This month would have marked the 10th reunion for Elizabeth Prostic C’96. Her death in March 2005—five months after being diagnosed with stage-four metastatic cancer and nine months after giving birth to a baby girl named Harper—was simply inconceivable to those who knew her. As her sister, Laura Prostic C’04, put it: “Lizzie was an unstoppable force who could do it all and light up a room in the process. She balanced a high-powered job, law school at night, and pregnancy with enthusiasm and grace.”
That job—managing director for the Washington law firm of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal—came after a vibrant career in politics, including stints as senior policy advisor to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans; as a staffer for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation; and as a staff assistant for Senator John McCain. Shortly after graduating from Penn, where she was a political-science and diplomatic-history major, she worked on Senator Bob Dole’s presidential campaign.
Lizzie’s husband, Michael Lundblad C’95, recently founded the MetaCancer Foundation to provide “inspiration, support, and a sense of community for patients and caregivers confronting metastatic cancers.”
One of the foundation’s goals is to create research grants and resource rooms in her honor, and its board recently approved funding for an Elizabeth Anne Prostic Memorial Research Grant at Penn. The board has been working with the School of Social Policy & Practice to launch a grant that would fund research for psychosocial issues related to metastatic cancer, to be carried out by a graduate student from that school, the School of Nursing, or the Department of Psychology. It will be awarded in spring of 2007.
Those interested in contributing should contact the foundation through its website, www.metacancer.org.
—S.H.
