Alumni Honors Banquet recognizes nine outstanding alums
Esteemed alumni recognized for exceptional achievements, service to others and loyalty to UND
Nine UND alumni were recognized during the UND Alumni Association & Foundation’s annual Alumni Honors Banquet on Thursday, Sept. 26, at the Alerus Center.
Six of those nine received the Sioux Award for Distinguished Achievement & Leadership, the highest award given by the UNDAAF.
Since 1962, the award has been presented to community leaders, accomplished professionals and devoted alumni who have dedicated their lives to serving others.
The remaining three honorees received the Young Alumni Achievement award. Established in 2002, the award recognizes recent graduates of UND who have made an impact since their time as students.
Sioux Awards for Distinguished Achievement & Leadership were given to the following recipients:
Chuck Kummeth, ’83
Dr. Monica Mayer, ’95
Dave Miedema, ’76
Cathy (Wilson) Rydell, ’88
Mike Jacobs, ’70, HON ’14, & Suezette Bieri, ’69, ’70, ’89
Young Alumni Achievement Awards were given to the following recipients:
Dr. Tiffany (Stratton) Hamilton, ’06
Emily O’Brien, ’15
Erica (Wondrasek) Thunder, ’11, ’14
Chuck Kummeth
Hometown: Glen Ullin, N.D.
Area of Study: Electrical Engineering
Charles “Chuck” Kummeth, ’83, was working his summer job at a gas station in Glen Ullin, North Dakota, when a group of travelers pulled up in a convertible, looked around at his small town and surrounding fields, and asked Chuck, “Why do you live here?”
At the time, the high schooler didn’t have a good answer. Forty-one years later after a career in corporate leadership that took him far from rural North Dakota, he now has the perfect answer for the curious convertible crew.
Chuck’s electrical engineering degree from UND helped him land a job at 3M Corporation. Over the span of 24 years, he went from a lab coat to a suit coat, earning his MBA along the way. As vice president of the company’s medical division and an international division director, he expanded 3M’s products and services across the globe.
Chuck spent the last 11 years as CEO of S&P 500 company Bio-Techne Corporation, turning a shrinking company into a leader in the development, research, and manufacturing of life science tools and diagnostics. During his tenure, he oversaw 19 acquisitions, nearly quadrupled its employee count, and grew revenue from $311 million to $1.1 billion.
Chuck acknowledges creating a name in the industry took years of work, building a strong executive team, and overcoming hurdles. “Overhauling the company infrastructure to compete in a modern biology world was the ongoing challenge,” Chuck explained. “The company didn’t even have laptop computers when I started. I bought the first!”
While UND fueled his interest in digital electronics, it also prepared Chuck to become an effective industry leader, but not in the traditional sense.
“I was a ‘B/C’ student,” Chuck explained. “I loved the schooling but was not a ‘book’ person. The work taught me discipline and focus. The knowledge learned – and mostly not used in years – was more a mental readiness process for me to become a leader.”
The Alumni Honors is the second prestigious UND award Chuck has received, following his 2009 Engineering Alumni Academy honor. “I never dreamed I could get acknowledgment at this level… I was always the person who assembled the people who could then work together to crack the problem. I could never on my own.”
Chuck and his wife, Angela, give back financially to the College of Engineering & Mines, recently establishing an endowed professorship within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to support faculty recruitment and retention incentives.
If given the opportunity, Chuck’s response to the interstate excursionists of his youth would now go something like this: “I’ve always been proud of being from North Dakota. I put it in my speeches and bring it up as I meet people from around the world. I’ve racked up 4.4 million Delta travel miles in my career, but it’s hard to describe the feeling I get every time I cross the border coming back into the state other than ‘home.’”
Dr. Monica Mayer
Hometown: New Town, N.D.
Area of Study: Medicine
Dr. Monica Mayer, ’95, points to four “profound experiences” that have shaped her: being selected twice to the North Dakota Girls Basketball All-State team, after which New Town (N.D.) High School retired her jersey; graduating as an M.D. from the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences; being selected to represent all 574 Native American tribes in testimony to the United Nations; and now, receiving the Sioux Award for Distinguished Achievement & Leadership from her alma mater.
Monica earned a basketball scholarship to Williston State College. However, a career-ending knee injury after transferring to Northern Arizona University forced her to rethink her future. “It was an epiphany. Basketball taught me valuable lessons: discipline, sacrifice, commitment, working together as a team, but I couldn’t live off it,” she said. “Education was going to be the only guarantee in my life.”
