CLASS NOTES
programming skills using a block-based language (like Blockly or Scratch). To learn more or try it for free, visit scram.frequal.com.
1996 At the 2016 San Diego State University Writers’ Conference, Beston Barnett (engineering and sculpture) won a Conference Choice award for his urban fantasy novel set in a folklore library in Berlin (“There’s talking animals, sex and lots of juicy stuff about cataloging,” he says). Beston worked as an engineer at IBM, ran a music publishing company (Art Hurts Records), then became an award-winning furniture maker. Read more at bit.ly/2gc7Es6. On Monday, Sept. 19, those watching one of the last Oakland Athletics home baseball games against the Houston Astros saw four Mudders win a flip-cup game against fellow fans at a mid-inning break. Hans Purkey (chemistry) started, followed by Russell Hamilton ’94 (engineering), Keith Pitts (biology) and, finally, anchor Kirby Lawton ’94 (biology). They won tickets to a remaining Oakland A’s game the following Saturday. All four credited years of intense competition in similar games at Mudd for their skill at winning.
1997 Katy Wong (engineering) received the Corporate
Promotion of Education award during the 2016 Women of Color STEM Conference. Katy is a senior staff systems engineer at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. She was lauded for executing a $10 million project while capturing a separate $3 million contract and leading a $70 million proposal. She uses her involvement with technical associations to enhance her team, mentors junior teammates and supports her team’s educational efforts. She provides outreach through activities at work and beyond, including being a supporter of HMC’s President’s Scholars program.
2001 Teri Krebs (mathematics) was a panelist at the Future
of Psychedelics event held at Právnická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy in October. The co-founder of EmmaSofia, an organization focused on protecting the rights of those who use psychedelics, Teri studied neuroscience at Boston University and the
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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE
Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She served as an associate in psychiatry at Harvard Medical and lives in Norway, studying MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy) and psychedelics with funding from the country’s Research Council. Paul SanGiorgio (physics) returned to campus this fall to discuss “Life After Physics, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Systems Engineering” for a Physics Colloquium. He shared his story with students: “After graduating from Harvey Mudd College, I was certain that I would someday become a professor of physics. After many years toiling in a basement at grad school, a couple of post-docs and plenty of life events later, I have found happiness and fulfillment in a highly unusual place: as a systems engineer for Illumina Inc. Illumina is the world leader in genetic sequencing and is the principal driving force bringing the cost of sequencing a human genome down from $100 million in 2003 to less than $1,000 today.”
2002 The Golden Bear Scholars program at West Virginia University Institute of Technology (WVUTech) recognizes two faculty each academic year for their exceptional record or nationally visible achievement in research, scholarship or creativity. One of the recipients, Deborah Chun (mathematics and engineering), WVU assistant professor of mathematics, received $2,500 to be used toward academic travel or research. Deborah worked for the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C., after leaving HMC. She completed a master’s in applied and computational mathematics at Johns Hopkins Whiting College and a PhD program in mathematics at Louisiana State University. In 2011, she began teaching mathematics at WVUTech, where she has instructed almost every mathematics course the college offers, including her favorites Discrete Mathematics, and Probability and Statistics. Her research focus is on matroid theory, which feeds into the larger mathematics fields of combinatorics and has applications in everything from computer science to engineering. Deborah plans to use her scholarship to focus on collaborations with researchers at Wright State College, Vanderbilt University and the United States Naval Academy.
Fernando Antonio Medrano (engineering) was a featured speaker at the 2016 TEDxSantaBarbara event. Antonio spoke about his life journey toward inner harmony and fulfillment. As a teenager, he formed his own extramural a cappella group, Denim, that performed throughout Northern California and recorded two albums, one of which won the national Contemporary A Cappella Award for best High School Album in the nation. His passion for science and music led him to a master’s in multimedia engineering followed by a PhD in computational geography, both from UC Santa Barbara. His PhD research was in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory using high-performance computing to identify quality corridors for the location of new electrical transmission lines and resulted in five publications in peer-reviewed journals. While in grad school, he toured the nation and three continents as the bass singer for the professional a cappella group The House Jacks. He recently taught geography in Spain and co-founded software startup Arogi, which specializes in artificial intelligence on geographic information, and he sings in a chamber choir and leads two a cappella groups, Airplay and Keep Me Posted.
2004 Adele Tamboli (physics), a U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE) scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and research assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines, has been awarded additional funding from the DOE’s Office of Science, which chose 49 scientists to receive significant funding for research as part of its Early Career Research Program. Adele joined NREL in 2014 and is part of its High Efficiency Crystalline PV research group. Her work, which focuses on photovoltaic materials and devices, centers on developing a new class of III-V analog phosphide and nitride materials. These materials may have applications in extremely efficient but inexpensive photovoltaics as well as into platforms for improved lasers and optical computing.
2005 Andrew Wetzel (physics) is highlighted in press
releases from Caltech and the Carnegie Observatories for his work to recreate the galaxy in a supercomputer. New theoretical modeling work