Class Notes Archive 1931-2014
Class Notes are searchable back to our spring 2000 issue. You can browse the notes by decade (click on a decade to view its class notes):
Class notes from the 1960s
| 1968Jeff Handy, M.S. ’72, retired at the end of May from his position as an assistant U.S. attorney for the district of Oregon, after a 35-year career in public service. After obtaining his law degree in 1984, he specialized in environmental law, then worked with the Oregon Department of Agriculture before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
(appeared in the Fall 2006 issue) • Stephen Rae, M.S. ’70, Ph.D. ’06, received his Ph.D. from UC Davis in plant biology in September after completing a 34-year study of California mosses. Rae also recently joined UC Davis Professor Michael Barbour in founding the Institute for Environmental and Ecological Research, a nonprofit focusing on bringing environmental assessment tools used in academia to the land-use decision-maker. He can be reached at stephen.rae@ucdavis-alumni.com.
(appeared in the Spring 2007 issue) • Tom Evans was elected to the board of the Western Municipal Water District and began serving in January. WMWD supplies water in western Riverside County. After college, Evans worked for PG&E for 30 years until 1998 when he retired and went on to work for the cities of Alameda and Riverside as their director of utilities. In 2005, after serving as the interim city manager for the city of Riverside, he retired.
(appeared in the Summer 2007 issue) • Ruth Leyse-Wallace recently published The Metaparadigm of Clinical Dietetics: Derivation and Applications (iUniverse), a reader-friendly version of her Ph.D. dissertation. The book, which describes how a professional metaparadigm can be used, can help structure thinking in professional practice, education and research.
(appeared in the Summer 2007 issue) • Norbert Poth, M.A., died in August 2007 of congestive heart failure. He was 83. Mr. Poth was born in Germany and received a master’s degree from the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim before immigrating to Canada. He then moved to the United States and worked in San Francisco as a laboratory technician helping develop techniques for heart transplantation. Mr. Poth later decided to become a teacher and obtained degrees from Southern Oregon College and UC Davis. He taught for many years at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill until he retired in 1985. His wife, Latvian immigrant Veronika Niedra, preceded him in death. His survivors include his sons, Andrew and Felix, and two grandchildren.
(appeared in the Winter 2008 issue) • Edward Hart Gruger, Ph.D., died in January from cancer at age 78. Dr. Gruger served with the federal government for 30 years before his retirement in 1983. He began his career as a chemist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Seattle and also held a position at the Agricultural Experiment Station at UC Davis. Later in his career Dr. Gruger worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, finally serving as a research adviser and coordinator at its Fisheries Center. He was also a research professor of chemistry at Seattle University from 1977 to 1982. He is survived by his wife, Audrey, and their three children, Sherri, Lawrence and Linda, and two grandsons.
(appeared in the Summer 2008 issue) • Robert Fontaine, M.D. ’72, was given a 2007 Friendship Award by the Chinese government for his efforts to establish infectious disease laboratory capacity and prevent the spread of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in China. As well as being a senior epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control, Fontaine is a resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in Beijing and has been working in China since 2003.
(appeared in the Spring 2009 issue) • Max Zurflueh recently retired after 35 years at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was an intern training director and professor of psychology. He also served as the president of Southeastern Massachusetts Psychological Association and adjunct faculty at Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, Antioch University New England and Suffolk University. He lives in Dartmouth, Mass., with his wife, Carol. His email address is mzurflueh@umassd.edu.
(appeared in the Winter 2010 issue) • A school founded five and a half years ago by Martin Rist and his wife, Bonnie Brunet, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Managua, Nicaragua, is now providing free education and nutrition to more than 250 students. Working with local educators, the couple started the school, Centro Escolar Hermanos Dunklee, with their own funds in late 2004. In 2007, they formed the nonprofit Foundation for Social Responsibility (www.FoundationForSR.org) in Santa Cruz to provide continuing financial support for the school. The foundation’s directors include Rist and Brunet—who own the Galloway Group commercial real estate company—and their son, Erik Rogers Rist ’00, an attorney in Colorado.
(appeared in the Summer 2010 issue) • Cecelia (Halbert) Tichi, Ph.D., has written Civic Passions (University of North Carolina Press) about innovative leadership in periods of crisis in American history. It is her 11th book. She is an English and American studies professor at Vanderbilt University and the winner of the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literature.
(appeared in the Summer 2010 issue) • Robert Fontaine was featured as an alumni spotlight.
Robert Fontaine
By Elizabeth Stitt
Occupation: Senior epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in Beijing.
