“That’s Robbie,” says Al Fereshetian.

Fereshetian, head coach of men’s cross country and track and field at �ֲ���ý, was talking about Rob Gomez ’05 and the acclaim his former runner has earned for creating a defining moment at a prestigious Maine road race on Aug. 5.

With the finish line of the 10-kilometer TD Bank Beach to Beacon race in sight, Gomez slowed up to help a stricken fellow runner, Jesse Orach, get up and finish the race. Grimacing as he steadied Orach’s nearly dead weight, Gomez kept Orach, who was suffering from heat stroke, upright as he lurched the last few yards.

Although the pair were running in 22nd and 23rd place overall at the time, the stakes were still sky-high: Whoever finished ahead of the other would win the coveted men’s Maine-resident division of the race. And as they came to finish, Gomez stopped short and let Orach literally fall into first place. Then Gomez walked over the finish line, second.

Rob Gomez ’05 speaks to the Maine media after the Beach to Beacon on Aug. 5, 2017. (Photograph by Ann Kaplan)

The win was Orach’s second straight in the Maine division. For Gomez, who lives in Windham, the runner-up Maine finish was his best in 10 tries.

For helping the fallen runner, Gomez is being widely praised as a standup guy, and his deed — call it smart sportsmanship — has sizzled through social media and the news media.

The has been shared 643 times, prompting 5,895 likes/loves/wows and attracting 229 comments. An Associated Press story has run in all 50 U.S. states and been seen by millions of readers.

Context matters, and this wasn’t your typical community road race filled with baby strollers and dogs. Founded by Olympic-gold marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson, the Beach to Beacon attracts 6,800-plus runners each year, including Olympians and world champions who headline the 35-runner professional field.

“Rob respects and honors his sport,” Fereshetian says. “He knows exactly who he’s racing against.”

And Gomez and Orach, both native Mainers, weren’t chugging along in 4,001st and 4002nd place, either.

Orach, a 2017 graduate of the University of Maine, was one of New England’s best college runners, and Gomez has been a top Maine road racer in recent years. He won the 2013 Maine Marathon and has two top-40 finishes at the Boston Marathon.

“Rob was running very, very well,” says Fereshetian. “His time, 31:31, is very fast.”

Coming around a final bend before the home stretch, Gomez only had a second or two to see that it was Orach on the ground and even less time to decide to pull him up. Still, his decision was an informed one.

Stopping just short of the finish line, Gomez releases Orach. (Photograph by Ann Kaplan)

The pair nears the finish line, Gomez grimacing as he guides Orach. (Photograph by Ann Kaplan)

Rob Gomez '05 (right) helps a faltering Jesse Orach as they near the finish line of the Beach to Beacon on Aug. 5. (Photograph by Ann Kaplan)

Orach tumbles over the finish line to capture first place in the Maine-resident division of the race. (Photograph by Ann Kaplan)

“Rob respects and honors his sport,” Fereshetian says. “He knows exactly who he’s racing against. He and Jesse had just met the day before, but Rob knows exactly who Jesse is, and he know Jesse’s not just some guy he’s running next to.”

Like many great competitors, Gomez is a student of his sport. “Going into the race, you understand the runner’s body of work. You understand what he’s done,” Gomez says. “Jesse had a very good spring track year at UMaine. He was the favorite, and I was maybe his best competition.”

The race played out that way. “The first mile, I stuck with him,” Gomez says. “Then he pulled away. As a runner, I’ve done enough of these to know that it wasn’t going to be my day.”

Gomez looks at it this way. “Jesse’s performance needed to get the respect that it deserved.” Had Gomez passed Orach by, the result would “have been a hollow victory. I would have lamented the fact that I had won; it would have left a bad taste had I won in that manner.”

Since Saturday, Gomez has played out other scenarios in his mind. Of course, he’d have “no problem beating the pants off him in normal fashion.” And if the two had been neck and neck, “if I had fought to be that close, and if it was my race to win, I would have won it” and let Orach fall by the wayside.

“But within 100 yards from the finish [helping him] was the only thing to do. Because I believed, and still believe, that he had won the race.”

“Rob deserves a medal for what he did, but knowing Rob, he’d never wear it.”

