Harvey Mudd College Magazine, summer 2016

SUMMER 2016

Hipster Sommelier

Diana Hawkins ’08 trades technical sales for the art and science of wine.

SPACE STUDY

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Hub of the Mudd Universe

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Office of Institutional Diversity

It’s colorful, expansive, welcoming and open to all members of the Harvey Mudd community. The Office of Institutional Diversity (OID), the social justice education hub of campus, has grown from a small, one-room space (established in 2004) to a userfriendly, four-room retreat. Thanks in part to student members of BLAM (Black Lives at Mudd)—HMC’s 2016 Outstanding Student Organization—the new space became a reality. Last spring, BLAM made the case for a space that would help increase inclusivity and improve campus climate. President Maria Klawe

provided funds to transform the north area of Platt Campus Center into new and improved OID offices.

After moving to the expanded space in January, OID was able to increase its programming, hold more intimate conversations with students and have a larger presence on campus. The intentionally vibrant walls speak to the spirit of OID: celebratory, fostering awareness, allyship and action.

ibrant also describes Sumi Pendakur, the V College’s award-winning, energetic chief diversity officer who oversees campus-wide efforts related to access, equity, campus climate and inclusion.

A member of the president’s cabinet, she also provides diversity training and advises academic departments and search teams about embedding equity and diversity.

here’s a little bit of everything in the movie library, 2 T from titles relating to world issues (The Other Side of Immigration), violence prevention (The Hunting Ground), gender issues (Boys Don’t Cry) and diversity (A Day Without a Mexican), plus the complete Eyes on the Prize series.

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rtwork, including a piece by Ricardo Levins 3 A Morales depicting the disability justice movement in South Africa, ensures that the space speaks to all facets and intersections of identity.

5 Frosted glass adorns the main entry to emphasize that this is a “safe space.” Individuals, student organizations and clubs have complete after-hours access by swipe card.

he OID bookshelves are filled with key social 4 T justice writings. Pendakur says it’s as intersectional as possible while also offering specificity.

Topics include critical race theory, feminist studies and queer theory. As with the movie library, an honors check-out system pervades in the spirit of the Honor Code.

he work table is part of a large community area 6 T that encourages users to gather, engage in difficult topics, learn from each other or just relax.

fter hearing about important events via social 7 A media and smartphone, students are encouraged to gather in OID to watch unfolding news together and engage in discussion. It’s also a popular place to watch documentaries and movies.

he OID space serves as yet another comfy 8 T hangout on campus, with entrances and exits to the main area and offices carefully planned to provide privacy and safety.

FROM THE

PRESIDENT

SUMMER 2016 | VOLUME 14, NO. 3

C3 Promotes a Sea Change LAST SPRING, A GROUP OF FACULTY

representing each academic department came together to form an exploratory committee to examine ways to expand computing research and teaching. The committee, which I co-chaired with computer science Professor Zach Dodds, held discussions in individual departments and expanded those conversations to the full faculty.

The results of this work are a roadmap for a new educational initiative called Cross-disciplinary Collaborations in Computing (C3).

Harvey Mudd College, in partnership with Claremont McKenna College, Cornell Tech and Stanford University, aims to create critically needed educational programs, curricula and research opportunities to address the shortage of graduates and faculty who can employ computing to meet the demand for teaching and research that recognizes the centrality of computing across all disciplines. Moreover, we are committed to our tradition of open and accessible programs and curricula.

The C3 Initiative provides a framework for partnership among colleges and universities interested in addressing both computer science pipeline issues as well as the growing need to teach non-CS majors the computing skills they need to be successful in whatever discipline they choose.

As an internationally recognized leader in developing new curricula to improve diversity in undergraduate computer science education, the College seeks to innovate disciplinary-specific pathways while also sharing our results with other like-minded institutions.

