Alumni

Caring in the Wild

November 6, 2013 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

Starting this June, Nikki Becich ’13 launched into a year-long journey to pursue her passion for conservation medicine. Over the summer, Becich cared for injured birds at the hospital of the National Aviary, before venturing out on a career-building trip to work and learn at wildlife centers throughout Latin America.

FINDING HER PASSION
Becich had several jobs and internships in zoo and avian medicine under her belt by the time she graduated. She knew she wanted more experience, and found a great match in the National Aviary, an indoor zoo home to more than 500 birds in Pittsburgh, Penn., and where she first volunteered in middle school.

At the Aviary, Becich worked with the center’s two veterinarians as a hospital intern. She helped them with surgeries, medications and daily caretaking, looking after birds brought in from the wild along with the zoo’s regular residents on exhibit.

Becich went into the internship with a focus on treating captive animals, particularly species that are endangered or extinct in the wild. Looking back, she says the experience inspired her to consider the bigger issue of environmental protection.

birdhold GETTING THE BIG PICTURE
Knowing she needed more hands-on training, Becich spent part of her senior year mapping out a trip to practice wildlife care at nature preserves in Central and South America. After graduation, she set off.

“I planned out the trip to apply for the Watson Fellowship, and when I didn`t get that, I decided to blow my savings and do it anyway, because it`s incredibly important for my future career to work and learn abroad,” she explains.

Becich started the first leg of her trek in September as a volunteer at an ecological center in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. She also is pitching in at Bioparque Amaru Zoo, developing preventative medicine protocols for a new veterinary clinic. In coming months she will intern at wildlife sanctuaries in Peru and Guatemala, helping to rehabilitate injured animals and promote local conservation projects. Becich says her connections from earlier programs were essential in helping her network and make contacts overseas.

She aims to learn first-hand how communities and organizations in the region are coping with threats like oil drilling, which, she says, can contribute to pollution and deforestation. “Meeting real people and seeing for myself what is happening has been extremely informative, but an emotional roller coaster,” Becich says, speaking from Ecuador. “What’s encouraging to see is how there is still protected forest here. We have time. We need serious action, though, and fast, if it`s going to survive.”

THE PATH FROM POMONA
A biology major, Becich mentions Professor Nina Karnovsky as an important mentor who “encouraged me to pursue my love for birds and go after work in conservation.“ She also points to the influence of her semester abroad in a tropical ecology program in Costa Rica, which shifted her focus toward environmental protection.

At Pomona, Becich explored her interests in other parts of the community. She got involved in caring for chickens at the Organic Farm, even raising a few chicks in her dorm in Harwood one year until they were ready to join the flock.

Becich is already looking ahead to her vision of combining medical practice with international research in ecology, with plans to attend veterinary school in the U.S. “I really came into my life’s passion this summer. I am so excited to be here doing what I am doing, and I am so grateful to Pomona for helping to get me there.”

Alumni Board Welcomes New Members

November 6, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Brenda Peirce Barnett ’92
Lives in: Carlsbad, Calif.
Education: Barnett majored in psychology at Pomona and has since taken classes in nutrition and wellness.
Career: Barnett is currently focused on raising her two girls. She spends her free time playing tennis and occasionally finds time to teach tennis to elementary aged children.
Alumni involvement: Barnett has been involved in the planning of her class reunions, as both a fundraiser and event organizer. On the tennis team during her Pomona days, she has worked closely with athletics staff to organize events for Sagehen tennis alumni. She also has served as an Alumni Council representative. Community involvement: Barnett serves as a volunteer in her local elementary school’s parent teacher organization. She recently stepped down from the executive board, and has served as art docent coordinator, treasurer and president.

Paul Farmer ’92
Lives in: Salinas, Calif.
Education: Farmer majored in economics and spent a semester studying abroad in Ecuador. He served as an ASPC senator during his senior year and worked for the Harvey Mudd College Upward Bound program during all four years at Pomona. After graduation, Paul spent a year traveling in South America with Mel Ramos ’95. Career: Farmer has lived and worked in Puerto Rico and Mexico City. He also has worked in Silicon Valley (for Intel and a dotcom), and founded a local computer training company in 2002 which is still in operation. Since 2012, he has been the CEO of the Salinas Valley Chamber of Commerce.
Community involvement: Farmer has volunteered for many local organizations, and served as the state president for the California Jaycees, a nonprofit leadership training and civic organization for young professionals.

