Category: Fall/Winter 2024

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2024 Alumni Fall/Winter 2024

SMU students with big ideas take advantage of business startup opportunities

PlantSwitch innovates with eco-friendly plant-based plastic

After four years of fits, starts and start-overs, the innovative PlantSwitch, cofounded by Maxime Blandin ’17 and Dillon Baxter ’20, may have hit the plant-based plastic jackpot. The dynamic duo are former SMU students and men’s golf teammates who spent their first few years leading PlantSwitch through a trial-and-error development process to find novel alternatives to single-use plastic products. Through painstaking effort, they found a market-competitive method of turning plant waste into bioplastic pellets. Nearly $20 million in financial backing has rolled into the young company’s coffers to help fund a massive facility under construction in Sanford, North Carolina, that will turn the nation’s agricultural byproducts – such as wheat straw and rice husks – into 50 million pounds of plant-based plastic each year. A multi-million-dollar grant from the USDA will provide regional hemp farmers and PlantSwitch a mutually beneficial arrangement that will set the company up for long-term success. For their innovative work, Baxter and Blandin landed in the latest Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. “The single use plastic industry is very, very big – way bigger than we anticipated, to be honest with you,” says Blandin. “The key is to come out with as many plant-based plastic products as we can over the next six months to a year and turning every single plastic out there into our technology and making it compostable and widely available.”

Nurovant is a note-taking app business startup

Trevor Gicheru ’25 is an SMU computer science major who has turned a challenging academic situation into a business startup that is winning awards, raising funds and attracting new users. While taking biology at SMU, Gicheru found himself struggling to keep up with lectures. He tried recording them but found that it took too much time to rewatch and absorb what the professor was teaching. He had an idea: What if you could use AI to condense lecture material into digestible bits to save time and make studying easier? His idea came to life in Nurovant AI, an innovative learning app that turns recorded lectures – up to 90 minutes in length – into digestible summaries, flashcards and quizzes. Hundreds of SMU students are already integrating Nurovant AI into their university experience and singing the app’s praises. Gicheru believes his app could also improve learning outcomes for students with dysgraphia, a neurological condition that inhibits a person’s ability to write down what they are thinking.

“I want to take this startup as far as I can,” Gicheru says. “I’d like to see it acquired by a big company that can put it into as many schools as possible to help as many students as it can. I’d like to have both a student-facing version and a school-facing version. I’ve been talking to investors and some engineers to help with coding, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this can go in the future.”

Attendance tracking system helps SMU students stay focused

College life provides a level of freedom that causes some students to lose track of their classes and attendance and ultimately fall through the cracks. Jude Lugo ’25, an SMU management major, recognized the problem when he tried to keep track of his own absences and determine which ones were and were not excused. He came up with the idea for LectureLogger – a comprehensive attendance tracking system that gives SMU students and faculty a common portal to see who’s missing class and who’s falling behind. Lugo first presented his idea at SMU’s Big iDeas pitch contest and later won over $74,000 in prize money as the first-place winner at the SMU Startup Launch Competition. Administrators are now finding ways to incorporate LectureLogger into the classroom experience and already noticing improvements in student engagement. The app provides an excusal feature that facilitates student-professor communication and uses a dynamic QR code system that streamlines attendance reporting. About 84% of students have reported that they are more likely to attend classes when using LectureLogger.

“It started out, for me, just seeing my professor struggle with attendance,” says Lugo, who also serves as student representative to the SMU Board of Trustees. “I saw it was taking up a lot of their time, and it was hard for me to keep up with attendance because of all my extracurriculars. It was a problem to solve for both parties.” Today, Lugo sees LectureLogger as an “opportunity to really help students succeed in a larger sense.”

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2024 Alumni Fall/Winter 2024

SMU-in-Taos celebrates 50 years as a satellite

Within the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the Carson National Forest, SMU-in-Taos satellite campus offers SMU students a unique experience.

SMU-in-Taos rises from the ruins of historic Fort Burgwin

While working for the Museum of New Mexico in 1956, noted archaeologist Fred Wendorf was enlisted to locate the pre-Civil War Fort Burgwin, also known as Cantonment Burgwin, a military base approximately 10 miles from Taos, New Mexico. After finding the buried ruins, Wendorf oversaw the site’s intensive excavation and reconstruction, transforming it into a research center.

In 1964, Wendorf joined SMU, establishing the Anthropology Department. That same year, SMU began acquiring the Fort Burgwin property, the merger spurred by the involvement and interest of former Texas Gov. William P. Clements, Jr., then chair of the SMU Board of Governors.

“It was Fred joining the SMU faculty that got all of this in motion,” says David Lee, assistant vice president for curricular operations and strategy. “But Gov. Clements helped secure the property for SMU.”

The northern New Mexico satellite campus held its first classes during the summer of 1973.

“For almost half the life of the University, SMU-in-Taos has been a part of the SMU experience,” Lee says. “As a specialized satellite campus, 50 years is a tremendous legacy.”