As part of our Core curriculum, we require that all students take courses in each of the STEM disciplines—math, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science and engineering—as well as classes in writing and critical inquiry offered through the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts. In this way, we provide our students with a broad scientific foundation as well as the skills to think and to solve problems across disciplines.

However, this preparation requires partnerships with institutions that possess unique and different perspectives.

Our goal is to respond to the national and local need for greater access to computing competencies and computational and analytical thinking, especially for students not intending to major in computer science. Through the C3 Initiative, we will increase access to computing resources, skills and modes of thought for our students and those at The Claremont Colleges.

Through research and curriculum development, we will share what we learn with other institutions.

To do this, we will need additional creative faculty and staff who are committed to extending the impact of computing in disciplines beyond computer science, along with collaboration partners who are willing to experiment with new ideas.

The C3 Initiative also will require new methods to spread successes beyond The Claremont Colleges. The academic literature will not be a sufficient end result; we aspire to influence computational thinking beyond Claremont. We will need to attract visitors, postdocs and industry experts to this endeavor so that we may spread what is learned and developed across disciplines that seek to utilize computing.

We believe we can develop a better understanding of how to address the needs of various disciplines with respect to computing. This will require identifying and uniting creative people who can “reach across the aisles” of disciplines in order to construct targeted and impactful educational experiences. These people will be able to experiment to identify methods and philosophies that allow them to develop best practices on how to achieve cross-disciplinary collaborations.

As they learn, they will be better positioned to apply these new ideas to new disciplines and new environments.

I would like to thank the members of the C3 Initiative Committee for their efforts this spring and summer in leading our conversations: Zach Dodds, computer science and committee co-chair; Rachel Levy, mathematics; Liz Orwin ’95, engineering; Theresa Lynn, physics; Debra Mashek, HSA; Bob Cave, chemistry; Eliot Bush, biology; and Melissa O’Neill, computer science.

As our plans continue to develop, we will share more about this initiative. In the meantime, if you would like to know how you can support our efforts, please email me at mklawe@hmc.edu.

The Harvey Mudd College Magazine is produced three times per year by the Office of Communications and Marketing.

Director of Communications, Senior Editor Stephanie L. Graham Art Director Janice Gilson Writer Eric Feezell Graphic Designer Robert Vidaure Contributing Writers Amy DerBedrosian, Ashley Festa, Doug McInnis, Neal Singer, Mara Watkins Proofreaders Kelly Lauer, Elaine Regus Contributing Photographers Seth Affoumado, Webb Chappell, Shannon Cottrell, Keenan Gilson, Jeanine Hill, Cheryl Ogden, Anne Ryan, Deborah Tracey, Bryce Vickmark, Marie Woods Vice President for Advancement Dan Macaluso Chief Communications Officer Timothy L. Hussey, APR The Harvey Mudd College Magazine (SSN 0276-0797) is published by Harvey Mudd College, Office of Communications and Marketing, 301 Platt Boulevard, Claremont, CA 91711.

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Copyright © 2016—Harvey Mudd College. All rights reserved.

Opinions expressed in the Harvey Mudd College Magazine are those of the individual authors and subjects and do not necessarily reflect the views of the College administration, faculty or students.

No portion of this magazine may be reproduced without the express written consent of the editor.

The Harvey Mudd College Magazine staff welcomes your input: communications@hmc.edu or Harvey Mudd College Magazine Harvey Mudd College, 301 Platt Boulevard, Claremont, CA 91711

Join the online conversation.

MAGAZINE.HMC.EDU Maria Klawe President, Harvey Mudd College

CONTENTS

Features The New Galileo

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A brief history and a new beginning.

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Ripple Effect

Yes, gravity waves do exist. Just ask one elated and incredulous expert, MIT physicist Matthew Evans ’96.

Written by Neal Singer

Perfect Pairing

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Engineering graduate Diana Hawkins ’08 excels as an atypical sommelier.

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Written by Amy DerBedrosian

Career Directed by GPS

John Lavrakas ’74 uses curiosity and persistence to find his way.

