“At one point, I felt like Forrest Gump when I was walking,” Parker recalled of the Miami marathon. “I joked that if I stopped, and said I was going back, what would happen to all the people behind me?”

Of course, there was no going back for Parker, the executive director of the New York City Bar Association, who competed in the World Marathon Challenge to raise money and awareness for Parkinson’s disease, which he was diagnosed with at age 38. Parkinson’s is a chronic, degenerative neurological disorder that affects 1 million people in the United States and 5 million worldwide. Parker sits on the Patient Council for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

In the intervening decade since his diagnosis, Parker has continuously tackled new goals, whether marathons, mountain climbing, or skydiving, that allowed him to test his body’s limits and show others that a person with Parkinson’s can live a full life like anyone else. The World Marathon Challenge carried this credo to new lengths, literally.

The challenge started on Jan. 30 in Novo, Antarctica, and included subsequent marathons in Cape Town, South Africa; Perth, Australia; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Lisbon, Portugal; Cartagena, Colombia; and Miami. For six straight days, Parker’s itinerary included a marathon followed hours later by a flight to the next day’s race location.

Parker prepared for the long distance and low recovery time by running marathons in Washington, D.C., and Chicago in October, and completing around 70 miles in a week leading up to the competition. He also trained in hot and cold weather to simulate the climate differences posed by Antarctica and the summer climates in southern hemisphere destinations Colombia, South Africa, and Australia. But what Parker couldn’t simulate was flying tens of thousands of miles, across several time zones, and then running on a few hours sleep. These factors combined made it necessary to up his Parkinson’s medication during the competition, he noted.

Even the conditions Parker trained for, such as Antarctica’s snow and ice, tested him in ways he did not expect. Relatively warm temperatures at the start of the Antarctica marathon forced him to remove a clothing layer, but as he progressed on the course, conditions became colder, windier, and more desolate, to the point that his iPhone froze and died for the rest of his 6-hour, 23-minute race. Parker struggled to speak at race’s end and his calves and hands suffered ill effects from the weather, he told the Washington Post.

Two days later in Australia, Parker notified supporters via a Facebook post that he did not know if he would finish his third marathon in time due to shin pain and a large foot blister. Instead, he finished with eight minutes to spare. The toughest race had “brought me over the hump that I might finish this,” he explained.

“I learned in some ways that I’m more stubborn, more determined, and tougher than I realized,” he said of the experience.

From there, Parker completed marathons in Dubai and Lisbon, and then flew to Cartagena, Colombia, where for the first and only time during the challenge a legal thought crossed his mind. As Parker neared the race’s end, joined on his walk by the race director, the two men took a wrong turn and sought out directions from police. In response, the officers asked both men to empty their pockets.

“The lawyer in me said this can’t be a legal search and seizure, but I recognized that I was in a foreign jurisdiction and kept my mouth closed,” Parker said, noting the officer eventually let the two men resume their trek.

The next day, Parker wrapped his whirlwind journey in the presence of family and friends. He praised his wife Katharine Parker ’92, a federal magistrate judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, for displaying the “patience of a saint” during his marathon preparation. The couple has two sons, Ben, 17, and Matt, 20. Parker credited Ben, a high school senior, for motivating him about his diet, training, and stretching regimes. The veteran lawyer also thanked the New York legal community for its incredible support.

While running the Chicago Marathon in October, Parker observed a woman whose shirt offered an in-your-face slogan that still resonates with him. (The safe-for-work version of the shirt: Do epic stuff.)

“Everyone has things they want to accomplish,” Parker shared. “Not everyone wants to run a marathon. For some it’s a three-mile run or a walk around the block. My hope is that people will take that slogan to heart.”

Participating in the World Marathon Challenge surpassed Parker’s expectations, he said, both in terms of his personal experience and the overall interest and support his efforts received. How will he top it?

“It may be tough to come up with something more epic,” he conceded.

—Ray Legendre

He will depart in June, and although his placement is not yet finalized, he hopes to study manuscripts and documents about suffering and trauma, and how these stories are told and retold.

Oktaba has had previous experience analyzing texts in the service of advancing discussions of trauma and human suffering. For his Gates Cambridge study, he read the Dionysiaca—at 20,426 lines, the longest surviving Greek poem from antiquity. His research integrates literature and the humanities as a whole into discussion of identity, sexuality, and trauma. It has touched on topics ranging from Dionysiac cult practices to the nightlife of Weimar Berlin, and he has presented his findings in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

In the past two years, Oktaba has taught courses in military history at Oxford and at Cambridge University, where he earned a Master of Philosophy degree. He is translating ancient Greek magic scrolls for a book about pharmaco-religious beliefs of Late Antiquity and their continuing contemporary resonance.

