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Obituary: Susan Hicks / ‘Passionately dedicated’ international studies administrator

Obituary: Susan Hicks / ‘Passionately dedicated’ international studies administrator

Died Oct. 23, 2015

Susan Hicks had a passion for international education that helped push the boundaries for students at the University of Pittsburgh who wanted a true global perspective.

As assistant director for academic affairs at Pitt’s Center for Russian and East European Studies, Ms. Hicks mentored students, oversaw a wide range of study abroad programs and recently launched and led an intensive global energy course that took students from the shale fields of Washington County, to Russia and Bulgaria to dig deep into global energy policy.

“She was passionately dedicated to helping students see themselves in a global sense,” said Andrew Konitzer, acting director of the center. “She was working on big programs for our center and [other international centers at Pitt] to come up with global projects that were really square on with the mission of the university.”

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Ms. Hicks, 34, of the East End, died Friday, hit by a car in Oakland while riding her bicycle home from work.

Hired at the center in 2013 as a program manager, Ms. Hicks was quickly promoted to assistant director, said Mr. Konitzer.

Besides being fluent in Russian, she brought to the center a background in anthropology with a focus on Russia and eastern Europe that made her a natural for her job, he said.

“She had a cultural understanding and a way to look at beliefs and values that made her fantastic for the energy course she ran,” he said.

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For that graduate-level course, she assembled a group of students from Pitt’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs for a two-week session earlier this year. They visited drilling sites and met with oil and gas industry and government officials in Washington County, then flew to Moscow and the Bulgarian capital of Sofia to exchange ideas with energy executives and policymakers in those countries.

“It’s hard to imagine a course that had so much depth and complexity to it,” said Mr. Konitzer. “So that’s a big loss. She was really finding her rhythm and her place professionally.”

Friends said that while Ms. Hicks was devoted to her career at the university, she made time for a wide range of other interests including Shakespeare’s plays, swimming, running, traveling and cycling.

She biked to work daily and had recently purchased a house in Bloomfield and planned to move in next month.

She was such a good athlete that when she recently joined her first rowing team, she was mistaken for a veteran rower, said Matt Fagerburg of Morningside. He was one of a group of Ms. Hicks’ friends who met weekly to read Shakespeare’s plays aloud.

“Susan was always the title character because she understood the plays so well and read with such passion,” said Jessica Friedrichs, who is Mr. Fagerburg’s wife.

On Thursday evening, the group gathered at Ms. Friedrichs and Mr. Fagerburg’s home where Ms. Hicks read the role of Hamlet.

“When she read the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy, I literally had a shiver because she captured it so beautifully,” said Ms. Friedrichs.

Another friend, Erika Fricke of Bloomfield, said Ms. Hicks had also begun studying the Turkish language, “just for fun.”

Her intellectual and scholarly pursuits didn’t prevent her from appreciating the world’s natural wonders, said Ms. Fricke.

On a trip to Siberia she left an event to use an outdoor bathroom and became so absorbed by the Aurora Borealis that she lost track of time and friends launched a search, fearing she was frozen, Ms. Fricke said. And on a vacation this past summer in Puerto Rico, Ms. Hicks was so determined to see a waterfall in a park at the end of the day that she ran full speed on a trail to get there before closing time.

Ms. Hicks grew up in Woodbridge, Va.. She came to Pitt for college, earning a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and English literature in 2003. She followed that in 2005 with a master’s in administration and policy studies, education. She received a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of British Columbia, and then worked for the American Councils for International Education in Ufa, Russia, prior to joining the center at Pitt.

Survivors include her parents who live in Woodbridge, Va., and three brothers.

Friends and family will hold a memorial gathering for Ms. Hicks at 5 p.m. today at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Schenley Park, Oakland.

Joyce Gannon: jgannon@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1580.

First Published: October 25, 2015, 4:00 a.m.

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