Alumni

Alumni Awards for 2014

September 4, 2014 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Awards for 2014

The Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Award honors alumni for achievement in their professions or community service, particularly those who have lived up to the quotation from James A. Blaisdell which is inscribed into the gates of the College: “They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind.” This year, there are three winners:

Ifeanyi “Tony” Menkiti’64 taught philosophy at Wellesley College for 40 years and is the author off our collections of poetry: Before a Common Soil (2007), Of Altair, the Bright Light (2005), The Jubilation of Falling Bodies (1978), and Affirmations (1971). He is the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, the nation’s oldest continuous all-poetry bookshop.

Born in Onitsha, Nigeria, he came to Pomona in 1961 on the ASPAU program (African Scholar-ship Program of American Universities). After Pomona, he attended Columbia University Pulitzer School of Journalism, New York University and Harvard University. In 1975, he received a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts State Council on the Arts and Humanities, followed in 1978 by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his collections, his poems have appeared in Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New Directions, The Massachusetts Review and other publications.

In 1996, he received the Pinanski Prize for Excellence in Teaching from Wellesley College.

Joe Palca’74 has been a science correspondent for National Public Radio since 1992. He has covered a range of topics, from biomedical research to astronomy, and is currently focused on the series, Joe’s Big Idea, which explores the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors.

Palca began his career in 1982 as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington,D.C. In 1986, he began a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first with Nature and then with Science Magazine. In 2009, he took a six-month leave from NPR to become science writer in residence at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

Palca has won numerous awards for his work,including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize. With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).

A psychology major at Pomona, he later earned both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in psychology at UC Santa Cruz, where he studied human sleep physiology.

Rip Rapson’74 is president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, a national, private foundation based in Detroit. Since 2006, he has led Kresge in developing programs in arts and culture, education, environment, health,human services and the renewal of Detroit, distributing approximately $150 million annually.

Rapson was a political science major at Pomona, graduating magna cum laude. After at-tending Columbia Law School, he joined the Minneapolis law firm of Leonard, Street and Deinard. He was recruited in 1989 to become the deputy mayor of Minneapolis under Mayor Don Fraser, and was primary architect of the pioneering Neighborhood Revitalization program, a 20-year, $400 million effort to strengthen Minneapolis neighborhoods.

Prior to joining Kresge, Rapson was president of the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation and also launched the Itasca Project, a private sector-led effort to develop a new regional agenda fort he Twin Cities.

He is the author of two books: Troubled Waters, a chronicle of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act legislation, and Ralph Rap-son: Sixty Years of Modern Design, a biography of his father, a renowned architect.Inspirational Young Alumni Award Lt.

Inspirational Young Alumni Award

Francine Segovia’04, a U.S. Navy Reserve research psychologist at the Robert E.Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies, assists survivors recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She is part of a team of scientists and medical specialists examining how optimism and resilience may boost the health of extreme trauma victims.

Segovia, who will return to active-duty service at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, attributes her research skills to experience she gained while at Pomona, including participation in the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). “The critical thinking skills graduates from an institution like Pomona possess have a direct impact on all your work moving forward,” she says. “These skills have helped me tremendously as I navigated my career.”

Coming to Doha

March 11, 2014 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

Just before graduating from Pomona, Alexandra “Zan” Gutowski ’13 learned she’d gotten a great opportunity to immerse herself in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, two of her biggest interests. Since this past September, Gutowski has been a student at a university in Qatar, doing intensive study of Arabic to master her language skills and prepare for a career in foreign policy.

TAKING ON A CHALLENGE Gutowski studied the language for several years in college and even spent some time in the Middle East while she was a student at Pomona, including a semester in Jordan during her junior year. “In Jordan I learned how to conduct my life in Arabic. I could negotiate my rent, get around the city, and attend college classes.”

But her interactions with people from local communities, including a volunteer project with refugees from Syria and Iraq, inspired her to take her learning even further. “In conversations with these young refugee women, my Arabic was good enough to understand them, but not strong enough to say something meaningful back,” Gutowski says. “That’s when I realized I wanted to push my Arabic much further.”

