Filmmaker Ken Burns joins William Jewell to honor alumni for life achievements at 62nd Annual Achievement Day Celebration William Jewell College honors distinguished alumni who have made significant contributions in their respective fields at its annual Achievement Day celebration March 2. Special guest speaker for the Achievement Day dinner is the Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and historian Ken Burns. Burns will offer the Achievement Day address at a 7 p.m. dinner March 2 at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City.

"During this special 62nd Celebration of Achievement, William Jewell College will reflect upon the achievements of our Jewell alumni," says Dr. Chad Jolly, vice president of advancement at William Jewell. "It is truly a celebration of the liberal arts tradition that the college has embodied for more than 150 years."

Honorees for the Citation for Achievement are Stephen R. Hemphill '78, former U.S. Senior Consul-Justice, Department of State, U.S. Embassy, Baghdad; David M. Israelite '90, President and CEO, National Music Publishers' Association; Donald M. Marolf '87, Professor of Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara; and David D. Powell '80, Vice President, Latin America, Occidental Petroleum.

Honorees will be saluted at a pre-dinner reception beginning at 6 p.m. March 2 at the Hyatt Regency. Holders of patron-level tickets can attend a special reception with Mr. Burns.

Buck O'Neil, Board Chairman of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, will serve as Honorary Chair for the event. Achievement Day Co-Chairs are Patty and Charles Garney and Shirley '56 and Fred '56 Pryor.

General tickets for the dinner are $100 per person; patron-level tickets are $150 per person, with various sponsorship opportunities available. Call 816-415-7550 for information and reservations. Proceeds benefit the Jewell Fund at William Jewell College.

Achievement Day honorees will share their perspectives on leadership with students and interested community members at a 10:15 a.m. convocation March 3 in John Gano Memorial Chapel on the college campus in Liberty, Mo. The public is invited to attend at no charge.

Ken Burns' film career debuted with his Oscar-nominated history on the Brooklyn Bridge, one of America's most beloved monuments. It was the beginning of a remarkable career in documentary filmmaking dedicated to exploring one deceptively simple question: Who are we as Americans? Burns explores fundamental questions about the soul of the nation and helps us understand how our historical and cultural roots shape who we are as Americans. He gives history an immediacy that more conventional approaches lack.

Burns has since produced a string of landmark television series for Public Broadcasting: "The Civil War," "Baseball," "Thomas Jefferson," "Lewis and Clark: Journey of the Corps of Discovery" and "JAZZ," a 10-part series examining this most American of art forms. His films are the highest-rated series in the history of American Public Television and have received nearly every major film and television award imaginable: the Emmy Award, Grammy Award, Peabody and the duPont-Columbia Award, just to name a few. When commenting on his films, critics use terms like "epic filmmaking" and "heroic television."

The 2006 Achievement Day honorees:

Stephen R. Hemphill recently completed an 18-month White House appointment as Senior Consultant, Justice in the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office for the U.S. State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. In this capacity, he was senior policy advisor to the Embassy on rule of law, judicial and penal matters. He currently serves as an international business consultant with an emphasis on the Iraq-Jordan-Palestine corridor. From 1999 to 2002, he served as the elected Prosecuting Attorney in Barry County, Mo. He served as Assistant Prosecuting Attorney from 1995 to 1997. He has served as a consultant to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Task Force and as an adjunct professor of business law at William Jewell College. He received his juris doctorate from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law and his B.A. from William Jewell. Hemphill is co-owner of B&B Movie Company,

L.L.C., which operates a 12-screen cinema complex in Liberty, Mo., and a 5-screen complex in Monett, Mo. He served as Mayor Pro Tem and City Council member in Liberty from 1991 to 1995 and has served his alma mater as a member of the National Alumni Association Board of Governors and the President's Advisory Council.

David M. Israelite is President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Music Publishers' Association, the premiere trade association representing American music publishers and their songwriter partners. The NMPA's mandate is to protect and advance the interests of music publishers and songwriters in matters relating to the domestic and global protection of music copyrights. From 2001 through early 2005, Israelite served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to the Attorney General of the United States. In this capacity he helped manage the U.S. Department of Justice's 112,000 employees and $22 billion annual budget. Prior to joining the Department of Justice, he served as the Director of Political and Governmental Affairs for the Republican National Committee. From 1997 through

1998, Israelite served as Missouri Senator Kit Bond's Administrative Assistant, and also served as Campaign Manager for Senator Bond's successful 1998 re-election campaign. He also practiced law at the Bryan Cave firm in Kansas City from 1994 to 1997. He earned his juris doctorate from the University of Missouri and received a B.A. from William Jewell in 1990.

Donald M. Marolf is a Professor of Physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He studies the thermodynamics of black holes, issues associated with gravity and entropy, and gravitational aspects of string theory and supergravity. In this context, he is most interested in the classical and quantum physics of branes, especially in connection with the AdS/CFT conjecture and black hole physics. His recent studies indicate that observers can disagree on the amount of entropy that an object carries into a black hole when it falls through the horizon. In particular, observers falling in with the object find the object to carry more entropy than do observers who remain outside the black hole. Marolf's past work has addressed canonical approaches to quantum gravity, finite dimensional models, and certain

algebraic approaches to quantum gravity which may be applicable to many theories of quantum gravity, independent of their underlying structure. Some of the most interesting results derived from this approach address the instanton approximation to quantum gravity. Marolf has also investigated spacetime singularities, the loop representation for quantum gravity, lower dimensional gravity and issues related to diffeomorphism invariance. Dr. Marolf is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship from 1999 to 2001. He received the National Science Foundation Career Award (1997 to 2201) and was the recipient of an NSF Graduate Fellowship from 1988 to 1991.

David D. Powell currently serves as Vice President, Latin America, for Occidental Petroleum. In this capacity, he oversees Occidental assets in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador, assets which represent approximately 25% of the company's total oil and gas production worldwide. He began his career with Occidental as an audit supervisor in the company's Tulsa and Houston offices in 1981, and has held a series of progressively responsible positions in financial management at company offices in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Malaysia, Quatar and New York. Prior to assuming his current responsibilities in 2005, Powell served for three years as Director of Investor Relations for Occidental International Corporation in New York. A native of Salina, Kan., he received his B.S. in accounting from William Jewell College and has completed advanced management study at the Harvard Business School.