Gomez has downplayed what he did, telling WCSH-TV that “I’m just a normal representative of what the Maine running community is all about,” and telling the Portland Press Herald that “maybe they don’t carry someone, but everyone wants others to succeed.”

Though he professes normalcy, Gomez does run to the beat of a different drummer, and he’s well-known for his distinctively generous, intense, and modest demeanor. As Samuelson told me, “Rob deserves a medal for what he did, but knowing Rob, he’d never wear it.”

“He’s very intense and focused about everything, and he was also one of the biggest supporters and cheerleaders for everyone on our team,” says Mike Downing ’05, a fellow runner at �ֲ���ý who now owns on Maine’s Upper Shin Pond.

And while generous acts like Gomez’s occur on occasion in road races, “it’s not going to happen in most running races,” Fereshetian says. When it does happen, “it’s usually the result of the people and personalities involved,” Fereshetian suggests.

Rob Gomez ’05 runs for �ֲ���ý as a sophomore in 2002. (Daryn Slover for �ֲ���ý College)

In that sense, “Rob was a tremendous teammate who cared deeply about the guys on our team,” Fereshetian says. “And I’m sure his teammates would say there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for them.”

Downing agrees. “Rob is a great person and friend, and what he did has to do with the person he is.” In other words, the choice to help Orach is not a one-size-fits-all decision. “While it’s hard to say what I would have done, I would have probably decided to win the race and let the medical staff handle the situation,” says Downing. Alluding to the fact that runners can be DQ’d for helping or being helped, Downing believes that approach would be “the fair thing to do for everyone involved in the race.”

To be sure, Gomez’s deed probably reflects a mixture of Gomez’s personality and the culture of long-distance running, which is marked as much by camaraderie as by solo effort.

Beginning in high school and continuing to college, runners, especially cross country runners, “gain a strong sense of team,” Fereshetian says. After college, “in open road races, the only way to get that fellowship and that camaraderie is to recognize that in some form or another, that competitor next to you is your teammate, too. And I think that Rob carries that with him.”

A native of Waldoboro, Gomez majored in chemistry at �ֲ���ý and was inducted into the Sigma Xi scientific research society as a senior. Today, he’s senior manufacturing engineer at General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems in Saco. Interestingly, Orach is also an engineer, at the Verso paper mill in Jay, Maine.

For his part, Orach, whose post-race body core temperature was reported to be 107.3 degrees, accepted his victory with grace. “I’m speechless with what he did,” he told the Press Herald, especially because the duo “was kind of vying for that No. 1 Mainer spot, and for him to give that up for me is pretty remarkable.” A bit more than bragging rights was at stake. Orach gets $1,000 for the win, and Gomez $500 for second. (Orach has said he wants Beach to Beacon to combine and split the first and second prize money evenly between the two.)

Joan Samuelson, a Bowdoin grad, parent of a 2010 �ֲ���ý alumna, and recipient of a �ֲ���ý honorary degree in 2015, addressed the intersection of winning and sportsmanship. Gomez’ gesture both epitomizes and transcends the sport, she says. “It showcases the very best of the human spirit.”

To be sure, “winning a race is a feather in one’s cap,” she says. “But carrying one to victory deserves a medal of honor that only a few people earn during their lifetime. Rob’s contributions to our sport should have been heralded long ago. His mentoring of young and aspiring athletes has been steadfast, unyielding, passionate, and inspiring.”

In addition to his day job at General Dynamics, Gomez has a running business,, which provides online coaching and training plans for runners. He’s served as vice president and president of the board for Dirigo Racing Club, a premier road-racing club.

“At �ֲ���ý, Rob loved running with a passion. And it’s great to see him being so engaged in the running community,” Fereshetian says.

“If there is nothing else that I have learned from this campus,” �ֲ���ý senior Alex Bolden told a gymnasium full of people gathered to see him and his classmates graduate, “it is that there are no bounds to the change a community can effect when it is grounded in love.”

In the Senior Address that Bolden, a double major in philosophy and rhetoric from Cleveland, offered at �ֲ���ý’ 149th Commencement, he explored the kind of love that bonds a class with a college and the classmates with each other, and how that love should now be directed outwardly.