Peggy Schuler Olson ’61
Lives in: San Marino, Calif.
Education: Olson majored in psychology at Pomona. She was in the Mortar Board honor society, and was a four year member of the Women’s Glee Club. She also served terms as director and moderator for the Associated College church choir. She is married to Marty Olson ’60.
Career: Olson has worked as a vocal soloist in Presbyterian and Christian Scientist churches.
Alumni involvement: Olson has served a term on the Alumni Council, and has been a committee and fundraising chair for several of her alumni class reunions.
Community involvement: She has volunteered as a member of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Committee for the L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra. Olson has served a term as the president of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, Los Angeles (PFLAG-LA) and her local PTA, where she was a long-time member and volunteer. She has also been involved in musical theatre, playing the lead in a number of musical productions in the South Bay area of Southern California.

Bruce Prestwich ’55
Lives in: Prestwich was born in Idaho and raised in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Calif. He lived in the greater Los Angeles area, the Bay Area and Carlsbad, Calif., before recently moving to Mt. San Antonio Gardens in Pomona.
Education: B.A., economics, Pomona College. Prestwich sang in Men’s Glee Club for four years, serving as the club’s business manager. Along with playing on the football team, he also served as President of Ghosts. Prestwich was named to the Sagehen Athletic Hall of Fame in 1975. He met his wife, Carolyn Tranquada Prestwich ’54, at Pomona.
Career: Worked in sales and marketing management for IBM in aerospace and public sectors.
Alumni involvement: He served on the Alumni Council and as an alumni area representative, and has been involved in fundraising for the College over the years. He has also interviewed prospective students for admissions as an alumni representative.

Roger Reinke ’51
Lives in: Tustin, Calif.
Education: A physical education major at Pomona, Reinke went on to earn an M.A. in education from Claremont Graduate University. At Pomona he served as vice president of the Associated Male Students and was a member of Ghosts, the service honor society, and Kappa Delta fraternity. He also played football and ran track. He is married to Joyce Reinke ’51.
Career: Reinke served as an officer in the U.S. Navy from 1953 to 1956. He spent 34 years in elementary education as a teacher and administrator in Anaheim, Calif.
Alumni involvement: In 1956, Reinke was selected for the Pomona Athletic Hall of Fame in football and track and was a member of the Athletic Hall of Fame selection committee for several years. He served as an alumni rep in fundraising efforts for the Robert Strehle ’19 and Earl “Fuzz” Merritt ’25 Fund. His eldest son, Don, graduated from Pomona in 1980, and his grandson, Jim, is in the Class of 2014.
Community involvement: Reinke has volunteered as a naturalist with the Upper Newport Bay Ecological Reserve, where he taught new volunteers about the botany of the bay. His hobbies include nature photography.

Tech vs. Stress

July 11, 2013 by Emma Paine '14 Comments Off

bandu1

A few months after graduating from Pomona, Joel Fishbein ’12 entered the Boston startup world. As a research engineer at Neumitra, founded by a neuroscientist and engineers in the neurotechnology class at MIT, Fishbein is helping to develop a wrist-based biosensor called bandu that will help to measure and manage stress levels.

PURSUING HIS INTERESTS

Fishbein headed for Boston hoping to find something he really wanted to do. “People say a lot of really nice things about Silicon Valley, but I’ve found that Boston has a really thriving start up scene too, especially in a lot of the fields I care about like healthcare.”

Once there, he started networking. He helped bring together a technology “Meetup” group in Boston, run through the online service that helps people organize themselves around common interests. At one of the meetings, Neumitra founder Robert Goldberg, a neuroscientist by training, came to give a talk. “He was speaking about the technology he was developing and it seemed like such a perfect marriage of the types of things I had been working on at Pomona in linguistics and cognitive science and psychology,” says Fishbein.

So Fishbein contacted Goldberg after the meeting. “One of the things I’ve learned since graduating is that, especially in the startup world, it is acceptable and even encouraged that when you think that you have something to offer someone, just email or talk to people and make the connection yourself.” He landed the job.

THE BIOWATCH

Fishbein hopes that the biowatch can make a substantial positive impact, especially for people who suffer from anxiety disorders or posttraumatic stress disorder. “It works by monitoring and managing stress by recording physiological indicators of stress such as skin conductance,” Fishbein says. Then, personalized stress management help can be delivered over devices like the iPhone.

For example, if the biowatch senses stress levels, it may advise its owner to listen to music or participate in some other activity that has been shown to reduce the owner’s stress.

Fishbein says that when asked what he does, he explains to people that he is working on a technology to reduce stress. “About 75 percent of the time, the response I get is ‘I could really use that!’”

POMONA IN PRACTICE

At Neumitra, Fishbein researches how best to apply the company’s stress-reducing technology to such groups as veterans. Then, he works to develop some of the capabilities that will make the treatment more effective. “I really do think about the types of things I learned at Pomona every day here,” he says.

