A Letter from the Department Chair

Dear HTM Friends:

Welcome back to the start of a new and exciting semester; I hope everyone enjoyed their Summer! It was an extremely busy and successful Spring Semester, and were overjoyed to have an entire year of being face-to-face on campus. Not only did we continue welcome a number of industry partners back to visit our classes to guest lecture, but we also were able to hold field trips to local businesses and companies that allow our students to engage in other experiential learning opportunities. In addition, we welcomed back HTM Career Day to its live form! Roughly 40 companies joined us over the 2-day span; we felt so lucky to re-connect with so many industry partners, students and alumni - it was a great success! We look forward to Spring of 2023 and hosting the 49th Annual Career Day, and continuing on creating new and growing our industry relationships.

As always, we are grateful to our faculty, staff and to everyone who has helped with our efforts of returning! It is wonderful to know that so many of you have stepped up to support our activities as we have begun to resume a more normal way of life again. Your continued support makes our success stories, enriches student learning, and allows us to maintain closer ties with our industry. We are very eager and excited to continue to build on the normalcy of last year, and really drive engagement for our upcoming activities. A special thank you to all of our HTM corporate sponsors and our HTM Career Day sponsors for your continued support of the department and engagement with our students. We would also like to express our gratitude to each and every member of the HTM Executive Board, Leadership Board, Young Alumni Council, and our alums. No wonder our momentum continues to grow each day.

HTM Leadership Board

This Summer at our June Board Meeting, we voted in a new Executive Committee as well as four new board members. Joining our Executive Committee is Tim Brett (Chair), Jane Pritzker (Vice Chair), We would like to thank our Executive Leadership Committee Board Chair, Laurie Stroll; Vice Chair, Tim Brett; Nominations Chair, Victoria Vega; External Relations & Engagement Chair, Fred Mitzner; and Development Chair, Jane Pritzker, for their continued leadership and support. Our student representatives on the board, Jacqueline Kaliouby and Olivia Tremblay, graduated in May 2022. Their presence on the board was well received and they represented the HTM student body effectively. Thank you, Jacqui and Olivia, and we wish you the best; please stay connected. Our Young Alumni Council representative, Keith Sacenti, has done a great job of representing the council and is instrumental in organizing young alumni events and keeping connected with current students.  Thank you, Keith, and to the Young Alumni Council!

On behalf of our HTM Leadership Board, let me extend a special welcome to our new board members, who are our co-chairs of our HTM Career Day Committee:

Carly Coughlin '23
HTM Student Representative

Andrea Ramirez-Franco '23
HTM Student Representative  

We would also like to express our gratitude towards four individuals: Jonathan Crellin, David Heath, Michael Sacenti, and John Siska who have transitioned to Emeritus board members. We have appreciated their time, passion and years of dedication serving on the HTM Leadership Board. Thank you, Jon, David, Michael and John. I am sure they will always be there for us to share their experience and wisdom.

HTM Alumni and Industry Events

Our Annual Award Banquet, held on May 17th, 2022 held for the first time since 2019 was a great success. With just over 200 HTM Alumni, faculty, students and friends of HTM, we recognized and honored four amazing individuals in our industry. In addition to these awardees, we also recognized our student scholarship recipients from the last three years between 2020-2022. Another special congratulation to our awardees:

Stephen Elmont Award Recipient
Matt Lambert ‘92
General Manager/COO, The Country Club at Mirasol

Distinguished Industry Leader Award Recipient
Jon Taffer
Host, Bar Rescue

Outstanding Young Alumni Award Recipient
Keith Sacenti ‘14
Project Manager, Security & Compliance at Acquia

Special Recognition Award Recipient
Ken Toong '04
Executive Director, UMass Auxiliary Enterprises

Stephen Elmont Alumni Scholarship Recipients
2020 Deanna McKnight & Natasha Prokopowich

2021 Olivia Schumacher & Sonam Choedon

2022 Juliet Truesdale & Madeline Sahagian

We are excited and look forward to continuing our Annual Awards Program for the sixth year in spring 2023 (a date will be announced in the coming months). We are also overjoyed to be bringing back our Boston HTM Alumni Reception on September 21st at the UMass Club Boston, for the first time since 2019. In November of 2021 were able to hold a very successful networking reception in November in NYC at Magic Hour, Moxy Times Square and look forward to our 2022 NYC reception on November 14th. Please stay tuned for further communications on upcoming events! Our thanks to all of you who help make these events possible.

• HTM Leadership Board
• A special thank you as well to our NYC Committee for their passion and effort towards this annual reception.

To our most recent alumni members of the Class of 2022 – congratulations on achieving this milestone in your lives. I wish you the best. Please keep in touch by connecting with us on LinkedIn or by contacting Jena Perron, jigel@isenberg.umass.edu, our Director of External Relations and Engagement.

Please know that we always like to hear from you and welcome your involvement and participation! Best wishes to all!

Sincerely,

Muzzo Uysal, PhD
Department Chair & Professor