Alumni Awards

The Blake School honors distinguished alumni through our alumni awards program. Alumni from Northrop Collegiate School, Blake School and The Blake School are recognized in the following categories:

Outstanding Alumni Award

The Outstanding Alumni Award honors alumni who have demonstrated outstanding leadership, achievement and influence in their field and/or in their community activities. If you would like to nominate yourself or a fellow alum, please fill out the nomination form here.

Young Alumni Award

The Young Alumni Award honors graduates of Blake from the last 25 years who have made significant contributions to civic or professional organizations, who are driven by a bold sense of curiosity and openness to differences and who constantly strive to be an engaged, courageous and intelligent world citizens. If you would like to nominate yourself or a fellow alum, please fill out the nomination form here.

Jenny Stephens Hagen Spirit Award

The Jenny Stephens Hagen Award honors alumni who have shown commitment to The Blake School community in the following ways: have devoted extraordinary time and energy to the school; have served as stalwart enthusiasts for the school; and have promoted, attended and supported with vigor the involvement of alumni in The Blake School community events. If you would like to nominate yourself or a fellow alum, please fill out the nomination form here.

Athletic Hall of Fame

The Athletic Hall of Fame highlights the accomplishments of alumni, coaches and friends and celebrates the school’s sports history. In addition to this year’s inductees, the Hall of Fame honors members of Blake’s Hockey Hall of Fame and past recipients of the Alumni Athlete of the Year award, which includes 40 alumni spanning multiple sports and 30 years. To nominate alumni, coaches or Bears supporters for the Athletic Hall of Fame, complete this form. Nominations are welcome year-round, but consideration for the following year closes on Jan. 31. The ceremony and reception are held the weekend of Homecoming & Reunion.

2024 Recipients and Biographies

Megan Murray '76: Outstanding Alumna 2024

Megan Murray ʼ76 is a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a named professor at Harvard Medical School. As the Ronda Stryker and William Johnston Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM), she directs the school’s research collaborative.

Megan’s work focuses on infectious disease epidemiology with special emphasis on tuberculosis (TB), COVID-19, Ebola and other emerging infectious diseases. She is considered one of the world’s leading experts on TB, conducting studies that have changed how we treat the disease by challenging the long-held assumption that drug-resistant TB is less transmissible and by investigating risk factors such as micronutrient deficiencies and diabetes. During the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, Megan helped evaluate the efficiency of a new rapid test to diagnose the virus.

In her evaluation of global health interventions and programs, including COVID-19 response, Megan focuses on research equity and capacity building to promote the health of vulnerable populations. She has conducted field studies in South Africa, Russia, the United States, India, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Niger and Rwanda. She conducts much of her research in Peru in collaboration with Partners in Health/Socios en Salud.

Megan is an editor for PLOS Medicine and for the European Journal of Epidemiology. She has served on numerous committees including the World Health Organization’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Tuberculosis (TB-STAG), the Stop TB MDR Working Group, Harvard University Human Subjects Committee, the Institute of Medicine Committee on Gulf War and Infectious Diseases and multiple National Institutes of Health study sections.

Megan received Harvard T.H. Chan School’s 2023 Alumni Award of Merit. In her award recognition, Harvard said Megan “has dedicated her four-decade career to improving people’s lives through groundbreaking—and actionable—research.”

While at Blake, Megan graduated cum laude and received the Dayton Scholastic Attainment Award and the Smith College Award in French. She earned her undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 1980, her Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School and her Sc.D. in epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 1990.

Megan will be honored on Sept. 27, 2024 at Breakfast at Blake during which she will be the featured speaker.

Cassidy Blackwell ʼ02: Young Alumna Award Recipient 2024

Cassidy Blackwell ʼ02 is the director of global community programs at Airbnb, where she has worked since March 2018 and also served as director of strategic projects, director of global editorial and director of international communications.

Cassidy’s work in communications and marketing has spanned the industries of consumer packaged goods, retail and philanthropy with specialized experience in empowering women, people of color and other underserved communities around the world. Under her tenure, Airbnb launched a 2022 partnership with the Congressional Black Caucus Institute (CBCI) to provide housing support for CBCI’s first-ever government relations fellowship program. Cassidy sat on their advisory council and briefed Congress on how to diversify the travel industry and make the economic benefits more accessible to more people.

From 2014-18, Cassidy was director of brand engagement at Walker & Company Brands, which produces Bevel, a shaving system geared toward people of color. Cassidy’s work was most visible on Bevel Code, Walker & Co.'s grooming-and-fashion website, which functions like a lifestyle magazine. Her team of writers, photographers and videographers created unique stories. Cassidy wrote profiles of the personal barbers of Barack Obama, Kanye West and Jay Z. She was the architect behind a poignant video that introduced the Bevel Trimmer, which featured rapper and Walker & Co. investor Nas and was viewed 1 million times in less than a month. In addition to her communications work, Cassidy also helped with the company’s product development, which resulted in an exclusive retail partnership with Target and the hair care line she led the development on launched at Sephora.

Cassidy founded and managed Natural Selection from 2009-15. The blog became a leading online entity in the natural hair space, reaching over 50,000 people a month globally. In this role she produced all original written and video content, created an editorial calendar, secured sponsorships, developed partnerships and collaborations with brands, produced events and managed all social media. Cassidy has also worked as the global editor of TextureMedia, Inc. and as the social media manager for Stitch Fix.

Cassidy appeared on Fast Company’s 2016 Most Creative People in Business list and Brand Innovator's 2017 40 under 40 list. She was a finalist for the Sage Group's Marketers Who Matter list in 2017. She was a 2008-09 fellow at the Rosenberg Foundation and a John B. Ervin Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis.

At Blake, Cassidy played JV and varsity hockey, earning the Most Improved Player award. She lettered in JV tennis and varsity lacrosse. Cassidy spoke at Breakfast at Blake in 2021 and was featured in the winter 2017 issue of Cyrus. Cassidy currently lives on a blueberry farm in Sonoma County.