West Haven, Conn., March 30, 2007 - The University of New Haven (UNH) Alumni Association will host its 24th Annual Scholarship Ball on Saturday, April 14, at the Omni New Haven Hotel. Proceeds from the event go toward scholarships for students of need. Over the years alumni and friends of UNH have raised more than $1.5 million for scholarships, helping many students pursue their educational dreams. The 2007 Scholarship Ball will celebrate the creation of eight new endowed scholarships. Highlights of the ball which raised more than $300,000 last year for worthy students include a silent and live auction. Serving as mistress of ceremonies and live auctioneer will be nationally known comedian Jane Condon, dubbed by the Associated Press as "an upper-crust Roseanne." The ball also serves as a way for UNH to honor distinguished alumni at this event. This year's honorees are:
Ralph F. Dellacamera, Jr. BS'75, Marketing, Managing Member & Chief Investment Officer, DellaCamera Capital Management, NY, NY
Ralph DellaCamera, Jr., was always quick on his feet, a fireball of a football player who had big athletic hopes. He planned to attend Southern Connecticut State University for a degree in physical education, but a football accident at 16 and a subsequent detached retina sidelined his dream. Faced with working in construction or struggling to pay his way through college, DellaCamera made a difficult decision. Though not a scholar, he had a way with numbers and was able to quickly calculate equations in his head. His new dream was a career on Wall Street. He met John Benevento, then the University of New Haven's director of admissions, who blanched at DellaCamera's grades but decided to help. Benevento sent DellaCamera to night school, where he worked feverishly to get into UNH. He also worked as a longshoreman to pay his tuition, took summer classes, and read the "Wall Street Journal" everyday. He graduated from UNH in 1975 with a bachelor's degree in marketing. DellaCamera worked for Advest, Paine Webber, Bache, the Guggenheim family and more. He married his wife Frances, had two children, Christina, now 26, and Nicolas, now 23, and eventually went to work as a senior convertible arbitrage trader for Elliott Associates, in New York. He opened his own firm, DellaCamera Capital Management, in 2006.
Dr. Richard J. Deslauriers BS '90, Mechanical Engineering, President and CEO, Doctors Research Group, Inc., Oxford, Conn.
Dr. Richard J. Deslauriers once preferred skiing to schoolwork, often skipping class to hit the slopes. An epiphany at the age of 16 led him to take his studies more seriously, enabling him enter the UNH mechanical engineering program where he thrived on the professor-student interaction. He graduated from UNH in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering. Prior to medical school he was a project engineer with Johnson & Johnson Medical Inc., where he also worked throughout HIS first two years of medical school. During his final two years of medical school, he was employed by Medtronic Interventional Vascular. Immediately following graduation from the University of Toronto Medical School in 1997, Deslauriers opened Doctors Research Group, Inc. which has successfully launched 25 innovative medical devices through strategic alliances with some of the world's largest medical device companies such as Becton Dickinson and the Stryker Corporation. Among his first inventions are an advanced stethoscope, a bone anchor that allows surgeons to reattach soft tissue and a stethoscope cover designed to reduce the transmission of viruses. He is currently developing his most significant innovation to date: a calcified triglyceride bone cement, which will literally glue two pieces of bone back together. Working with some of the world's most prominent surgeons, he still manages to carve out time to spend with his wife, Kristen, and sons Jack, 5, and Eric, 2.
Jeffery P. Hazell BS '83, Hotel & Restaurant Management, Owner and President, Jeffery's Restaurant & Piano Bar, Boston Lobster Feast, and Bar Harbor Lobster Co., Inc., Orlando, Florida
Fish have been a recurring theme in Jeffery Hazell's life since the days he cast his line for flounder on his grandfather's boat in Marblehead, Mass. Later, he spent hours culling lobsters from traps and banding their claws for his father's lobster-fishing business. At UNH he found a college that offered both a hotel and restaurant-management program and an opportunity to play football. He found both at the University, along with an internship program in which he worked at Disney World in Flordia. Following graduation in 1983, he held several restaurant and hotel management positions before moving to Florida. Several years later, while lobstering with his father in of Massachusetts, he had a revelation as he watched workers packing the shellfish into insulated boxes to be shipped for sale-why not do the same in Florida? Hazell went from building lobster tanks in his garage to house his lobsters to selling them restaurant door to restaurant door. He began selling scallops, mussels, haddock, cod, flounder and more, hired more employees, and grew to become a full-line seafood distributor. Eventually he opened his own restaurant, Boston Lobster Feast, in four locations in FLA? His most recent venture, Jeffery's Restaurant and Piano Bar, opened in Orlando in January of this year. Hazell resides with his wife, Telia, and son Warner, 13, in Orlando, Florida.
For more information visit the Scholarship Ball Web site: www.newhaven.edu/alumni/scholarshipball2007
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