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 1970s
| 1974Susan Rinne, M.S. ’78, was appointed vice president of regulatory affairs with NeurogesX Inc., a biopharmaceutical company in San Mateo focused on developing pain management therapies. She has over 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical regulatory affairs arena. (appeared in the Winter 2008 issue) • Lawrence Wolfe is an attorney and manager of Denver-based law firm Holland & Hart, the largest law firm in the region with 13 offices in seven states and Washington, D.C. Wolfe and his wife live in Cheyenne, Wyo., and have two grown children. (appeared in the Winter 2008 issue) • Bruce Freeman, M.S., has joined Wrightwood Technologies Inc. as a member of the board of directors, as well as chief scientific officer of the Cherry Instruments division. Freeman has over 30 years of experience in industrial chromatography earned principally at Beckman Instruments, Electronic Associates Inc. and the Fort Dodge Animal Health division of Wyeth. Freeman lives in Neptune, N.J. (appeared in the Spring 2008 issue) • Rick Morrrow, M.S., has moved to a new position with San Diego-based Sempra Energy Utilities where he has been employed for 30 years. He is now vice president for customer services. (appeared in the Spring 2008 issue) • Kent Steinwert, president and chief executive officer of Farmers and Merchants Bank in Lodi, was appointed to the board of directors of the American Bankers Association. He lives in Lodi with his wife, Patti, and has four adult children and one grandchild. (appeared in the Spring 2008 issue) • Edward Vine, M.S., Ph.D. ’80, is one of the 2,000 scientists working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with whom Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Vine works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From UC Davis, Professor Daniel Sperling also has a claim to the Nobel. Sperling is the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies and a contributor to IPCC’s most recent report. (appeared in the Spring 2008 issue) • John Nesbitt, M.A., Ph.D. ’80, has had his most recent western novel, Death at Dark Water, published by Leisure Books. It follows Raven Springs (Leisure Books), which was recognized as a finalist in the annual Western Writers of America Spur Awards. (appeared in the Summer 2008 issue) • Attorney Bill Sims recently spent two weeks in Texas, volunteering his legal services to Hurricane Ike victims in the Galveston area. After traveling 1,500 miles from Tustin in his RV, he was appointed to work at several Federal Emergency Management Agency and state of Texas Disaster Recovery Centers. He said while the rest of the country has moved on, the victims of Hurricane Ike fight a daily battle to restore some sort of normalcy to their disrupted lives. (appeared in the Winter 2009 issue) • Ron Engel went back to college at San José State University to pick up his “red shirt” year in wrestling. He placed fifth at the West Coast Conference wrestling championship, made All Conference and also was selected as one of 32 qualifiers for the National Collegiate Wrestling Championships in March 2008 in Lakewood, Fla. Engel suggests for those who want to go back to college to compete for a club team do so before they’re 56 years old. (appeared in the Spring 2009 issue) • Jack de Golia retired after 33 years of federal service. He spent the last 20 years as the public affairs officer for the 3.3-million-acre Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in Montana. While working at Yellowstone National Park, he co-authored a curriculum called Expedition: Yellowstone! De Golia plans to live in Henderson, Nev. with his wife, Brenda. (appeared in the Spring 2009 issue) • Murray Haberman retired in December from his position as executive director of the California postsecondary education commission. His career in state service spans nearly 35 years. (appeared in the Spring 2009 issue) • John Nesbitt, M.A., Ph.D. ’80, wrote two novels, Poacher’s Moon (Pronghorn Press), a contemporary western, and Trouble at the Redstone (Leisure Books), a traditional western. Three of his short stories were published online by Amazon.com. His Web site is www.johndnesbitt.com, where he keeps a blog and summaries of his work. (appeared in the Spring 2009 issue) • Scott Cochrane is a pediatrician at Holyoke Pediatric Associates in Holyoke, Mass., where he has worked for the past 16 years. He lives in nearby Amherst with his wife, Carol, who is a physical therapist in the Amherst schools. Their daughter, Lizzie, is at the University of New Hampshire and their son, Eric, is at Keene (N.H.) State College. Scott still loves to swim and he returned last fall to California with his brother, Steve Cochrane, to swim the RCP Tiburon Mile, a race from Angel Island to Tiburon in San Francisco Bay. (appeared