In Asia, he hopes to deepen his understanding of trauma from a global perspective, using storytelling to investigate various forms of witnessing in post-traumatic survival, and exploring new ways to bridge academic and public discussions on trauma and its symptoms.

“Trauma is not a unidirectional narrative. It’s not simply a javelin that’s hurled from Point A to Point B. It is affective, and it is contagious,” he said.

Launched in 1974 by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Luce Scholars program identifies potential future U.S. leaders in order to promote cross-cultural understanding between the two regions.

For 100-year-old Reginald T. Brewster, LAW ’50, a former Tuskegee Airman, the momentous 1941 flight also served as a symbol of the African-American struggle for equal treatment in America.

“Eleanor Roosevelt took a flight with the pilot merely to demonstrate that a black man, if trained to fly, would do the same as a white man trained to fly,” he said. “She wanted to stress the item of equality—that if [blacks]were exposed to the same training or type of learning, there would be no difference. The color of their skin doesn’t determine their mentality.”

Brewster was one of roughly 16,000 Tuskegee Airmen who served during World War II after being trained at the Tuskegee Air Force base. The all African-American group consisted of pilots, air traffic controllers, technicians, navigators, ground controllers, maintenance workers, and other support staff who were denied military roles in the U.S. armed forces.

In many ways, Brewster said the Tuskegee Airmen were fighting two wars: One abroad and one at home in America.

“The discrimination [in the United States]was sharp,” Brewster recalled during an interview in his Harlem home. He recounted an incident in the South where a white man walking alongside him demanded he get off the sidewalk because he was black.  “It was very critical and sometimes it was even hurtful.”

Brewster was based in England and France, where he served as secretary to the Air Force Base Commander. In England, he was “graciously received,” he said. “I was treated with a great deal of respect and a great deal of consideration. I didn’t feel the scorn or sting of discrimination.”

After sustaining a shrapnel injury during the war, Brewster was honorably discharged. He left the Air Force with one goal in mind: To get an education.

“I realized that education was the key to my promotion [and]my advancement back in the United States,” he said.

He studied government and math at Fordham College before attending and graduating from Fordham Law in 1950.

“When I was in the army, I encountered soldiers from the South that had such a limited education,” he said. “I wanted to go as far as I could in the field of law.”

He practiced civil law until he retired at age 90.

Today, as one of the few surviving Tuskegee Airmen, Brewster hopes to keep the rich history of the historic African-American patriots alive.

“I don’t think the contributions that blacks have made should be minimized,” he said. “It’s not the height that we attained, but it’s the depth from which we came.”

Three Fordham students are hoping to revolutionize and reshape those two facets of mental health treatment.

“We have all these different fitness apps out there, so we figured, why not create a similar model for mental health patients?” said Mariella Sypa, a sophomore at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

The founders of KindMind Mental Wellness Mobile Technology see their start-up program as a mental “fitness” app.

Teaming up for innovation

The KindMind team includes five founders—two of them Fordham students and one a recent graduate, Weiyu Shen, GSAS ’16. Sypa manages operations and business strategy along with her brother, Steven Sypa, who handles legal matters.

The team also includes Elijah Bullard, who will graduate from Fordham this year with a master’s in computer science, and Elle Bernfeld, a licensed therapist who heads KindMind’s creative development. Undergraduate student Francesca Zambrano helps with front-end development.

The app is the brainchild of Mariella Sypa and Bullard, who came up with the idea in February of 2016 after having met at Fordham while studying computer science.

Shen, who graduated with a master’s in computer science, joined the duo as the chief technology officer in April of last year.

The KindMind app team won a pitch competition this past February at TrepCon, sponsored by the   Entrepreneurship Society at Fordham, Adobe, and Deloitte.

With features like mood tracking, a mood diary, and easy access to mental health providers, KindMind aims to benefit both first-time users and people already in treatment. Among the newest features the team has added are voice and face recognition functions that can help detect a person’s mood.

“We wanted to focus on mood tracking to help people become more aware of emotional patterns—and of their importance,” said Sypa.

The mood-tracking feature asks users to describe their moods, how they are feeling, and who may have affected their mood on a given day. The KindMind team hopes to optimize this function even further, with features like emojis and progress achievements.

“All of the features of KindMind work together as one unit,” said Shen, adding that he hopes their users can utilize the app to improve their mental health on a daily basis.