Hoping to become a more skillful speaker, Gutowski made plans to enroll in an Arabic program after graduation. Part of her goal was to gain an edge in Middle Eastern affairs, the field she hopes to enter.“There’s a level of nuance I want to reach in the language,” says Gutowski. “Sure I want to understand things, but that’s something Google Translator can do for you. I want to dig deeper into tone, diction, and syntax, to understand what is being said beyond mere translation.”With the help of some of the staff at Pomona’s Career Development Office, Gutowski applied to the Qatar Scholarship, a year-long program sponsored by Georgetown which allows college graduates from the United States to study Arabic at Qatar University in Doha, the country’s capital. Her acceptance letter came just in time for Commencement.

LEARNING ON THE GROUND

Living and studying with a very international group of students, Gutowski says she’s started to make some exciting progress since arriving last fall. “What’s great is that I’m getting to the point where I’m learning about other things using this language. I can turn on the news or pick up an article, and really understand the bulk of it.”“This is a big breakthrough for me,” she says. “It’s getting fun now.”Outside of class, Gutowski spends a lot of her free time with friends and classmates exploring what the city has to offer, including museum exhibits, lectures and film festivals.

Gutowski says that her experiences in the Middle East so far have opened her eyes to the complexities of the region.

Meeting people from many different countries and having to find her way in an unfamiliar place has been a challenge, but also a cause for growth.“Coming to Doha was a good experience. It woke me up to the fact that I don’t know everything and there’s so much that I have to learn.”

SHAPING HER PATH

An international relations major, Gutowski says she’s always been drawn to public service. But her classes at Pomona were what stoked her passion for foreign affairs. She points to Professor David Elliott as a key influence. “I’m truly indebted to him, not just for shaping me into someone who could pursue foreign policy as a career but as someone who always wants to keep learning.”

Going forward, Gutowski wants to focus on national security issues and Middle Eastern politics. After her scholarship ends in June, she hopes to find work with a research institute or a branch of government like the State Department. She’s already taken a first step by landing an internship this spring as a foreign policy researcher at the Brookings Doha Center, the Qatar-based branch of the well-known Washington think tank. Still, Gutowski says her time in Doha has given her a broader perspective on the path she wants to take in the future.

“Especially in the first year out of college, people feel like they have to have everything figured out,” she says. “In this program I’ve met people who are all in different stages of their lives. I’ve realized that it takes awhile to get to where you want. It might not happen right away.”

The Art of Surprise

March 8, 2014 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

Mowry Baden’s art has deep Pomona College roots. He started here as a student and then came back to campus later as an art professor, department chair and gallery director from 1968 to 1971.

Long based in Victoria, B.C., Baden ’58 is known for his large-scale kinesthetic sculptures. “Dromedary Mezzanine,” on view at the Pomona College Museum of Art through April 13, is a tall, platformed bicycle that a museum visitor pedals to reach four wall-mounted tents containing tools—an effort that is both exercise and meditation for the participant. Baden’s body-oriented, interactive works have impacted generations of Pomona students and garnered him wide respect.

baden1 Q: What’s the philosophy behind moving sculpture?

A: Almost all of my working life as a sculptor I’ve dedicated my energies to capitalizing on the physical energies of the period. So often people ask me, “What is your medium?” I say, exertion. Not my exertion but the exertion of the viewer, and this involves so often intercepting their habitual habits, gestural habits; intercepting those habits and sending them in unexpected directions.

So the viewer makes a discovery, or several discoveries, about the way their mind and body collaborate—and we call that kind of event an illusion, a phantom. This sculpture [“Dromedary Mezzanine”] capitalizes on the viewer’s energy. To ensure that the viewer engages with the work as long as possible, I’ve put these little destinations, chambers, high on the wall and each chamber contains a tool. When I acquired the tools I didn’t know their function; they’re very old, they’re out of use. So old are they, we have no idea how to put them into use, so that each is a mystery. This sculpture tries to do two things at once, exertion and the pausing and pondering of these mystery objects.

What do you find most compelling about this kind of work?

