Graduate Award Recipients
2024: Drew Wayland
Drew Wayland, a native of Raleigh, North Carolina, earned a BA in media and journalism with a minor in creative writing from UNC Chapel Hill. As a Morehead Cain scholar, he pursued his passion for discovering and reporting true stories through diverse international experiences. These included roles as a media literacy instructor in Hong Kong, a human rights reporter in South Africa, and a mountain sports journalist in British Columbia, Canada.
At UNC, Drew immersed himself in campus storytelling. He served as editor-in-chief of content for Vintage Blue, a Lodge-founded and student-run fashion company, and as editor for Chapel Hill’s arts and culture magazine, Coulture. His contributions to the UNC School of Journalism’s Media Hub led to winning the 2020 National Hearst Award in Explanatory Reporting for his story on artificial coral-reef regeneration in Belize. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Drew developed a passion for documentary filmmaking, working as a freelance filmmaker in Chapel Hill.
Drew pledged at the Lodge in fall 2017, quickly embracing its history and traditions. He served as assistant Lodge manager and later Lodge manager, living in both Crabdance and Exotica. His passion for researching and sharing the fraternity’s lore extended beyond his active membership and continues to this day.
After graduating in 2021, Drew worked as a development writer for Story Syndicate, a documentary film production house. There, he pitched new films to major streaming services and advised on story mechanics. Concurrently, he worked as an audiovisual technician at the Durham Convention Center and directed a feature documentary, Nowadays, about a Hawaiian farming family’s struggle to preserve their traditional lifestyle.
Drew credits his time at the Lodge as foundational to his interest in exploring diverse global stories. The Lodge, he says, is fundamentally a place of stories, a place to tell them, hear them, and preserve them in ways that bring the fraternity together. Inspired by his fraternity experience and international work, he began a dual Masters of Sciences in global media and communications at the London School of Economics and the University of Cape Town in 2023. This pursuit aims to enhance his storytelling capabilities and his ability to represent subjects more authentically and responsibly.
2024: Nolan Gingrich
Nolan Gingrich, from New Bern, North Carolina, graduated from UNC in 2023, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in biology with a minor in chemistry. Nolan was a member of the pre-optometry club and served as president of the club lacrosse team for two years. While in school, he worked at a local optometry clinic as an administrative intern before joining the staff full-time as a technician.
Nolan pledged at the Lodge in spring 2020 and filled the role of social chair, Delta Advocate, and #5 shortly after. He lived in the Lodge for four semesters, beginning during the COVID pandemic. He lived in the Mojito Lounge his sophomore year and First in Flight during his junior year. Nolan spent his senior year in a nine-bedroom house with other members of the fraternity.
Nolan has been working at Carrboro Family Vision as an optometric technician for the last year while applying to optometry school. His role is to prepare patients for their routine and medical eye exams by performing pretest scans, gathering information regarding their medical history, and coordinating referrals to various specialists.
In September, Nolan will be moving to Boston, Massachusetts, to attend the New England College of Optometry. This is a four-year doctorate program with an optional one-year residency offered to those wanting to specialize in cornea and contact lens, ocular disease, pediatrics, primary care, or vision rehabilitation.
2023: Walter Winslow
Originally from Hurdle Mills, North Carolina, Walt returned to North Carolina after attending high school in Indianapolis, Indiana, to get his undergraduate degree at UNC. At UNC, he earned a BS in public health, focused on health policy and management, as well as two minors in business administration and computer science. Around the UNC community, Walt held leadership positions across multiple professional, academic, and community-related extracurricular activities. The first of his key leadership positions was serving as copresident for the Jon Curtis Student Enrichment Fund, where he led fundraising efforts to support student extracurricular enrichment activities for academic or professional purposes. He also served as fundraising chair for the UNC chapter of Timmy Global Health, where he helped fund public-health missions around the globe, staffed by UNC students and faculty. Walt was also a key member of other professional clubs in the business and public health schools and served on local consulting projects.
Walt pledged at the Lodge in fall 2014 and quickly became an active member of our fraternity leadership. His most significant role was serving as assistant treasurer (#4.5) and then treasurer (#4) in his junior and senior years. Prior to that, he served as a rush chair for three semesters, a social chair for two semesters, a pledge trainer for one semester, and a #5 for one semester. He also lived in the Lodge for six semesters in both the Sleeping Porch (2 years) and the Boardroom (1 year). He regards the friends he made at the Lodge across those four years as many of his closest friends to this day.
