Baylor Young Alumni Honored

Four Baylor alumni—groundbreaking scientist Dr. Sarah Brosnan, sociologist and Pulitzer-Prize-nominated author Dr. Michael Lindsay, entrepreneur Rick Tullis, and tuba playing professor Dr. Kenyon Wilson—will be presented with the 2009 Herbert H. Reynolds Outstanding Young Alumni Award at Homecoming. The presentation by the Baylor Alumni Association will take place during intermission at the 6:30 p.m. performance of Pigskin Revue, held on Friday, October 23, in Waco Hall on Baylor’s campus.

Brosnan, a 1998 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Baylor, established her scientific reputation even before earning her PhD from Emory University in 2004. In September 2003, she was the lead author of a groundbreaking study of capuchin monkeys that had implications for the motivations underlying cooperation among primates. Brosnan is currently an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she researches the evolution of complex social behavior.

She has received two major research grants from the National Science Foundation and published more than thirty book chapters or articles in journals, including Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her work has been featured on such media outlets as NPR, BBC, and MSNBC and in the Economist, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. 

Lindsay, a 1994 Phi Beta Kappa Baylor graduate, is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Rice University. He is the author of the Pulitzer-nominated book Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, which was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 2007. Lindsay earned his doctorate at Princeton, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and the Harold W. Dodds Fellow.

Prior to that he served as a survey researcher at the George Gallup International Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He also holds graduate degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary and Oxford. His research focuses on leadership and culture, and his work has been published in the leading scholarly journals of three academic fields—sociology, religion, and American studies. He was honored in 2006 as the most promising sociologist under thirty-five in the world by the World Congress of Sociology.

Tullis, a 1993 Baylor graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering, started his career at McGregor’s Trane Company as a product engineer. He quickly advanced to become the controls product manager for North America. After a stint as a manager at a Waco HVAC company, Tullis decided in 2005 to launch Capstone Mechanical with a couple of fellow Baylor graduates. Tullis serves as president of the company, which has become one of the fastest-growing companies of its type in the U.S. and serves a wide area in Central and East Texas.

The company has more than one hundred employees and provides engineering, contracting, and service in the areas of air conditioning, heating, plumbing, energy conservation, and sheet-metal fabrication. Capstone is a corporate partner with Baylor’s School of Engineering and Computer Science.

Wilson, a 1992 Baylor graduate, is a performer, teacher, and composer of and for the tuba. An assistant professor of music at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, he teaches music theory, pedagogy, and applied brass. He has also taught at several other universities and was a lecturing Fulbright Scholar at the Baku Music Academy in Azerbaijan.

He is principal tubist with the Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra in Alabama and the Augusta and Carroll symphony orchestras in Georgia. He has performed solo recitals around the world and in thirty-six states. His musical compositions have been recorded on six albums, and he has conducted his own works at Carnegie Hall and in Japan.

His brass fanfare, Kerfuffle, was the subject of an article in the arts section of the Wall Street Journal in 2008. This year, he will premiere several new compositions.