Austin Alumnae Panhellenic Association

Austin Alumnae Panhellenic Association Promoting sorority life through community, scholarships, and resources for alumnae and local students and their families.

Today we celebrate the origins and joy of Juneteenth! The day celebrates the emancipation of enslaved individuals as the...
06/19/2026

Today we celebrate the origins and joy of Juneteenth! The day celebrates the emancipation of enslaved individuals as the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery finally reached Galveston, TX, in 1865. While set as a Texas state holiday since 1980, the day was finally recognized as a national holiday in 2021 thanks to petitions from Opal Lee, the "grandmother of Juneteenth," and other civil rights groups!

Another feature of Pride Month is Alan Turing!Alan Mathison Turing was born in June 1912, in London, England, and was ra...
06/14/2026

Another feature of Pride Month is Alan Turing!

Alan Mathison Turing was born in June 1912, in London, England, and was raised in southern England. The son of a civil servant, Turing was educated at a top private school and entered the University of Cambridge in 1932 to study mathematics.

After graduating in 1934, he gained a fellowship at King’s College, attended Princeton University (1936-1938) for his Ph.D. in mathematical logic. After returning to his fellowship at King’s College, he joined the Government Code and Cypher School at the outbreak of war with Germany.

From Autumn 1939-Spring 1940, Turing and others designed a code-breaking machine known as the Bombe which supplied the Allies with large quantities of military intelligence. In 1942 Turing also devised the first systematic method for breaking messages encrypted by the sophisticated German cipher machine. At the end of the war, Turing was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his code-breaking work.

In 1945, Alan was recruited to the National Physical Laboratory in London to create an electronic computer, the Automatic Computing Engine. He also wrote the first-ever programming manual, and his programming system was used in the first marketable electronic digital computer in 1951.

Alan was a founding father of artificial intelligence and modern cognitive science, where he was an early leader of the hypothesis that the human brain is in large part a digital computing machine. He proposed what subsequently became known as the "Turing test" as a criterion for whether an artificial computer is thinking in 1950.

Turing was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in March 1951, a high honour, yet had to undergo 12 months of hormone "therapy" due to homosexuality being a crime in Britain at that time. By the early 21st century Turing’s prosecution for being gay had become infamous. In 2009 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, speaking on behalf of the British government, publicly apologized for Turing’s “utterly unfair” treatment. Four years later Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a royal pardon.

Our next feature of Pride Month is Brandi Carlile!Born in June 1981, in Washington State, Brandi Marie Carlile is an Am...
06/10/2026

Our next feature of Pride Month is Brandi Carlile!

Born in June 1981, in Washington State, Brandi Marie Carlile is an American musician and singer-songwriter known for her powerful voice and distinctive blend of folk, rock, country, and Americana music.

As the eldest of three children, Carlile was raised in a rural and isolated community outside Seattle. Having few friends or neighbors close by, she entertained herself by hiking and camping in the nearby woods and by singing. Many of Carlile’s family members were musical, including her mother, grandparents, and great-grandparents, who all were singers and greatly influenced her early musical development, and at age 17, she taught herself to play guitar.

In 2004 Brandi secured a contract with Columbia Records, and they released her self-titled debut album the following year. She wrote or co-wrote the majority of the album, and it received glowing praise and earned her a spot on Rolling Stone’s list of “10 Artists to Watch in 2005.” To support the album’s release, Carlile went on tour. She headlined several concerts and performed as an opening act for artists such as Ray LaMontagne, Tori Amos, and Chris Isaak.

In addition to her rise to fame in music, she has been widely recognized for her advocacy for LGBTQ rights, including co-founding the Looking Out Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to social justice causes, in 2008, with her wife, Catherine Shepherd, a British philanthropy executive.

Be sure to show some extra love to your besties today for National Best Friends Day! 🧡🥰
06/08/2026

Be sure to show some extra love to your besties today for National Best Friends Day! 🧡🥰

Our first feature for Pride Month is Sylvia Rivera!Sylvia Rivera was born in July 1951, in the Bronx, New York, U.S. and...
06/06/2026

Our first feature for Pride Month is Sylvia Rivera!

Sylvia Rivera was born in July 1951, in the Bronx, New York, U.S. and was an American civil rights activist who advocated for gay rights and was particularly influential in the movement’s early years. A transgender woman, she fought for the inclusion of transgender and other gender-nonconforming people in the mainstream le***an and gay communities.

