After earning a degree in molecular biology and a certificate from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Vinnakota went to work as a management consultant. A conversation he had with classmates about education and urban policy at his first Princeton reunion, in 1994, changed his direction.

Vinnakota took a leave of absence from his job and, with a partner, created a plan for the SEED School of Washington, D.C., which opened its doors to 40 students in 1998. The school, which offers cultural enrichment programs and a college-prep curriculum in its boarding school setting, now enrolls 320 students from grades seven through 12. Ninety-eight percent of SEED graduates have been accepted to college, and 62 percent of its alumni are progressing toward graduation from college, more than three times the rate for the population that the SEED School serves.

Vinnakota has been active in University and alumni affairs. He served as a Princeton trustee from 2003 to 2007 and currently is the chair of the University's Annual Giving Committee. This year, he received the Josh Miner '43 Experiential Education Award from the Friends of Outdoor Action Board, which is presented annually to a Princeton graduate to recognize leadership in education. In 2004, he returned to Princeton to talk to students about providing poor youngsters with educational opportunities as part of the Wilson School's Practitioner-in-Residence Program.

Max is the first woman to receive the Madison Medal. She arrived at Princeton to earn her PhD after receiving her bachelor's degree at Radcliffe College in 1968. Early in her career she studied the plasma physics aspects of laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, where she made important contributions to laser-plasma interactions and to the understanding of astrophysical plasmas.

Since 2001, Max has been a faculty member at Santa Cruz and an astronomer at the University of California Observatories, performing research at the Lick Observatory in Mount Hamilton, California, and the Keck Observatory. She also is director of the Center for Adaptive Optics, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and headquartered at Santa Cruz. Her current research in astronomy involves the use of adaptive optics to study merging black holes at the centers of galaxies.

In spring 2008, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors that can be accorded to a scientist or engineer.

The Class of 1926 Trophy, awarded to the class that raises the largest amount in each year's campaign, went to the Class of 1983. For their 25th Reunion, class members raised $8,300,000, an all-time record for any Princeton class. The class was led by Class Agent Andrew B. MacDonald, Special Gifts Co-Chairs Kevin T. Callaghan and Louise Nicholson Howe, Participation Chair M. Wistar Wood III, and Class President Elise P. Wright.

(From left: Robert Murley '72, Harold Helm Award winner James Crawford '68, and Annual Giving Director William M. Hardt '63)

Four doctoral students received the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship honoring excellence in scholarship: Daniel B. Bouk, in the Program in History of Science, whose research probes the pivotal role that science has played in building the American life insurance industry; Hannah J. Crawforth of the English department, who has explored English etymologies in Renaissance poetry; Peter A. DiMaggio of the department of chemical engineering, whose research focuses on proteomics -- the large-scale study of proteins in a living system; and Jianfeng Lu of the department of applied and computational mathematics, whose work sheds new light on a complex but powerful tool for analyzing the electronic structure of systems of large size.