After leaving the Lodge and UNC, Walt worked at McKinsey and Company across healthcare projects as a business analyst and fellow in McKinsey's Center for US Health System Reform, before leaving to join an early-stage healthcare technology startup: Stellar Health. Stellar Health focuses on supporting primary care providers to best care for their patients under value-based payment arrangements. At Stellar, Walt was promoted twice within his first year at the company and helped with two successful venture capital fundraising initiatives.
Walt states that his experiences at the Lodge and UNC helped him refine his interest in an MBA program by exposing him to the highest caliber of student entrepreneurs and building his professional network, ultimately driving him to take his GMAT while an active brother in the Lodge and to apply to and be accepted at Stanford several years later. Within his MBA program, he is focusing on entrepreneurship in healthcare and has coordinated his coursework, extracurricular activities, and internships around this emphasis. His ultimate goal is to start his own healthcare technology services business, and he regards the Stanford MBA as the best path to pursue this aspiration.
2022: Duncan Richey
When selected for the BRBH award, Duncan Richey was entering the master’s degree program in city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was serving in an internship with the New York City Department of Transportation on its research, implementation, and safety unit. As this internship indicates, he has a strong interest in transportation planning and safety, within his more general interests in knowledge and policy transfer, the psychological impacts of urban design, and the relations among transit, cities, and society. While an undergraduate at UNC, he learned from a brother in Alpha Sigma about the Burch Field Research Seminar. Through this program, he studied urban planning and policy in The Hague and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, with support from an Alpha Sigma Summer Enrichment Scholarship Program.
In addition to an impressive GPA in his environmental-studies major, Duncan led many impactful student organizations while at UNC. Duncan started Greek Sustainability Consulting (GSC), a group working with fraternities and sororities on waste reduction and mitigating harmful environmental impacts. He obtained funding from the IFC to support projects enhancing energy and water usage efficiency in Greek organizations. Following up on an idea from GSC, Duncan and three other members of GSC started Carolina Thrift. This is UNC’s first student-run thrift and resale shop. The group collects donated items from students and the community at the end of each semester (items that were being thrown away before Carolina Thrift) and sells them at discounted prices at the beginning of each school year. By the time Duncan graduated, Carolina Thrift had hosted two sales and earned $15,000 in profits. Carolina Thrift leaders were invited to speak at the 2019 Sustainable Brands conference in Detroit. Carolina Thrift donates all profits to environmentally focused student organizations and initiatives at UNC.
Duncan also served as codirector of UNC’s oldest student organization, Carolina Kickoff, a three-day student-operated camp that introduces first-year students to UNC. As a codirector, he met 100% of the financial aid need for the first time in program history. This allowed a greater diversity of students to attend.
After graduating, Duncan will consider entering consulting roles in his new home of New York City. In the longer term, he will also consider entering a doctoral program to pursue his interests in transportation, urban design, improving the quality of urban life, and related topics.
2021: Clark Williamson
The Foundation is pleased to announce that the inaugural recipient of the Brothers Remembered, Brothers Honored Award is Clark Williamson. Clark is entering his third year at the UNC School of Medicine and will likely take a year between his third and fourth years to either explore several research interests more intimately or complete his Masters in Public Health.
A native of Statesville, North Carolina, Clark graduated from UNC in 2018 with a Bachelor of Science in public health. As an undergraduate, Clark served as a clinic advisor for the Student Health Action Coalition, was a member of the men’s club tennis team and volunteered with various organizations, including No Kid Hungry NC and A Helping Hand. Upon graduating, he spent a year developing and implementing a nutrition program with Sacred Valley Health, combatting childhood malnutrition and anemia in the high-altitude Andean communities outside Cusco, Peru.
Clark’s commitment to healthcare access and community involvement has remained strong since his return to Chapel Hill for medical school. He serves as community service chair for the Latino Medical Student Association and helps run a free cardiology clinic for uninsured/underinsured patients. Under the mentorship of fellow Sigma Kurt Gilliland (Σ ’92), he is involved in medical-education research, analyzing bias in test making. Last summer, he worked with an organization to provide COVID testing to patients in rural North Carolina, and he now helps vaccinate people at mass clinics outside of his normal clinic schedule. Finally, he is the medical student liaison to Beyond Clinic Walls, which connects UNC medical, pharmacy, nursing, social-work, and public-health students to provide holistic care to patients with limited access to healthcare.