New committee members

New members of the executive committee are Cynthia B. Aten, M.D. ’81; Sharon L. Bonney, M.D. ’76; Joseph F.J. Curi, M.D. ’64; David H. Lippman, M.D. ’71; and Harold R. Mancusi-Ungaro Jr., M.D. ’73, HS ’76.

Aten is a pediatrician who served as chief of undergraduate medicine at Yale for seven years. She is now studying how to augment the treatment of adolescent eating disorders using Reiki, an ancient system of healing touch. As a medical student, Aten appreciated the school’s flexibility, which allowed her to extend her clerkships over two years to see more of her two young children. She lives with her husband, Raymond Aten, in Hamden, Conn.

After studying engineering at Duke, Bonney used the Yale System to get the liberal arts education she’d missed. “I like to say I minored in English in medical school. ... I adore the Yale System and I adore Yale.” Currently at Pfizer in New London, she is running trials of a cardiac drug. Bonney lives in Old Lyme, Conn., with her husband, James Beattie, and has three stepsons.

For 32 years, Curi has taken care of children and teenagers in the small city of Torrington, Conn., practicing solo. He likes preadolescents, “because you can still communicate with them.” He and his wife, Susannah Curi, have four children (two of them Yale College grads). Curi says that “because of the Yale System, I was really able to become a human being,” with time for sports and volunteer work. He’s served the AYAM off and on for 20 years. “Working for Yale is not a chore, believe me,” says Curi.

Lippman has practiced psychiatry for two decades in Great Barrington, Mass. He worked as a doctor in Africa for two years in the mid-70s, and six years ago he and his wife, Honey Sharp Lippman, took their three children around the world (See Books). Lippman valued the noncompetitive atmosphere at Yale. “You were all in it together.”

Mancusi-Ungaro had planned to join his father as a pediatrician in New Jersey until his first clinical rotation, when he observed a surgeon repair a child’s fusion defect of the head. “What I saw was instant gratification,” recalls Mancusi-Ungaro. He was sold on surgery from that moment. Now he does plastic and reconstructive surgery in Beaumont, Texas. A “Texan by choice” (with pickup truck), he does come East to visit his two children at Yale College. “Yale is never out of your bloodstream,” he says.

New representatives to the Association of Yale Alumni are Arthur Ebbert Jr., M.D., and Betty R. Klein, M.D. ’86, HS ’91. Ebbert studied medicine at the University of Virginia and came to Yale in 1953 as an instructor. He served as deputy dean of the medical school beginning in 1973. The AYAM made Ebbert an honorary alumnus when he retired in 1988. He sold his sailboat, Goose, last year, but still sails with friends. Klein is an ophthalmologist in Danbury, Conn., specializing in the retina. She and her husband, Eric Yale Brown, have two children.