A: The central objective is to get into the sensory, to get in behind the external of the viewer, to surprise her with her own perceptual habits, which she thinks she knows from A to Z, but she doesn’t. So the sculpture opens a window into that internal space and she is surprised. Then another layer consists of the signaling that goes on between her and the other people in the room. So she comes, she engages with this, her friend or a stranger watches her and waits her turn. But sometimes her friend is too timid, sometimes her friend is too self-conscious, sometimes

her friend is inappropriately dressed. No matter, because just the act of watching this activity is something her friend’s brain pays acute attention to. In her brain, what are firing are synapses called mirror neurons, and we all have them. In more conventional language, we would call the firing of your neurons empathy. Then there’s another layer: gossip. She comes, she engages with the sculpture. She came alone. But she sees her friend at Starbucks and tells her what happened. Her friend comes to experience the same things, but the curious thing is she doesn’t experience the same thing. Because the two people are different. So really, that’s why I emphasize the particular, because no two people are the same. Generally the same, but particularly not. Another layer is institutional. There’s a lot of code breaking going on here. The first code is, don’t touch the art. So [a work like this] circumvents that code and invites the viewer to do something that she shouldn’t do in this no-touch world of the museum.

The fifth layer has to do with collaboration. If you come sometime to this space and watch people come in, you know how best to manage this apparatus, but they don’t. Each person engages with it unsuccessfully, but those people who view that person interacting with the sculpture take it a step further when it is their turn.

Q: How did your Pomona experience at those different stages—first as a student, then a professor, then as a gallery director—impact your art?

A: In this group of exhibitions, the museum is presenting drawings and paintings by my old teacher Frederick Hammersley…back in 1954-58. He would have us sit at our drawing places and he would say, “Put your pen right there.” [Baden tosses tissue to the floor signifying the movement.] “Now send it around.” So the idea was to keep your eye out there on the object and keep your pen traveling along its perimeter as you drew on the paper in front

of you. It could take a long time to get the line all the way around the object and often the results were startling, but they were always very physical. So your eye and your hand and your body all engage with trying to make this mark significant. He was a very good teacher and you can see how through a kind of filter it surfaces in the kind of work that I do. Then later when I taught here, then ran the department and then was gallery director, I had the good fortune to meet and work with a lot of students and with the gallery director who were more than ready to embrace the engagement of the body as an active component of a work of art. So I had wonderful colleagues like Guy Williams and David Gray in the studio program, later on Lewis Baltz. I had wonderful students like Chris Burden ’69 and Michael Brewster ’68, and I had maybe the best gallery director of the period… Hal Glicksman. So it was really, truly a golden moment in the history of this institution and I was very privileged to be a part of it.

Q: What drives your art?

A: Boredom. Just wanting to entertain yourself, right? I’ve been an artist since I was 8 years old; I don’t know how to do anything else really. At least nothing that chases boredom away so conclusively. I’m also the son of an architect, so almost all my work is larger-scale, body-size, even mini-architectural scale. And even one of my sons is an architect. So I guess in a way it kind of runs in the blood of the family. My mother was a poet. I’m just an art brat.

This interview has been abridged and edited.

Coffee with Conscience

November 6, 2013 by Brenda Bolinger Comments Off

nikki

Sociologist Nicki Lisa Cole ’02 carries around an accordion file stuffed with empty, flattened coffee bags she has collected from cafes across the U.S. over the last several years. Each item in her collection, begun when a package of coffee at Starbucks caught her eye, bears imagery or prose that hints at the ethical considerations behind the beans’ journey across the world and into your cup.

As the labels pile up, it’s a lot of information for Cole to parse. And so it is for everyday coffee-drinkers as well. With so many coffee-with-a-conscience practices operating—fair trade, direct trade, organic, shade grown, bird friendly—understanding the different approaches to ethically-sourced coffee, each with pros and cons, would seem to require pursuing dissertation-level research on the topic.

Cole did just that. She became so fascinated with the messages being sent to consumers about ethically marketed or produced coffee that the issue came to drive her doctoral research. Now a lecturer in sociology at Pomona, Cole writes blog posts (21centurynomad. com) on coffee sourcing that are broadly followed, and her expertise has been sought by The Nation, Conducive Magazine and others.

