Business beat

Banking

Spokane Teachers Credit Union has added two vice presidents to their staff. Chris Severin will serve as vice president of retail. Severin has nearly 20 years of banking leadership to the position, in which he will guide banking operations at 25 locations with expectation to add four more locations by the end of the year. He most recently worked as a senior vice president at Columbia Bank and Pacific Coast Banking School. Joe Yetter will serve as the senior vice president of commercial and business services, in which he will oversee STCU’s growing lending offerings and business services. Yetter has more than 30 years of experience in commercial banking and lending, previously working at Umpqua Bank in various leadership roles and most recently serving as the senior credit administrator at Banner Bank.

Legal

Spokane-based law firm Van Valkenburg James will begin a collaboration with the The Law Offices of Athan P. Papailiou to expand its civil legal services. Van Valkenburg James specializes in criminal defense and juvenile dependency.

Honors

David Gracon, assistant professor of integrated media at Gonzaga University, has received a U.S. Fulbright Specialist grant. Gracon will travel and work for up to six weeks abroad to continue his international work in media literacy education/training, digital media production and the advocacy for democracy. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a travel destination and date has yet to be set but will be determined within the next three years. Gracon taught as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar at Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, during the 2017-2018 academic year, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in media studies and media literacy as well as training professor s to complete media literacy certifications alongside the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. He joined the Gonzaga faculty in 2019, previously teaching from 2010 to 2019 at Eastern Illinois University in the department of communication studies. Gracon earned a doctorate in media studies from the University of Oregon in 2010. H his research interests focus on the integration of digital video production and critical media studies.