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 1990s
| 1999Katy (Kilpatrick) Agnost and Peter Agnost ’01 had their first child, James, in August. Katy teaches English at Diablo Valley Community College, and Peter is a police officer in Pleasant Hill. (appeared in the Winter 2008 issue) • David Bouck received a Ph.D. in biology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and has started a postdoctoral fellowship in the chemical biology and therapeutics department at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. He and his wife, Autumn Atkinson Bouck ’00, live in Bartlett, Tenn., with their two young sons, Will and Andrew. (appeared in the Winter 2008 issue) • Laura Keels graduated from Johns Hopkins in 2000 with her B.S.N.-R.N. and later received her master’s degree in nursing as a family nurse practitioner at UC San Francisco. Keels has worked abroad with Amigos de las Americas and Child Family Health International and did volunteer work for Hurricane Katrina victims in Houston, Tex. She is currently working at the Bay Valley Medical Group in Hayward. (appeared in the Winter 2008 issue) • Peter Adrian Kavounas and his wife, Jennifer, welcomed their first daughter, Madeline Rose, in October. Peter is currently working as an attorney in Washington, D.C., with Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP. (appeared in the Spring 2008 issue) • Katharine Kobayashi and her husband, Frank Kobayashi ’00, welcomed their first child, Kailee Ann Toshiko, in April. (appeared in the Summer 2008 issue) • Kristen Klari Reis is an internationally known artist who has had solo exhibits in London and Munich and has recently signed with a San Francisco art gallery. More information about Reis can be found at www.klarireis.com. (appeared in the Summer 2008 issue) • Raina Lee received a master's degree in media and film studies from the New School for Social Research in New York City. She is the author of Hit Me With Your Best Shot: The Ultimate Guide to Karaoke Domination, published by Chronicle Books in May. She is also founder and publisher of 1-Up MegaZine, an international art journal about video game culture and criticism. She lives in Los Angeles. (appeared in the Fall 2008 issue) • Jennifer Litsinger married Jason Stinebaugh in October 2007 in Lake Tahoe. Litsinger is a senior manager at Accenture, a global consulting firm, and Stinebaugh is a systems engineer at MDS Analytical Technologies. They live in Walnut Creek. (appeared in the Fall 2008 issue) • Anne (Rice) Davis and Andrew Davis '03 welcomed their first daughter, Abigail Ann Davis, in October 2007. (appeared in the Winter 2009 issue) • Pascal Benyamini, J.D. was recently named a partner at Reish Luftman Reicher & Cohen, a law firm based in Los Angeles. A labor lawyer, Benyamini specializes in defending employers in state and federal court proceedings against claims of wrongful terminations, discrimination, harassment, wage and hour and unlawful employment practices. (appeared in the Spring 2009 issue) • Seth Rockman, Ph.D., wrote Scraping By (The Johns Hopkins University Press), a book about low-wage workers in the early 1800s in Baltimore, Md., and is currently working on a new book about the trade in plantation goods during the 18th and 19th centuries. Rockman is an assistant professor of history at Brown University. (appeared in the Spring 2009 issue) • MATTHEW RAFAT has a law practice in San Jose that specializes in labor and employment cases. He also has a blog, www.gotshares.com, about law, economics, the stock market and shareholder meetings. (appeared in the Summer 2009 issue) • Sheila Arkee is the creator and co-publisher of the beauty blog, Painted Ladies, www.painted-ladies.com. Launched last August, the site features other bloggers, reviews, contests, interviews with professional makeup artists and tutorials. (appeared in the Spring 2010 issue) • Larissa Parecki was appointed chief operating officer and interim director of the Sacramento-based nonprofit, CaliforniaALL, focusing on closing the achievement gap and enhancing student success. (appeared in the Spring 2010 issue) • Dave Quintana and Troy Wright ’02 spent three years working on a piece of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge’s new eastern span. Their project culminated last Labor Day weekend when a 50-foot section of the old span was moved aside and a replacement piece slid in place. A video of the work can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp0wVTDTOqk. Quintana was the lead project engineer on the east tie-in for the Caltrans team, and Wright was the lead project engineer with the CC Myers team. (appeared in the Spring 2010 issue) • Seth Rockman, Ph.D., received the 2010 Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians in April for his book Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press). The award is given for best book published in American social or intellectual history. He is an associate professor of history at Brown University. (appeared in the Summer 2010 issue) • Max Whittaker By Elizabeth Stitt Occupation: photojournalist, regular contributor to the New York Times and senior photographer at Sactown Magazine. Developing photographer: As a student at UC Davis, Max Whittaker thought of photography more as a hobby rather than a potential job. The history major didn’t take it seriously until he started working as a mountain guide for Outdoor Adventures. In 1997 he took the fall quarter off to climb the mountains of Peru—the same year a huge storm snowed in the mountains, making it impossible to climb. With nothing to do, Whittaker bought a camera on the