As part of her Ph.D. research, Cole queried 230 coffee drinkers, all of whom identified themselves as regular consumers of some kind of ethically-produced coffee. “Uniformly, people have a very vague, surface-level knowledge of what’s going on,” says Cole. “They tend to recognize the fair trade label, for instance, and know it stands for something good, but most have not done much research.”

With this hazy awareness, the heart of the matter can get lost. Cole wants to remind us why ethical sourcing for coffee is necessary. The reasons include historically low prices that make life a struggle for small producers, fluctuating prices because coffee is traded on the commodities market and price gouging of small producers by large transnational buyers.

So what can coffee drinkers do?

No system is perfect, but Cole says ethical coffee practices do, in fact, make some positive differences around the world. And so her one cup of coffee and one double espresso per day is always fair trade or direct trade. “While I have critiques of all the models out there, I always advocate for picking one that resonates with you and going with it, because it’s better than not,” she says.

The first step: “Ask about the coffee where you buy it: What are the sourcing practices behind this coffee?” Cole says.

The café or coffee shop owner might tell you that they import fair trade certified coffee because they value how the higher price supports community development, or that the certification standards require environmental practices such as minimized use of agrochemicals and water-conserving irrigation systems. Or, you might learn that they happily pay an even higher cost for direct trade coffee (also “relationship coffee”), purchased directly from a grower they trust, as opposed to a cooperative of producers, like in fair trade.

And if they clam up?

“If they can’t tell you what their sourcing practices are, that’s generally a bad sign. It’s probably not the place to get your coffee,” says Cole, a Pomona sociology major who earned her Ph.D. in the same field from UC Santa Barbara. “Most people in the industry who are using some sort of ethical sourcing are proud ofdoing that and want to share that with you.”

Cole points to the transparency of Portland-based Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which practices the direct-trade approach. “They claim ‘our books are open,’” Cole says. Want to learn exactly what price was paid to what producer practicing what methods? You got it.

But even if your coffee vendor provides evidence of ethical sourcing practices, how do you know which system is best? Cole says that depends on what you value. For example, fair trade certification requires a premium be paid on top of the minimum price per pound, which is then used to help workers, farmers and their families through such projects as school improvements, student scholarship provisions or the establishment and maintenance of healthcare clinics. The direct trade model does not provide for this kind of community betterment, according to Cole.

On the other hand, Cole notes, the democratic structure of fair trade cooperatives, where leadership constantly rotates, makes it difficult for buyers to nurture long-term, trusting relationships with producers. Since direct-trade buyers work directly with producers instead of cooperatives, it’s possible to cultivate close, symbiotic relationships in which both parties benefit—buyers pay a higher price for the assurance of high quality coffee, which in turn affords growers a higher level of economic stability.

Also worth considering is Fair Trade USA’s 2012 split from Fair Trade International for the explicit purpose of including large-scale plantations in the fair trade system. When the decision was made, Cole stirred up quite a bit of discussion by declaring “Fair Trade is dead” on her blog, referring to the ramifications of this decision. She still has plenty to say on the matter: “I fear that it’s very bad for small producers, squeezing them out of a market that was supposed to be a fair market.”

Fair Trade U.S.A.officials have defended the move as a way to benefit more farmers and workers, and to allow more consumers to buy Fair Trade products. Cole, though, says there is not nearly enough of a market to support current fair trade coffee production, so adding larger plantations will harm existing fair trade producers.

True to her small-is-good approach, Cole frequents the independent Last Drop Café, located in the Claremont Village just a block or two from campus. “We usually talk about coffee, and it’s been interesting learning about her opinions and insights,” says owner Mike Manning. “Her students have definitely learned a lot from her.”

One thing you might be surprised to learn about Cole, considering the depth of her knowledge and the hundreds of coffee shops she’s visited over the years: She is not a voracious coffee drinker. She is definitely a fan, but has reduced her consumption in consideration of the intense physical efforts that go into cultivating, harvesting and processing coffee beans.

Cole says choosing the higher-priced fair or direct trade coffee, but consuming less coffee overall, is one way to make a difference: “If we change our orientation to the value of goods and to respecting the labor that goes into them, paying a truly fair and just price for those goods, we would see different conditions.”

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

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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.”

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