She completed a degree in science education and briefly taught before feeling a pull toward medicine. She joined the Army, serving as a medic and medical supply specialist. This path provided her with the experience and financial aid needed for medical school.
After earning her medical degree, Dr. Mayer returned to the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. She became the chief medical officer for the Indian Health Service’s Great Plains Area, managing 19 medical facilities across four states.
Monica’s commitment to service led her to run for the Mandan Hidatsa and Arikara Nation Tribal Business Council in 2016, representing the North Segment of the reservation. She became the first female physician to serve on a tribal council in the United States. Since her term began, law enforcement has increased from two officers to nine tribal and three city officers, plus 15 drug enforcement agents; Main Street has been revitalized with a new laundromat and daycare center; and the $85 million North Segment Community Center is slated to open in December 2025, featuring an indoor pool, track, and elders’ meal site.
She has also poured herself into supporting the tribal youth, providing school supplies and regularly speaking in classrooms. From 2016-20, the New Town school had graduation rate increased from 52% to 90%.
Throughout her career, she has confronted public health crises, including diabetes, heart disease, and COVID-19. However, she says the real crisis in her community is addiction. She helped open The Door Resource & Recovery Lodge but acknowledges that the real work lies in prevention. “We can address the alcohol and drug addictions, but we have to spend our time and money on prevention – every activity we do has an anti-drug campaign behind it.”
Monica’s advocacy extended to the global stage when she testified before the United Nations on violence against Indigenous women, which drew significant international attention.
Throughout her journey, Dr. Monica Mayer has been a steadfast advocate for the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. As she gears up to run for a third term on the tribal council, her message of the importance of education and health remains, along with a lesson passed on by her mother: “Serve the Lord first, your family second, and your community third.”
Dave Miedema
Hometown: Marion, N.D.
Area of Study: Management and Marketing
“There’s no one thing I can point to,” said Miedema when asked about his legacy at UND. “I just happened to be the fortunate person serving as a conduit, helping people achieve what they wanted to do for the benefit of UND.”
Other than a two-year stint in the Trust Department at Bremer Bank, Miedema worked at the UND Alumni Association & Foundation from 1985 to 2018. He held several roles with the organization, including time as the Executive Vice President and CEO.
After earning UND degrees in management and marketing in 1976, Miedema says he gained valuable sales experience working at Team Electronics in Grand Forks for respected local businessman Don Fisk.
“At some level, we are all involved in sales, whether of a product, a service or ourselves.” At Team, Miedema says he learned the value of being a good listener, knowing your product, and to never prejudge people – all lessons he would use as a fundraiser for UND.
That job came to him one Saturday morning in 1985 when he was summoned to meet Earl Strinden at his UND Foundation office on campus. Earl was the Executive Vice President and CEO of the Alumni Association & Foundation. While Dave knew two of Earl’s brothers, he had only met Earl once, when he went to UND for a school visit while a high school senior more than a decade earlier.
Miedema, selling small business and educational computer systems for Team Electronics at the time, thought perhaps Earl was interested in a new computer system for the alumni office, but instead, Strinden asked him to join the organization.
“To this day, I’m not sure how he made the connection or why he was interested in me,” said Miedema, “but I ultimately accepted his offer to join the Foundation, and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.”
Dave spent most of his years with the organization as a development officer, a person who works with potential donors to best structure their gift to UND. He describes the job by using a quote featured on the Wall of Honor in the old J. Lloyd Stone Alumni Center, honoring those who had “reached back in appreciation and expressed their faith in the future of the University of North Dakota.”
“My primary responsibility was to help people express their faith in the future of UND. Many of the donors I worked with were oftentimes making the single largest gift commitment of their lives, and I felt a tremendous responsibility to ensure the process was meaningful to them and that they would experience the true joy of giving.”
Miedema says he is proud that in the three jobs he held throughout his career, he was recognized with each organization’s highest honor: the national Sales Master Award from Team Electronics, the Eagle Award from Bremer Bank, and now, the Sioux Award for Distinguished Achievement & Leadership from UND.
“This recognition is an especially humbling experience. When I review the names of past Award recipients and realize my name will now become part of that list, I’m tremendously appreciative, but above all, very honored. How could one possibly top the experience of receiving recognition like this from the university you love? It simply doesn’t get any better than that.”
Cathy Rydell
Hometown: Grand Forks, N.D.
Area of Study: Political Science
Every time Cathy (Wilson) Rydell, ’88, stepped into a new role, she felt like an imposter. “I’ve never had a job where I believed I was qualified in my entire career,” she said, “but I grew into my positions because I loved the work and always wanted to learn more.”