A linguistics and cognitive science major, Fishbein found his path after taking an intro psychology course his freshman year. He credits Pomona professors such as Deborah Burke and the late Bill Banks with encouraging him to continue cognitive science, linguistics and psychology coursework. Fishbein’s studies culminated in a thesis on language processing under the guidance of professors Jesse Harris and Meredith Landman.

“His thesis was exemplary and showed me that he would hit the ground running and with minimal need for traditional management,” says Goldberg, Neumitra’s founder.

Adds Fishbein: “A lot of what I do here is scientific writing—reading journal articles and synthesizing them and presenting them—so it was important to show that I was able to work on a project like the thesis where I was doing creative thinking and the hard work of the writing and research, too.”

—Emma Paine ’14

A Different Groove

June 26, 2013 by Rachel Stewart Johnson '96 Comments Off

Tae Phoenix ’05

Seattle singer and songwriter Tae Phoenix ’05 long dreamed of pursuing a career in music. For years she hesitated, put off by the insidious attitudes of industry insiders. “A lot of people said, ‘God I love your voice; you’re such a great musician. Get your nose fixed and lose 20 pounds and we’ll talk.’”

It wasn’t until her late 20s that she decided to quit her corporate job and pursue music full time. Since the release last year of her debut “handcrafted acoustic pop” album, Rise, Phoenix has enjoyed a lengthy string of weekends booked with live performances. She’s happy doing things her own way. “In terms of being able to make the art you want to make—get it out there the way you want to—and really sell your product and sell yourself as opposed to what a label wants to turn you into, it’s fantastic, and I would not ever go back to the way things were,” says Phoenix, who was known as Teresa Valdez-Klein during her time at Pomona.

The old industry model saw artists pursue a contract with a record label. Now, the landscape includes more opportunities to find an audience. The catch? Few are lucrative. Artists can self-finance an album—what Phoenix dubbed a “musical calling card.” They can put their music on YouTube. They can build up a fan base with live gigs. They can sell music via websites and apps such as CDBaby and iTunes, often one 99-cent single at a time. One thing hasn’t changed: the lifestyle requires grit.

“There’s a lot of rejection, there’s a lot of people who take more than they give, there’s a lot of emotional struggle,” Phoenix says. “Carving your own path, no matter what it is that you’re doing—if you’re trying to establish a new industry, if you’re trying to start a new company, if you’re trying to do anything outside of the prescribed formula that we’re given for life—can be really brutal. You fail more, you hurt more, you bleed more, you get your heart broken more.”

Allison Tartalia ’96

Allison Tartalia ’96 hasn’t followed formula. A theatre major, she left Pomona believing she would pursue a career on the stage. It was work in musical theatre that led her to bridge two longtime interests. The New York singer and songwriter has never pursued a career outside the arts, instead innovating ways to make a living with what she termed a “freelance livelihood.”

She maintains a studio of piano students and licenses a curriculum to teach music classes to young children. She was nominated for a regional Emmy award in 2010 for her musical contribution to a PBS documentary and released Sweet and Vicious, a short album, the following year. She performs regularly, including as part of an ensemble in a Joni Mitchell tribute show.

“It used to be that what you hoped to get was a label deal,” says Tartalia. “Now to some degree it’s not as necessary because you have more direct access to audiences than you did 20 years ago. There’s not necessarily enough financial benefit to sacrificing what you have to sacrifice to justify signing with a label.”

Jason Mandell ’01 did sign an old-fashioned deal. He met with early success in his music career, while still on campus working toward a degree in English. His Claremont band, Think of England, included then-Dean of Campus Life Matt Taylor on the drums. The group first won the nationwide Pantene Pro-Voice contest and then gained national interest by opening for pop star Jewel and others. The attention Mandell garnered helped lead him and a later partner to ink a deal known as a publishing contract, which provided funds to support future songwriting. He had enough income to focus exclusively on creating music for a year.

It was a rare opportunity for any artist. “There was some really awesome stuff happening right out of the gate,” Mandell recalls. But then, the realities of a cutthroat business meant that his subsequent work couldn’t gain a lasting foothold. The company that signed him never recouped its expenses with sales of his work—and still holds the rights to any gains from that music. Mandell and his partner split. He drifted into work with new collaborators, and today performs with the Los Angeles country-folk band The Coals, which releases its album A Happy Animal this summer.

Mandell is uncertain that the industry’s metamorphosis has enriched its output. “I’m not sure that the alleged democratization of music is yielding superior product. I think the opposite,” he says. The audience has changed as well. “The attention span is certainly decreasing. I’m not sure that benefits anybody.”

