The News Journal ::: Class Notes

B.S. Harold Benson Queen (Chem) retired in 1982 from Bayer Corp. in Berkeley, where he was a senior production engineer. He had been with the company since 1950. Before that, he had been with Chickasaw Ord. Works in Memphis, TN, and DuPont Explosives in Pompton Lakes, NJ. From 1983 to 2004, he was a member of the Mobile Missionary Assistance Program, an RV-based national organization that offers volunteer labor in construction, repair, and rehabilitation of churches, bible camps, and conference centers throughout the U.S. In all, he participated in 80 projects in California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Tennessee, and Indiana.

1942

B.S. Myron Tribus (Chem) retired as senior vice president at Xerox in order to found and direct Exergy, where he focused on the application of his work in "thermo-economics" to sea water demineralization. He retired from that position when Exergy was acquired by GE. He and his wife live in Pensacola, FL, in what he humorously called "God's waiting room."

We received no class notes from graduating years 1943-1961; please, let us know your news! Use the link to the questionnaire from http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/alumni.

1962

B.S. Geoffrey E. Dolbear (Chem) reports, "I am still enjoying my second career as a self-employed consultant. This autumn marks 16 years, and it continues to be a great way to apply every bit of chemical knowledge and intuition I picked up as a student and in my 24 years as an industrial chemist. Most of my clients are smaller companies developing new technologies in the energy and fuels areas, but I have occasional forays into other areas (see my web page www.gedolbear.com)." He and his wife, Cathy, have two children and three grandchildren, and live in Diamond Bar, CA.

1963

B.S. Gordon W. Gribble (Chem) has been appointed to a newly-created endowed chair at Dartmouth College, where he is now the Dartmouth Professor of Chemistry. He has been on the faculty there since 1968.

1965

B.S. Stephen F. Johnson (Chem) is a director at Inovant, a subsidiary of Visa, where he manages a distributed processing project for Visa Europe. He writes, "I have never worked in the chemical industry, primarily because I immediately went into the Air Force via the ROTC program and spent four years as a communications officer. However, I have used the scientific skills and knowledge I gained at Berkeley extensively throughout my career." He is married to Elizabeth (Soley) Johnson (see 1966 B.A. Chem). "We both enjoyed our years and learning experiences at Berkeley," writes Stephen. "UCB and chemistry are directly responsible for us being married, since we met there as chemistry students in 1964!"

B.S. William J. Tango (Chem) retired in 2003 as a senior lecturer in physics at the University of Sydney, Australia. He retains an honorary appointment at the university and continues to do research in stellar astrophysics with the Sydney University Stellar Interferometer.

1966

B.A. Elizabeth (Soley) Johnson (Chem) spent 27 years with SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute), doing chemical marketing research and managing several of SRI's world-wide programs. She retired in 1997. She began her career at the Forest Products Research Lab, part of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture, while her husband, Stephen F. Johnson (1965 B.S. Chem), was stationed nearby in the Air Force.

Three alumni named HHMI Investigators

Three college alumni were selected as new Howard Hughes Medical Investigators in March. Linda Hsieh-Wilson (Ph.D. '96, Chem), David Liu (Ph.D. '99, Chem) and Kevan Shokat (Ph.D. '91, Chem) all did their doctoral work with Professor Peter Schultz, who relocated to the Scripps Research Institute in 1999. They join the more than 300 investigators at the HHMI, a nonprofit medical research organization that supports long-term research at the forefront of biomedicine. Hsieh-Wilson, an assistant professor of chemistry at Caltech, combines organic chemistry and neurobiology to study carbohydrate modifications to proteins and their roles in regulating fundamental cellular processes such as transcription and neuronal signaling. Liu, who is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, uses evolutionary principles both to study and manipulate synthetic and biological molecules as well as to create new tools for probing biological systems. Shokat, who is a professor of chemistry at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, has developed a chemical-genetics technique to decipher individual kinases and their cellular signaling networks in order to understand each kinase's role in the body and to learn which of these phosphate-transferring enzymes are good candidates for drug development.

