Matt Loewen ’08 studies the rocks he finds in some of the most remote corners of Alaska to help him understand volcanoes.

Growing up, there weren’t many sports Erin Peterson ’00, DPT’03 didn’t try. “If it was a sport, I played it,” says Peterson, who played varsity softball and basketball at Puget Sound while she studied natural science. It was softball that earned her a spot in the Puget Sound Athletic Hall of Fame in 2013, thanks in part to school records she set, some of which still stand. Softball was always her first love: When she discovered it at the age of 6, she says, it “felt like coming home.”

As a kumu hula, or master teacher of hula, Michael Pili Pang ’84 firmly believes in the concept of huliau: to look back in order to move forward. “Hula is an indigenous art form, but it is not something that is to be kept on a shelf,” he says. “It evolves.”

Madyson Willoughby ’19 hadn’t planned to become an entrepreneur right out of college, but she was perfectly positioned for it to happen.

The Tacoma native majored in business at Puget Sound, and after graduation was waiting tables and selling her vintage clothing collection on the app Depop when she stumbled across an opportunity to lease a pint-sized storefront on 6th Avenue. Several months later, Willoughby opened Good Vibes Vintage & Resale, a pastel-pink treasure trove of pre-loved clothing.

Atop a mountain thousands of miles from home, Gretchen Kunigk Fraser ’41 eased into the starting gate, set into a crouch, and awaited the signal to start the biggest ski race of her life. The odds against Fraser were already tremendously long. The fact that she had even made it to this point—competing in the 1948 Olympic slalom event in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and clinging to a narrow one-tenth of a second lead as she began her second and final run in the competition—felt like something of a miracle.

When members of the Leavitt family gathered recently to consider the next steps in their philanthropy, they united around the University of Puget Sound and its ability, according to one family member, to develop students with “well-honed analytical skills to help solve the complex problems facing the people of the world.” After giving to the Puget Sound Fund for many decades, the Leavitt family first established a scholarship fund in 2014.