Written by Ashley Festa

Departments 01

SPACE STUDY

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COLLEGE NEWS

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FACULTY NEWS

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COLLABORATION

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STUDENT NEWS MY MUDD LIFE: NATASHA ALLEN ’16

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RESEARCH

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CLINIC PROGRAM

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MUDDERINGS

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CLASS NOTES ALUMNI PROFILE: ELECIA WHITE ’96 ALUMNI WEEKEND REUNION CLASS PHOTOS

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

With respect to your graph of Married Mudders vs. Class Year (HMC Magazine, spring 2016, page 35), it appears that the string of zeros at the left is due to ignoring marriages terminated by divorce or death. Here are two examples I know of: In the class of ’63, Paula Hagedorn married George Diehr.

But the relationship did not “endure.”

In the class of ’61, Lori Wilcox married Professor Robin Ives.

While not a member of any student class, Ives certainly qualifies as a Mudder. Shown is a picture I took in May 1961 of Ives in the Seal Pond. Alas, I can no longer identify

Thanks for the illuminating and well-written glimpses into life at Mudd and after. Keep them coming!

Andrew S. Lim ’04

with certainty any of the other people in the picture. The person bent over in the middle is possibly Gene Moore ’61. And half-hidden in back, the person in the suit could possibly be Professor Roy Whiteker.

Bob Ashenfelter ’61

It is a generosity I appreciate very much indeed to receive your exceptional publication.

The implication that it is not pointless to subsidize the minds of aging parents is generous–and in keeping with developments in cognitive science. My hippocampus is the better for it I suspect, and I thank you.

Elizabeth Pierce P06

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Phase Change THERE HAVE BEEN QUITE A FEW FIRSTS LATELY FOR

Harvey Mudd College. Women now make up the majority of department chairs (see page 11); the College welcomed its most diverse entering class thus far in 2015; more female than male engineering majors graduated in 2014 for the first time in HMC history. And now this.

Despite dwindling numbers of women earning physics degrees nationwide, Harvey Mudd graduated its first majority-female physics class this spring (52 percent). Recently, President Maria Klawe spoke with Theresa Lynn, professor of physics and the first female chair of the Department of Physics—where 38 percent of the faculty are women. The two discussed what Harvey Mudd has done to encourage more women to pursue physics in an interview published by Forbes in May. Here’s an excerpt.

Students work in the lab of physics department Chair Theresa Lynn.

klawe: Has the department been working in certain ways to become more female friendly?

Lynn: When our female students talk about barriers to their becoming physicists, they talk about high school experiences, about expectations and attitudes of older relatives, and things like that. So, it’s about issues that they bring with them.

We have tried to be sure that the gender diversity of our faculty is out there for students to see. In our core courses, in recent times, we’ve tended to have one man and one woman splitting the lecture. I think that’s something that makes an impression early on for students. I’ve had students comment that it was important to see different people, different genders, different personalities up there in front of the whole freshman class or the whole sophomore class, giving the lectures and answering the questions.

We’ve been thinking and working hard the last year or two on the topic of climate in the department—the extent to which we foster community, welcome those coming in from the outside, and nurture a strong sense of belonging.

I think those efforts will also help us recruit and retain great students who are women or from underrepresented minorities.

Klawe: What are some of the initiatives that have supported improving our climate for women in physics?

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Lynn: The Women in Physics student group, which is a student-led initiative, has done some welcoming things, such as community homework nights. Those have been nice climate events and not exclusively for women, which I think is exactly right.

They might have an eye toward what is welcoming or encouraging to female students, but their membership doesn’t exclude men. And, some of the men who participate are there because they believe so strongly in the need for physics to become more welcoming to women. We also send students every year to a Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, and that has been a great experience for our female students.

Klawe: Why is diversity important in the classroom?

