Known to family and friends lovingly as Aunt Marye, Marye (Trinkle) Ruzila, who graduated from FDU’s Rutherford Campus in 1958, generously gifted $1.1 million to FDU. Her gift was endowed to the Career Development Center and the Silberman College of Business.
The gift to the Career Development Center provides grants to cover part of the costs of transportation, wardrobe and lost wages for students completing unpaid internships. In honor of her generosity, the Career Development Center on the Florham Campus was named the John Robert Ruzila and Marye Trinkle Ruzila Career Development Center. John Robert Ruzila, an alumnus himself, graduated from FDU’s Rutherford Campus in 1956.
Aunt Marye’s experience as one of the first few women to receive a B.S. in business management inspired her to establish the John Robert and Marye Trinkle Ruzila Endowed Scholarship in the Silberman College of Business. Rosemary Trinkle Baran, BS’83, also a graduate of FDU’s Rutherford Campus, noted, “Though Aunt Marye and Uncle John didn’t live to see the full impact of their gift, their spirit of altruism lives on in many FDU students.”
One of the best things about this award is accessibility. This grant is open to all students regardless of year, major, financial-aid status or citizenship.
DONNA ROBERTSON University Director FDU Career Development Center
Learn more about the Students First campaign at SUPPORT.FDU.EDU/STUDENTSFIRST
Maroa joined BBH in 1995 as the head of the Audit department. She served as Comptroller from 2000 until 2007. Maroa was appointed Partner and assumed oversight of Operations in 2008.
Prior to joining BBH, Maroa was the general auditor at Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield and, before that, she managed the audit division of Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., with responsibilities for the global audit program of capital markets trading activities, trust, securities services, private banking, and finance. Maroa has also worked in the public accounting area of Deloitte & Touche, where she specialized in brokerage and banking institutions.
Maroa holds a B.S. degree in accounting from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is a Certified Public Accountant.
Schwamb was born on July 14, 1939 – French Independence Day (“Bastille Day”) – and spent over 30 years of his career working for international companies based out of Switzerland and Germany well before the term “global economy” became a staple term of American business.
After joining Bloomingdale’s Executive Training program upon graduation from FDU in 1962, Schwamb spent seven years there before joining Swiss-owned Spinnerin Yarn Company as Vice President of their Sport and Ski apparel division. This would lead to an association with Bogner of America, based out of Munich, Germany, in 1973. His first role was as Eastern Sales Manager for the innovative, family-owned company who was at the time, were the world’s leading producer of high-end fashion ski, tennis and golf apparel.
Schwamb would go on to spend over 25 years with Bogner, moving up the ladder to National Sales Manager and Executive Vice President of Marketing before retiring in 2000 as its Chief Operating Officer. While working with Bogner, Schwamb in 1982 became the managing partner of the first franchised Callahan’s Hot Dogs location in New Jersey, a legendary staple of the Garden State for decades.
Besides his family, one of Schwamb’s greatest loves has been the FDU men’s basketball program. He began playing basketball at age 11 and went on to have a Hall of Fame career on championships teams at Cliffside High School which led to a basketball scholarship to FDU in 1958. He has remained an ardent and passionate supporter of the program since his graduation.
The eldest of two children, his family owned The Maple House, a legendary upscale North Jersey furniture store and he developed a love of music from his mother and of fishing from his father. His grandmother owned an ice cream parlor in Jersey City and his maternal grandfather was a diamond cutter in New York’s famous diamond district. He has traced his family roots back to 1538 in Germany.
He met his wife JoAnn (Cusanelli) in 1957 and the high school sweethearts have been married for over 60 years. Together they raised three children – Stephen, Wendy and Tracy.
Besides his volunteer work on behalf of FDU, where he was recognized in 2015 as its “Volunteer of the Year,” Schwamb has stayed busy in retirement giving back to his communities. He is a member of the Park Ridge, NJ Planning Board, currently serving as Chairman and spent five years as co-chairman of the Park Ridge Open Space committee. He spent 14 years as Vice President of Bears Nest Board of Directors and 20 years a co-chair of the landscape committee.
An avid tennis and golf player, he also enjoys boating and fishing and has been a long-time member of the Hackensack Golf Club and the Long Beach Island Yacht and Tennis Club.
Not surprisingly, given his long ties to international businesses, he loves to travel with family and friends. Besides seeing nearly all of Europe he has also visited Australia, New Zealand, Grenadines, St. Croix, Jamaica, Japan, Macao and the Dominican Republic as well as extensive travels across North America.
