Thirty Years of Distinguished Alumni Awards

The 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award honorees are Jane Zalutsky '76, Ramsey McPhillips '76, Sarah (Long) McGlenn '06, and Avi Gupta '19. 

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Catlin Gabel's Distinguished Alumni Awards, a tradition that began in 1996 and has since given the school community a chance to reflect on the question: what does a Catlin Gabel education make possible over a lifetime?

This year's four honorees reflect the range of what a Catlin Gabel education can lead to. 

Jane Zalutsky '76 spent two decades helping run Seattle's Bumbershoot festival, welcoming roughly 250,000 people a year and bringing acts like the Bolshoi Ballet, R.E.M., and David Byrne to the city. She later led experiential marketing at Washington Mutual, founded her own consulting practice, and has spent the last decade leading the Seattle Center Foundation. "I just kind of followed my passions wherever they led," she says. Read Jane’s full story. She receives the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award. 

Ramsey McPhillips '76 is an environmental leader, regenerative agriculture advocate, and community organizer whose work spans waste reduction, soil health, food security, and biodiversity. As founder of Zero Waste McMinnville, he rallied citizens, businesses, and government agencies around ambitious waste-reduction goals — and prevented a Fortune 500 waste company from expanding in the process. His work now spans regenerative agriculture and pollinator habitat restoration, alongside running his family's 165-year-old Oregon farm. He receives the Distinguished Alumni Community Engagement Award.

Sarah (Long) McGlenn '06 has had a number of unique jobs since graduating, including whitewater guiding, farming in New Zealand, firefighting, and years as a Certified Nurse-Midwife on the Texas-Mexico border and in rural Washington. Today, she and her husband run Human Nature Hunting, a conscious hunting and foraging school, and its companion nonprofit, Nature & Community. Accepting this year's honor, she says, meant grappling with a bigger question: what counts as "achievement" when your daily work is raising a family. She receives the Distinguished Younger Alumni Award.

Avi Gupta '19 traces his drive toward public service back to his grandmother. "My Nani always encouraged me to work toward improving the lives of others," he told Stanford upon being named a 2022 Truman Scholar. That impulse led him to co-found LifeMech, developing a low-cost, open-source ventilator during the Covid-19 pandemic, and later to the White House, where he helped draft a landmark executive order on AI policy. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and is a judicial law clerk at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Following his judicial clerkships, Avi hopes to continue to pursue a career at the intersection of technology, law, and policy. He receives the Distinguished Alumni Emerging Leader Award.

Read more about each honoree's path on the Distinguished Alumni Awards page.