She ran away from home when she was 11 years old, and while living on the streets of New York City, she met Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender rights activist. At the time the term transgender was not widely in use, and Johnson and Rivera identified as drag queens. The two bonded over challenges they faced as transgender individuals.

In 1969 Rivera participated in the Stonewall riots, a series of confrontations between gay rights activists and the police outside the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. The riots evolved into an international movement for gay and le***an rights. Rivera joined some of the early gay rights groups, including the Gay Liberation Front. However, the gay rights movement originally discriminated against drag queens, many of whom were people of color. Rivera and other transgender and gender-fluid individuals were often discouraged from participating in parades and other actions advocating gay rights. Often misunderstood, they had to fight for acceptance in the gay community.

In 1992—following the death of Johnson, who drowned under mysterious circumstances—Rivera returned to her activist roots. She once again became involved in the fight for inclusion of gender-nonconforming individuals in the gay rights movement. Through her efforts and others’, the gay and le***an community eventually expanded to fight for le***an, gay, bisexual, transgender, and q***r (LGBTQ) rights. In 1994 Rivera was honored at the 25th-anniversary celebration of the Stonewall Inn riots.

Rivera died of cancer in 2002, and that same year the Sylvia Rivera Law Project was founded and named in her honor. It provides legal services to gay, transgender, and gender-fluid individuals.

We're excited to celebrate Pride Month this June by featuring individuals from the LGBTQIA+ diaspora! ❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜
06/01/2026

We're excited to celebrate Pride Month this June by featuring individuals from the LGBTQIA+ diaspora! ❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜

Our last feature for Jewish Heritage Month is Gertrude Elion!Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion was born January 1918, in New...
06/01/2026

Our last feature for Jewish Heritage Month is Gertrude Elion!

Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion was born January 1918, in New York, N.Y., U.S. to Lithuanian Jewish and Polish Jewish immigrant parents.

After graduating high school at age 15, Elion graduated from Hunter College in New York City with a degree in chemistry in 1937. Unable to obtain a graduate research position because she was a woman, she found work in various lab assistant/assistant chemist/teacher roles over the next seven years. During this time she also took classes at New York University, where she graduated with a master’s degree in 1941. Unable to devote herself to full-time studies, Elion never received a Ph.D.

In 1944, Elion joined the Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories (later part of Glaxo Wellcome; today known as GlaxoSmithKline). There she was first the assistant and then the colleague of George H. Hitchings, with whom she worked for the next four decades. Elion and Hitchings developed an array of new drugs that were effective against leukemia, autoimmune disorders, urinary tract infections, gout, malaria, and viral herpes. Their success was due primarily to their innovative research methods, which marked a radical departure from the trial-and-error approach taken by previous pharmacologists.

Gertrude received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1988, along with Hitchings and Sir James W. Black, for their development of drugs used to treat several major diseases, including the development of the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used to fight rejection in organ transplants, and the first successful antiviral drug, acyclovir (ACV), used in the treatment of herpes infection. She was the fifth female Nobel laureate in Medicine.

Even after her retirement from Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories, Elion continued to work in the lab almost full-time. This allowed her to play a significant role in the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS.

With today being the last day of Mental Heath Awareness Month, we want to share resources anyone can use here in the U.S...
05/31/2026

With today being the last day of Mental Heath Awareness Month, we want to share resources anyone can use here in the U.S. Always remember that none of us are ever alone and you can always reach out to someone for help! 💚

Happy Founders' Day to all the members of Alpha Gamma Delta! ❤️💛💚 Celebrating 122 years since being founded on the campu...
05/30/2026

Happy Founders' Day to all the members of Alpha Gamma Delta! ❤️💛💚 Celebrating 122 years since being founded on the campus of Syracuse University!

Alpha Gamma Delta International Fraternity


Our other main event of the year we want to feature is our 2026 Scholarship & Awards Brunch we had in May! We got to cel...
05/29/2026

Our other main event of the year we want to feature is our 2026 Scholarship & Awards Brunch we had in May! We got to celebrate our two Scholarship recipients, the 2026 Sorority Woman of the Year, and also the 2026 Panhellenic Woman of the Year in the best way!

Big thank you to all the alumnae chapters and individual alumna who donated this year for next year’s scholarship as well as the UT Alpha Phi chapter for hosting us! Tag us in your event photos, and be sure to keep an eye out to join us at next year’s event!

❤️2026 Brunch Host❤️


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