Cathy’s career peaked with a 21-year tenure as CEO of the American Academy of Neurology, the world’s largest association of neurologists and neuroscience professionals, which concluded in 2020. Cathy’s journey to the top, however, was unconventional. “It was a very crooked path,” she said, reflecting on her start at UND in 1968. She loved her classes, sorority, and boyfriend, future husband Chuck Rydell, ’71.
She and Chuck married before she graduated and had their first child. Chuck joined the military, and Cathy focused on raising Kim (Rydell) Zellers, ’98, and soon Jen and Mike. Years later, as the couple considered the challenge of financing college for three children, Cathy began to look for work. Known for her community leadership, Cathy was encouraged to run for office and was elected to the North Dakota House of Representatives, where she chaired the Human Services and Education Committee. “I had to become the expert in health care and K-12 education,” she said.
One of her proudest achievements was sponsoring the North Dakota Clean Indoor Air Act. “No legislator wanted to touch it,” she recalled. “I was a Republican told by mentors, ‘Don’t do this. It’s anti-business.’”
Cathy didn’t care. Her mom died of lung cancer, and she knew the detrimental effects of secondhand smoke. The bill passed. After that Cathy, who won her first election by 76 votes, was re-elected by the largest number of votes of any legislator in the state.
During her legislative years, Cathy started thinking about that unearned college degree. “I ran into (then UND President) Tom Clifford at the capitol and said, ‘Tom, I never graduated. I want to get my degree from UND.’”
Tom agreed to help Cathy, who didn’t want to leave Bismarck. In 1986, people weren’t using computers. “Sending a fax was as techy as anybody got,” Cathy said.
Nevertheless, Cathy enrolled as a UND student. She worked with UND students and professors to get notes and took exams at Bismarck State College (BSC). To graduate, she worked with Lieutenant Governor and UND Professor Lloyd Omdahl on an independent study.
A connection with a fellow student in a BSC class and her legislative reputation led to a position as the Director for Women and Children’s Services at St. Alexius Hospital. “I was totally unqualified, but I loved the job!”
Her performance in each role led to greater responsibilities. She became Director of Surgical Services at St. Alexius, Executive Director of the North Dakota American Medical Association, and finally CEO of the Academy of American Neurology.
“It was there that I realized my real skill was in identifying and growing talent in others. That made me believe that I’m not an imposter,” she said, recognizing the value in her natural ability to foster success in others. “I thought everybody could do it, but not everybody takes the pride in and enjoys seeing others succeed.
Fun Facts About Cathy
Cathy’s granddaughter, Reagan, is a sophomore at UND. Her grandson, Will, will be here in year (fall 2025) to play hockey. “He went to his first hockey game in a onesie,” she said.
Mike Jacobs and Suezette Bieri
Hometown: Stanley, N.D.
Areas of Study: Suezette: Sociology, Counseling, & Space Studies; Mike: Philosophy & Religious Studies
From preschool classmates to distinguished alumni, Mike Jacobs, ’70, and Suezette Bieri, ’69, ’71, ’89, have shared an extraordinary journey together. Their story begins in Stanley, N.D., where they met as children and graduated high school in 1965. Their class of 64 students was the largest until the oil boom years. The couple married in 1971, a union that has spanned over five decades of shared experiences and accomplishments.
When they arrived at UND, both felt like they were stepping into a new and exciting chapter of their lives. “There was a sense of moving on,” Mike recalls. The grandeur of Merrifield Hall and The Chester Fritz Library left a lasting impression on these small-town kids. Their time at UND was filled with memorable experiences and significant connections.
Suezette quickly became involved in student government, a role that took her to a Black Panther rally in Oakland, marking her early engagement with social issues and leadership. Meanwhile, Mike joined the staff of the Dakota Student, eventually rising to the position of editor. Their involvement in these activities introduced them to a network of people who would become lifelong friends and mentors. One of their fondest memories includes a trip to Winnipeg with classmates in theatre studies. “From our time at UND, the thing that is most valuable is the people we have met and had long relationships with,” Mike said.
In the 1970s, the couple lived in several North Dakota towns, including Dickinson, Jamestown, Mandan, and Grand Forks, before settling on 60 acres west of Gilby, N.D. Mike began his career with the Grand Forks Herald in 1981, where he served in various roles, ultimately becoming editor and publisher. His tenure at the Herald was marked by significant contributions, including his involvement when the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service following the 1997 Red River Flood. The flood destroyed the Herald’s building, yet the paper didn’t miss a single issue, demonstrating the resilience and dedication of its staff.
