Committee Members

Biographical Information

Arpita Bhattacharyya is a senior international relations major and cross-cultural studies concentrator. Her family currently lives in Rochester, Minnesota. On campus, she works as a sustainability assistant and is active with the College’s environmental groups. She also serves on the Environmental Advisory committee as well as the Admissions and Financial Aid committee. She plays frisbee on the women's ultimate team, Eclipse, and dances and does choreography for the group Ebony. She is trained in Indian classical dance and loves to perform whenever she has the chance. Her plans after college include a couple years off, interning and working abroad, and eventually going to public policy school. Until then, Arpita intends to make her last terms at Carleton as fulfilling and wonderful as possible (in between comps).

Hazel Roberts Donald (Carleton Class of 1976 and Parent 2002) currently serves as a community volunteer. She worked as an actuary for several insurance companies from 1978 to 1988, and also formerly as a teacher at the Whitfield School in St. Louis.
Ms. Donald has also received a B.S. in mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis. She has served as a co-chair of the St. Louis Public Schools Foundation’s Principals For The Day program; a Trustee of Webster University; a member of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center Friends Committee; and is a former member of the St. Louis Children’s Museum Board of Directors.

McKay Duer is a senior international relations major and currently serves as the President of the CSA (Carleton Student Association), a one-term member of the Academic Standing Committee, a member of the Club Sports Executive Council, a co-Director of an ACT volunteer program, and a co-treasurer/player for Syzygy. McKay thinks that, “One of the greatest things about Carleton is that you really can do everything, as long as you take advantage of the opportunities you are given.”
McKay continues to try new things, to be a part of new organizations, and to get to know all different aspects of this school. She started her time here as an athlete, playing varsity soccer and competitive women's ultimate frisbee (Syzygy). She also immediately joined the first type of leadership role she learned about: SAAC (Student Athletic Advisory Committee) and became the treasurer for Syzygy. She continued playing both of these sports through the end of her sophomore year, at which point she realized that there was a lot more that Carleton had to offer and she wanted to make sure she could experience Carleton for all that it is before she graduated. So, she stopped playing sports for the year and got involved in a number of other activities including: the CSA senate, the Carletonian, Dining Board, the Club Sports Executive Council, and she managed/announced the women's soccer games.

Jack Eugster ’67 P’02 (trustee since 1992, vice chair 2004-2008, chairman 2008-present) is the director of Donaldson Co., Inc., an organization dedicated to industrial and engine filtration systems, and Graco, Inc., a world leader in fluid handling systems in commercial and industrial settings. Mr. Eugster also is the former chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Musicland Stores Corporation, former non-executive chairman of Shopko Stores Inc., and former executive vice president and director of The Gap Stores. Since his retirement in January of 2001, Mr. Eugster has served on the Board of Directors for dozens of public and private corporations, including Best Buy Inc., MidAmerican Energy Inc., Trans-Alarm Inc., Consignment Ventures Inc., RCG Ventures LLC, Next Amp LLC, and Panel Claw, LLC. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Minnesota Orchestral Association, and on the Board of Overseers for the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota. Mr. Eugster is also strongly affiliated with many other public organizations such as the Wayzata Community Church, United Way of Minneapolis, and was a Youth Basketball Coach for seven years. Mr. Eugster holds a M.B.A. in Finance from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Chemistry from Carleton College.

Derek Fried (Carleton Class of 1993) has been a vice president at Wells Fargo HSBC Trade Bank in Minneapolis since 2003. Prior to this he was director of international licensing for CBS Marketwatch (2000-2003) and a business development officer for Norwest Bank, NA (1993-1999). He holds an M.B.A. from the University of Minnesota (1996) and a graduate degree in International Relations from Georgetown University (2000). Derek has been actively involved as an Alumni Annual Fund (AAF) volunteer since 1997. He currently is Chair of the AAF Board.

Joe A. Hargis, associate vice president for External Relations at Carleton College will be assisting the search as the presidential search secretary. Joe has held a variety of positions over his 22 years with the College including assistant to the president and a stint as Interim vice president for External Relations.

Michael Hemesath, professor of economics, did his undergraduate work at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota and his Ph.D. at Harvard. He teaches international trade, health economics, and the economics of the former Soviet Union. He has been active in incorporating the case method of teaching into several of his classes. He has published research, some completed jointly with a colleague at St. Olaf, comparing attitudes towards markets in the U.S., Russia and China. He is also interested in economics education in the former Soviet Union. Professor Hemesath is deeply committed to off-campus studies programs. He has directed three Associated Colleges of the Midwest programs in Krasnodor, Russia, and has been faculty director for Carleton's Economics Seminar at Cambridge University five times, most recently in summer of 2007. He has been the director of the Ethical Inquiry at Carleton (EthIC) program since 2006, is in his first year as president of the Carleton faculty, and is chair of the economics department.