Lynn: A lot of companies in the U.S. say that it’s hard to hire enough qualified employees who are interested in certain STEM fields, including physics.

Under those circumstances, I think it’s important that we, as a field, don’t lose students simply because they didn’t feel that physics was a field that accepted or welcomed their color, their gender, their sexual orientation, or what have you.

There are many possible, successful approaches to the world’s problems. And one of the key steps

in solving important problems is choosing the best questions to ask. As we expand this field with people from very different backgrounds, it will inevitably enrich the range of questions we are asking and the types of problems we can solve.

Physicists play an important role in so many areas of technology. Physics graduates tackle critical energy issues such as solar power and how to develop new technology to reduce energy consumption. They design computer hardware as our society continues to demand more advanced and innovative types of portable, wearable technology.

One of the most amazing things to me is that these students are going to begin confronting problems that we’ve never even imagined. Their generation will discover new questions as technology evolves, and they will be there designing the tools to equip us for the future.

The bottom line is that we need more physicists.

It would be crazy not to welcome as many people as we can from as many different backgrounds as possible to help us address these critical issues.

Read the entire Forbes article at onforb.es/1WFEDTE.

Refurbishment of the Libra deck this summer was a major undertaking.

Six Interesting Facts About the Class of 2020 Class size: 217

8% are from 11 countries outside of the U.S.: Canada, China, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Rwanda, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam

37% are from California

45% are women

88% were in the top 10% of their class (of high schools that ranked)

12 members of the class had at least one parent attend HMC; for three, both parents attended

Clearing the Deck Peeling paint, cracks, leaks: all telltale signs that the waterproofing on the Libra deck was failing. Correcting these issues has been a key priority, and the patio area east of Sprague Center became the most extensive of the College’s summer projects.

The old deck area—31,645 square feet—was removed within days. A new waterproofing membrane was installed, and fresh concrete topped it off just in time for the new school year. Students returned to find new lighting under the arcade (covered walkway) and in the courtyards of Parsons and Jacobs/Keck as well as a new concrete band that will reduce wheeled traffic noise.

Work on the Galileo auditoria also began this summer. Read more about this project, including how you can make your mark, on page 22.

Libra deck improvements by the numbers: 1,566,427

Pounds of concrete replaced

1,440

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Rolls of new waterproofing membrane

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Labor hours to remove the concrete deck

New wireless access points

5,120

21

Labor hours to install new waterproofing and concrete deck

247

Warts carefully removed and stored during construction

New LED light fixtures under the arcade

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Weeks to completion

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Mudd Prize Impact

A Tale of Two Awards THIS YEAR’S WINNERS OF TWO pres-

tigious College awards have a lot in common. Both have worked at Harvey Mudd for more than 20 years in the Office of Admission and Financial Aid. The history of their awards is also intertwined.

Henry T. Mudd (1913–1990), the son of Harvey S. Mudd and founding trustee and chair of the board for 23 years, was instrumental in the creation and early development of the College named for his father. So it was fitting that an award was created in his name in 1992 to recognize faculty and staff for their extraordinary service to Harvey Mudd College.

The recipient of the 2016 Henry T. Mudd Prize is Peter Osgood, director of admission, an integral part of the team that recruits, reviews, admits and enrolls students who are the best fit for HMC. He was lauded for his dedication, mentoring, leadership and for being a champion of diversity.

Osgood is in good company: Mudd Prize recipients include Founding President Joseph Platt, facilities and maintenance Senior Director Theresa Lauer, and Professor of Life Sciences and Engineering Dean Emeritus Samuel Tanenbaum. It’s Tanenbaum who brings these two awards together.

The Mudd Prize, which Tanenbaum received in 1996, comes with a $4,000 prize, $2,000 of which is designated for use within the College at the discretion of the recipient. Tanenbaum and his wife, Carol, decided to honor Carol’s mother and, with the prize money, established the Mary G. Binder Prize for staff. Other Mudd Prize recipients have directed their funds to scholarships, student organizations, courses and even bikes (see sidebar).

