Alumni News: Winter/Spring 2026
Alumni honors, career moves, and items of note
The Senate confirmed Caroline Pogge, DrPH ’19, as Brigadier General in the Army.
Bookshelf
99 Ways to Die and How to Avoid Them, by Ashely Alker, SM ’09
In this “Anthony Bourdain-style greatest hits tour of death,” Ashely Alker, an emergency medicine doctor and self-described ‘death-escapologist,’ provides practical advice and stories from her experiences in life and medicine.
Jessica and the River Fairies, by Jeffrey Blander, SM ’00, SM ’04, ScD ’08
Blander’s fifth book and second children’s title, Jessica and the River Fairies is inspired by his late mother and co-author, Ann Blander and a short bedtime story she wrote for him as a child.
In Memoriam
Bill Foege, MPH ’65, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who led the United States’ early response to the AIDS epidemic and developed the vaccination strategy that helped wipe out smallpox in the 1970s, has passed away at the age of 89.
In 1994, Foege received the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Alumni Award of Merit, the highest honor presented by the Alumni Association to an alum of the School; in 2006, he received the Julius B. Richmond Award alongside Anthony Fauci; and in 2022, he joined several former CDC directors to speak on a panel at the School.
For all his accolades, Foege has been called the “grand old man of public health.”
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