Chase Kimball is a senior economics major from Evanston, Illinois. He entered Carleton in the fall of 2004, took two years off after his freshman year to work for his church in the Netherlands, and then returned as a sophomore in the class of 2010. Chase has always participated in a variety of organizations at Carleton. Since the spring of 2008 he has served as a senator on the CSA Senate. Last year he served on the New Dean Search Committee and this year he is serving as the CSA liaison to College Council and College Budget Committee. Chase currently works as a prefect and a student departmental advisor for the economics department, and was previously employed as a chaplain’s associate. He played on the rugby team during his freshman year, and contributes articles regularly to the Carletonian. In addition, he is a member of Carleton’s sketch comedy group, Lenny Dee and he has performed in an additional seven works of theater having co-written two, and directed three.
For comps Chase is researching the consumption patterns of drug addicts, and in addition to economics his academic interests include religious studies, history, and political philosophy. This spring he participated in Professor Roy Grow’s political economy seminar in China and Southeast Asia, and in the summer enrolled in a program through SIT studying education and social change in South Africa. Next year he plans to move to Washington, D.C., and in the longer term, hopes to work either in public policy or higher education administration.

Daniel Lugo (Carleton Class of 1991) is an associate dean of Admissions. Prior to joining the Admissions Office in August of 2009 in this position, Dan served in the division of External Relations as a development officer in the Major and Planned Giving Office for three years. He worked as an assistant dean of Admissions at Carleton. Dan is a member of the newly-formed Community, Equity, and Diversity Initiative board. He has been an enthusiastic and capable ambassador for Carleton for many years.

Marilyn McCoy (trustee since 2003) has been vice president of administration and planning at Northwestern University since July 1985. She is responsible for university-wide planning, program review, trustee oversight and operations, and institutional research. Additionally, Ms. McCoy provides support to the president by defining strategic issues and monitoring progress of university goals and his reporting to the Board on these efforts. Ms. McCoy was previously the director of planning and policy studies at the University of Colorado and presently serves as a trustee of JPMorgan Funds and Carleton College. She is past director of Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, Mather Lifeways, Metropolitan Family Services and the Metropolitan YMCA. She is a member and past chair of the Chicago Network and a member of the Economic Club of Chicago. She also is a past president of both the Society for College and University Planning and the Association for Institutional Research, and a consulting editor for Planning. Ms. McCoy received a Bachelor’s degree, cum laude, from Smith College in 1970 and a Master’s degree in public policy from the University of Michigan in 1972.

Elizabeth McKinsey, professor of English and American studies, served as Dean of the College at Carleton from 1989 to 2002. During her tenure she was instrumental in creating the Learning and Teaching Center (now the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching), strengthening interdisciplinary study by instituting joint faculty appointments in departments and programs and helping create the Environmental and Technology Studies concentration, and broadening international opportunities through winter-break field trip courses and the new Cross Cultural Studies Program. Since returning to the classroom in 2003, her teaching at Carleton has included the American literature survey, first-year writing, Southern literature, Introduction to American Studies, Methods in American Studies, and courses on 19th century attitudes toward nature and national expansion, and The Midwest in the American Imagination. In the spring of 2007 she led the English department off-campus program in London. She is the author of the book Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime, as well as articles on Transcendentalism, American painting, and teaching issues. Her current research continues her interest in American responses to nature, focusing at the moment on Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks.

A Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Radcliffe College in 1970, she earned her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard. After two years teaching at Bryn Mawr College, she returned to Harvard to teach in the English Department, where she directed the undergraduate program. She was Director of the Bunting Institute (a research institute, now the Radcliffe Institute) for four years just before coming to Carleton.

Dee Menning P’03 is the administrative assistant in the Corporate and Foundation Relations Department at Carleton, starting in 2000. She will be serving as the secretary to the Presidential Search Committee.

Susannah R. Ottaway is an associate professor of History. She came to the College in 1998. She is a Carleton graduate (class of 1989) and went on to Brown University, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Early Modern European social, cultural and intellectual history. At Carleton she teaches a wide range of courses in Early Modern European history including courses of French and British social, political and intellectual history, seminars on the history of social welfare, and surveys of Irish history. Professor Ottaway’s research focuses on eighteenth-century British social history, especially the history of old age, the family and social welfare. She is currently working to complete a project on the workhouse in England, 1660-1834.