in the Summer 2010 issue) • Van Snow ’74, D.V.M ’78, a prominent equine veterinarian from Santa Ynez, died in April when his small plane crashed just short of the Borrego Valley Airport runway in Borrego Springs. He was 58. According to news accounts, he had been practicing for an acrobatic flying contest and reported mechanical troubles just before his Harmon Rocket crashed. He was an expert on treating lameness in horses and had been an early pioneer in shock-wave therapy to treat soft-tissue injuries and stress fractures. He practiced equine medicine in Virginia and the Santa Ynez Valley and in 1997 established Santa Lucia Farm, where he bred and treated horses. A flying enthusiast, he sold the Long EZ experimental plane to John Denver in which the singer crashed in October 1997. Dr. Snow is survived by his fiancé, Lindsey Creed; children April, Amy, Hayley, Tye, Shelbie and Cody; mom, Evelyn Brockel; dad, Lawrence Snow; brothers, Gary, Steve, Ronnie, Alan and Lawrence; sisters, Jan, Gayle, Rosalie, Marcia and Carly; seven grandchildren and numerous nieces and nephews. (appeared in the Summer 2010 issue) • Francis Lee was featured in the 2010 summer edition. Francis Lee by Jo Shroyer Occupation: former CEO and current board chair for Synaptics in Santa Clara. At your fingertips: If you don’t know Lee’s company by name, you probably know it by touch. Synaptics designs and produces the sensing technology used in more than 60 percent of the touchpads in laptops, smart phones, MP3 music players and other devices. A series of fortunate events: Lee ’74 credits his company’s success to its employees—“In the end, it’s the people who get the job done”—and his own career success to luck. “My life has really been a series of things I stumbled into,” he said. Pointing the way: Lee was 16 when he moved with his family from Hong Kong to Sacramento and enrolled as a junior in a local high school, not able to speak any English. “There were no ESL programs,” Lee said. “It was total immersion.” His first challenge was figuring out the cafeteria. “I pointed at some Twinkies near the cash register and handed over a $20 bill. That was what I had for lunch at first. And they were pretty good!” The next year, Lee transferred to McClatchy High School, and did so well in math and science that he was runner-up for a scholarship to the University of Southern California. But without the scholarship, he attended Sacramento City College for two years then transferred to UC Davis. He majored in electrical engineering on the advice of a Sacramento City professor who foresaw semiconductors as the wave of the future. Semiconductor sense: After graduating, Lee went to work for the National Semiconductor as a product engineer. He stayed with the company for more than 20 years, the last seven in executive roles. In 1995, lee started a new company, NSM, a Hong Kong-based joint venture of National Semiconductor and S. Megga. He welcomed the return to Hong Kong for the chance to give his son and daughter a cultural immersion experience similar to the one he had. When they came back to the U.S. in 1998, his children were fluent in Chinese and he was ready for a new challenge. He joined Synaptics as director and CEO, positions he held for a decade until his retirement last July. “We are not a tech company. We are a human interface company, making use of one of the five intuitive sense, touch.” (appeared in the Summer 2010 issue) • Jack Czarnecki was featured in the 2010 summer edition. Jack Czarnecki by Emily Grosvenor Occupation: Truffle hunter Food alchemist: Some people are never done finding what they’re looking for. Take Jack Czarnecki ’74, who grew up foraging for mushrooms in eastern Pennsylvania with his father, a mushroom photographer. Now one of the nation’s premier truffle experts, Czarnecki has parlayed his successful career as a restaurant owner and chef to bring the essence of truffles into the country’s food consciousness—one sweep of the rake at a time. For years Czarnecki wowed diners with truffle dishes at his restaurant, the Joel Palmer House, in Dayton, Ore. Now, he has created an authentic truffle oil using American ingredients—a first, according to Saveur magazine. “This is the culmination of my life,” Czarnecki said. “This is the project I was born for.” The nose knows: While studying bacteriology at UC Davis, Czarnecki took a course that would forever steer him toward his career at the forefront of America’s food culture: “Sensory Evaluation of Wine.” “That’s the most important course I took for learning how to cook,” Czarnecki said. “It also taught me all that I needed to know about making a decent food product.” Now, his nose for scent and his well-honed palate have found new inspiration as he harnesses the essence of truffles, one of the world’s most sought-after ingredients. After months of experimenting in