The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s General Alumni Association (GAA) has honored three alumni who are broadly influencing their professions with its Distinguished Young Alumni Award.
Hunter Lewis, editor of Cooking Light magazine; Danae Ringelmann, co-founder of the fundraising website Indiegogo.com; and John Sides, political science professor and co-founder of The Monkey Cage political blog, received the awards from the GAA’s board of directors at a banquet held on Friday, Oct. 16, at the George Watts Hill Alumni Center. This is the 27th year the GAA has presented the awards recognizing alumni age 40 or younger for bringing credit to the University through their achievements.
“The remarkable accomplishments of many of Carolina’s younger alumni such as Hunter, Danae and John are truly inspiring,” said Douglas Dibbert, GAA president. “These honorees well represent the quality of our Carolina graduates and the many contributions being made by our alumni in North Carolina, the U.S. and around the world.”
Lewis, of Mountain Brook, Ala., began his journalism and culinary careers while still an undergraduate at Carolina, writing for The Daily Tar Heel and cooking at local restaurants. After graduating in 2000 with a degree in journalism and mass communication, he began to connect both pursuits, enrolling in a food-writing course in 2004 at the French Culinary Institute in New York where renowned chef James Beard served as one of the instructors. He later went to work for Chef Jonathan Waxman, cooking in Waxman’s restaurants in New York and California and working with him and other chefs on their cookbooks.
In 2008, Lewis returned to New York to direct the test kitchen for Saveur magazine. He became the food editor for Bon Appetit and then took charge of food content for Southern Living. In 2014, he was named editor of Cooking Light, where he featured a person instead of food on the cover for the first time in the magazine’s 28 years. The first person to appear on the cover of the magazine was First Lady Michelle Obama, whom Lewis interviewed about her “Let’s Move!” program to fight childhood obesity. The magazine also launched a related feature piece – “Let’s Cook!” – aimed at getting youngsters and their families to cook and eat healthier food.
Ringelmann, of San Francisco, Calif., started Indiegogo.com to give startups, nonprofits, artists and entrepreneurs a method to raise money directly from the public outside the traditional financial system. A Morehead Scholar who graduated in 2000 with a degree in American studies from the College of Arts and Sciences, Ringelmann launched the website in 2008 with a couple of graduate business school classmates at the University of California at Berkeley. She was inspired to start Indiegogo after seeing her parents’ frustrations trying to get financing for their small business and from her experience on Wall Street, where she found traditional ways to secure financing and monetary support to be inefficient and unfair.
Today, Indiegogo has campaigns in more than 200 countries, four currencies and three languages and distributes millions of dollars a week to support approximately 8,000 campaigns a year. Indiegogo’s staff of about 100 is noted for being balanced between men and women, rare among most Silicon Valley tech firms, which are traditionally dominated by men. Ringelmann also has testified before Congress about innovative ideas for raising capital to finance small businesses. Fast Company named her among its Top 50 Women Innovators in Technology in 2011, and in 2013 the Advertising Women of New York organization recognized her with its No Apologies Changemaker Award.
Sides, of Washington, D.C., an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, co-founded The Monkey Cage political blog with his colleagues in 2007 as a quick way to disseminate their ideas and research on current issues while it was still relevant and topical rather than waiting for months or longer to publish in academic journals.
Four years into Sides’ career as a blogger, The Week magazine named him 2011 Blogger of the Year. The following year, Time magazine cited the then-independent themonkeycage.org among its 2012 Best Blogs. In 2013, The Washington Post acquired The Monkey Cage as a regular feature. The blog averages about 200,000 views a month, with readership doubling during election seasons. By pushing data-driven political science research into the public discourse, Sides is noted for giving substance to political opinions as well as distilling difficult concepts and making political discussions more accessible.
Sides attended Carolina as a Morehead Scholar and graduated in 1996 with a degree in political science from the College of Arts and Sciences. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. He also has written several books on politics, including The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Election.
