Three alumni honored at Saint Mary’s Reunion Weekend June 20-22

         WINONA, Minn. — Each year during summer Reunion Weekend festivities, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota honors outstanding alumni.

            This year’s Distinguished Alumnus Award recipient was Paul J. Meyer ’64, J.D. of Phoenix, Ariz.; the Alumni Appreciation Award was given to Thomas J. Baryl ’58 of Oak Brook, Ill.; and the Outstanding Young Alumnus Award was given to Nathan Semsch ’04 of Crystal, Minn. All three were honored during a reception Saturday, June 21, on the Winona campus.

            Approximately 450 alumni, family and friends returned for Saint Mary’s Reunion Weekend festivities, which began Friday, June 20, and ran throughout the weekend.

2014 Saint Mary’s Reunion Weekend Honorees:

 

Brother William Mann, president of Saint Mary's University, with Nathan Semsch

Nathan Semsch ’04

Outstanding Young Alumnus

Nathan Semsch is currently a senior project manager with Sullivan/Day Construction, a commercial general contractor based in the Twin Cities. Throughout his time at Saint Mary’s University, he built many good friendships, as well as a reputation for helping others. Selected as Outstanding Senior, he served as president of the university’s Habitat for Humanity chapter for two years. His exceptional involvement at Saint Mary’s continues; in May 2012 he concluded six years of service on the Saint Mary’s Alumni Board, including two years as president. Semsch has assisted with several university initiatives including service days, last year’s Centennial and the First Generation Initiative.

 

Brother William with Thomas Baryl

Thomas J. Baryl ’58

Alumni Appreciation

Thomas Baryl received the Alumni Appreciation award for his lifetime support of Saint Mary’s University and other Lasallian Catholic institutions. Baryl is president of Peoples Auto Parking, a family business which manages and has owned several parking facilities in downtown Chicago, and which has diversified into banking investments and other commercial properties. Baryl has stayed active with his alma mater, serving as an alumni board member and president of the Chicago alumni chapter, as a financial contributor, a president’s advisory member, and as a supporter of the Chicago Centennial Celebration. He also has sponsored Chicago theatre alumni events.

Brother William with Paul Meyer

Paul J. Meyer ’64, J.D.

Distinguished Alumnus

After being selected an Outstanding Senior at Saint Mary’s, Paul Meyer went on to notable careers in law and business. Meyer served as the senior law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court, and he later became a managing partner of Meyer, Hendricks & Bivens, PLC in Phoenix, Ariz. Meyer was executive vice president and general counsel of Eller Media and then president and CEO of the Americas Division of Clear Channel Outdoor, the largest outdoor advertising company in the U.S. He is now president of Digital Sign Services of JCDecaux North America. Meyer is currently serving his second term on the Saint Mary’s Board of Trustees. His generous financial contributions have significantly furthered the mission of Saint Mary’s University.

Saint Mary's professor, alumni play role with Fermilab’s MicroBooNE project

Father Paul Nienaber, Ph.D.

WINONA, Minn. — As the massive 30-ton MicroBooNE particle detector — a tool that may unlock many unexplained mysteries of the universe — was transported across the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab site today, a Saint Mary’s University physics professor watched with anticipation alongside the world’s leading physicists.

Father Paul Nienaber, Ph.D., associate professor of physics at Saint Mary’s, has been involved with the project since it was proposed in 2007. Additionally, four Saint Mary’s undergraduates (including, most recently, 2014 graduate Evan Shockley) worked on MicroBooNE as summer research interns from 2010-2012.

The MicroBooNE detector has been under construction for nearly two years. The tank contains a 32-foot-long “time projection chamber,” the largest ever built in the United States, equipped with 8,256 delicate gilded wires, which took the MicroBooNE team two months to attach by hand. This machine will allow scientists to further study the properties of neutrinos, particles that may hold the key to understanding many unexplained mysteries of the universe.

“The MicroBooNE collaboration is an amazingly talented and energetic group of scientists, many of whom are in the early stages of their careers,” Dr. Nienaber said. “Their enthusiasm and ingenuity is infectious, and I’m excited and grateful for having had the opportunity to contribute to an enterprise on which so many bright people have worked so hard. But this is just the beginning. Now that the detector is built and located in the particle beam line, much work remains to check all the detector systems under running conditions, and to begin to accumulate the estimated three years’ worth (minimum) of data from the run.”

Father Nienaber will continue to work as part of the MicroBooNE collaboration through its initial commissioning and data run stage (expected to last until the beginning of 2018).

“My role on the MicroBooNE experiment is as a collaborator from an undergraduate teaching institution,” Nienaber said. “I try to connect Saint Mary’s students to the physics profession in general and introduce them to the particular rewards and challenges of research. These efforts are of necessity not as central or as crucial as the ones made by laboratory scientists and students working full-time, but they have paid dividends for me and for Saint Mary’s students (as evidenced by Evan Shockley’s entering the physics Ph.D. program at Chicago) and have contributed to the success of the experiment.

“The four Saint Mary’s students and I worked on part of a detector subsystem; their summer stipends were paid by a National Science Foundation grant. It is unmistakably unusual that physics undergraduates from an institution like Saint Mary’s would have had the chance to be associated (in however small a way) with a project of this importance.”