Homecoming to Honor Niva Tro

Westmont will honor chemistry professor Nivaldo Tro ’85 as Alumnus of the Year during Homecoming 2015 Oct. 2-4. Tro, who has taught at Westmont since 1990, was born and raised in Culver City, Calif., after his parents emigrated from Havana, Cuba, in 1959. The Westmont alumnus earned a doctorate in chemistry from Stanford for researching optical techniques to study the adsorption and desorption of molecules in an ultra-high vacuum. He conducted postdoctoral research on ultrafast reaction dynamics in solution at the University of California, Berkeley.

Since coming to Westmont, Tro has authored more than 20 journal articles and been awarded grants from the American Chemical Society, the Petroleum Research Fund, Research Corporation and the National Science Foundation to study the dynamics of various processes occurring in thin adlayer films adsorbed on dielectric surfaces.

He has been honored as Westmont’s Outstanding Teacher of the Year three times and Outstanding Researcher of the Year. Tro is best known for his chemistry textbooks that are used at more than 600 colleges and universities worldwide and translated into five different languages. A third of all college students taking chemistry today use a textbook authored by Tro.

Alumni Sean ‘95 and Paige (Baird ’00) Whiting will be given the Global Service Award. Sean and Paige, who did not meet at Westmont, found each other while living abroad and married in 2009.  Soon after, they began working with children at Covenant Children’s Homes (CCH), pursuing a calling they felt in India.

Sean and Paige, who both have backgrounds in education and religious studies, work with at-risk children in rural, developing areas of India's southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh. They direct the CCH orphan care ministry, which brings local orphaned children under the care of a local village pastor. The orphans, who are raised by the pastors’ families and church community members, are sent to the best available schools in their area. The Whitings have lived in India for five years, but return to the U.S. each year to share this unique model of global orphan care.

Ryan Wolfshorndl ’05, a CFA, CFP and partner of Anodos Advisors in Santa Barbara, is the Young Alumnus of the Year. Wolfshorndl, who grew up on an almond farm in Chowchilla, Calif., earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and business while leading Westmont Student Ministries and traveling to Asia. During those years, he formed lifelong friendships, a love of learning and a faith foundation encouraged by the faculty and campus pastor’s office.

Since graduating, he has lived in Santa Barbara and worked with fellow alumni at Anodos, a fiduciary consultancy firm that analyzes investment managers for trustees and individuals.

For more information about Homecoming, including a schedule of events, please visit http://www.westmont.edu/alumni/homecoming/