Class Notes Winter 2025 – The University of Utah Magazine

Larry Echo Hawk JD’73, who built his career as one of the first Native American attorneys, spoke at the U’s S.J. Quinney College of Law’s 2024 convocation ceremony. Following service as the Bannock County, Idaho, prosecuting attorney and two terms in the state’s House of Representatives, Echo Hawk was elected attorney general of Idaho in 1990, the first American Indian elected to the position. He later became assistant secretary of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was asked to serve a second term but left to serve as a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Echo Hawk was also a tenured professor at the law school at Brigham Young University and general legal counsel for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall (Idaho) Reservation. A member of the Pawnee Nation, he founded and is now of counsel at the Echo Hawk law offices in Pocatello, Idaho, where one of his sons now leads the Indian law practice group. Echo Hawk has served since 2018 as Utah’s special counsel on Native American affairs. Speaking about Dean Elizabeth Kronk Warner in his convocation speech, he said, “When I was admitted to law school in 1970, it was a class of 147 students, and five of them were women. Now I stand before you in the presence of the second Native woman to ever be a law dean and the first-ever at the University of Utah. It makes me very proud to see that. She is a bright star.”

Ron Perla PhD’71 was recognized with the Distinguished Alumni Award from the U Department of Atmospheric Sciences. Known for discovering the “30-degree threshold,” where slopes of 30 degrees or more are much more likely to cause avalanches, Perla conducted research while working ski patrol at Alta Ski Resort and as a snow ranger with the U.S. Forest Service Alta Avalanche Study Center. His pioneering models of moving avalanches and lifelong contributions to snow science have significantly improved safety for backcountry adventurers. Now based in Alberta, Canada, he continues his impactful research.

Nikhil K. Bhayani BS’98 received the International Association of Top Professionals’ 2024 Presidential Award in Healthcare, presented for exceptional dedication, innovation, and leadership in the field. Bhayani is an infectious disease physician and an assistant professor at Texas Christian University, where he teaches and mentors medical students and residents, conducts research on various infectious disease topics, and collaborates with other faculty and staff. He practices infectious disease medicine in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, serving a diverse patient population and offering consultation services to hospitals and clinics.

Elizabeth Heider BS’00 has published her debut novel, May the Wolf Die, which The Washington Post named one of the 10 best mystery novels of 2024 and The New York Times listed among the year’s best crime fiction. Set in present-day Naples, the thriller follows a female detective tasked with solving a murder involving organized crime and the U.S. military. Heider lived in Naples for several years as part of her job with the U.S. Navy. She notes, “Unfortunately, the transcendent beauty of the city has a bleak shadow: rampant poverty and the Commora mafia infesting all aspects of society.” During her time as a civilian researcher for the Navy, Heider wrote and ran wargames and assessed at-sea exercises. She was later a scientist with the European Space Agency, where she was part of a group helping put ESA science experiments and technology demonstrations into operations aboard the International Space Station, and she has also worked for Microsoft’s AI4Science Research Program. At age eight, Heider began taking adult-learning creative-writing lessons in the evenings, and she began high school early. At 16, she entered the U’s Actor Training Program before jumping fields into physics, going on to a master’s and PhD at Tufts University, conducting research at the Fermilab National Particle Accelerator Laboratory and at a high-field magnet laboratory. She authored a comic series developed by the ESA, and her short fiction has been recognized with several awards.

Jamie Sorenson BA’05 JD’08 is the new president of the U Alumni Board of Governors, where he is working on ways to reconnect with and support our alumni community. After graduating from the university in French and political science, and relying on his experience with the Hinckley Institute of Politics, Sorenson went back to Washington, D.C., for law school. Since graduating, he has practiced in the bankruptcy and litigation sections of Ray Quinney & Nebeker and has been a part of groups committed to increasing and supporting diversity in the law and community, including the Utah Minority Bar Association.

Elizabeth N. Bess BS’09 PhD’15 has helped make remarkable strides in discovering a cure for Parkinson’s disease. Bess is lead researcher on a team at the University of California, Irvine, that has found that the protein chunks that aggregate in the brain and lead to Parkinson’s appear to form in the intestine as a result of the E. coli bacteria. “So, if you can stop the aggregates from forming in the gut, there’s a chance that the proteins won’t reach the brain and cause Parkinson’s,” she notes. “And now that we know a way that these protein aggregates form, we can find ways to prevent their formation.” The concept that a treatment for a disease like Parkinson’s that afflicts the brain may begin in the gut is a new one. “But our research is charting a map for how this is possible,” Bess explains. “We hope our work will open new avenues for better treatments to help people with this disease.” Now an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Irvine, Bess earned her bachelor’s in biological chemistry and her doctorate in organic chemistry before going on to a postdoc in microbiology and immunology at UC San Francisco.

Rebecca Lindenburg PHOTO BY JASON SHELDON

Rebecca Lindenberg PhD’11 has a new poetry collection, Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible. Lindenberg is an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, where she is also poetry editor of The Cincinnati Review. Her previous work includes The Logan Notebooks, winner of the 2015 Utah Book Award. She’s the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Excellence Award and a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, among others. She has also been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the MacDowell Arts Colony. Her poetry, lyric essays, and criticism appear in American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Third Coast, Smartish Pace, Iowa Review, and elsewhere and have been anthologized widely, including in The Best American Poetry series.

Dennis Connors MS’14 won silver for the United States as a paracyclist in the 2024 Summer Paralympic Games in Paris. Connors has won the U.S. Paracycling Men’s Trike National Championship six times and became the MT2 road race world champion with competition in Zurich in September. He is also a member of the U.S. Paraclimbing Team and is considering adding other sports. Connors served nine years in the Marine Corps and completed three deployments in Iraq. He suffered multiple TBIs and a stroke while in the military, and he continues pushing his physical and mental limits to show that you should never give up on the things you love.

Widowed at 34 and left to raise four children alone after her husband passed away from a brain tumor (and after having lost her father to glioblastoma brain cancer when she was 20), Hollie Morales BS’19 turned her moment of greatest darkness into motivation, starting school at age 35 determined to make a positive impact against cancer. Morales is now a doctoral student in oncology at the U. “If I am able to make a difference in just one life, all the years of studying, sleepless nights, and sacrificing a social life will be worth it,” she says. “Don’t let others tell you what can’t be done. Chase your dreams.”

Savannah Talbot BS’19 (MA in applied behavior analysis, Ball State University) is a licensed and board-certified behavior analyst and therapeutic recreation specialist working with children with autism spectrum disorder at the Carmen B. Pingree Autism Center for Learning. She also volunteers at nonprofit organizations that help people of all abilities participate in outdoor activities such as skiing, climbing, and more, and sits on the executive board of the Utah Recreation Therapy Association.

Kandis King Taylor PhD’23 was recognized with the Superior Accomplishment Award in the 2024 Utah Music Educators Association awards. Taylor is both percussion instructor at Brigham Young University and director of bands and percussion ensembles at Lakeridge Junior High. Her research interests focus on leveraging educational technology as a tool for music learning, and she has presented both nationally and internationally. With more than 18 years of experience teaching, directing, and adjudicating public school musical groups, Taylor also composes music and has published several pieces.

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