TACOMA, Wash. – Historian and former Tacoma mayor William H. “Bill” Baarsma ’64, P’93 will deliver the Commencement address at University of Puget Sound’s 131st Commencement Ceremony on Sunday, May 14, 2023. The Logger alumnus will also receive the honorary degree Doctor of History, the highest distinction bestowed by the university.

Traveling to Europe for a study abroad program has always been on Leonardo Hall ’23’s bucket list. An international business major with a minor in economics, Hall dreamed of seeing the world and learning to live, work, and thrive in another country. So, when the staff at the Office of International Programs suggested he apply for the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, he jumped at the chance to stamp his passport.

Puget Sound’s Archives & Special Collections recently acquired 150 pop-up books, donated by retired art librarian Stanley Hess of Bremerton, Wash. Pop-up books, which date to the 13th century, are intricate—their authors are often referred to as “paper engineers”—and highly interactive. The books are popular not just with kids but also art lovers and book collectors.

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.

Roger Allen has been a professor, a sailor, a celestial navigator, a physical therapist, and a professor again. The latest leg of Allen’s unconventional career path has lasted nearly three decades, a different sort of adventure than life at sea, but no less intrepid. Or, as Professor George Tomlin said in his introduction to Allen’s Regester Lecture in 2016: “Dr. Roger J. Allen, professor of physical therapy, is not the kind of person you’d think of as coming from Kansas—but he does. Or did … just like Amelia Earhart … first female to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.