Robert H. Smith School of Business

Just two years after graduating, Khalil Pettus '15 established a scholarship fund recognized by ODK, within the Division of Student Affairs, to support students who are “leaders among leaders.” The Kiyomi D. Harper ODK Scholarship Fund, named after Pettus’ mother, is his love letter to his mom as well as a lasting expression of his appreciation for his leadership and educational experiences.

In India, “Aagarwal” describes a mercantile caste in the country’s central region. Pallavi Agarwal has taken her surname to heart. She’s CEO and founder of Kander, a firm that helps clients in the professional services, high-tech, higher education and nonprofit industries implement cloud technology to assist their daily operations.

As president and CEO of Potomac, Md.-based Curbio, Rudman works with realtors and homeowners to make repairs and updates to homes before they go on the market. They’re improvements that can add tens of thousands of dollars to sales prices.

Gene Fatula ’88 (right) described his father, Edward, as a noncompliant diabetic. In 1998, at the age of 61, he suffered a heart attack at his son’s Philadelphia-area home and did not survive. But because he was an organ donor, 17 others did.

Dan Kaplan (BA English & Business, ‘91) provides communications training to leaders, managers, and teams, using DiSC, the 5 Behaviors of A Cohesive Team, and his heart. Read about how he thinks we can build culture and connection in a disconnected world.

With more than 61,000 pizzerias spread like pepperoni across the American landscape, there’s no shortage of competition for your palate. Luke Watson ’18, CEO of Washington, D.C.-based Timber Pizza, thinks he knows what will have you coming back for more.

“Our crust is king,” he says. “We’re all about the dough. It’s a step above the rest.”

On the evening of April 3, the University of Maryland Alumni Association and Student Alumni Leadership Council hosted their annual ‘Terps Under 30’ event, which featured four alumni under the age of 30. The event began with a networking hour and reception, and then transitioned into a TED talk-style program, where our four speakers, Alexandra Givan ’16, Thomas Hong ’2020, Rachel Lipman ’15 and Derek Xiao ’19 spoke about their life experiences and how they find themselves moving fearlessly forward.

In working with hundreds of growth-focused entrepreneurs and CEOs around the world, Seema Alexander ’00 starts with two simple questions: “Why does your business exist?” and “What makes you unique?”

Whether you’re asking Google for driving directions or enabling your computer’s spam filter, artificial intelligence – or AI – is an indispensable part of life. The idea that computers can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as speech recognition and decision-making, was once the stuff of science fiction. For Adriana Avakian ’12, the future is now.

When Roy Schwartz ’98, MBA ’01 co-founded the online news website Axios in 2016, he was guided by a singular mission: articles would be 250 to 500 words, and bullet points would help busy readers digest the day’s headlines in a matter of minutes. Schwartz even helped fashion a term for the approach: smart brevity.