black market, and soon discovered his passion for taking pictures. Coming back campus, he joined the California Aggie as the “slightly paid” staff photographer. From slightly paid to a little more slightly paid: After graduating in 1999, Whittaker spent seven years subsisting on Top Ramen while he established himself as a photojournalist. “It’s an incredibly hard industry to get into,” Whittaker said. “They don’t make it easy on you. You live in places you don’t want to live and the pay is bad.” But competitive and self-motivated, Whittaker never gave up—and it paid off. He’s been published in most every major magazine like Time and Newsweek, and his photos regularly appear in The New York Times. “It was pretty trippy to see my name in the byline,” he said about the first time he had a photo published in a major newspaper. “You know most people are going to skim the article, but they always look at the photo.” Living History: His work has taken him to places all over the world, and he has covered events like presidential campaigns, the economic crisis, Mexican wrestling and war. “I’ve certainly been shot at a number of times,” Whittaker said, but he’s never been hit. Whatever the assignment, he said, “It’s still the same job—looking for the moments that are a part of the larger story.” Whittaker currently lives in Sacramento with his wife, Jen Picard, the senior producer for Capital Public Radio’s Insight, along with his six cameras. “I feel like my whole job is current history. The best part about it is being there when history is made.” (appeared in the Summer 2009 issue) • Max Whittaker By Elizabeth Stitt Occupation: photojournalist, regular contributor to the New York Times and senior photographer at Sactown Magazine. Developing photographer: As a student at UC Davis, Max Whittaker thought of photography more as a hobby rather than a potential job. The history major didn’t take it seriously until he started working as a mountain guide for Outdoor Adventures. In 1997 he took the fall quarter off to climb the mountains of Peru—the same year a huge storm snowed in the mountains, making it impossible to climb. With nothing to do, Whittaker bought a camera on the black market, and soon discovered his passion for taking pictures. Coming back campus, he joined the California Aggie as the “slightly paid” staff photographer. From slightly paid to a little more slightly paid: After graduating in 1999, Whittaker spent seven years subsisting on Top Ramen while he established himself as a photojournalist. “It’s an incredibly hard industry to get into,” Whittaker said. “They don’t make it easy on you. You live in places you don’t want to live and the pay is bad.” But competitive and self-motivated, Whittaker never gave up—and it paid off. He’s been published in most every major magazine like Time and Newsweek, and his photos regularly appear in The New York Times. “It was pretty trippy to see my name in the byline,” he said about the first time he had a photo published in a major newspaper. “You know most people are going to skim the article, but they always look at the photo.” Living History: His work has taken him to places all over the world, and he has covered events like presidential campaigns, the economic crisis, Mexican wrestling and war. “I’ve certainly been shot at a number of times,” Whittaker said, but he’s never been hit. Whatever the assignment, he said, “It’s still the same job—looking for the moments that are a part of the larger story.” Whittaker currently lives in Sacramento with his wife, Jen Picard, the senior producer for Capital Public Radio’s Insight, along with his six cameras. “I feel like my whole job is current history. The best part about it is being there when history is made.” (appeared in the Summer 2009 issue) • Laura Barger, Ph.D. '99, by Nadine Elsibai Occupation: Harvard research associate who is conducting a NASA-funded sleep study of astronauts in space. During the summer she teaches a course in exercise physiology at UC Davis. Shuttle lag: Astronauts traveling in space experience the ultimate jet lat. They often completely reverse their sleep/wake cycle in the week before launch and then, once in space, experience a sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes. That, combined with a dim shuttle, misaligns an astronaut’s circadian rhythm, Barger Hypothesizes, collected data from the discover astronauts before, during and after their August flight. Participants wore an “actiwatch” that measures wrist motion and contains a photodiode to determine light exposure. Astronauts also kept a sleep log. She is now analyzing the data to better understand any irregularities in sleep patterns on Earth and in space. Barger has already analyzed data on five previous flights and has improved some of the software used to interpret the information. She hopes to gain insight from the astronauts on at least three more shuttle flights before publishing any findings. Space and beyond: Results from the study could benefit not only astronauts but also people who suffer from insomnia, particularly those who work odd shifts and the elderly. “Astronauts are not ones to readily admit that their performance might be degraded, but they do see themselves making little mistakes and know that it is due to not getting a good night’s sleep.” (appeared in the Fall 2005 issue) • Colleen Lindsey-Cope and her husband, Kevin Cope, welcomed their son, Elliot Levi, in August. Colleen is a project manager at Genentech in South San Francisco and Kevin is a project manager at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. (appeared in the Winter 2011 issue) |