Fighting diseases: When there’s an outbreak of an infectious disease, people usually run away from it. Robert Fontaine ’68, M.D. ’72, runs toward it. As a scientist for the CDC since 1973, Fontaine has chased the likes of encephalitis in New Hampshire, hepatitis A in Minneapolis and smallpox in India. “We get challenged with the most difficult public health problems imaginable.”
Like father, like son: Fontaine knew at an early age he wanted to go into disease control. He was exposed to epidemiology as a boy from his father, Russell Fontaine, who worked for the California Department of Public Health in the 1950s and then spent much of his career controlling malaria in Latin American, Asian and African countries before accepting a mosquito research position with the UC system at Davis.
A friend of China: Like his father, Fontaine has traveled the globe, helping the public health systems in the Middle East, Central America and Asia. After the SARS breakout in 2003, he has been the adviser to Chinese doctors, training them to contain, investigate and eventually eradicate diseases—most recently the H1N1 and H5N1 flu viruses. For helping better public health in China, in 2007 he received the Friendship Award—the highest honor given by the Chinese government to a foreigner. And for Fontaine, the feeling is mutual—after more than six years in China, Fontaine doesn’t want to leave any time soon. “I’ll be there two more years. The CDC will have to pull me out.”
When he’s not overseas, Fontaine and his wife of 28 years, Karla, live in Atlanta, Ga. They have three sons—one of whom is working on his Ph.D. at UC Davis in electrical engineering.
“It’s one of the most interesting jobs around. There’s always something going on. If something new doesn’t come up and hit you in the face, you have plenty of opportunities to find, prevent and control other human diseases.”
(appeared in the Winter 2010 issue) • Geraldo Arraes Maia, M.S., received the title of professor emeritus at Federal University of Ceará in Brazil in a September ceremony. During a career spanning more than four decades, the food scientist wrote 245 scholarly papers and 15 books, advised tropical fruit processors and helped establish fruit juice standards for the South American trade organization Mercosur.
(appeared in the Winter 2012 issue) • Two novels by Don Cambou—The Crystal Point of the MOG POGS and The Treasure of the Carpathian Den—were released this spring as Kindle e-books. They are the first and second in the young-adult MOG POG Saga fantasy-adventure series. Cambou is a former television writer, producer and director. For a dozen years, he was executive producer of the History Channel’s Modern Marvels.
(appeared in the Summer 2012 issue) • Kristoffer Paulson, Ph.D., a retired English professor and an authority on the works of Norwegian American author Ole Rolvaag, died in March in Minneapolis, Minn. He was 77. He taught English, American and Canadian literature at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, for 32 years. He was also active in Canadian storytelling. He is survived by his partner, Meredith (Dee Dee) Wilson; and his sons Kristoffer Rolf and Kai Cedric Rieber, of North Vancouver.
(appeared in the Summer 2012 issue) • Ron Clausen, J.D. ’71, was recently elected to the board of directors of the National Wildlife Federation. He practices corporate law and business succession planning in Point Richmond.
(appeared in the Fall 2013 issue) • Lucas Dobrzanski, who was founding president of the UC Davis fencing club in 1966, competed for the U.S. fencing team in the Veterans World Championships in Varna, Bulgaria, in October. He placed 21st in the 70-years-plus saber category. The recipient of the 1992 UC Davis Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award, he is now partly retired, runs a consulting business and is president of the nonprofit Kern Athletic Fencing Foundation, which promotes healthy behavior for at-risk kids through fencing and academic tutoring. He and his wife, Anna (Bendarzewski) ’68, live in Bakersfield, as do their daughter Lara ’89 and her husband, Mike Riccomini ’89; son, Robert ’92; and daughter Eva and her husband, Matt Billings ’97. Lucas and Anna hope some of their eight grandchildren will become Aggies someday.
(appeared in the Fall 2013 issue) • Melita Wade (Drane) Thorpe, M.A., won an award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in August for “exceptional service and outstanding support.” Her San José travel company, MWT Associates, offers tours around the world for viewing the aurora borealis, meteor showers, eclipses and historical astronomy. (appeared in the Fall 2014 issue) |
| 1969William Kidd, D.V.M. '75, heads the Moraga Veterinary Hospital. Kidd has been running the hospital since 1977, caring for companion animals and volunteering his time to care for sick and injured animals brought in by animal welfare groups. (appeared in the Spring 2000 issue) • Gregory Ferraro, D.V.M. '71, director of the Center for Equine Health and a clinical professor of veterinary surgery at UC Davis, was appointed to the California Veterinary Medical Board, which is responsible for the licensing and regulation of veterinarians and veterinary technicians. (appeared in the Fall 2001 issue) • Stan Oden joined California State University, Sacramento, this fall as assistant professor of government. Previously he was assistant to the city manager of Berkeley and then a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, where he received a Ph.D. in sociology in 1999. (appeared in the Winter 2002 issue) |