Osgood directed the College portion of his award toward the President’s Scholars Program.

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Admission and Financial Aid Operations Assistant Judy Givigliano received the 2016 Mary G. Binder Prize, which includes a $750 award and certificate, for combining “a record of exceptional service with a truly helpful and friendly attitude toward students, faculty and fellow staff members all across the College.” She began working in College Advancement in 1988 and transferred to Admission and Financial Aid in 1989, so she is familiar with the Binder Prize and all of its recipients, one of whom is her co-worker, Senior Receptionist Patricia Lewis.

“I am honored to be among the many Mary G. Binder Prize recipients,” Givigliano says.

Osgood and Givigliano briefly celebrated their respective awards before returning to the job of recruiting the next entering class. They both agree that these awards inspire even more enthusiasm for their work at an organization where relationships really do matter.

Each year, recipients direct a portion of their award to the College.

2016 Peter Osgood President’s Scholars Program

2004 Sheldon Wettack Summer Research Program

2015 Ran Libeskind-Hadas Wellness course

2003 Kerry Karukstis Brass lettering on Jacobs Science Building, southeast corner

2014 Liz Baughman Community engagement 2013 William Daub $1,700 prize to a student and $300 for travel mugs for chemistry majors 2012 Jeff Groves Dickens Hardy Program 2011 Mike Erlinger Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts, discretionary use

2001 Tad Beckman Center for Environmental Studies 2000 Jerry Van Hecke ’61 Funding toward J’nan Sellery Media Studio in Shanahan Center 1999 Betty Lumpkin Scholarships

2010 Andrew Dorantes Bike for employee raffle

1997 Tom Helliwell Established Louise and Graydon Bell Prize for physics students

2009 John Townsend Physics Prize

1996 Sam Tanenbaum Established Mary G. Binder Prize

2008 Theresa Potter Powersol solar-powered outdoor charging station on campus

1992 Joe Platt Helped fund Jean & Joe Platt scholarship and physics laboratory equipment budget

2007 Robert Cave Upward Bound scholars 2006 Jeanne Noda Mudders Making a Difference

Judy Givigliano and Peter Osgood

2002 Deren Finks Matching gift to encourage alumni donations

2005 Dick Olson ’62 Garrett Fund within Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts

The following prize winners’ designations are unknown: Bob Borrelli (1998), Bill Purves (1995), Ray Miller (1994), Courtney Coleman (1993)

TRUSTEE UPDATE

New to the board

Recognition

R. Miller Adams

In recognition of his many years of dedicated service and generosity to the College as an active and committed trustee, serving as chair of the board from 1998 to 2006, the board unanimously elected R. Michael Shanahan as emeritus trustee.

In appreciation of their service to the College, the board also elected J. Dale Harvey and Andrea Leebron-Clay as emeritus trustees.

founder and managing director, Pier 70 Ventures

Saturday, Oct. 8, 2016 | 9 a.m.–4 p.m.

Aiming to encourage a multidisciplinary knowledge of environmental issues, this conference is for students, faculty, staff and local community members who wish to raise their academic and personal awareness about environmental sustainability issues. Discussions will focus on sustainable design and what methods and processes are used to develop sustainable solutions. The keynote speaker, guest panels, posters and presentations will cover topics in science and technology; policy; markets and humanities; and sustainability in institutions of higher education—all as it pertains to sustainable design and solutions.

Laurie Girand consumer advocate

Shamit Grover ’05 managing director, MSD Capital (previously a young alumnus trustee)

Kjersten Moody vice president for information and analytics, Unilever

Keynote Speaker Amanda Sabicer vice president of development, Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator

Register at hmc.edu/sds-2016

John Norin ’90/91 vice president, technology and ventures, DIRECTV Inc.

