Social enterprises create value for underserved, underrepresented or disadvantaged people or for the environment. And among students and recent college graduates, they have never been more popular than they are today.

Robin Tinghitella, a professor in DU’s Department of Biological Sciences, is accustomed to the fact that her research attracts a lot of curiosity. After all, who doesn’t want to learn about the courtship rituals of crickets? For Tinghitella, mating habits are the perfect hook for introducing students and the public […]

It was the only spanking he ever got from his mom, jokes Ved Nanda, international law professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. As a young boy living in Gujranwala, India, Nanda got a tattoo from a man on the street. He was proud of the artwork. […]

Knee-deep in her cross-disciplinary Honors thesis for her two majors, history and English, senior Ashlyn Stewart finds herself digging deeper, stretching further and thinking harder. Which is precisely why, four years ago, Stewart applied to DU’s Honors Program. She wanted to immerse herself in academic challenges and to study alongside […]

Thanks to an expanded list of fun and educational programs, students had the chance to exercise their bodies and brains at the 2017 Founders Celebration, held March 1 and 2 on campus and elsewhere in Denver. The festivities included a student formal dance at the Cable Center and two separate […]

Family is a way of life for Marc Schulman, president of Chicago-based dessert empire Eli’s Cheesecake. Schulman (BSBA ’76) inherited the business from his father, the late Eli Schulman, owner of several now-shuttered Chicago-area eateries that played host in the ’60s and ’70s to celebrities such as Woody Allen, Barbra […]

For Yvette Cook, there was no choice growing up but to serve her community. She says her civic-minded parents encouraged her to follow a path of altruism. Now Cook (BA ’82, MA ’85) heads up Usher’s New Look (UNL), an Atlanta-based nonprofit started by the multiplatinum-selling performer at the age […]

Brian Vicente (JD ’04) has been fighting the marijuana fight for more than a decade, most significantly as co-director and one of two primary authors of the 2012 measure that made Colorado the first state in the country to legalize recreational marijuana. These days Vicente and his 50-person firm, Vicente […]

Two years ago, Nicole Mattson (BSBA ’03, business; MBA ’12) and her husband, Scott, opened Nocturne, an upscale jazz club in Denver’s up-and-coming RiNo (River North) neighborhood. A hotspot for local jazz artists and aficionados — including faculty and students from the Lamont School of Music —t he club has […]

Hillary Frances (MA ’09, international and intercultural communications) is instructional dean of adult education and the Language Learning Center at Emily Griffith Technical College, where she helps prepare nontraditional students — including refugees and immigrants — for the workforce. The school’s bridge classes are designed to help adults who worked […]

A Denver native and East High School graduate who went to Princeton to play basketball, CJ Chapman (JD ’06) returned to his hometown after college to pursue a law degree at DU. He is now a partner and real estate lawyer at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, where he has negotiated […]

Candi CdeBaca (BS ’09, sociology; MSW ’09, social work) is co-founder and executive director of Project VOYCE, a nonprofit that mobilizes and trains Denver youth to work on problems in their schools and communities. Her goal is to prepare kids from Denver’s poorer neighborhoods to claim their seat at the […]