Mandell laughs, noting that perhaps he sounds like a “curmudgeon” at this point in his career. He remembers a different era. “No one buys music,” he says. “When I grew up, there were two ways to listen to music. You happen to hear it on the radio or you buy it. That’s certainly not the case anymore.”

Mandell pointed to a goal for musicians today: licensing deals. Placing one’s work in film, television and other media can be a boon. His “I Wanted a Lover, I Needed a Friend” appears in the video game Silent Hill: Downpour. Tartalia’s “Ran” was used in the reality television show Dance Moms. Although these steps raise audience interest, income can still be elusive. Mandell’s tune is controlled by his old label. Tartalia receives a respectable 63 cents on the dollar for sales of her single on iTunes, but earns only fractions of a cent from websites like Spotify when fans stream her music from there.

After years of focus on his music career, Mandell decided to pursue what he calls “a proper day job” and now serves as director of public affairs for the United Way of Greater Los Angeles. “Looking back, the truth is I’ve had a lot of experiences that I feel really fortunate to have had and maybe never really expected to have,” he says. “You know it’s fickle and you know it’s difficult. I enjoy it more now because I expect even less of it, financially speaking. It’s really freeing.”

I Wonder What They’re Thinking

March 28, 2013 by Mark Wood Comments Off

“I wonder what they’re thinking.”

We’ve all had those moments with the animals in our lives—whether it’s a cocker spaniel at our feet or a baboon in the zoo. Moments when we’ve seen something that rings a bell. Something telling in their eyes or their body language or their actions. A playful hop. A thoughtful look. A slump of sadness. Something our human minds, so adept at mind-reading among our own species, can almost latch onto as a sign of purpose or emotion or contemplation. At such moments, it seems to be simple common sense that other animals think and feel in ways that are both strange to us and, at the same time, strikingly familiar.

And yet, during much of the 20th century, with the ascendancy of behaviorism in both human and animal psychology, it was strictly taboo in most scientific circles to speak of animals having minds or feelings. The very idea was mocked as anthropomorphic thinking—that sentimental human tendency to project our own motivations onto things around us, from the balky station wagon that won’t start to those vicious weeds that invade our garden each summer. Even Darwin, who, in his time, speculated freely about the cognitive abilities of all sorts of animals, from lizards to apes, was considered naive in this regard. And so, for much of the century, science moved forward in the unshakable conviction that not only was animal thought and emotion unknowable; it was out of the question. Animals did not love.They did not suffer. They did not think or plan or communicate in meaningful ways.

Then, in 1960, along came Jane Goodall, a non-scientist who didn’t know any better, and her years of careful observation and record-keeping among the scheming, tool-wielding, communicating, socially obsessed chimpanzees with whom she lived was instrumental in starting a revolution. That revolution—still somewhat controversial in scientific circles—is slowly but surely opening to scientific discovery an amazing world of animal cognition, offering tantalizing glimpses into the thoughts and feelings of the creatures with whom we share this world.

For Virginia Morell ’71, this has clearly been a subject of fascination for many years, and her new book is a joyous, globe-trotting trek through the surprising and not so surprising intelligentsia of the animal kingdom. Along the way, we meet a number of the scientists who have risked their reputations and dedicated their lives to finding rigorously scientific ways of breaking through the barrier of ignorance surrounding non-human cognition. How they’ve done so is as interesting a story, in many ways, as what they’ve discovered.

But the real stars of this book are the animals themselves, who sometimes seem as easy to understand as old friends, sometimes demonstrate abilities that are so startling that they almost give us goosebumps, and sometimes reveal attitudes and motivations that are so alien that we recoil.

Morell starts her journey as far from the human branch of the evolutionary tree as possible, with a creature the size of a printed hyphen—a rock ant—and works her way closer, upping the cognitive ante each step along the way.

There’s the archerfish that has to learn and apply some fairly advanced mental calculations in order to shoot a bug off a branch with an intense little jet of water (and also seems to take special pleasure in shooting lab technicians in the eye).

There’s Alex, the African gray parrot who not only seemed to have a clear grasp of the meaning of the many words in his vocabulary, but used them to describe concepts that were once thought far beyond the understanding of non-human brains. Here’s an example:

… Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye.

“What’s same?” she asked. She looked at Alex nose-to-beak.

Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened. “Co-lor.”

“What’s different?” Pepperberg asked.

“Shape,” Alex said. Since he lacked lips and only slightly opened his beak to reply, the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words— and what can only be called the thoughts—were entirely his.

One of my own favorite moments in the book is a bit later in the chapter, when Alex is listening to another young parrot garbling a new word it’s trying to learn and bursts out with: “Talk clearly! Talk clearly!”