1969

1970

Ph.D. Charles "Chuck" S. Fadley (Chem) received the 2005 Medard W. Welch Award from the American Vacuum Society for his work on "the development of novel techniques based on photoelectron spectroscopy and synchrotron radiation, and their application to the study of the atomic, electronic, and magnetic structure of surfaces and buried interfaces." He was also recognized for his mentoring of young scientists. He is on the physics faculty at UC Davis and is a member of the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

1971

M.S. Tom Koster (Chem) retired this July as assistant vice chancellor at UC Berkeley, where he oversaw space management and capital planning. He played a key role in many major campus projects, including our own Tan Kah Kee Hall, the physical reorganization of the biological sciences, the improvement of the main library and a number of its branches, the development of the campus' seismic plan, and, most recently, the successful capital proposals for the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). He had served Berkeley since 1976 and, before that, had worked for three years in the UC Office of the President.

1974

Ph.D. Ronald M. Baldwin (Chem) is currently a research associate professor and director of positron emission tomography (PET) chemistry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, with an emphasis on CNS and cancer applications. Prior to that, he was on the faculty of Yale University, where he established a radiopharmaceutical research lab in the department of psychiatry in order to investigate neurological and psychiatric conditions by imaging with PET. Before entering academia, he was at Medi-Physics, where he co-invented the brain-imaging agent iofetamine.

1981

B.S. Paul Burke (ChemE) was recalled to active naval duty in the Arabian Gulf at the end of 2004. He is now the senior watch officer in the Navy's 5th Fleet Command Center, working in current operations. He will return to Portland, OR, at the end of this year, where he is plant manager at Kanto Corp. His work in the military has involved oil infrastructure protection, search and rescue, surface and air operations support to carrier battle groups, and support to the Combined Task Force assigned to anti-terrorism. While he has been away, his wife gave birth to a daughter, Leeza. He writes, "I have learned a lot and missed a lot, and am counting the days and hours to my return."

B.S. Colin Christie (ChemE) is president and CEO of MxSecure in Scottsdale, AZ. The company provides medical transcription services. An expert in many aspects of Internet technology, he has had experience with a number of technology management companies, including Motorola, Philips Semiconductors, and Symmetricom, Inc., where he directed the operations of their semiconductor unit.

1982

B.S. Dan Tow (ChemE), who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1986, works as an independent database-tuning consultant and has written a book, SQL Tuning, published by O'Reilly. He and his wife, Lois, live in Palo Alto and have two children, ages 3 and 7.

1986

Postdoc. After 10 years on the chemistry faculty at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, Hans-Joachim Knölker (Chem) became a professor of organic chemistry at the Dresden University of Technology in 2001.

1991

Postdoc. Stephen P. Fodor (Chem) received the American Association for Clinical Chemistry's Edwin F. Ullman Award in recognition of his contributions to advancing the technology of clinical laboratory science. Fodor is chairman and CEO of Affymetrix, Inc., a biotech firm in Santa Clara, CA, that develops microarrays on a chip, and is a member of the college's Advisory Board.

1992

M.S. Francis R. Carandang (ChemE), a medical officer in the U.S. Air Force, was recently assigned to Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany as one of two general pediatricians on staff. He serves the joint communities of Ramstein Air Base and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

1995

Postdoc. Stacey Lowery Bretz (Chem) has taken a position in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at Miami University in Oxford, OH, where she is spearheading the Ph.D. program in chemistry education research. She did her postdoc with Professor Angy Stacy.

1997

B.S. Leopoldo F. Castro (ChemE) graduated in 2004 from Northwestern University, where he received his M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management and his M.E.M. from the McCormick School of Engineering. He works as an associate consultant at A.T. Kearney in Chicago, IL.

1999

B.S. Valerie (Grill) Florez (ChemE) married John Florez in October 2003 and became a licensed professional engineer in the state of Texas in June 2004. This summer she relocated from Houston to Chicago.

B.S. Stephanie Grancharov (Chem) returned in July from a 10-month Fulbright Fellowship in Potsdam and Berlin, where she worked at the Max Planck Institute studying magnetic nanoparticle synthesis for MRI use. Upon her return, she defended her thesis and received her Ph.D. from Columbia in September 2005. In February 2006, she plans to start work as a management consultant at McKinsey and Co. in New York.

2000

Ph.D. After completing a postdoc at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Ruben L. Gonzalez, Jr. (Chem) will become an assistant professor of chemistry at Columbia University in January 2006.

Ph.D. Patrick "Pat" R. L. Malenfant (Chem) and his wife, Nathalie (a former member of the Berkeley chemistry department staff), are happy to report the birth of a daughter, Marcelle Ghislaine, on June 13, 2005. She joins her older sister, Pascale. Patrick works as an organic chemist for GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY.

2001

B.S. Sunil K. Aggarwal (Chem) is in his fourth year of the M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, where his doctoral work focuses on medical geography. He is president of the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.

