electronic payment network for United Healthcare, one of the two largest health insurers in the U.S.
CLASS NOTES
2002 1999 | Reunion Year
Online publication Ars Technica reviewed the PicoBrew Zymatic, a machine designed to automate the painstaking process of home brewing. In 2011, Microsoft software architect Avi Geiger joined brothers Jim and Bill Mitchell, the latter a former Microsoft executive, to work on the device that allows users to simply add ingredients, let the machine do its magic, and return to processed beer and an easy cleanup. The review states, “More recent versions of the PicoBrew machine moved to custom AMTEGA controller boards and a number of custom parts, some rendered by Geiger himself. With the level of specificity provided by the PicoBrew, the founders state that users should be able to turn out recipes ‘precisely on spec.’ The machine can also import BeerXML-formatted recipes and translate and scale them to the PicoBrew’s setup.” Read the full review at http://bit.ly/16Kbk7D In October, Katherine Parker was featured in the article “Cambodia Methodist Church Embodies Vision of Hope and Love” on the website of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church. The article describes Parker’s work as a Global Ministries missionary in Cambodia, where she helped develop local leaders and worked on projects that ensured food security, stability and access to biologically safe drinking water. This work relates to her undergraduate degree (biology) and her master of science degree, also in biology (California State University, Sacramento). This year, she began a new assignment as part of the Health Team of the United Mission to Nepal, focusing on water, sanitation and hygiene. Read the full story at http://bit.ly/1hk6iWs.
2000
Harvey Mudd trustee Chris Seib was featured in an InformationWeek Healthcare article about online medical bill payments. Chris is the CTO and founder of Instamed, which provides services for more than 400 hospitals and 60,000 practices and clinics. The Sept. 9 article describes how InstaMed is providing the
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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE
The Association for Computing Machinery featured Kate Matsudaira on its website in September. She is founder of popforms, software that helps employees set goals and outline the steps to achieve those goals. She has worked in engineering leadership roles at Decide, Moz and Amazon and has worked at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Kate builds and manages teams that create technology to solve important problems, and her technical expertise includes the construction of high-performance distributed systems and systems addressing data collection and analysis. Kate maintains a popular blog (popforms.com/blog/) about issues in leadership and management. Read the ACM interview at http://bit.ly/1bZw9fa.
2003
John Cloutier recently released Reflect, a
geometric puzzle game for Android devices. The game challenges your geometric reasoning skills by asking you to match a pattern by mirroring a starter layout within a limited number of turns. John received a Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara, and his game is available at http://bit.ly/1baSrMS. Nate Eldredge is moving to Colorado to start
a job as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Northern Colorado. He’s looking forward to making new friends, teaching and researching cool math—and hiking the Rockies!
2004 | Reunion Year
Physics graduate Joe Checkelsky has accepted an assistant professorship in the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology starting in January 2014. After graduating from Harvey Mudd, Joe did his Ph.D. research at Princeton in the Ong laboratory, then worked at Japan’s Institute for Physical and Chemical Research and was a lecturer at the University of Tokyo.
2005
Nicholas Carbone married Jessica Ashley
Freeman-Slade Oct. 12 in Larz Anderson Park in Brookline, Mass. Jessica is an editor of cookbooks and other food books at Clarkson Potter, a division of Random House, in New York. Nicholas is a National Research Council
postdoctoral research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Washington. Previously, he was the director of research and development at Ener.co, a manufacturer of polymer coatings, in New York. He has a master’s and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Columbia.
2006
The Whistle Activity Monitor was one of several new pet-monitoring devices reviewed in a Sept. 11 article in The New York Times and in October by the website Marketplace. Kevin Lloyd is co-founder and head of technology at Whistle. Co-founder and CEO Ben Jacobs told the Times, “Sudden changes in behavior, like sleeplessness, can alert an owner that it is stressed or suffering from some other ailment before the symptoms are more obvious.” A pet’s movements are registered by an on-collar stainless steel tag embedded with an accelerometer. Data is fed to pet owners via a smartphone app so they can monitor their pet’s happiness and health.
2007
Kapy Kangombe is now a web application
developer at market research firm MacKenzie Corporation in Irvine, Calif. Brian Kirkpatrick returned to campus in
October to present the talk “Lay in a Course!: A Mudd Approach to Astrodynamics, Orbit Determination and Trajectory Control.” Discussion included the problem of trajectory control in orbital dynamics and the impact of noise and assumptions, plus how spacecraft are controlled, maneuvered and modeled. Brian is an aerospace systems engineer for TASC Inc., in El Segundo, Calif. A graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (M.S., aerospace engineering), he was the founding president of the Mudd Amateur Rocket Club and has since explored problems in software engineering, modeling and simulation, and aerospace systems. Ongoing work includes a cloud-based IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) for scientific computing as well as challenges in the aerospace industry. Ben Tribelhorn earned his Ph.D. in computer
science from Oregon State University and is now an assistant professor at Seattle University.