“It is out of love that we have become allies to those who are struggling,” he said, “and it is out of love that we stand for those who cannot stand for themselves.”

But Bolden’s speech was charged with love of a more immediate kind, too. He said, “I want to give special recognition to my fiancée,” classmate Jamilia Davis of Oak Park, Ill. “Thanks for saying ‘yes’ last night.”

That was one of several peak moments in a May 31 ceremony also highlighted by a Commencement address by honorary degree recipient and award-winning mathematician Manjul Bhargava.

In his talk, Princeton professor and Fields Medal recipient Bhargava celebrated the liberal arts education through an exploration of his own fascination with the unities among music, poetry, and math.

Receiving honorary degrees in addition to Bhargava were two internationally acclaimed Mainers, furniture designer Thomas Moser and Olympic runner and environmentalist Joan Benoit Samuelson; and Mark Abelson, a ophthalmological researcher responsible for numerous eye remedies.

The college conferred bachelor’s of arts and of science degrees on 484 �ֲ���ý graduates.

Held in Merrill Gymnasium because of rain, the ceremony began with a welcome from President Clayton Spencer. Perhaps inspired by Bhargava, a specialist in the properties of whole numbers, Spencer quantified some of the accomplishments of the graduating class — which contains, for example, 14 Fulbright Fellows, 93 double majors and one triple major, 37 honors thesis students, and 69 NESCAC All-Academic athletes.

That last figure, by the way, gave the president a chance for a shout-out to the women’s rowing team, whose win in the NCAA Division III championship yesterday in Gold River, Calif., gave �ֲ���ý its first-ever NCAA team championship.

In another memorable development, Professor of Sociology Sawyer Sylvester, appointed to the faculty in 1969, carried the college mace for the last time.

As senior member of the faculty, Sylvester had the honor of bearing the mace at the head of the academic procession. But he is retiring this year, so while he carried the ceremonial mace into Commencement, he didn’t leave with it.

As he led the academic procession from the stage during the recessional, Sylvester handed over the mace to his successor, Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics Michael Murray.

“The surprising unity of all fields of human endeavor.”

Bhargava began his address in a light vein. “When you all exited your last class here at �ֲ���ý and were getting ready for graduation, you probably weren’t thinking, ‘I wish I could have had one more math class!’ ” he said. “In case you were thinking this, your dream has just come true.”

But not really. Bhargava devoted most of his time at the podium to an examination of, in his words, “the relationships that exist between mathematics and art, between sciences and the humanities — and more generally the surprising unity of all fields of human endeavor — and what this all means in terms of the value of a liberal arts education.”

Bhargava is known as a theorist who perceives math’s complexities in the context of a greater whole in which, for him, music and ancient Sanskrit poetry also figure prominently.

He told the �ֲ���ý audience a bit about the numerical relationships that determine which frequencies of sound are pleasing to the ear, and therefore musical.

He pointed out that several central concepts in mathematics, such as Fibonacci numbers, “were first discovered . . . in the context of poetry.” In fact, the structure of the Sanskrit poetry that Bhargava studied with his grandfather “naturally led early poets and linguists to consider various mathematical and scientific questions that one might not immediately expect from a poet.”

In fact, hundreds of years ago math was taught through poetry, Bhargava said, offering an example of a poem from 1150 that uses jasmine, a fragrant lotus blossom and the buzz felt between a male and a female bee to teach square roots and fractions.

In one of several generous references to his fellow honorands, Bhargava cited ophthalmologist Abelson to exemplify how concepts from outside one’s own discipline can catalyze important breakthroughs — disciplines, in Abelson’s case, including pharmacology, pathophysiology, economics, chemistry, and cellular biology.

A second example was the mathematician and Nobel Laureate John Nash, subject of the film A Beautiful Mind and creator of so-called Nash equilibrium, a broadly useful theory for analyzing competitive situations. Clearly moved by the recent deaths of Nash, a colleague from Princeton, and his wife in a car crash, Bhargava said that Nash equilibrium was not only a mathematical masterpiece, “but also contained extremely artistic, creative ideas and constructions that were inspired by phenomena in neighboring disciplines.”