24-hour community support

Another essential tool that users will have is the ability to connect with a licensed mental health professional directly from their phones.

“Help is right in your pocket,” said Sypa. “You don’t even have to worry about getting to a physical location.”

Much like existing popular fitness apps, KindMind will offer a 24/7 community support forum as well as a mental health blog with contributions from professionals.

“We want to have a widespread and honest dialogue about mental health, one in which there is no judgment for anyone,” said Sypa.

Sypa said that KindMind will be a useful resource for mental health professionals just starting out.

“Mental health providers can work from home, set their own work schedules, and hopefully optimize the number of clients they can treat,” she said.

KindMind has been in the beta testing stage and Sypa said the testing will continue during Mental Health Awareness Month. Interested parties can log on to the site (iOS only) to try it. Sypa said the team expects to have an official launch this summer.

—Angie Chen, FCLC ’11

The Administration Building, located in the heart of Fordham’s 85-acre Rose Hill campus, will be officially renamed Cunniffe House during a ceremony on Dec. 4. The building, which houses the office of Joseph M. McShane, S.J., Fordham’s president, among other offices, will be named for alumnus and trustee emeritus Maurice J. Cunniffe, FCRH ’54.

“I have had the great pleasure of knowing Mo Cunniffe for more than two decades,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “He is a man of both great accomplishments and great humility. In naming the administration building Cunniffe House, we not only acknowledge Mo’s and Carolyn’s great generosity and service to Fordham, but their integrity and steadfastness. It is very much Fordham’s honor to be associated with their name in this public way.”

In addition, the newly built fountain nestled between the Administration Building and Hughes and Dealy Halls will be christened the Carolyn Dursi Cunniffe Fountain, after Cunniffe’s wife Carolyn Dursi Cunniffe, Ph.D., GSAS ’71.

“If there is one couple that typifies the warmth, decency, and generosity of the Fordham Family, it is Mo and Carolyn,” said Roger A. Milici, Jr., vice president for development and University relations. “I have been the beneficiary of their wisdom and friendship from my first day here. They helped make Fordham a welcoming place for me, and by bestowing their name on Cunniffe House, they make the University a more welcoming place for all.”

Cunniffe was a 2010 recipient of the Fordham Founder’s Award, which recognizes members of the University community whose support has been extraordinary. Cunniffe, the chairman and chief executive officer at Vista Capital Corporation, served as a trustee for both the University and Fordham Preparatory School, of which he is a 1950 graduate. During his eight-year tenure as a trustee, the University saw such transformative events as the launch of its Excelsior | Ever Upward | The Campaign for Fordham, a $500 million capital campaign designed to bring Fordham into new era of preeminence.

Cunniffe said that his gift to Fordham not only pays tribute to his family’s legacy (his nephew is a 1993 graduate of Fordham Prep, and his grandson is a senior in the Gabelli School of Business), but also recognizes and supports the place that has been like a home for nearly his entire life.

“It’s in my bones,” Cunniffe said. “I had lived within walking distance of Fordham, and then I started the Prep in 1946. But I’d played on the campus even before that. So in some ways, I’ve been hanging around Fordham my whole life.”

Much about the campus has changed since his days of studying Latin, Greek, and physics at the University, Cunniffe said. For one thing, the bricks and mortar on campus today were largely nothing more than trees and turf.

“There were no buildings between the front gate and Duane Library. Residence halls such as Campbell, Salice, and Conley, and even the library weren’t there. It was just green,” he said.

Nevertheless, the building that will bear Cunniffe’s name was a centerpiece even on the campus Cunniffe knew, as it is one of the oldest buildings at Rose Hill. Built between 1836 and 1838, the building has stood throughout Fordham’s evolution into the institution that it is today. The Greek revival manor house sprang up right before Rose Hill transitioned from Fordham manor—the property granted to John Archer in 1671 by the British royal governor of New York—to St. John’s College. New York’s Archbishop John Hughes purchased the property in 1841 to establish what would become today’s Fordham University.

Now, Cunniffe hopes that the newly dubbed Cunniffe House will continue to see transformations for the better.

“Fordham is aspiring to not just do a competent job, but to become a first-class institution,” Cunniffe said. “Fordham will continue to get better, but that doesn’t change overnight—it changes over time.”

Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the agency, is currently the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security.

“John Brennan’s career of service and extraordinary record has prepared him to be an outstanding director of the CIA,” said a White House statement.

