Alumni Focus

A hard hat sits on a bookshelf in her office. It's a requirement for visiting the construction site across from the Dimock Community Health Center, but the prop fits Ruth Ellen Fitch '83, the center's president and CEO, in more ways than one.

John G. Roberts Jr. '79 is the first graduate of Harvard Law School to become chief justice of the United States.

Donald Alexander '48 is a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C., where he has a wide-ranging tax practice.

Through literature and law, Larissa Behrendt LL.M. '94 S.J.D. '98 speaks for aboriginal rights.

Twenty-six years ago, Peter Ferrara '79 picked a then obscure topic for his third-year paper: Social Security solvency.

AIDS, malaria and malnutrition claim millions of lives in the developing world every year. One approach to such problems is to provide free health products--condoms, malaria kits and vitamin supplements--to health clinics.

George Leighton '43 ('46) spent his childhood in Massachusetts summering in Plymouth and wintering in New Bedford. His summer home was a shanty with no running water or electricity near the cranberry bogs, and his winter home was an unheated apartment near the textile mills.

Can a veteran prosecutor whip the Department of Homeland Security into shape? Michael Chertoff '78 has already started.

As chairman of International Specialty Products Inc., Samuel Heyman '63 is a leader in business. But his early experiences in the U.S. Department of Justice made him a firm believer in government service.

Traveling across the country, sowing apple seeds and watching them grow sounds like an American folktale. For Linda Singer '91, it's her job.

Paul V. Applegarth J.D./M.B.A. '74 runs a government corporation with a new approach to foreign aid.

Nick Brown '02 gained fame as a contestant on the reality show "Survivor." Today his reality is the Green Zone in Baghdad, where he carries a laptop and a rifle as a U.S. Army JAG officer.

Eliot Spitzer '84 has no time to waste. Instead of hello and a handshake, the New York state attorney general greets a visitor with "OK, let's get to work."

Christopher Cox '76 ('77) and Jane Harman '69 sit on different sides of the aisle, but the urgent threat of terrorism unites them.

A principal at Fish & Richardson in Boston, Charles Hieken '57 has practiced all aspects of intellectual property law for more than 50 years. He and his wife, Donna, recently made a gift to the school to establish the Hieken Professorship in Patent Law.

Katherine Locker '98 knows that children with disabilities who are in the foster care system are some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

In a nondescript building in suburban Virginia, two subway stops from the Pentagon, a team of a half dozen or so defense lawyers works on what is perhaps the toughest--and most controversial--legal assignment in America.

Last spring, an Oregon attorney named Brandon Mayfield was arrested by the FBI and jailed for two weeks. He was suspected of being linked to the Madrid train bombings, thanks to the FBI's mistaken match of a fingerprint to a print found on a bag of detonators near the scene.

In his recent book, "The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage," Frederick P. Hitz '64 gives credence to the saying that truth can be stranger than fiction.

Some honors take longer to attain than others. More than 75 years after graduating from law school, 108-year-old Walter Seward '24 ('27) has earned distinction as Harvard's oldest living graduate.

It was December 2002 when House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt called Jamie Gorelick '75 to offer her the last Democratic slot on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.