As the founder and Executive Director of the New Jersey Association of School Resource Officers, a non-profit 501c(3), Kissane was instrumental in developing, introducing, and passing the Safe Schools Resource Officer Training Law. A certified New Jersey Police Instructor, he has been teaching the Police Training Commission (PTC) SRO/Liaison Training Course for the New Jersey Association of School Resource Officers over the past 16 years. Since the inaugural class, he has instructed Law Enforcement/School Relations as part of the School Safety Specialist Certification for the New Jersey Department of Education Office of School Preparedness and Emergency Planning (OSPEP).
With over 30 years of experience in public safety, Patrick Kissane is recognized as an expert in school safety and schoolrelated policing.
The firm has developed a reputation as a specialist in tax planning, business advisory services, litigation support and forensic accounting. Tim is a nationally recognized expert and speaker on a variety of accounting, tax, audit and business topics. Many fortune 500 companies as well as many national associations regularly feature Tim as their keynote speaker. Among the more noteworthy positions that Tim holds, he is the National Director and Editor-inChief for the world’s largest accounting and tax training program, the Becker Gearty CPE professional program. Tim has frequently been called upon over the past twentyfive years to present accounting, tax, auditing and business topics to large groups, organizations, and corporations, accounting firms and in legal proceedings.
Tim is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. He is also a member of the New Jersey Society of Public Accountants and has been a trustee of the organization. Tim is also a member of the New Jersey and American Bar Associations. Tim holds a BS in Accounting from Fairleigh Dickinson University where he was inducted into their Hall of Fame, and both an MBA in Finance and a Law Degree (JD) from Seton Hall University.
Paying it forward and making it count
Tim Gearty’s family, friends, colleagues, and especially his students will attest to his dedication to mentorship and education. Introduced by his daughters, Kristi and Julie, here is Tim Gearty’s induction into The Pinnacle Society at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Follow your heart, but make sure you’re willing to work.
Your investment in an FDU education will never depreciate.
Inspired by her grandmother, who owned a restaurant in Liberia, Adenah is now the owner of 8 restaurants including 4 IHOP franchises in northern New Jersey. She opened her first IHOP in Irvington Township, New Jersey at the age of 27, making her one of the youngest franchisees in the country at that time. In late 2017, Adenah launched Cornbread, her first independent fast casual, farm-to-table, soul food restaurant, which she co-founded with fellow entrepreneur, Zadie B. Smith. They recently opened their second location in downtown Newark, and a third in Brooklyn, NY. Additionally, in keeping with Adenah’s mission of bringing high quality food and services to urban communities, in the summer of 2021 she launched her latest restaurant concept, Urban Vegan, in downtown Newark.
In addition to her restaurants, Adenah is a successful real estate developer with a portfolio of several major residential and mixed-use urban redevelopment projects across northern New Jersey, including the former Irvington General Hospital site, and several other urban locations. Most recently, she was awarded a 9% NJHMFA affordable housing credit for her 100% affordable, 40-unit property located in Newark’s Southward, making her the first black woman developer in the US to accomplish the feat.
Despite her numerous successes as a restaurateur, real estate developer, and philanthropist, Adenah’s proudest achievement is being a mother to her 2 children.
Two indelible geopolitical moments propelled Malaak Jamal, BA’13, toward wanting to make the world a better place.
The daughter of immigrant parents from Lebanon, Jamal had her first life-changing moment at 10 years old, on September 11, 2001. “Following the attacks, it was as if there was a conflict between being Middle Eastern and Muslim and being an American. Even though I was young, I knew from my own life experiences that I didn’t need to choose between the two — they’re interrelated and central to my identity.”
Then, during her senior year in high school, as she mulled possible majors and colleges, she also paid close attention to the 2008 presidential election in the United States. “I remember following the debates between then-candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, with a particular interest in how they would approach foreign policy.”
These events, and her growing investment in global affairs, sparked Jamal’s interest in political science, international relations and sociology, eventually leading to her job at the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) as its policy officer, and now director of policy and research.
HRF is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies. HRF unites people in the common cause of defending human rights and promoting liberal democracy. They defend, partner with, and give a platform to human rights activists who are boldly changing their communities and countries, connecting activists to industry leaders, and developing modern solutions to combat the worst human rights violations.