Kathleen Fisher

Ellyn Shook chief human resources officer, Accenture

Yvonne Wassenaar chief information officer, New Relic

2016 Dr. Bruce J. Nelson ’74 Distinguished Speaker Series

Speakers explore contemporary issues of social justice and investigate how STEM enthusiasts may, and must, incorporate work toward social justice into their daily lives and long-range goals.

J. Dale Harvey

Young Alumni Trustees Tracy Bartholomew ’07

Social Justice and STEM

R. Michael Shanahan

professor of computer science, Tufts University (daughter of Michael Shanahan)

manager, client solutions, inventory management, Warner Bros.

Andrea Leebron-Clay

Jason Fennell ’08 director of engineering, Yelp

hmc.edu/calendar/nelson-speaker-series

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Key Contribution

Fellowship brings cybersecurity expert displaced from war-torn Syria to Harvey Mudd Written by Steven K. Wagner Photo by Cheryl Ogden

IIE-SRF fellowships enable outstanding professors from countries in turmoil to pursue their academic work in safety.

WHEN THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR ARRIVED AT HIS

doorstep, Ahmad Adib Sha’ar knew it was time to leave.

His departure brought him to the U.S. and, ultimately, to a visiting professorship at Harvey Mudd College, where Sha’ar will teach at least one course within the realm of cryptography, programming algorithms, information theory and radar theory.

He also will continue his groundbreaking research into prime codes and the wireless communication technique known as code division multiple access (CDMA). Sha’ar has wasted no time settling into his new academic environment.

Already, Sha’ar, who is visiting under the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund, has lectured on his departure from Syria and the circuitous route he took to avoid ISIS as well as a longstanding primary research interest: the application of CDMA to radar. His stay, which will continue through the 2016–2017 academic year, involves lecturing to students and assisting them with their own research.

“My plan was to retire in my traditional house in Aleppo,” says Sha’ar, who left Syria with his wife, Sawsan, and two sons (five children preceded them in leaving). “I did not anticipate the violence and destruction that would prevent me from fulfilling that dream.”

Indeed, the war has cost him dearly. Not only was he forced from his home when his family’s safety was threatened and utility services became scarce, but his brother was killed in a rocket attack.

Born in Aleppo, Sha’ar was educated at Kent University in Canterbury, the United Kingdom, where he earned an M.S. degree in digital communications and a PhD in computer networks. He returned to the Middle East, where he joined the academic staff at Assad Academy of Military Engineering and Mamoun Private University for Science and Technology, both in Syria, and King Khaled University in Saudi Arabia. In the early

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1980s, he co-invented prime sequencing codes for fiber optics, later applying them to radar and collision engineering algorithms, and co-authored a definitive paper titled “A survey of one-coincidence sequences for frequency-hopped spread-spectrum systems,” which describes the methods of primary code sequences designed to minimize channel interference from multiple users.

“I’ve always had an interest in solving big things; however, I have some difficulty dealing with smaller things,” says Sha’ar. With a chuckle, the wireless communication protocol authority offered a paradoxical example: “For instance, my 17-year-old son is better than I am at understanding mobile phone instructions.”

Upon arriving in the U.S. through a Scholar Rescue Fund fellowship, Sha’ar worked as a visiting professor at Salisbury University in Maryland, teaching a course on codes in communications and computer systems. IIE-SRF fellowships enable outstanding professors, researchers and public intellectuals from countries in turmoil to pursue their academic work in safety and to continue to share their knowledge with students, colleagues and the community. When the position at Salisbury ended, Sha’ar looked toward Harvey Mudd College, which by then seemed as far away as possible from the fighting in Syria.

“There was no water, no electricity, no Internet and, most important, no security in Aleppo,” says Sha’ar, who once narrowly escaped a rocket attack. “My children were protesting against the government, and I knew it was too dangerous to stay.”