Then, there are the wild parrotlets in Venezuela whose calls are being translated, bit by bit, during a study that has gone on for decades. Each bird, it seems, has a signature call that it uses to identify itself and that other birds use to call to it. That signature is inflected slightly differently based upon the relationship between the caller and the callee. Not only that, evidence is accumulating to indicate that this signature call is given to each bird by its parents. It’s a process that sounds spookily familiar to any parent who ever named a newborn.

The book is full of such intriguing details, offering glimpses of amazing possibilities, many of which are still beyond the confirmation of science, but maybe not forever. The names of the chapters are enough to give you an idea: “The Laughter of Rats,” “Elephant Memories,” “The Educated Dolphin” and “What it Means to be a Chimpanzee.”

It’s telling, by the way, that Morell chose to end her trek through animal intelligence not with humanity’s closest relative, the chimpanzee, but with its closest friend and partner. After all, humans and chimpanzees have had millionsof years to evolve apart. Humans and dogs, on the other hand, have had many millennia—maybe forty or more—to evolve together to the point that it’s not fantastic at all to say that we can read each other’s minds.

For those of us whose intuitions have always shouted that animals have thoughts and feelings that are just as real and just as intense and just as meaningful as our own, this book is both a vindication and a joy ride, but it’s also an ethical challenge. After all, the more you know about how animals think and feel, the more you can identify with them and the harder it becomes to ignore their plight. Morell’s epilogue is a cautionary note that reflects a sense of sadness born of many years as a science writer, watching species after species vanish forever from the earth. But there’s also a note of hope. Understanding how animals think, she suggests, can help us eliminate unintended consequences. For instance, understanding that elephant herds depend upon senior matriarchs to keep youngsters from going rogue may help to eliminate the damaging practice of thinning herds by killing off the oldest animals.

It’s true that the science in this book is still on the bleeding edge, much of it controversial, and that applying rigor to this field is both necessary and exceedingly difficult. But in the final analysis, it’s hard to believe there’s no connection between the eagerness with which so many people embraced—and continue to embrace—the idea that animal cognition is a chimera and the vested interest that the human race holds in its sense of exceptionalism and its dominance over the animal world. With that in mind, though I found the stories in this book uplifting and compelling, I also found Morell’s pessimism more convincing than her thin reeds of hope.

Massachusetts Miracle

March 28, 2013 by Malcolm Fleschner '91 Comments Off

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

photo by John Solem / UMass Amherst

This iconic line from Jaws occurred to MIT Senior Scientist Jeremy Kepner ’91 on the day in 2004 when he realized that the modest new data center he and his team were planning to construct in converted lab space in the Boston area wouldn’t be large enough to handle the school’s ever-growing computing needs.

Roy Scheider’s police chief character never did get that bigger boat. Kepner, though, succeeded in building a much larger data center—specifically, the recently opened Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), a nine-acre, $100 million supercomputing complex constructed alongside the Connecticut River in Holyoke, Mass.

Often larger than city blocks, data centers house countless racks of computer servers that handle the exabytes (1 followed by 18 zeros) of data generated by all of our Facebook status updates, tweets, credit card purchases, blog posts, song downloads and the trillions of other data bits that travel the Internet. Tens of thousands of data centers operate around the globe, with the largest using as much electricity as a small city.

To handle MIT’s long-term computing needs, which involve processing everything from astronomical images and climate data to plant, animal and bacteria DNA sets and particle accelerator data, Kepner realized the university would need a data center 10 times the size of the facility under consideration. A quick calculation of the electrical costs (as much as $20 million per year) and the environmental impact (as much CO2 released per year as is typically emitted by a town of 10,000) forced him to think bigger—and greener. Spending the next year researching different approaches to power generation, Kepner traveled to Western Massachusetts and the post-industrial town of Holyoke, where he chatted with the local hydroelectric plant’s operator and supervisor. He discovered that a hydroelectric dam, once built, has very low costs because turbines last for decades and maintenance costs are minimal. Other benefits Holyoke offered included available land and a dire need for urban renewal. Convinced that hydroelectric was both the greenest and least expensive option, Kepner returned to MIT intent on persuading his fellow committee members to do something unprecedented: locate the university’s new data center in an old mill town 90 miles away.

What followed was a five-year journey of persuasion and coalition-building that eventually brought together Harvard, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts and Northeastern University, all of which faced similar challenges in handling their ever-growing data processing needs.

Also on board were Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who saw the political advantage in locating a data center in economically depressed Holyoke, and corporate sponsors EMC and Cisco Systems. Executive Director John T. Goodhue credits Kepner with both the insight and the persistence that helped make the MCHPCC a reality. “Like many great ideas, the MGHPCC has many fathers—and mothers!,” he says, “but Jeremy was truly there at the beginning, when he made the first scouting visit to Holyoke in 2004 and was part of the original study group that laid out the ideas that led to the creation of the MGHPCC.”