“HRF is a natural fit for me, given my personal and academic background,” she says. Her undergraduate and graduate education, Jamaal noted, “provided me with a solid foundation for the work that is done within the legal and policy team. At HRF, I found that I could take all of the knowledge that I possess and turn it into substantive and impactful work.”
As HRF’s policy officer, Jamal provided policy advice on where the organization should focus its advocacy, impact litigation and research efforts. And now as the director of policy and research Jamaal oversees HRF’s research and analyzes political regime developments in countries under authoritarian rule.
“My main focus is to manage HRF’s political regime project, which classifies all of the countries in the world by their regime type,” she says. Jamal monitors the political regime and human rights developments taking place in HRF’s countries of focus. “The project categorizes countries into three regime types — democratic, competitive authoritarian, and fully authoritarian. It identifies the countries where HRF should be targeting its work. According to HRF’s research, 94 countries in the world are ruled by authoritarian regimes, and 54 percent of the world’s population is living under authoritarianism.”
Jamal also oversaw the speaker-selection process for HRF’s annual conference, the Oslo Freedom Forum. Some of the work she is most proud of includes a policy memo and two op-eds she coauthored, which ran in TIME magazine and The Washington Post, covering the topics of human trafficking, Ethiopian leadership, and authoritarianism.
“Knowing that I was able to educate people on the topics of human trafficking and the current political and human rights developments in Ethiopia has been very rewarding.”
She is educating people on the most urgent human-rights issues the world faces through her writing and calls-to-action.
“When I was growing up, I always wanted to make the world a better and freer place by making a positive difference in people’s lives,” Jamal says. “And that is exactly what HRF is all about. It focuses on helping the people in the world who need it the most — people who lack basic fundamental rights — whether it be through its events, programs, research or litigation and advocacy efforts.”
You, too, can transform the life of an FDU student.
For Brian Temple, BS’00, MS’01, an infectious disease (ID) physician at the Aurora Medical Center in Oshkosh, Wis., every day is a quest — to find answers, to better understand diseases and to heal his patients.
This was especially true during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Temple found himself at the forefront of the fast-spreading medical mystery. Faced with a virus unlike any other, “we were all forced to deal with our mortality and our fear of the unknown,” he says. Temple trusted his training and infection-prevention protocols, but everything the experts knew, or thought they knew, kept changing.
At the height of this uncertainty — when there were more questions than answers — Temple’s days were long and exhausting, and he often felt unappreciated. “It was tough to see so many people die because we couldn’t do anything about it,” Temple says. “We also dealt with misinformation, patients who thought they knew medicine more than we did and others who believed COVID wasn’t real.” But “seeing someone you thought would die walk out of the hospital” made it all worthwhile.
Finding the correct diagnosis and appropriate treatment for patients gives Temple much fulfillment. Each virus brings with it unique characteristics that need to be understood. “We’re like detectives because we’re often consulted to figure out what’s going on” with a patient, he says. The process from initial consult to diagnosis is not always a straight line, and he has often taken circuitous routes to find the right answer to a patient’s problem.
Temple remembers treating a patient who had a high fever and headaches with increased liver enzymes. “Admitted with sepsis and given broad antibiotics, the patient continued to worsen,” he says. Temple talked with the patient, did a physical exam and evaluated his labs. “He was eventually diagnosed with anaplasmosis [a bacterial disease transmitted to humans by a blacklegged tick or deer tick],” he adds. “I started him on doxycycline [an antibiotic] and noticed a significant improvement.”
Temple doesn’t only treat complex or contagious diseases — a common misconception about ID physicians. “Cases can range from a urinary tract infection to a necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease) or spinal/vertebral osteomyelitis (bone infection), post-travel infection or fever of unknown origin (FUO).” And “because we don’t deal with just one organ,” collaboration with other specialists is crucial.
Temple is always up for the challenge. “I love my job because no day is the same,” he says. Timely and relevant knowledge is power, so he regularly checks the IDSA (Infectious Diseases Society of America), CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and WHO (World Health Organization) websites. “I get alerts each day from various journals and sites such as Medscape [which offer essential drug-and-disease information],” he added. He also meets with the Aurora Medical Center’s infection preventionist to ensure there are no outbreaks within their facility.
Preparation is half the battle. Temple believes it takes a certain kind of person to do the job well: one who is ready to work hard — oftentimes unnoticed — and is committed to a life of continuous learning. “ID medicine is tough, but it can be very rewarding,” he says.