After four decades on SMU’s faculty, Wendorf retired in 2003. He died in 2015 at the age of 90.

Satellite campus enhancements foster enriched experiences

Nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and surrounded by the Carson National Forest, the SMU-in-Taos satellite campus is situated on 423 acres and includes 34 buildings. Over the past 50 years, the campus has leveraged its “classroom without walls” philosophy by expanding both in land and facilities.

For example, the Fred Wendorf Information Commons and the campus’ library opened in 2004. Five years later marked the dedication of Casita Clements, a 3,350-square-foot residential student facility. It became the first commercial or institutional building in the Taos area to achieve the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification for sustainable, environmentally responsible construction.

Centrally located is the Carolyn and David Miller Campus Center, dedicated in 2015, which includes a great hall accommodating up to 100 guests, seminar rooms, classrooms, plazas and deep porches. Upcoming plans center on renovating the dining hall, for which early artist renderings have been completed.

Participants of the SMU in Taos Cultural Institute attend Bringing Life to Art: The History and Legacy of Taos Artists and Their Work, taught by Nicholas Myers and Jade Gutierrez, Friday, July 21, 2023 at the Couse-Sharpe Historic Site in Taos, New Mexico.

Campus offers breathtaking backdrop for immersive learning

SMU-in-Taos campus offers small class sizes, nurturing engagement and connection for undergraduate students. Lee says between 90 to 100 students typically take one class per term; two-week terms are held in January, May and August.

“We are working to add new programs in the future to expand student opportunities,” he says.

Each term, undergraduate students connect with the local community by participating in field trips, for example, to notable sites such as Picuris Pueblo, Earthships and Chimayó in Santa Fe.

In addition to for-credit courses for students, the annual SMU-in-Taos Cultural Institute provides a summer weekend of informal classes taught by SMU faculty members for non-students. The four-day event offers courses on a variety of subjects, from local cuisine to the history of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.

“Most universities don’t have anything like this to offer,” Lee says. “When we look back on this legacy, we see what an important part SMU-in-Taos plays in the identity of the University – how it sets us apart to have a place like this.”

Categories
2024 Alumni Fall/Winter 2024

Community theater and beyond: All the world’s a stage for these SMU alumni

From North Texas community theater mainstay Kitchen Dog Theater to Broadway and beyond, these notable SMU alums live for the applause.

Steven Gridley ’00 brings live theater to life

This talented playwright received his BFA in Theater Studies in 2000. He had the privilege of premiering the Drama Desk Award-nominated Spaceman (written under the pseudonym Leegrid Stevens) in New York with his wife, Erin Treadway ’00, starring in the production. Since that debut, the play has been translated into German, staged in Switzerland and made its regional premiere at Fort Worth, Texas’ Amphibian Stage last year. In addition to his writing career, Gridley works as a sound designer, composer and director, while simultaneously working as an Investment Group Assistant at Capital Group Companies. 

“SMU gave me the knowledge and access to do live theater on my own,” he says. “It allowed me to make my own opportunities.”

Since his Spaceman days, he staged a show called War Dreamer and has a synthwave musical titled The Trojans set to open in Manhattan in spring 2025.

Laura Galt ’91 brings Pony pride to New York’s Broadway

Anyone working in live theater likely dreams of one day crossing the stage to accept Broadway’s most prestigious honor. And for SMU alum Laura Galt, that dream came true on June 16, 2024.

“Winning a Tony Award is a dream come true,” she says, acknowledging the recent Best Musical win of The Outsiders Musical for which she served as coproducer. “Broadway has been something I have aspired to since the age of 12, so winning a Tony is the ultimate reward for years of keeping a goal in sight, fortitude and overcoming obstacles.”

Galt & Co. is a theatrical and film production house that coordinates all aspects of production management with creatives and companies. Galt is also a speech-language pathologist, so she provides voice, diction, dialect coaching and accent modification for people and professionals who speak English as a second language. 

Galt says SMU set her up for success by providing her with a breadth of experiences. Currently, her daughter, Campbell Snavely ’25, enjoys those same educational benefits while also working at Galt & Co. to form a powerful new mother-daughter team.

Kitchen Dog Theater made community theater an SMU tradition

Founded in 1990 by five graduates of the MFA Theater Program, Kitchen Dog Theater has continued the tradition of SMU alums at the helm. The artistic integrity instilled in each student guided their approach and led the quintet to stay in Dallas after graduation to broaden the local creative community. 

Today, Tina Parker ’91 and Tim Johnson ’91, who both graduated a year after the theater company’s founding, have settled into leadership roles and have worked together since the beginning.

“[The founders] brought me in to direct Howard Brenton’s Sore Throats in 1993, and I cast Tina in the show. It was the first KDT show for both of us,” Johnson says. 

“I think it was important to me to keep the way we work at KDT alive, which is so deeply steeped in the training we received at SMU as grads and undergrads, as part of our ongoing legacy,” Parker says. “Our mission statement is the same as when the company was founded 34 years ago and is still our touchstone when making artistic decisions today.”