The 90,000-square-foot building, which was constructed on the site of an old textile mill, officially opened Nov. 16. The center is powered by water from the Connecticut River, while construction materials were culled from buildings that were demolished to make way for the MGHPCC. And while a typical data center consumes nine megawatts of power just to cool the sea of electrical equipment, the MGHPCC will cut that figure to just three megawatts, in part by circulating chilly New England air through the building during winter months.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Gov. Patrick said the facility serves as an economic development model for the state and the nation. Kepner, meanwhile, sees the MGHPCC as an example of how scientists can take the lead in working to counteract the potentially devastating impact of climate change.

“The issues associated with global warming are very technical, which makes it difficult to act decisively as a society,” he says. “… those of us in the supercomputing community who understand the environmental impact of supercomputers need to come up with innovative solutions to those problems and see them implemented.”

On a personal level, Kepner says the most rewarding moment came during a visit to Western Massachusetts with his wife, Alix Sholl ’90, and 11-year-old daughter Jemma a few weeks before the ribbon cutting. “On the way out of town I suggested to Alix that we go by the site so she could see it for the first time,” he says. “We drove past a warehouse and there it was, shining in the sun between the two canals. Alix was speechless. Eventually she turned to me and said, ‘I’m so proud of you!’ and gave me a big kiss.”

New on the alumni board

November 14, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Onetta Brooks ’74

Lives in: She is in Fairfax, Va., through May serving as an interim pastor. Education: B.A., mathematics, Pomona College; master of public administration, Cal State Dominguez; master of divinity, San Francisco Theological Seminary/Southern California.

Career: Ordained in 2007 in the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) and is serving as the interim pastor of MCC of Northern Virginia. She worked for 34 years as program manager/systems engineer/software engineer/programmer analyst at aerospace and defense companies such as Rockwell, Hughes, Logicon and Northrop Grumman.

Alumni involvement: Served on the Alumni Council from 1986 to 1989; after she was inducted into the Pomona–Pitzer Athletic Hall of Fame (volleyball and basketball) in 1984, she served on the Athletic Hall of Fame Committee for several years; supported and participated in activities of the Office of Black Student Affairs over the years; participated in a few alumni phone-a-thons.

Community involvement: Brooks serves on the MCC Governing Board through 2016 and supports various social justice groups in the Los Angeles and in the D.C. metro/Fairfax County areas.

Adam Conner-Simons ’08

Lives in: Cambridge, Mass.

Education: Conner-Simons majored in psychology. He was part of the campus band the Fuzz, was involved in The Student Life newspaper and the gender-discussion group Male Dissent and served as a student representative for the Admissions Committee.

Career: As a student, Conner-Simons did research for Psychology Professor Patricia Smiley, and worked at the Career Development Office and the Office of Communications. He is communications coordinator at Brandeis International Business School at Brandeis University.

Alumni involvement: Conner-Simons writes regularly for Pomona College Magazine, and has helped organize Boston-area alumni events and served as an alumni ad- missions interviewer.

Bill Ireland ’81

Lives in: Venice Beach, Calif. Education: Ireland majored in history, before attending UCLA Law School. He played water polo and swam at Pomona and is in the Athletic Hall of Fame. He met his wife, Ellen Brand Ireland ’82, when he was visiting her roommate, Caren Carlisle Hare ’82, who was a freshman swimmer.

Career: Ireland is a partner, specializing in commercial litigation, at Haight Brown and Bonesteel, a Los Angeles-based law firm. One of the cases he worked on re- sulted in two published books, Greenmail by Norma Zager and Parts Per Million by Joy Horowitz. Ireland competes in open water swimming competitions, which is mostly an excuse for trips to places with warm water.

Alumni involvement: Ireland was on the Alumni Council from 1987 to 1996. After working with events, and volunteering for the 90th and 100th anniversary celebrations, he was president of the Alumni Association for 1993-1994. Later, Ireland served as an alumni volunteer on the Board of Trustees Nominating Committee. Ellen and he have both repeatedly chaired their class reunions. Bill was also an Alumni Admissions volunteer. Community involvement: Bill and Ellen have been involved with their local Presbyterian church. Bill has been a trustee, and an elder, as well as clerk of the Presbytery Judicial Commission for the Presbytery of the Pacific. Bill also has been an officer and board member for the governing board and the foundation for Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian camp and conference center in Abiquiu, N.M.

Kayla McCulley ’09

Lives in: Amherst, Mass.