Nash’s example “clearly show[s] that creativity and technical know-how are both needed in this world, and are needed together, and creativity or inspiration often comes from the connections, relations, and analogies that one sees with other subjects.”

“Keep learning about other disciplines,” Bhargava told the graduates. “And don’t just appreciate the connections between different realms of human endeavor that you find but actively look for them – because they’re definitely out there.”

Directed and accompanied by music faculty member John Corrie, the Commencement Choir followed Bhargava with a performance of Stephen Schwartz’s song “For Good” from the musical Wicked. It was another way for the Class of of 2015 to offer a more-than-fond farewell: “Because I knew you / I have been changed / For good.”

“What was the moment you fell in love with �ֲ���ý?”

At the top of the ceremony, Bolden was pointed and eloquent in describing how the love �ֲ���ý students feel for each other and their school is, or should be, “a love that can change the world.”

“What was the moment you fell in love with �ֲ���ý?” he asked his classmates. He explained how his own introduction to �ֲ���ý differed sharply from those of many �ֲ���ý students. Unmoved by the beautiful campus, respected professors, and so on, Bolden came instead for financial reasons, wishing he could attend a big city university instead.

For him, falling in love with �ֲ���ý was a gradual accretion of details: things like a party invitation in his second week at �ֲ���ý and a film course taught by Charles Nero that forever changed how Bolden interprets media.

But it was a love that Bolden awoke to only during study abroad thousands of miles away, studying in New Zealand.

“It was at that point that I realized that �ֲ���ý was not only the right choice for me, but where I belonged.”

Asking his classmates again when they fell in love with �ֲ���ý, Bolden said:

“I challenge you to share the love of that moment . . . with those who need it the most, whether that be by writing a scholarly dissertation on women’s rights, reassuring that little boy or girl in your City Year or Teach for America class that ‘it gets better,’ or organizing a rally against fracking — or simply sharing on social media the fact that black lives do and have always mattered.

“Do it all with the same love that made you fall in love with those here next to you today.”

Students celebrate receiving their degrees last May. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

�ֲ���ý will confer honorary degrees on four leaders in medicine, mathematics, American furniture design and athletics during the college’s 149th Commencement ceremonies on Sunday, May 31.

Manjul Bhargava, winner of the 2014 Fields Medal for mathematics and a professor at Princeton University, will deliver the Commencement address.

During Commencement, which begins at 10 a.m. in Merrill Gymnasium (due to inclement weather) and will be livestreamed at bates.edu/live, the college will also confer honorary degrees on:

• Dr. Mark Abelson P’97, pioneering ophthalmologist whose research and work has led to dozens of new eye treatments and cures;
• Thomas Moser, master craftsman whose handmade furniture beautifies public spaces around the world;
• Joan Benoit Samuelson P’10, Olympic gold medalist and environmentalist.

�ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer will confer the honorary degrees.

“These four individuals approach their work with passion, creativity and extraordinary dedication,” Spencer said. “In so doing, they have become leaders in their fields and models of the values we seek to instill in our students and embody in all aspects of the �ֲ���ý experience.”

Commencement concludes the undergraduate careers of the 484 members of the �ֲ���ý Class of 2015, representing 32 U.S. states and 31 countries.

More about the 2015 honorands

Manjul Bhargava, Doctor of Science

Manjul Bhargava

Manjul Bhargava is celebrated for his achievements in mathematical research, achievements that last year earned him , a coveted honor for mathematics that goes to three or four under-40 mathematicians every four years.

“Bhargava’s work in number theory has had a profound influence on the field,” the in announcing Bhargava’s award. “A mathematician of extraordinary creativity, he has a taste for simple problems of timeless beauty, which he has solved by developing elegant and powerful new methods that offer deep insights.”

Bhargava’s breakthroughs in number theory are the products of an intellect that perceives math’s intricate complexities in the context of a greater whole.

“Bhargava’s mathematical tastes, formed in his earliest days, are infused with music and poetry,” Erica Klarreich wrote in Quanta Magazine. “He approaches all three realms with the same goal, he says: ‘to express truths about ourselves and the world around us.’”

For Bhargava, wrote Klarreich, “the counting numbers don’t simply line themselves up in a demure row. Instead, they take up positions in space. … And they move through time, in the rhythms of a Sanskrit poem or a tabla drumming sequence.”