Suezette’s professional journey was equally impressive. She worked at Job Service ND, J.C. Penney in Dickinson, the South Central Social Services Office in Jamestown, and as director of the Student Union at Bismarck State College. After returning to Grand Forks, she worked at the University of Minnesota Crookston.
In the mid-’90s, a keen “interest in the future” brought Suezette back to UND, where she became one of the first students to earn a master’s degree in space studies. She would become deputy director of the North Dakota Space Grant Consortium, a position that allowed her to introduce students across North Dakota to the wonders of space. She had the privilege of meeting several astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin, Karen Nyberg, and Sally Ride, whom she admired greatly.
Mike and Suezette exemplify the spirit of UND alumni. Their lifelong commitment to each other, their professions and their community make them deserving recipients of the Sioux Award for Distinguished Achievement & Leadership. “We’re very proud to be honored with it,” Suezette said.
Dr. Tiffany (Stratton) Hamilton
Hometown: Andover, MN
Area of Study: Biology/Pre-Health
Why UND?
(My dad and I) were in Moorhead and I told my dad, “UND is like an hour north; we should just stop by.” It happened to be Homecoming weekend. That was busy, but also a good time to and see everything. From there, I just fell in love with it. It was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to go to the kind of campus that you could walk everywhere.
I joined the Air Force because …
We have strong military roots in my family. My grandfather always encouraged me that the military needed doctors and for the longest time, I told him, “That’s not what I want to do in the military.” But when it came down to it, medical school costs a lot.
Before becoming a Pediatric Cardiologist at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital …
In residency, I volunteered in Mongolia. We went around the countryside and for four days we screened children’s hearts. The second week, we were in the city, where they would do some surgeries and other procedures.
After I graduated residency, I was stationed in Misawa, in Northern Japan where a lot of families were stationed. The closest hospital was 45 minutes away and the next military hospital was at least Hawaii, so we just did our best to start a new standard of care there to avoid shipping families off site.
Emily O’Brien
Hometown: Lakeville, Minnesota
Major: Entrepreneurship
On winning office at the age of 23:
The district chair reached out to me to ask if I would run. I got on a call with Cynthia Schrieber-Beck, who represents a district in Wahpeton. She encouraged me to do it and offered to take me under her wing and teach me the ropes if I won.
So, I end up winning and I’m hiding in the bathroom of the Hilton Garden Inn freaking out a bit when Bruce Gjovig calls and says, “Representative O’Brien.” And I thought, ‘What did I just sign up for?’
Those first two years I took the mentality that you have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them proportionally. I believe you can do anything if you put your mind to it and listen and learn.
Favorite experience at UND:
I struggled my first semester getting involved in meeting people. I had an advisor who suggested I check out sorority recruitment. I joined Gamma Phi. It was a blast. I loved it and wouldn’t change that experience for the world.
On becoming a mom:
During my second session, I was pregnant with my first child [O’Brien now has two girls while her boyfriend has three children]. After having a kid, the bills you pass hit differently. You realize that you are impacting future generations.
Both my kids spent a lot of time with me in Bismarck and were exposed early to the process. It’s rewarding to be an example for them and to set the standard that you can be whatever it is you want to be.
Erica Thunder
Hometown: Bottineau, N.D.
Area of study: Political Science
What makes you proudest?
My most proud accomplishment has been the ability to bring an Indigenous voice to the table in all my positions. In many cases, that hadn’t happened before. I am constantly asking, ‘How do I improve my communities and leave things better than I found them?’
On Winning Woman of the Year:
I thought the email telling me I was the USA Today Woman of the Year for North Dakota was spam. “I was talking to my mom on the phone at the time and I said, ‘Does this sound real?’”
On the Women in her Life:
Through my journey, I’ve been able to shine a light on the women in my life (mom, grandmother, aunts) and speaking about the incredible things they did at a very difficult time with all sorts of odds stacked against them.
On UND:
My dad passed away when I was in high school, and my time at UND felt like a healing time. I was in a safe place, surrounded by supportive people.
On the academic side, I took my first Indian law class, Indian Gaming taught by Dr. Steven Light, which started my career trajectory. My grandma, an Arikara and member of the MHA Nation, suggested I consider Indian law.
Growing up, my family attended many performances at the Chester Fritz Auditorium, and I went to UND basketball and volleyball camps. My brother (Evan Wondrasek, ’10) played in the UND Wind Ensemble. Even though I wasn’t going into music, Dr. Popejoy offered me a music scholarship for the Wind Ensemble.