Education: A Pomona double major in international relations and French, McCulley is working toward her M.B.A. and master’s in sport management at the University of Massachusetts. At Pomona, McCulley was a four-year member and senior co-captain of the lacrosse team and was active with the European Union Center of California.

Career: After graduation McCulley departed for Europe, first to Brussels as an intern with the U.S. Mission to NATO and then to Switzerland as a Fulbright scholar. Since then, McCulley has pursued her passion for sports with positions at the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Octagon and the Ivy Sports Symposium. She is a frequent contributor to national media outlets such as espnW, Women Talk Sports and The Business of College Sports.

Alumni involvement: McCulley serves as an alumni admissions volunteer in the liberal arts college hotbed that is Western Massachusetts, enticing would-be Williams/Amherst/Mount Holyoke students to head west and become proud Sagehens.

Bulletin Board

November 13, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Alumni Weekend May 2–5, 2013

What do you call 1,500 Sagehens flocking together for four days of revelry? Alumni Weekend! Please make your calendars for May 2–5, 2013—especially class years ending in ’3 or ’8. This is Pomona’s 125th anniversary year, so we will be celebrating our shared history while looking ahead to the future. Start on Thursday evening by dining with current students. Attend classes, “Daring Minds” lectures, and academic department open houses on Friday. Enjoy the Parade of Classes, Wash Party and your class reunion dinner on Saturday. Sip champagne in the beauty of the Richardson Garden on Sunday. For more details, visit www.pomona.edu/alumniweekend.

Travel Study:

Galapagos Cruise With Professor of Biology and Associate Dean Jonathan Wright August 3–12, 2013 Join Professor Jonathan Wright on his third trip to the Galapagos with Pomona travelers. You will visit a place where animals live without fear of humans and enjoy close en- counters with giant tortoises, sea lions, marine, land iguanas and Darwin’s finches. You will also be joined by a Lindblad-National Geographic certified photo instructor.

Coming in 2014:

Walking Tour of Sicily with History Professor Ken Wolf

Land of the Ice Bears/Arctic Svalbard with Biology Professor Nina Karnovsky

For more information about these or any of our other trips, please contact the Pomona College Alumni Office at (909) 621-8110 or alumni@pomona.edu.

Reflecting on Change

November 13, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Susanne Garvey ’74 came to Pomona at the inspiration of her grandmother, Madeline Willard Garvey, Class of 1911, who spoke with awe of the atmosphere of cooperation and commitment to learning.

Susanne wanted those things, too. At Pomona, she embraced the life of the mind, engaging in those deep late-night conversations, and finding “just the right mix of serious study and social life.” She was an English major—Phi Beta Kappa and Mortar Board—who had many friends in the sciences. She served as arts and culture editor for The Student Life, and also took modern dance classes from Professor Jeannette Hypes, performing several times in her dance troupe. She soaked up everything she could from the small liberal arts college atmosphere.

Then came senior year. Her first semester, spent studying abroad in England, was amazing. Coming back to Pomona for the final semester, though, was a letdown, with the campus now seeming too cloistered at a time before Pomona of- fered the breadth of summer research, community service and internship

So, after a year back home in Menlo Park, Calif., working at an antiquarian bookstore, she was off to earn her master’s at the University of Virginia. Garvey was part of the small percentage of master’s students accepted to stay on and pursue a Ph.D.; but when it came to dissertation time, she realized she was going to have to focus on something very narrow. She decided against that path.

Garvey did remain in the realm of education, though. Her next stop was the U.K., where she spent a year organ- izing a college-level semester abroad program—the very program she had participated in as a Pomona student. Then, Garvey moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked for a semester-in-Washington program before becoming director of development for MATHCOUNTS and National Engineers Week, STEM programs serving elementary and secondary school students across the U.S.

For the last two decades, Garvey has been director of external affairs for the D.C.-based Carnegie Institution for Science. Part of her work takes her to the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, which have historic ties to the Mount Wilson Observatory—and that connection brought her back into contact with Pomona nearly a decade ago.

Carnegie astronomers from Pasadena were invited to give guest seminars at Pomona for advanced astrophysics classes. That led to Pomona and Harvey Mudd students doing internships working with Carnegie’s astronomers. And that, in turn, led Garvey to meet three Pomona student interns.

“They were everything that I remembered that was good about Pomona,” Garvey says. “They were smart … relaxed and interesting. I thought ‘what an amazing place Pomona still must be to produce students like these.’”

When Garvey was invited to serve on the alumni council a few years later, she readily accepted. She didn’t expect to become president. “I don’t have an agenda,” she says, though upon further thought, she adds, “I do have a theme— English majors have themes— ‘Reflecting on Change.’”