Manjul Bhargava uses math ‘to express truths about ourselves and the world around us.’

Number theory is the study of the properties of whole numbers. Bhargava has made important contributions to the field in such areas as composition laws pertaining to binary quadratic forms, which were the topic of his dissertation at Princeton University, and in the field known as the geometry of numbers, where his contributions merited the Fields Medal.

Born in Canada in 1974 to parents of Indian origin, Bhargava grew up primarily in the United States. When he was a young child, his mother, Hofstra University mathematics professor Mira Bhargava, found that she could keep him occupied by asking him to add or multiply large numbers. He also spent time with his family in India, where through his grandfather he discovered ancient Sanskrit poetry, whose mathematical qualities captivated him — and provided early insights into number theory.

Mira Bhargava also introduced her son to the Indian hand drums known as tabla, and today he is a dedicated and highly accomplished player with a sideline as a concert performer. He also plays guitar, violin and sitar.

Manjul Bhargava graduated from Harvard University in 1996 and received his doctorate from Princeton in 2001. He became a professor at Princeton two years later, and today is the there. He is also the Stieltjes Professor of Number Theory at in the Netherlands.

In addition to the 2014 Fields Medal, his other honors include the Merten M. Hasse Prize of the Mathematical Association of America (2003), the Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics (2005), the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2005), the Cole Prize in Number Theory of the American Mathematical Society (2008), the Fermat Prize (2011) and the Infosys Prize (2012). He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

Bhargava was awarded the , India’s third highest civilian honor, this year.

Mark Abelson, Doctor of Science

Mark Abelson

If you have ever been prescribed an eye medication or treatment for an external eye disease, it’s likely that you have benefited from the lifelong work of Dr. Mark Abelson, one of the world’s leading eye doctors. His groundbreaking research in how clinical trials are structured has led to the development of some of the most prescribed drugs currently available for the treatment of eye diseases.

When it comes to bringing a new drug to market, the rigor and scientific methods used to study and ensure its safety and effectiveness are just as important as the science behind the drug itself. Abelson recognized this more than 40 years ago and began his lifelong work to improve the drug development process, which lead to the founding of .

Abelson currently serves as chief scientific officer of Ora, the world’s leading ophthalmic research and product development firm. Ora and its clients have, over the past 30 years, earned nearly three dozen approvals for medical treatments and devices marketed globally.

Born in Montreal, Canada, Abelson earned bachelor’s and medical degrees from McGill University. He is a member of the board of trustees at the , clinical professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and surgeon emeritus at . In addition, he served 10 years on the Medical Advisory Board to the Dean of McGill Medical School.

By applying creative problem solving across a range of disciplines, Abelson exemplifies a life of purposeful work.

Abelson has received numerous awards over the course of his career and has written more than 600 publications and abstracts, including a textbook, Allergic Diseases of the Eye. Abelson also started , one of the country’s first multi-specialty eye care private practices.

�ֲ���ý believes that preparing students for lives of purposeful work lies at the heart of the liberal arts mission, and Abelson exemplifies a life of purposeful work. By applying creative problem solving across a range of disciplines, he has built a healthy, respected business while simultaneously improving the health care of millions of people worldwide.

Further, he and his son Stuart, a member of the �ֲ���ý Class of 1997 and �ֲ���ý trustee, have offered many �ֲ���ý graduates the opportunity to explore the medicinal drug industry through both jobs and internships at Ora over the past two decades. They note that these young workers are able to apply their creativity and analytical skills to conduct and publish research while working with top pharmaceutical scientists to move drug development forward.

When he’s not working, Abelson divides his time between competitive skate-skiing in the winter and competitive rowing in the summer.

Thomas Moser, Doctor of Humane Letters

Thomas Moser

Thomas Moser has earned an international reputation as a designer and maker of handmade American furniture. While his company’s Maine-made work graces homes, businesses, colleges, libraries and public spaces around the world, “I’ve never looked at our efforts as being in the furniture industry,” he has said — indeed, his work is more about the careful and elegant joining of art, craft and talent.

