The university names five Loggers to receive its most prestigious alumni awards.
Professional Achievement Award/Lifetime
Sarah Rudolph Cole ’86 is one of the country’s leading scholars on arbitration, mediation, and other forms of alternative dispute resolution. She holds the Michael E. Moritz Chair in Alternative Dispute Resolution at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.
Cole’s family moved to Tacoma from Nebraska when she was 9, when her law professor father became dean of Puget Sound’s then-law school. She began taking classes at the university during her senior year of high school and graduated with a B.A. in American history. Cole cites professors Terry Cooney, William Breitenbach, and Arpad Kadarkay as influential, calling them “dynamic, knowledgeable” teachers. At Puget Sound she also won five NCAA Division II swimming titles and was named Outstanding NCAA Division II Woman Swimmer in 1985.
Cole became interested in alternative processes while a law student at the University of Chicago. “I was fascinated that instead of using the judicial system, we have people opt out of it,” she says, pointing out that at least 98% of cases are now settled out of court.
A few years ago, Cole and a group of Ohio State colleagues developed a collection of resources to aid communities facing polarizing conflict. The result was the Divided Community Project, which she hopes will teach community leaders the mediation and facilitation skills to “help them engage better with people across differences in a civil manner."
Cole says the most gratifying part of her career is witnessing her students’ enthusiasm for learning about law. She has a particular fondness for helping her students plan careers that they love. “I get a special happiness when my students plan jobs they’re really excited about,” she says. “And if I’ve played any role in that, I’m ecstatic.”
Professional Achievement Award/Mid-Career
Laura Heywood ’01 has a special knack for harnessing her passions.
“The closest thing I can come up with for a consistent job description is ‘professional enthusiast,’” she says. “I’ve been a broadcaster, a spokesperson, an entrepreneur—a whole bunch of things in one—but they all seem to come back to the fact that my superpower is spreading joy through contagious enthusiasm.”
Heywood is known to her followers as @BroadwayGirlNYC on social media, where she shares her infectious love of theatre. She has interviewed leading Broadway stars like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kristen Chenoweth, and Idina Menzel; she also provides social media consulting services to theatre companies and other businesses.
Before becoming Broadway’s main hype woman, Heywood participated in the theatre arts program at Puget Sound, lived in the Spanish House, and took part in the Lavender Graduation ceremony for LGBTQ+ students. But it was her KUPS show that laid the foundation for her thriving career in media: Heywood hosted an early-morning slot devoted to the college a cappella craze, and the radio station soon became her second home.
Her broadcast experience resulted in Rockapella (the group best known for Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?) asking her to introduce them before a sold-out show at the Seattle Opera House. It also led to her first job out of college, working as a morning show producer for fellow alum Julie Jacobson Gates ’90.
The entrepreneurial verve that served her back then is still alive and well.
“I try to focus not just my content, but the way I think about the world, on the things that bring joy and light,” she says. “I think as a result, I have been able to bring more joy and light to some people’s lives, and that’s my proudest achievement.”
Service to Community Award
For Jean Baumgartel ’76, a sense of adventure, coupled with her passion for humanitarianism, has taken her all over the globe. In her career as an occupational therapist, she’s traveled to Chile, Vietnam, Peru, Honduras, Nepal, Bhutan, and Georgia, among countless other places.
“I think occupational therapy has given me a really unique way of getting to know people in another country,” she says.
When she started as a Puget Sound student, Baumgartel already knew she wanted to work in occupational therapy—she was inspired by her grandmother, who treated returning soldiers and worked in a mental hospital in the then-nascent field during World War I. But Puget Sound’s liberal arts approach allowed her to explore unexpected subjects, including a ceramics class led by artist F. Carlton Ball and a Winterim class on wilderness survival and cross-country skiing.
She met her husband, James Mitchell ’74, in a physiology lab. After graduation, the couple volunteered for the Peace Corps in Chile, where Jean provided therapy to children with neurological and learning disabilities.
