Sarah Chayes ’84
Raya Dreben ’49, LLB ’54
Clara Longstreth ’59
Lisa Randall ’84, PhD ’87, RI ’03
Bonnie Tsui ’99
Alumnae Recognition Awards
Sarah Chayes ’84 is an activist, journalist, and photographer. She began her reporting career freelancing from Paris for the Christian Science Monitor and other outlets. From 1996 to 2002, she served as Paris reporter for National Public Radio, earning the 1999 Foreign Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi awards for her reporting on the Kosovo War. She has also reported from Algeria, Bosnia, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, and Serbia and covered the International War Crimes Tribunal and the European Union. After reporting on the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Chayes left journalism to help rebuild the country. Beginning in 2002, she served in Kandahar as field director for the nonprofit group Afghans for Civil Society. Later, she ran a dairy cooperative. In 2005, she established the Arghand Cooperative with the aim of discouraging opium production by helping farmers earn a living from legal crops. Chayes is the author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (Penguin, 2006) and has published articles in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post. She graduated from Harvard College in 1984, earning the Radcliffe College History Prize.
Raya Dreben ’49, LLB ’54 is an associate justice on recall of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. When Bailey Aldrich was appointed a judge of the United States District Court, she became his first law clerk. She was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and thereafter, engaged in private practice at a number of firms. She joined the law firm of Palmer & Dodge (now Edwards & Angel Palmer & Dodge) in 1964, and in 1969, she and another associate became the first women part-time partners at a major Boston law firm. Dreben taught copyright law at Harvard Law School for a number of years while at Palmer & Dodge and was appointed to the Appeals Court by Governor Michael Dukakis in 1979. She has served as trustee of several organizations, including Radcliffe College, and has received the Haskell Cohn Distinguished Judicial Service Award from the Boston Bar Association. She graduated from Radcliffe College magna cum laude in 1949 and from Harvard Law School cum laude in 1954, where she was in the second class that included women.
Clara Longstreth ’59 is the music director and founder of the New Amsterdam Singers, a critically acclaimed amateur chorus in New York City. The New Yorker has called her “one of the more imaginative choral programmers around.” She has served on the faculty of Rutgers University, where she conducted the Voorhes Choir of Douglas College, and has taught music at private schools. Longstreth has been the guest conductor for performances with the Limón Dance Company, the Messiah Sing-In at Avery Fisher Hall, the New York Choral Society, the Riverside Church Choir, and the West Village Chorale. She has led the New Amsterdam Singers in 15 tours to Europe and South America; been an auditor at a Tanglewood seminar in orchestral conducting; served as adjudicator in the New Jersey High School Choral Festival; and given a lecture-demonstration at the American Choral Directors Eastern Division Conference. Longstreth studied government at Radcliffe, graduating cum laude, and studied choral conducting with G. Wallace Woodworth at Harvard College. She earned a master’s in choral conducting from the Juilliard School, where she studied under Richard Westenberg.
Radcliffe Fellowship Award
Lisa Randall ’84, PhD ’87, RI ’03 is a professor of physics at Harvard University, the first woman theoretical physicist to gain tenure there. She has also served on the faculties of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University, where she was the first tenured woman in the Department of Physics. Randall is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society. She is also the author of the acclaimed book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (Ecco, 2005), partly written at the Radcliffe Institute. She has edited the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science and Nuclear Physics B; she currently edits the Journal of High Energy Physics, where she is on the advisory board. When she was a senior at Stuyvesant High School, Randall won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. As an undergraduate at Harvard College, where she was Phi Beta Kappa, Randall was awarded the John Harvard Scholarship and David J. Robbins Prize and was named the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Scholar and Radcliffe Scholar.
Jane Rainie Opel ’50 Young Alumna Award
Bonnie Tsui ’99 is a freelance writer and travel journalist. She has lived in Australia, studying at the University of Sydney and writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, and won a Radcliffe Traveling Fellowship to New Zealand. Bonnie has written for Let’s Go travel guides, been a contributing editor to blue magazine, and worked as an editor at Travel + Leisure. She also contributes frequently to the Boston Globe and the New York Times. Tsui contributed to The New York Times Practical Guide to Practically Everything (St. Martin’s Press, 2006) and edited A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise: 20 Young Writers on Finding a Place in the Natural World (Sierra Club Books/University of California Press, 2007). She is also the author of She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers of the Civil War (Globe Pequot Press, 2003) and, more recently, American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods (Free Press, 2009). In 2007, she was a winner of the Lowell Thomas Award for travel journalism. Tsui graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in English and American literature and language.