His medium is wood, a “creative compass,” in the words of The Portland Press Herald, that has guided, formed and defined Moser’s and his company’s creativity and self-identity over the past 43 years. In 1972, Moser was a tenured associate professor of rhetoric and director of debate at �ֲ���ý when he resigned from the faculty to pursue his woodworking. “I want to be a doer,” he said. Thus having dismantled the framework of one career, he set about to design and assemble another.

“I never started with the notion this could be successful,” he told USA Today in 1993. “I had no sense of turning it into a business. I just wanted to make truly well-made things of wood.”

Moser recalls the epiphany on a bright September morning in 1971 when, after inspecting a table he had made in his cellar woodshop, he concluded that “this was a good table.” In that moment, he discovered purposeful work — how “there was enough artistry in me to produce something that people would pay for” and, “more importantly, those people would be getting their money’s worth.”

‘I just wanted to make truly well-made things of wood.’

He began his business, , in an old grange hall in New Gloucester, Maine. His wife, Mary, managed the selling and finances, while their four sons trained as apprentices (all four have worked for the company). The company’s first advertisement, in Maine’s Down East magazine, read, “Our furniture is inspired by traditional design, constructed with pride and executed by hand, restoring a relationship between man and his practical art.” Self-taught, as are most of his designers and builders today, Moser drew from Shaker, Queen Anne, Pennsylvania Dutch and other traditions for his early designs. Today, the Thos. Moser style reflects design movements in various cultures and eras that share, in his words, “a distaste for ornament and ostentatious display…[and are] respectful of materials [that] celebrate the work of the human hand.”

Moser pieces are at home in public libraries from Atlantic City to Vinalhaven, Maine; in colleges from �ֲ���ý to UCLA, and in public spaces from the Thoreau Institute at Walden Pond to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. “We are in the business of creating tomorrow’s heirlooms,” he said in 1982. In 1987 the company built a new workshop facility in Auburn, Maine, not far from its original location, and today employs some 70 cabinetmakers and 130 employees total. The company has showrooms in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in addition to Freeport, Maine.

Joan Benoit Samuelson, Doctor of Humane Letters

Joan Benoit Samuelson

Joan Benoit Samuelson is among the most recognized and decorated athletes ever to emerge from the state of Maine. A native of Cape Elizabeth, Samuelson is an Olympic gold medalist, a two-time winner of the Boston Marathon and a world record holder many times over. She was the subject of a Nike advertising campaign titled, “There is no finish line,” and was named by Sports Illustrated one of the top female athletes of the 20th century. Beyond sports, she is an environmentalist, a mother, coach, author and philanthropist.

And, at age 58, she is showing no signs of slowing down or looking back.

Looking back, in fact, is something Samuelson almost never does, especially when she is running. “When you look back, you are conceding the race,” she says.

Although her dominating win in the inaugural women’s marathon at the is often thought to be Samuelson’s crowning achievement, it’s through her involvement and work in Maine that most people have come to know “Joanie.” A resident of Freeport, Samuelson has coached at the town’s middle school and served on public boards and commissions dedicated to issues she feels passionately about — protecting the environment, and nutrition and physical fitness for children. She is a longtime and active board member of , which works to improve and protect the bay’s environmental health. Samuelson is also on the senior leadership team of , a nonprofit dedicated to reducing childhood obesity. Over the years she has lent her name and talents to the YMCA and to many other charities and nonprofit organizations.

Joan Benoit Samuelson is an environmentalist, a mother, coach, author and philanthropist.

Samuelson is the founder and chair of the , run each summer in support of Maine charities. This summer, the race will benefit the Good Shepherd Food-Bank in Auburn. Samuelson is also a trustee at Bowdoin College, from which she graduated in 1979 with a joint major in history and environmental studies.

Samuelson’s daughter, Abigail, �ֲ���ý Class of 2010, majored in sociology and was elected to the College Key. She was a member of the college’s Nordic skiing and cross-country teams.

A champion for young women everywhere, Samuelson has blazed a path for others to pursue their dreams and to push themselves beyond the bounds of what they thought possible. Samuelson’s outlook on running translates perfectly to everyday life: Keep moving forward. Be comfortable with yourself. Believe in your accomplishments. But most importantly, run your own race.