| 1973Leslie Bowman Marcus, of Woodland, died of pancreatic cancer in May at age 60. She worked the last seven years as a paralegal and director of the Fair Housing Hotline Project at Legal Services of Northern California. A political activist from her days as a student opposing the Vietnam War, she worked to pass affordable housing ordinances in Yolo County communities in the 1990s and ran the local Democratic Party headquarters in 2008. |
| 1974Mark Gailey, of Chico, recently retired after more than 32 years of teaching. The Chico Unified Teacher’s Association selected him 2012 Secondary Teacher of the Year. He plans to pursue his interests in drawing, soccer, acoustic music, music festivals, bicycling, canoeing and swimming, as well as volunteering at Chico’s Pleasant Valley High School, where he had been a resource specialist. He has been married to Cynthia Hills for 25 years and has a stepson, Skylar. • Barb Peppin is a licensed marriage and family therapist at Golden Hills Church in Brentwood. Her practice focuses on trauma, play therapy with children and animal-assisted therapy. She completed her master’s degree and a pastoral counseling degree in 2003 from Holy Names College in Oakland. |
| 1976A new ebook by Tom Garrison, M.A., Why We Left the Left: Personal Stories by Leftists/Liberals Who Evolved to Embrace Libertarianism, is now available at Amazon.com. • Composer and music journalist Webster Young wrote Berkeley–Paris Express: A Lively Memoir of Studying Classical Music and Painting, which is available at Amazon.com and Kindle books. The book includes a chapter on his time at UC Davis. He has composed 130 works for opera, ballet, orchestra, piano, solo strings and solo guitar, and written opinion pieces for Newsday, the Intercollegiate Review and the Catholic Herald. • Steven Horton died unexpectedly of a heart attack at his home in Atlanta in February 2011. He was 56. He spent more than 32 years in ocean transportation services, living in New York, Baltimore, St. Louis, San Francisco, Miami and Atlanta. He volunteered with the Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless organization in Atlanta, as well as with animal rescue organizations. |
| 1978Karen Caplan and Jorge Steiner reconnected after 35 years. Their two companies, Frieda’s Specialty Produce in Los Alamitos, and Proficol in Bogota, Colombia, are in discussions about marketing tropical fruits and vegetables in the U.S. together. |
| 1979John Stewart-Savage, Ph.D. ’84, a biology professor at the University of New Orleans, died of natural causes in New Orleans in June. He was 55. His research focused on fertilization in marine invertebrates and mammals. |
| 1982Janet Walberg Rankin, Ph.D., a faculty member at Virginia Tech, is 2012–13 president of the American College of Sports Medicine. She is a professor of human nutrition, foods and exercise in Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and associate dean of the university’s Graduate School. She is an authority on nutritional strategies for reducing inflammation and other health complications related to athletic training and obesity. |
| 1985A short story by Taryn Hook, “Pluto Rising,” is included in The Writing Disorder Anthology, Vol. III, the online literary journal’s best works of 2011. Hook is an author and private investigator living and working in the south Bay Area. • Randy Holmes ’85 and Sarah (Sembach) Holmes ’86, Ph.D. ’93, died within a day of each other in May in Austin, Texas. Randy, a software engineer for Systems Process Engineering Co., died unexpectedly in his sleep at age 48; Sarah, 47, succumbed the following day to the cancer she had battled for two years. She worked as a senior systems analyst in information technology services at the University of Texas, Austin. They were parents of two teenagers. |
| 1986Nathaniel Lim, a senior technical writer for Elekta in Sunnyvale, was named an associate fellow of the Society for Technical Communication for contributions to the field and the society. |
| 1987Jean Beagle Ristaino, Ph.D., a plant pathology professor at North Carolina State University, will spend the next year as a Jefferson Science Fellow advising the State Department. She is an expert on the pathogen Phytophthora infestans, which caused the Irish potato famine and is still a global threat to food security. |
| 1988Anthony Rao, J.D. ’94, recently joined Duane Morris as a partner, practicing labor and employment law in the firm’s New York and San Francisco offices. He previously practiced at Rao Tiliakos, a firm he co-founded in 2008, and Seyfarth Shaw. Super Lawyers magazine named him a 2011 New York Super Lawyer. |
| 1989Terri (Brock) Tramel, M.S., has a new position leading a partnership program at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center near Huntsville, Ala. She helps academic, industry and government researchers in using the center’s materials and processes laboratory. |
| 1991Ashwin Amanna joined Virginia Tech’s Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science as research program manager for two areas—cognition and communication, and national security. In addition to his UC Davis degree, he holds a master’s and doctorate from Virginia Tech in electrical engineering. • Keith Roberts, a budget analyst for Head Start, died in August at his Davis home from pancreatic cancer. He was 51. |
| 1992Dina (Dibenedetto Collins) Linkenhoker earned her doctorate in educational leadership from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., in April. Her dissertation is titled, Teachers’ Perspectives and Suggestions for Improving Teacher Education to Facilitate Student Learning. Linkenhoker was selected as the 2012 Bedford County Teacher of the Year, and has been a semifinalist for the past two years for a regional McGlothlin Award for Teaching Excellence. She is also a candidate for National Board certification in social studies–history/early adolescence. She teaches world history at Staunton River Middle School in Moneta, Va., where she lives with her husband, Jim, and their children, Mason and Marina. • David Whitacre, Ph.D., edited and co-authored Neotropical Birds of Prey Biology and Ecology of a Forest Raptor Community (Cornell Press, 2012). The book reports findings from his nine years of research with the Peregrine Fund in Guatemala’s Tikal National Park. He now teaches biology and statistics at the Treasure Valley Math and Science Center in Boise, Idaho. |
| 1994James “Bo” Pearl, a partner in O’Melveny’s Century City law office, was appointed to the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Federal Judicial Improvements for a three-year term. |
