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By Victoria Bourne

Leigh Comsudis, a decades-long 51�鱨վ employee who died Feb. 2, 2024, had a brilliant smile that lit up a room and made you feel better for seeing it, say those who knew her.

“Leigh treated everyone with the utmost respect and kindness,” said Donna Meeks, a close friend and the University’s policy manager and executive secretary to the Board of Visitors. “Everybody who knew her, loved her.”

She was a loyal confidante, added Lynda Shirk Williams, another good friend and a financial analyst at 51�鱨վ.

Comsudis’ 51�鱨վ career started in 1970, with a brief gap when she married and moved out of the area around the late 1980s. She was a senior executive secretary for Academic Affairs from 1999 to 2001. She then served as assistant to the vice president for Administration and Finance until her retirement in 2023.

A devoted Monarch, Comsudis was “a huge basketball fan,” Meeks said. While working in Student Affairs, she even helped affix a blue mane — made from a collection of fluffy bath mats — to an early incarnation of Big Blue. “I accidentally stapled my finger while doing it!” Comsudis wrote in a letter that ran in the spring 2012 Monarch magazine.

As of November, a memorial bench was to be dedicated to Comsudis on Williamsburg Lawn outside Koch Hall where she spent much of her career. It was a favorite spot, said longtime friend Tara Saunders, 51�鱨վ’s executive director of the Real Estate Foundation, who spearheaded the bench’s fundraising effort at the request of Vice President of Administration and Finance Chad Reed. Saunders said Reed was determined to honor Comsudis in a meaningful way on campus.

“I can’t think of anyone who loved 51�鱨վ as much as Leigh,” Saunders said.