Carnegie Mellon University

Alumni News

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Thanks to those of you who sent an alumni news update to us after seeing the new digital CFA Magazine. Although we know that many of you send your news directly to the academic program from which you graduated, we would love for you to fill out our alumni contact form so we can help to let your classmates know what you’ve been doing.

Here are a couple that came through last time!


Freaksburg cover image.

John Casey (BFA, Design/Journalism ’85), published a new novel titled, “Freaksburg.” Much of it is set in Pittsburgh, he said.


Sankalp Bhatnagar

Sankalp Bhatnagar (BSA, Mathematical Sciences/Design ‘13; MA, Design ’15) has focused his career on studying how designers operate in different contexts. His work has involved working across disciplinary boundaries, including at a design research laboratory, an R&D unit at a humanitarian organization, and an AI think tank across multiple academic institutions.

Bhatnagar joined the Harvard Library Innovation Lab as a research fellow during the past academic year to carry out a new and collaborative project in partnership with NuLawLab, where he is a senior researcher and, previously, a research resident. The partnership supporting his research is the first of its kind between the two law school innovation labs. “I saw a common task between the work I proposed to do and its alignment with the expertise of each lab,” he said, “preserving legal knowledge and advancing legal design.”

Sankalp gained his first exposure to the practice of legal design in a seminar on law, justice, and design at Harvard Law School, after which he taught and led efforts to advance the field and its directions at Northeastern University School of Law. He is now designing a workbook of exercises for law students tasked with crafting and choosing between legal alternatives that he calls a casebook for legal imagination.

“I aim to build an example of a new kind of teaching method, with the hope that it will be directly useful throughout the world of legal education,” he said, “as well as more generally useful for thinking about law as its own form of design, so that we look around and see lawyers and judges designing our lives by making arguments, not apps, crafting scenarios, not services, and justifying decisions, not products.”


Find out what alumni are doing across the School of Architecture, School of Art, School of Design, School of Drama, School of Music and BXA Intercollege Degree Programs.

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