states and 48 countries. Knox's "Old Main" is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.