“Since 9/11, he has been on the front lines in the fight against al-Qaeda. Over the past four years, he has been involved in virtually all major national security issues and will be able to hit the ground running at CIA.”

During his time working for the administration, Brennan has been involved in variety of security issues, from the 2011 raid that killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, to counterterrorism efforts in Somalia and Yemen.

Previously, he served as Middle East station chief for the CIA in Saudi Arabia and as chief of staff for agency director George Tenet. He was soon named CIA deputy executive director. After 9/11, Brennan established the precursor to the National Counterterrorism Center, tasked with coordinating international intelligence from myriad agencies.

It was during his time at Fordham that Brennan, a political science major at Rose Hill, became interested in Islamic culture. He traveled first to Indonesia as a freshman, then to Egypt his junior year, where he studied at the American University in Cairo and learned to speak Arabic.

The experience gave him a personal connection to Islam and to Muslims at home and abroad. Brennan has publicly objected to the use of the word “jihadists” to describe terrorists.
“Jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam,” he has said, stressing that violence and murder are not condoned by the religion.

For his unyielding commitment to protect the United States, and his three decades of public service, he was presented an honorary degree at Fordham’s 167th Commencement on May 19, 2012. In accepting the honor, he recalled that his studies resonated with him to this day.

“The textbooks I read and the papers I wrote in John Banja’s philosophy class have traveled and remained with me over the past 35 years,” he said.

“I have reread them many times as I have struggled with the real-world application of the concepts that I learned about as a 20-year-old.”

If confirmed, Brennan will become the second Fordham alumnus to head the CIA, following William J. Casey, FCRH ’34, who ran the agency from 1981 to 1987.

Omar Jawo was looking forward to his graduation ceremony from the New York Institute of Technology, where he had earned an associate’s degree. He went to work at his job downtown at the Bank of New York on what was a sunny autumn day, dressed to attend the diploma ceremony that evening.

“My ceremony never happened,” Jawo says. “Because it was Tuesday. nine-eleven.”

The horrific act that led to so many deaths at the hands of terrorists deeply disturbed Jawo, who is a practicing Muslim, and who couldn’t reconcile the acts with his religion. But it also primed Jawo to further pursue some tough educational goals that the Gambian-born father of five always wanted to—and still wants to—achieve.

Jawo is completing his bachelor of arts degree in social work at Fordham College of Liberal Studies, where he has been on the Dean’s List for three consecutive years and has earned membership in the Alpha Sigma Lambda Honor Society for Adult Students. For the past three years, he has risen early each day to teach autistic children at the Hawthorne County Day School in White Plains, and then headed back downtown to Fordham to take classes, usually 12 credits per semester. He calls himself a lifelong learner and says he is a voracious reader.

“Nothing bores me,” says the father of five children, ages 14 to 29. “I always say the brain is just like a nut on a bolt. If you don’t lubricate it, you know, it gets rusty. At the same time, I had kids who were going to college, and I wanted to be kind of a model to my kids.”

In Gambia, Jawo had been politically active and had worked managing a children’s program in rural communities in partnership with the Cooperative Movement, a Canadian non-governmental organization. He also studied social work in the United Republic of Cameroon. Following a military coup in Gambia, Jawo and his family received political asylum in the United States, arriving in 1997. Eventually settling in the Bronx, Jawo began to study computer technology, which he didn’t have a chance to study in Gambia. Jawo eventually decided to apply to Fordham, which further appealed to him because he had attended Catholic schools in Gambia, and was “impressed with Catholic training, which has discipline.” At Fordham, he was able to count some college credits from his schooling in Africa toward his degree, and is graduating with advanced standing.

His interest in social work, he says, is “congenital.”

“My dad was a traditional healer in herbal medicine, and people came from far and near to consult him in treatment,” he says. “I saw as a child how my parents were healing people, especially in lean years, when there was no food. So my interest in helping people is very deep. In America, being a social worker is more for the individual, and it is giving people intangible things, like counseling. But it can also be helping with tangible things, like helping someone who is lacking food and rent. Back home, we deal with communities and not individuals, like a whole village that needs food or medicine. As a social worker you work to get help for the whole group.”

Returning to Gambia to do such work, and to teach, is one of Jawo’s dreams. His eldest son is still there, and so is his family’s home. “I think my country needs people like me, who have the training,” he says. “The only politics I’ll get into now are the politics of helping people through education.”

But first, he wants to apply his advanced standing status to finish a master’s degree in social work in one year, right after his graduation.

And this time, for Jawo, the ceremony will happen.

– Janet Sassi