An award-winning playwright, a retired U.S. Navy commanding officer, and a physics professor and researcher are the newest additions to Maine South High School’s Wall of Honor recognizing distinguished graduates, the school announced.
George Brant, Brian Humm and Dante Amidei are scheduled to be inducted into the Alumni Wall of Honor during a dinner on Oct. 3. They will also be asked to speak to the Maine South student body during the Homecoming assembly the following day, the school said.
Brant is a 1987 Maine South graduate and writer of 11 plays, including “Grounded,” which won several awards and starred Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway in a 2015 production at New York City’s Public Theater. He is also the writer of “Elephant’s Graveyard,” winner of the Keene Prize for Literature and the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award, which was staged by Maine South High School students in 2014.
In an interview with the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate that year, Brant shared that his love of theater began at Maine South, where he appeared in several stage productions and wrote comedy sketches for the annual V-Show.
Humm, a 1983 graduate of Maine South, served in the U.S. Navy for 30 years, retiring in 2017 as commodore of a submarine squadron, according to the Navy. Humm also served as commanding officer of the USS Ohio and the USS Buffalo, the Navy said.
Humm is currently the program manager at Oceaneering, which, according to the company’s website, provides engineered services and products to the offshore energy industry.
Amidei is a member of Maine South’s class of 1974 and a professor of physics at the University of Michigan. According to the university, he conducts research in particle physics as part of the ATLAS experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, based in Switzerland.
The three Wall of Honor inductees were selected following a call for nominations that took place earlier this year. They join a list of seven prior inductees that includes former U.S. Secretary of State, presidential candidate and First Lady Hillary Clinton, journalist Patricia Callahan, climate change researcher Nathan Hultman, former acting U.S. Attorney General Mark Filip, former chief software architect of Microsoft Ray Ozzie, former director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT Susan Lindquist, and Chair of Medical Oncology for City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center Ravi Salgia.
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