She spent 30 years working for Group Health Cooperative/Kaiser Permanente, mentoring a number of Puget Sound OT students along the way. Though she retired in 2015, she still strives to improve wellness in resource-scarce countries by educating local health care workers there. She’s also a member of the steering committee for Health Volunteers Overseas and a founding board member of the Tacoma-based nonprofit LICHA African Heritage Relief Organization, which aims to better the lives of women and children in Kenya.
Baumgartel has advice for students looking for a fulfilling line of work: “If they want a career that combines traveling the world and meeting interesting people in other countries with providing health care,” she says, “getting a degree in physical or occupational therapy will lead them to the perfect profession.”
Service to Puget Sound Award
Joel Hefty ’86 has served his alma mater in a wide range of roles. He has been a class agent for 15 years, served on the Alumni Council Executive Committee, and has been an integral part of Logger Day Challenge since its inception in 2018. He also has chaired the alumni committee of the Puget Sound Fund and volunteered for the ASK (Alumni Sharing Knowledge) program. In 2016 he created the Joel T. Hefty Scholarship Fund for deserving students.
“I’m motivated by that feeling of connection to current and previous students and being part of something that's bigger than I am," he says.
Hefty calls his time at Puget Sound “transformative.” He praises his liberal arts education for developing his intellectual curiosity and communication skills. Those skills have served him well in his career as a consultant, trainer, and facilitator in the banking industry—a job that has taken him to 29 different countries.
During college, he was a member of the Adelphian Concert Choir. He points to Professor Emeritus Mike Veseth ’72 as a formative influence for his sense of humor and teaching ability.
“My time at Puget Sound was very much focused on broadening my perspective and understanding of the world,” Hefty says. “When I came in, I probably thought that I knew more than I did when I left, and that’s the sign of a good education, realizing how much you don’t know, and gaining both curiosity and the ability to learn.”
Hefty also has cultivated and maintained a number of friendships from the Puget Sound community. “The opportunity to meet different Puget Sound people at different stages in life has been a real joy,” he says. “People from the Class of ’67 all the way to grads from the Class of ’23—being able to engage with them has made for a much richer understanding of the university and a much better grasp of its continuing mission.”
Young Logger Service Award
Rachel Sugar ’16 credits Puget Sound’s liberal arts approach with shaping her current worldview and social justice values. “The more time I spent at Puget Sound, the more curious I felt about the world, about addressing social problems and approaching that holistically from all sorts of different perspectives,” she says.
Sugar wasn’t expecting to pursue psychology, Latin American studies, or religion, but soon took an interest in all three, eventually earning her degree in psychology. (She also forged some lifelong bonds: Last year, she married Reilly Rosbotham ’15, and six of her bridesmaids were Loggers.)
After graduating, Sugar spent nearly two years as a domestic violence legal advocate for clients at YWCA of Pierce County, then worked in a similar capacity at The Family Tree in Denver. She returned to Washington to study at Seattle University School of Law and interned at Disability Rights Washington, the ACLU of Washington, and Legal Voice before receiving her J.D. in 2022.
Sugar then worked as a staff attorney at Tacomaprobono Community Lawyers’ Housing Justice Project. Recently, she took a new position as an associate attorney at Cedar Law in Seattle, where she advocates for students with disabilities.
Sugar’s interest in equity and her psychology background have served her well as an attorney—she says that understanding the effects of trauma and oppression on mental health have helped her bring a person-first, trauma-informed perspective to her legal work. In keeping with this fiercely empathetic mindset, she emphasizes the importance of mutual exchange and human connection in fighting social ills.
“Taking the lead from community and approaching things with a broad toolbox is the best way to do that,” she says. “And I think that’s very much something I learned from my Puget Sound education.
Know a Logger who deserves to be honored?
Nominations for the 2025 awards are welcome. Just fill out the form at: pugetsound.edu/awardnomination.
