Rutgers Business School celebrates leadership, success and community

In a dinner ceremony marked by expressions of gratitude and pride, Rutgers Business School recently honored the accomplishments and contributions of a group of alumni and supporters.

The fourth annual ceremony was held at the Rutgers Club as the sun set on the horizon of the Livingston Campus. The Rutgers Glee Club set the tone early as guests cheered and sang along to the traditional Rutgers University fight song.

Lei Lei, the dean of Rutgers Business School, credited the career success of the alumni gathered at the dinner for contributing to some of the latest rankings, including one by LinkedIn that makes the Rutgers MBA Program No. 10 among public business schools.

The alumni honored at the awards ceremony were Brian Smith and Craig Washington (Industry Leadership), Jeffrey Hermann and Gary Horowitz (Alumni Service); Rob Falzon received the Lifetime Achievement Award. The honorees also included Rutgers University alumni, Toacca Rutherford (Business Excellence) and Alex Picou (Distinguished Leadership); and Amy Towers, chair of the Rutgers University Board of Governors, received a Business Excellence Award.

Rutgers Business School presented Deloitte with the 2025 corporate partnership award for its long-standing support and engagement. The award was accepted by Jeffrey Mraz, a Rutgers Business School alumnus who attended the dinner with a group of his colleagues from the company. 

Jason Geary, provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, praised Dean Lei as a “great champion” and described the dinner “as a celebration that reflects the excellence of Rutgers Business School.”

“We’re also celebrating how the achievement of alumni and partners forms a virtuous circle of opportunities now and in the future,” Geary said.

The alumni honorees all spoke with a mixture of pride, nostalgia and gratitude for their educations, the careers and lives it allowed them to have, and their desire to pay it forward, whether in the form of mentoring first-generation students, funding programs or serving on the dean’s advisory board. In her remarks after accepting the award, Rutherford described the recognition as “humbling” after the “phenomenal ride” of her career and life after college. 

Jeffrey Hermann, an alumnus of the Executive MBA Program, spoke fondly of his days as an Executive MBA student and he described how Rutgers leadership worked with him to create the Road to Supply Chain Leadership Program, one of the newest of Rutgers Business School’s Road to Success programs. “It’s a rewarding opportunity to make a difference,” Hermann said of the program.

Towers, who attended college in Wisconsin before her banking career on Wall Street, looked around the room after receiving her award and told the group, “You’re the reason someone like me believes in this place.”

Towers chaired the board of directors for the Rutgers University Foundation before joining the university’s board of governors. She currently chairs the board of governors. Like other honorees, she spoke of the importance of lifting others, of creating “more opportunities for the people who come up behind us.”

“The opportunity for leadership success only exists,” she said, “in a community that makes excellence possible.”

-Susan Todd