As a young man, Dennis O’Brien’s dream was to play major league baseball. He went to tryout after tryout in the New York metropolitan area, hoping to catch the eye of a team scout. Finally, a scout suggested that he might have better luck attracting the attention of a major league team if he first played for a college program. The scout happened to know Harvey Woods, FDU’s first-ever director of intercollegiate athletics and head baseball coach. The scout gave Woods a call.
Based on the scout’s endorsement, O’Brien, BS’65, enrolled in FDU on an athletic scholarship. “I was the first in my family to go to college,” he says. “My parents couldn’t afford to send me.” During his freshman year, he quickly made a name for himself, tossing back-to-back no-hitters in the same week, an accomplishment remarkable enough to earn him a mention in Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd.”
But, by his senior year, O’Brien began to understand that his dream of being a professional ball player might not come true. Armed with his FDU degree in accounting, he went to work for Warner Lambert, the pharmaceutical and health care products giant, rising through the corporate accounting ranks and, ultimately retiring as vice president, finance, consumer health care – U.S.
“I had a very enjoyable career,” he says. “I travelled the world.”
In 2001 the O’Briens — Dennis and his wife Adele — endowed the Harvey Woods Scholarship fund because, O’Brien says, “when Adele and I look back and ask ourselves ‘How did we get here?’ the answer is simple. It was that baseball scholarship granted to me by Harvey Woods.”
The scholarship is awarded to students who will be playing Division 1 baseball and are “academically successful, have good character and financial need,” O’Brien says.
O’Brien’s commitment to the sport he loves and his alma mater has not waned. He is a co-founder of the baseball alumni organization, a regular at reunions and serves as a member of the FDU Division 1 Athletics Hall of Fame nominating committee.
Almost 60 years after he threw those back-to-back no-hitters, O’Brien says “I still have a passion for FDU baseball and all it stands for.”
Kelley Kramer, BA’05, the deputy managing editor at Fox News Media, says that she can trace many of her professional successes to her time at FDU. “What will come as absolutely no surprise to the alumni and friends of FDU, is that the seeds for so much of what I have been able to accomplish were sewn during my four years at the metropolitan campus.” Kramer says that at FDU, she discovered the thing that sparked her imagination. And that, as well as the connections that she made, both inside and outside of the classroom gave her a strong foundation on which she has built her career.
Kramer, who served as editor in chief of the student run newspaper, the Equinox, recalls that paper’s advisor, Jane Foderaro, who was fondly known as “Tinker,” was both a mentor and a role model. On Thursday nights, when the paper was being put to bed, and the student editors would often work until the wee hours, Foderaro, then in her 70s and having already had a career as a working journalist, was always there at 3:00 am, making sure that the student journalists always head themselves to the highest journalistic standards. “I learned a lot about journalism, professionalism and ethics from her,” Kramer says.
Kramer says that the scholarships that she received while at FDU were the leg up that she needed. Originally focused on a career in public relations, says that a “wonderful alchemy of guidance, skill, focus, ambition, connections and a little luck” helped her to set her sights on a career in broadcast journalism.
One of the internships that she had while a student – at Fox 29 in Philadelphia — led to her first job in journalism. She rolled the teleprompter for the station’s morning show.
After several promotions, she ended up on the assignment desk, but she says that, having held a variety of jobs at the station, she knew that what she really wanted to do was write and produce live TV news. Using some of the tenacity that she had honed at FDU, she began applying for producing jobs across the country. “That’s how this Jersey girl ended up in Green Bay, Wisconsin,” she says, “running the morning show at the local NBC station.” From there, she was rehired by Fox 29, this time as a producer. “I spent three years there before the big leagues came calling,” she says. “I started at Fox News as a writer on Fox and Friends and worked my way up to senior producer before moving to the digital side. “
Kramer knows that ambition and tenacity are not always enough. “No one makes their way alone,” she says. “A great university is defined by the way in which it identifies and nurtures the talents that each student brings and that’s what FDU did for me. We all have potential and I was fortunate to find a university and mentors who saw mine and challenged me to grow, learn and find my way in the world.”
Kramer, who makes an annual gift to The Fund for FDU, says that hers is only one of the many stories of FDU students who you have been assisted by the generous gifts from donors — “the students who have taken the encouragement, training, guidance, inspiration, instruction and preparation into the world and created the best versions of themselves.”
