Distinguished Alumni and Rising Star Awards
In mid-April, the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences honored alumni at its Alumni Awards Banquet — these alumni are making important contributions in their community and within their professions. The honorees represent the change agents who have graduated with degrees in the liberal arts and sciences and gone on to find success professionally, through civic engagement and through their intellectual and cultural pursuits. The awards recognize the Distinguished Alumni, those who graduated more than 10 years ago and the Rising Stars who graduated within the last 10 years and show great promise in their careers.
Distinguished Alumni Award
Mark Brandenburg | Class of 1988, Biology
Assistant Chief of Staff | Bristow Medical Center
Bristow Medical Center, Brandenburg, B.A. biology, practiced emergency medicine at the Trauma Emergency Center in Saint Francis Hospital, the largest trauma center in Oklahoma. He has served on the faculty at both Oklahoma State University and University of Oklahoma, and as the medical director of the Tulsa paramedic training program. He is also the founding program director of Oklahoma’s only allopathic emergency medicine residency program.
Brandenburg has served in leadership positions during two major disasters. He was an on-duty emergency physician one mile away when a 1995 terrorist bomb blast destroyed the Federal Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Brandenburg subsequently assisted in the epidemiologic research of this terrorist incident, and later collaborated with family members of pediatric bombing victims in Project Pediatric Preparedness.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Brandenburg was tapped to serve as medical director of the Oklahoma Evacuee Center at Camp Gruber, where thousands of displaced New Orleans residents were housed and treated following their rescue from the storm. During the Hurricane Katrina response, Brandenburg’s action plan (“Operation Child-ID”) was disseminated nationally by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the real-time Centers for Disease Control Health Alert Network. Brandenburg has published over 25 peer-reviewed medical papers in the field of emergency medicine, three medical textbook chapters and two parenting books on preventing childhood injuries. Brandenburg lives in Tulsa, Okla. with his wife and two boys.
What professional advice would you give your younger self?
“Prepare for failures, setbacks and adversity. Despite all your best efforts to work hard, striving for integrity, honesty, and excellence in both your professional and personal life, you will fail repeatedly, experience setbacks and face unimaginable adversity. You will overcome these experiences by keeping your goals in sight while still allowing adjustments of course when necessary, having perseverance, asking for and accepting help from others when needed and using your moral compass to guide you through the foggiest nights.
As you journey toward your goals, be appreciative of the challenges in your way because it is that resistance (like workouts in the gym on your muscles) that make you strong and wise. And when you get where you’re going, only then will you realize that the great joys of life are what happens on the journey; so, be sure to enjoy the ride.”
Dana Moore | Class of 1984, Psychology
Retired Assistant Inspector General for Management and Administration | Office of Inspector General, Department of Veterans Affairs
Dana L. Moore, Ph.D. was named assistant inspector general for management and administration in July 2012. Management and Administration provides comprehensive support services to all organizations in the Veteran Affairs Office of Inspector General and operates a nationwide toll-free hotline. These services include strategic and operational planning, congressional reporting, report publication and follow-up, space planning and facilities management, and all phases of the budgetary process, human resources management, information technology and data analysis. She recently retired this fall.
Previously, Moore had been a member of the Senior Executive Service for more than six years, serving as deputy assistant inspector general for healthcare inspections for four years and as deputy assistant inspector general for management and administration since 2010. She has a broad range of experience within the Office of Inspector General as executive assistant to the inspector general, Office of Inspector General hotline director, and operations support division director, coupled with extensive knowledge of veteran affairs programs and operations gained from 21 years as executive director of Leadership VA, human resources manager, education specialist and clinical psychologist.
Moore has practiced as a licensed clinical psychologist in Washington, D.C., and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and English from Austin College and a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from WVU. She began her federal career at the Nashville VA Medical Center in 1977, and has served continuously with Veteran Affairs ever since. Her husband is an Army veteran and a retired international tax treaty attorney who now studies history. They live in Alexandria, Va.
What's the best piece of professional advice you've been given?
“You come to graduate school to learn a body of knowledge and particular skills, both of which can become dated rather quickly. What you learn as a professional that carries you forward is the language and the ethics of your profession, and you learn how to teach yourself what you need to know.”
Rising Star Award
Allen Mendenhall | Class of 2009, English
Staff Attorney to Chief Justice Roy Moore | Supreme Court of Alabama
Adjunct Professor | Huntingdon College
Adjunct Professor | Faulkner University
Allen Mendenhall holds a B.A. in English from Furman University, M.A. in English from West Virginia University, J.D. from West Virginia University College of Law, LL.M. in transnational law from Temple University Beasley School of Law and Ph.D. in English from Auburn University.
He edits the Southern Literary Review and has been an adjunct legal associate at the Cato Institute, a Mises Emerging Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada and a Humane Studies Fellow with the Institute for Humane Studies.
He is an elected member of the Philadelphia Society and the Hugh Maddox American Inn of Court, and is president of the Montgomery Chapter of the Federalist Society.
He has taught in university English departments, a humanities department, a law school, a business school, a Japanese private school and a penitentiary.
While in private practice in Atlanta, he represented nonprofit corporations and litigated cases involving real property, contracts, collections, foreclosures, restrictive covenants and real-estate transactions.
His academic writing has been included in The Journal of Jurisprudence, The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence and The British Journal of American Legal Studies, among many others. His writing for popular media has appeared in Newsweek, The American Spectator, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others.
He has appeared on various radio programs and on Al Jazeera America’s “Inside Story,” and has spoken or delivered papers at Harvard University, Brown University and Georgetown University Law Center.
What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve been given?
“I can’t recall who said it to me, probably several people, maybe nobody at all, but I recall adopting the view, gradually and by slow degrees, that a person’s love goes hand in hand with his or her talent. We typically love the things we’re good at, and we’re good at them because we love them and enjoy practicing and perfecting them.
Knowing what you love comes easy, but it takes diligence to figure out how your love for something can provide a useful service for someone else. The best way to convince someone that your personal love can be an asset to someone else is to prove it by getting to work. The longer you wait, the harder it will be not only to prove that, but also to refine your skills.”