a home laboratory, Czarnecki discovered a way to produce a natural American truffle oil for commercial use. He starts with an olive oil with little natural flavor and infuses as much as half a pound of truffles for two weeks in each bottle to leech out the truffles’ heady scent. Selling online at oregontruffleoil.com, he ships the oil around the globe—surprising world-class chefs and home cooks who have never tasted truffles from outside of Europe. Treasure hunter: Czarnecki digs truffles out by hand in the mountains of western Oregon. On a recent spring day, he tied a carved-out mild jug to his waist and trudged to a fern-blanketed patch under a single Douglas fir. And then he dug, looking for a glimpse of creamy white. If his eyes weren’t attuned to meager light filtering through the canopy, he just might have raked a baseball-sized white truffle past his foot and not even noticed. “That’s when I really get mad—when I’m standing right on top of them,” Czarnecki said, pulling a truffle out of the earth. “It [digging truffles] is like a drug. Every one of the truffles you see pop out of dark sweet earth, it generates a dopamine response.” (appeared in the Summer 2010 issue) • John Nesbitt, M.A., Ph.D. ’80, won two 2010 Western Writers of American Spur Awards—best original mass market paperback for Stranger in Thunder Basin (Dorchester Publishing) and best short fiction for “At the End of the Orchard,” which appeared in Hardboiled magazine. It was his third year in the row to place in the literary contest; his book Trouble at the Redstone won in 2009 and Raven Springs was a finalist in 2008. His most recent publications include a traditional western novel, Not a Rustler (Leisure Books) and a novella, Dead for the Last Time, published in two parts by online magazine Mysterical-E. His website is www.johndnesbitt.com. (appeared in the Fall 2010 issue) • Eric, M.S., Arel, M.S. ’75, Philip ’75 and Karl Wente, M.S. ’01, were honored with a lifetime achievement award by the California State Fair Commercial Wine Program for their family’s Wente Vineyards in Livermore, and its 125-year influence in the California wine-making industry. After five generations, Wente Vineyard is the oldest continuously family operated winery in the country. Its wine is exported to over 50 countries. (appeared in the Fall 2010 issue) • Karen Joy Fowler — Adapted from an article in UC Davis College Currents Occupation: writer of novels, short stories and poetry, including The Jane Austin Book Club Drawing on the wide world: Relishing the tales of political intrigue that her professors discussed in lectures, Karen Joy Fowler, M.A. ’74, developed her love for stories while studying political science in college. It was not until she was 30, however, that Fowler seriously began writing, drawing from her political science education and interest in the theory and history of a country’s politics. “I like the theory of a story, giving you the big picture of how the world works,” she says. “I like the big perspective.” Now the author of four published novels, Fowler likes to focus on her characters’ personal lives and the larger outlook of the world, rather than on the minute details of her characters’ thoughts or personalities. Bestselling and big-screen success: In 2004, Fowler published The Jane Austen Book Club (Putnam). The novel that made her a bestselling author is now being made into a movie. “I am pretty removed from the making of the movie, although I did visit the set one day,” Fowler says. “It is much like when I heard the audio version of the book, which was very well done. It was a bizarre feeling to hear my words being read by another person. It’s not really mine anymore.” A local inspiration: Despite her national success, Fowler remains loyal to her local community. Living in Davis with her husband, Fowler frequently holds readings in Davis and Sacramento libraries, lectures at UC Davis and finds peace in the back of downtown Davis’ Bogey’s Books, where she will occasionally spend time writing new material. But it’s not writing that Fowler says is her biggest accomplishment—it’s raising two children who are now grown. “When my kids went to college, I imagined that I’d be more productive in my writing. But what I’ve realized is the opposite is true—I put aside my writing for almost everything.” (appeared in the Summer 2007 issue) • Eric Lesser is landscape coordinator for the Inland Empire Utilities Agency in Chino in southwestern San Bernardino County. In 2007, he oversaw the layout and installation of native plants in a 22-acre wetlands and habitat park created with reclaimed water next to the agency’s headquarters. He is a California-registered landscape architect and International Society of Arboriculture-certified arborist. A resident of Riverside, he plays cello in local orchestras. (appeared in the Winter 2011 issue) |