Aisling Maki

Dr. Mehdi Sadeghi was just a boy in 1979, when the Pahlavi Dynasty was overthrown in his native Iran, and in 1980, neighboring Iraq invaded, sparking a seven-year war that would leave an estimated half a million soldiers and an equal number of…

EMPHASIS: Insurance In 1973, Cindi Gresham was a biology major at the University of Memphis – then called Memphis State University – when she was offered a part-time job, and later a full-time job, at a now-defunct Memphis insurance agency. (Memphis…

Sarah Opara-Nadi made the leap to self-employment in 2011, founding Dust to Dawn, which provides professional services to residential and commercial clients in Fayette and Shelby Counties and North Mississippi. Sarah Opara-Nadi honed a diverse skill…

Memphis native Laura Terry, development officer at The MED Foundation, has dedicated her career to bettering the community by working in the Bluff City’s nonprofit sector – something she attributes to her parents’ influence. Terry was born in Memphis…

Memphis has turned out be a perfect fit for Plough Foundation program associate Katie Midgley, whose research interests landed her in the city back in 2008. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Mississippi State University, she…

Mitch Moskovitz, founding partner at Shea Moskovitz & McGhee PLC, who has been practicing family law in Memphis for 20 years, said he “always knew he was going to go to law school.” After graduating from Ridgeway High School, he left his native…

Katy Spurlock, director of education and dissemination at The Urban Child Institute, has had a varied career in which every step along the way seems to have led her right to where she’s meant to be. “I’m just passionate about what children – young…

David L. McKee, longtime chief operating officer at ALSAC, the fundraising arm of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, died in a car accident in the Memphis area Friday, Aug. 17. He was 66. In a long and storied ALSAC career that spanned 35 years,…

While working toward his undergraduate degree at St. John’s University in Minnesota years ago, Peter Gathje – now professor of Christian ethics and associate dean at Memphis Theological Seminary – felt called to practice the lifestyle of the monks at…

Sister Barbara Spencer has been changing children’s lives for decades. As a founding staff member of Memphis-based Youth Villages, she’s been instrumental in its growth from a small nonprofit into a national organization that provides a wide array of…