2003

B.S. Jennifer A. Cruz (ChemE) married Steven Rea on August 20, 2005. The couple is expecting their first child. Jennifer is a graduate student in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University. Steven spent his junior year at Berkeley on the Education Abroad program working with Prof. Marcin Majda in chemistry, before going on to receive his masters in chemistry at the University of Leeds, UK.

2004

B.S. Nicole A. Alaniz (ChemE) is an accidental release prevention engineer for the Contra Costa County hazardous materials department.

B.S. Kristine M. Del Rosario (ChemE) is a process engineer with ExxonMobil in Torrance, CA.

B.S. After interning at Genentech, Anh H. Pham (Chem) began the USC-Caltech joint M.D./Ph.D. program this fall.

B.S. After working as a research assistant in chemistry at Ohio State University, Chun L. Yu (Chem) began his graduate studies in chemistry this fall at Harvard University.

Ph.D. John P. Evans (Chem) is a postdoctoral researcher in mechanistic enzymology in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UC San Francisco.

Postdoc Heiner Ebel (Chem) is lab head in medicinal chemistry in the department of chemical research at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG in Biberach, Germany.

2005

B.S. Kevin W. Lor (ChemBio) is a graduate student at the University of Washington School of Pharmacy.

B.S. Michelle (Eastlack) Dyer (ChemE/MSE) is a process engineer in yield enhancement at Texas Instruments. She recently married Phillip Graham Dyer, Jr.

B.S. Kate (Gropp) Galloway (ChemE) married fellow Berkeley alum Gordie Galloway (Business Õ03) this summer. The couple has moved to Pasadena, where Kate began graduate school at Caltech.

B.S. Andrew G. Lee (ChemE) began graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, this fall. He spent the summer visiting China, then taking the Trans-Siberian Railway from Beijing to Moscow, where he embarked on a trip through Europe.

B.S. Juan R. McKinney (ChemE) is a process engineer at ExxonMobil in Torrance, CA.

B.S. Jodie Nygaard (ChemE) began a master's program at UCLA this fall with a full scholarship from outside sources.

B.S. Andrew Pascall (ChemE) married fellow Berkeley alum Lainie Chaney in March 2005.

B.S. Paul M. Zimmerman (ChemE) is in the doctoral program in chemical engineering at Stanford University.

B.S. Gregory D. Hirson (Chem) celebrated his graduation by traveling through Europe this summer.

B.S. Carlin Hsueh (Chem) wrote last spring that she has done research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the epitaxial growth of GaN and InGaN quantum dots with Professor of Chemistry Stephen Leone. She has also researched nanostructures' linear and nonlinear optical characterization in Professor Richard Saykally's group. Active in her sorority's activities, she served as the recording secretary and administrative vice president of Berkeley's Gamma Phi Beta Sorority.

Ph.D. Jonathan L. Eide (ChemE) has taken a position as a consultant at Bain and Co. in San Francisco.

Ph.D. Mark A. Nierode (ChemE) is a research engineer with ExxonMobil. He lives in Houston, TX.

Ph.D. Analeah O'Neill (ChemE) is a health care consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in San Francisco.

Ph.D. Brian F. Pfleger (ChemE) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. He is working with David H. Sherman, studying the signaling of antibiotic production in S. coelicolor.

Ph.D. Kai Wang (ChemE) began work this October as a research analyst in R&D at the CNA Corp. in Alexandria, VA.

Ph.D. Ming Chen Hammond (Chem) is a postdoc in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at
Yale University.

Ph.D. Cleo M. Salisbury (Chem) is a postdoc at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA.

Ph.D. Laurie B. Schenkel (Chem) is working as a medicinal chemist at Amgen in Cambridge, MA.

Postdoc. Shuwli Yang (ChemE) is a senior staff engineer and scientist in R&D at Honeywell International in Buffalo, NY. His work focuses on the fluorocarbon process.

Postdoc. Shawn C. Burdette (Chem) is an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

Postdoc. Anderson L. Marsh (Chem) recently started as an assistant professor of chemistry at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, PA.

Postdoc. Rebecca T. Ruck (Chem) landed a position as a senior research chemist in process research at Merck in Rahway, NJ.

Postdoc. Xiaodong M. Shi (Chem) is an assistant professor of chemistry at West Virginia University in Morgantown.

Postdoc. Neal A. Yakelis (Chem) is an assistant professor of chemistry at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA.

Classnotes

by Rebecca Egger

1940