Catherine James Paglia (trustee since 1984 and chair of the Buildings and Grounds Committee) has an extensive Wall Street background, combined with operating experience as chief financial officer of two publicly held companies and investment experience as a principal in a successful buy-out firm. She currently is a director of Enterprise Asset Management, Inc., a privately held real estate and asset management company.

Ms. Paglia’s Wall Street career spanned 14 years, including eight years at Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated, where she was the first female managing director in the firm’s 53-year history. At Interlaken Capital, a principal investment firm located in Greenwich CT, Ms. Paglia was a managing director for 10 years, with responsibilities including initiating transactions and strategic oversight of portfolio investments in a wide variety of service businesses. She acted as chairman and chief financial officer of several public and private companies. She left in 1998 and joined Enterprise Asset Management, a New York-based investment firm, where she is responsible for investments in real estate, oil and gas, and public and private equities. She also is responsible for the operation of a family charitable foundation, the Robert and Ardis James Foundation.

Ms. Paglia serves on the Board of Directors of the RiverSource Mutual Funds and the Leadership Council of the YWCA of Greenwich. She also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has a BA from Carleton College and an MBA from Harvard University. She lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her husband and two children.

Arjendu Pattanayak is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and co-director of the Carleton Interdisciplinary Science and Mathematics Initiative. Pattanayak started at Carleton in the Fall of 2001, coming here most recently from Rice University. He received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1994 from the University of Texas, Austin; Sc.M. in Physics in 1988 from Brown University; and the B.Sc. in May 1986 from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, India.

Professor Pattanyak’s research field is theoretical and computational non-linear dynamics, more broadly statistical physics. He is interested in non-linear dynamics of systems that are chaotic in the classical limit, and in coherence and decoherence -- the impact of environmental noise and coarse-graining on these dynamics. While previous work was on fairly abstract issues, recent work has been done while working closely with experimentalists in atomic physics; other work has predictions about the behavior of fluid dynamical systems. He writes a blog/professional journal entitled “Confused At A Higher Level.”

Lois Perkins, P’06, ’07, library assistant in the Loan Services Department, graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1971 and then worked as a Trust Officer at First National Bank of Minneapolis for nine years. She joined Carleton in 1995, starting in the Business Office and moving to the Library in December 1996. As part of her duties in the Loan Services Department, she supervises approximately 40 students on the Circulation and Reserve desks. She has served in previous years as a Staff At Carleton representative to College Council and the Budget Committee.

Caesar F. Sweitzer ’72 P ’02, ’06 (trustee 1997, chair Academic Affairs Committee) works part time as a senior advisor in the investment banking department of Citigroup. Prior to assuming this role in January of 2009, Mr. Sweitzer was a managing director for twenty years at Citigroup and its predecessor firms Salomon Smith Barney and Salomon Brothers. He began his Wall Street career in 1977 with the firm of Dean Witter before moving to Salomon in 1983. All of his investment banking career has been in New York City. After receiving a B.A. in Sociology from Carleton in 1972 he worked at a small, independent trust company in Denver before receiving an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in 1977. His wife and two children also graduated from Carleton.

Kristen Vellinger is a sophomore from Pleasanton, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although currently undeclared, she is considering a major in international relations with a possible concentration in women's and gender studies and hopes to eventually go into non-profit development work. She is working for the second year in the President's Office as a student worker. Passionate about music, Kristen has been a member of the Accidentals all-female a capella group since freshman year, and performed in (as well as helped to create) the original Carleton musical, "Liberal Arts: The Musical!," which returned - new and improved! - this year. She is also taking this year to focus more on her passion for social activism, and so is a member of Carleton's MPIRG group, "Women for Women" - an organization that helps to support Congolese women, and serves as the student co-chair of CRIC (Carleton Responsible Investment Committee).

Wallace R. Weitz ’70 P ’96, ’99, ’02 (trustee since 2000, co-chair of the Campaign Steering Committee, and chair of the Investment Committee) is the president of Wallace R. Weitz & Company, an investment firm located in Omaha, Nebraska that manages eight public mutual funds and one private partnership. In 1973, he joined Chiles, Heider, a small, regional brokerage firm in Omaha, and spent 10 years as an analyst and portfolio manager. In 1983, he started Wallace R. Weitz & Company and now heads a group of seven additional investment professionals that manages approximately $2 billion. Mr. Weitz received his B.A. in Economics from Carleton College in 1970.