Physics/engineering alumnus and HMC Board of Trustees member Mahesh Kotecha ’70, who introduced the College to the Rescue Scholars program, another trustee and a third donor helped

to fund the Sha’ars stay. In Claremont, the Sha’ars are happy, settled and enjoying the charm of the community and Southern California. Sha’ar already is immersed in his work: Typically used in cellular and other telecommunications networks, CDMA had not previously been applied to fiber optics. An ongoing challenge remains radar.

“When we began our work, there was no existing scientific effort to apply CDMA to radars,” he says.

“In fact, nobody put such a challenge in front of me. I fabricated this challenge, and we solved it by recommending the use of our fiber optic CDMAmodified prime codes to radars in order to control the pulse repetition interval agility of a set of adjacent radars. We demonstrated algebraically the effectiveness of the suggested code sets.”

Sha’ar now has a new challenge that he’s embracing wholeheartedly.

“Harvey Mudd College has some really talented students,” he says. “As I begin my time here, I can’t think of anything I’m more looking forward to doing than sharing my knowledge with them.”

Four Questions for Leadership Expert Werner Zorman Werner Zorman, the inaugural holder of the Annenberg Leadership Chair and new faculty member in the Department of Engineering, was most recently the associate director of the Engineering Leadership Program at Cornell University. For two decades before that, he worked at Nokia, first in Austria and then in the United States. Between 2009 and 2012, he led the Nokia Leadership and Organization Development Program for North America. Zorman is an expert in leadership development and coaching and has a special interest in meditation and the character virtue of resilience.

What attracted you to Harvey Mudd?

I think it’s a good match here because it’s smaller [than Cornell]. One of my strengths is to have very supportive and coaching-like relationships with students. So here there are 200 new students a year. At Cornell, it’s 800 a year, so there’s no way you get anywhere close to meeting all your students. At Harvey Mudd, there are many opportunities to get to know most students.

It’s better for me, for how I teach and establish relationships. Also, from the very first time I stepped on campus here, I loved the Mudd culture. Part of leadership development and helping people to develop

leadership skills is that the good leader creates a culture, an intended culture. You always have a culture.

If you don’t do anything, you might have a culture you don’t want. Here it seems very collaborative.

What do you consider your strengths?

One of my strengths is I’m going to see your potential really, really clearly, often before you see it. Just by interacting with the student, I see a strength. Often you don’t see your strengths because it’s so natural and you just do it, right? So for instance, if you are a very empathetic person, you wouldn't see it as a strength because it's just natural for you. I can highlight what someone’s strengths are, their talents, and help them fine-tune and develop them.

One of your tasks is helping to develop leaders at Harvey Mudd. How will you do that?

Part of leadership is determining what’s important in life. What do I stand behind? What’s important to me?

First, you need to lead yourself. I will help students develop themselves and their skills and also share how to interact with others so to have the intended impact.

As a leader, it’s all about knowing what you want to be different in the world. A leader, by definition, wants

to change or introduce or do something new which is so big that you can’t do it on your own. If you want to change something big in the world, you need a team.

So you need to be able to enroll and motivate them, make them want to be part of your cause and then reward them and then also help them to see when they do things wrong. Every leader has to know how to follow, and every leader has to know how to work in a team.

I understand this is your sixth state and 16th home with your wife, son and daughter (now teenagers).

What do you like so far about Claremont?

I love the mountains here. The weather: I think mainly it’s going to be great, although I’m not a fan of hundred-plus temperatures … It’s a very family-like community. I love that. I’m really looking forward to finding nice running trails and climbing again. I’m planning to hike Mount Baldy. And, I look forward to finding and trying authentic Mexican food.

Teacher-Scholars Appointed to Tenure-Track Positions Danae Schulz, assistant professor of biology. Schulz studies African trypanosomes, the parasites transmitted through tsetse flies that cause sleeping sickness (African trypanosomiasis). She is interested in how the parasites adapt to different environments in the fly and mammalian bloodstream, with an eye toward manipulating this adaptation to help fight the disease.