Garvey notes that before she joined the alumni council, she hadn’t been back to Pomona in decades, and she was impressed with all the changes in terms of opportunities for internships, research and travel, as well as the physical improve- ments to the campus. “I just felt that everything was better,” says Garvey, who, in a sense, is getting an extended re-do of that last semester of senior year.

Sewing Comfort

November 13, 2012 by Sally James '77 Comments Off

When Karen Gerstenberger ’81 holds a quilt in her hands, she sees more than red and purple and blue and more than crisscross lines of thread. She sees the patterns that grief can make on the lives of patients and families. She imagines a young face, cradling the blanket they may receive on their first day of cancer treatment at a Seattle hospital.

Her own daughter, Katie, died at the age of 12 after about 10 months of treatment for a rare cancer. Before the diagnosis, in a hurry to catch a ferry across Puget Sound to the hospital, Katie grabbed a comforter Karen had made. Through the emotional turmoil of many months, this comforter absorbed symbolism and memories. “After she died, I slept with that blanket,” says Karen, holding the blanket. One side has the cheerful images of official state flowers and the other is just a pale yellow floral. When times were tough for Katie in the hospital, she used the blanket and its state flowers as a distraction, a wrap, hiding place and a comforter.

Five years later, Karen helps others to find safe topics and comforting spaces inside of the toughest months of their lives. She runs a formal guild of volunteers who sew blankets for patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She hopes the quilts will be therapeutic.

Some quilts have cowboys, rocket ships and electric guitars on them. Her volunteer army includes people who find donations of fabrics and people who like to sew them together. One woman, Lucile, is 90 years old and puts together almost a whole quilt every day. The guild has given away almost 1,000 blankets at last count.

Through a special patient support system at the hospital, the blankets of many colors and designs are chosen to fit a pa- tient’s interests. Karen and her guild members do not hand them out or meet the patients, but sometimes receive delight- ful notes. Each blanket has a tag with the guild’s name and a dress. From one patient’s mother came this message:

“We had a major setback, and she had to be admitted. … She was so scared at the big bed—she [had] never slept in
one—and having to stay. When she saw the Minnie Mouse blanket she said, ‘I OK now Mama. Minnie is with me.’”

When she was paralyzed by her own grief, in the early months after Katie’s death, Karen found herself motivated to make the first blanket for another child. “Picking out the fabric and thinking about a child I did not know was very satisfying. I knew that child would have that blanket, and if the child didn’t make it, the parent would have that blanket,” she explains. It was there, at her dining room table, that the idea for the blanket guild was born. Karen studied art history at Pomona College before transferring to another college in the early 1980s. But she doesn’t feel especially artistic about these blankets.

“I sew some, but mostly what I do [for the guild] is the administrative stuff,” Karen says. Starting the guild and devoting herself to helping families “opened up a huge new adventure for me.” Katie’s cancer was a rare form known as adrenocortical carcinoma. The family’s journey with Katie included a surgery and eventually the knowledge that she could not be cured. She was in hospice care for about a month before she died in 2007.

During that time, Karen feels her family was lucky to get expert counseling and support from the hospital and health-care team. But not every family is so lucky. She has chosen public ways of sharing her family’s stories in hopes of helping to train physicians and other caregivers.

She wrote a book titled Because of Katie, and was asked to speak at various fundraisers, including one for a summer camp for children with cancer. She also created a video that will become part of staff training at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

“We don’t give young doctors enough help in understanding how to cope with death,” she says. “They need to take care of themselves.” Taking care of others includes preparing for the time when treatment may not be practical. Some states don’t have hospice care for children, for example, which Karen believes is very important. For Karen, there is a thread of writing and sharing that runs through her whole life, even though she didn’t call herself a writer until recently. She found a certain courage in telling Katie’s story, and the courage shows in how she handled an interview full of tough questions with humor and grace.

“I got in trouble [as a kid] for talking in class. Writing is really the same thing, and it is a part of me now.”

FROM BECAUSE OF KATIE:

“IN THE FIRST WEEKS AFTER KATIE’S PASSING, I slept with her comforter—the one which I had made for her. She had held onto that quilt all through her treatment and recovery; you can see it in many of our photographs.

If I needed to wash it, I had to return it to her on the same day. There are two kinds of fabric in it, and she preferred to have it on her bed with a certain side up. She loved that quilt, and used it as a real comforter all through her cancer journey: as a mask, a bathrobe, a blinder, a hiding place, a lap robe, a privacy screen. After she died, sleeping with her quilt felt like a link to her, physically.”

—Karen Gerstenberger ’81 in Because of Katie

(Photo by Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun)

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