Bellarmine held its 44th President’s Award Dinner the night of October 24. The annual event, which took place on campus in the Samuel A. Liccardo Center, is in recognition of donors who contribute to the school at the $2,500 or more President’s Club level of Annual Giving.
In addition to conveying gratitude to all President’s Club level donors, each year the President’s Award is bestowed on an individual or couple who have made a positive impact on the school. This year’s recipients were Margaret and Paul Petrus. Their sons, Bellarmine alumni Joshua ’21 and Matthew ’19, were also on hand as their parents were honored.
Paul, a graduate of Virginia Tech who earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering, is a senior advisor and former CTO of RADAR, the technology platform that combines RFID and computer vision technology to track and precisely locate in-store inventory.
Margaret is an Engineering leader at Broadcom, specializing in Network Virtualization with a particular focus on real-time monitoring and analytics. She is a longtime member of Bellarmine’s Board of Regents and serves on the Faculty Student Parent Life (FSPL) Committee.
The award that was presented to the Petrus’s was created in Bellarmine’s Maker Lab by student Diego Vasquez '26 with guidance from faculty members David Dutton and Kyle Medeiros ’10.
In his President’s Award acceptance remarks, Paul expressed the admiration that he and Margaret have for Bellarmine and what he believes are the inherent values that set the school apart. He indicated his belief that Bellarmine’s motto of persons who are “for and with others” is essentially in line with forming individuals of interdependence. “Bellarmine focuses on making these men independent and teaches them to be interdependent,” said Paul. “We need these men to be good leaders of their families, workplace, and society at large. As the Good Book says, ‘the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.’”