Factoid: She holds a bachelor’s of music in violin performance from the New England Conservatory.

Brian Shuve, assistant professor of physics. Shuve is a theoretical particle physicist who develops and studies new theories to explain mysteries of the universe, such as the nature of dark matter and why there exists more matter than antimatter. He also devises new experimental tests to learn more about the fundamental constituents and forces of matter.

Factoid: Now working as a research associate at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, he is deferring his HMC start date until fall 2017.

Timothy J. Tsai, assistant professor of engineering. Tsai’s research lies at the intersection of signal processing, machine learning and music.

Factoid: He worked at SoundHound, a startup that allows users to search for music by singing or humming a part of the song.

Yi-Chieh (Jessica) Wu, assistant professor of computer science. Wu researches phylogenetics, developing evolutionary models and algorithms for reconstructing gene histories across multiple species to understand how genes form and function.

Factoid: She has been a visiting faculty member in computer science since fall 2014.

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In Memoriam

Engineering Professor Clive Dym Renowned engineering educator, prolific scholar, mentor

INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED ENGINEERING

educator and Harvey Mudd College Professor of Engineering Emeritus Clive L. Dym died at his home in Claremont, California, on May 3. An expert both in mechanics and in the use of artificial intelligence in engineering design, Dym had an enormous impact on engineering education at Harvey Mudd and around the world.

Dym joined Harvey Mudd in 1991 as the inaugural holder of the Fletcher Jones Design Chair, where he developed innovative strategies and paradigms that transformed design education. Dym believed design was the distinguishing activity of the engineer, an activity that he viewed as central to creative thinking, problem solving and decision making. He developed a framework for teaching design that rejected the notion that students required a foundation of engineering science before their engagement in design and brought formal design education to the first-year curriculum. One of his most innovative contributions resulted in design thinking and exercises within the team environment, where diversity of thought and experience combined to produce the desired outcomes. Dym wrote extensively about design, how to think about design and why design thinking was so critical to effective decision making.

Through his passion for design engagement, Dym created a community of scholars interested in design education and organized a biennial program of workshops—now named in his honor as the

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Clive L. Dym Mudd Design Workshops—that brought together educators, practitioners and researchers to discuss issues in design and engineering education.

Prior to joining the College, Dym was renowned for his contributions in the fields of applied mechanics and artificial intelligence. He was an expert in the areas of solid mechanics, applied elasticity and stability formulations and in the performance of plates and shells, where he used energy formulations to develop simplified methods for the analysis of complex structures. Over the course of his long career, his interests shifted to expert systems, computer-aided engineering and the idea that artificial intelligence could lead to enhanced knowledge acquisition and decision making.

Dym was a prolific writer, authoring and co-authoring hundreds of refereed journal articles, proceedings and technical reports, as well as 13 books.

Dym’s contributions brought a multitude of recognition, awards and prizes, including the Walter L. Huber Research Prize (ASCE), the Fred Merryfield Design Award (ASEE), the Joel and Ruth Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award (ASME), the Benjamin Garver Lamme Award (ASEE) and, together with Harvey Mudd professors Mack Gilkeson and Rich Phillips, the National Academy of Engineering Gordon Prize for creating and disseminating innovations in undergraduate engineering design education for the development of engineering leaders.

Upon his retirement from Harvey Mudd in 2012, Dym received an Honorary Alumni Award in recognition of his service to students and to the College.

Dym served as chair of the Department of Engineering (1999–2002), recruited the department’s first group of female faculty, expanded the department’s project-based learning experiences and served as director of the Center for Design Education (1995–2012).

Dym is survived by family in the United States and Israel, including his wife, Joan Dym; daughters, Jordana Dym (and Scott Mulligan) and Miriam Dym; and his adopted family member, standard poodle Hank.

Community members may leave remembrances of Dym at hmc.edu/remembering-clive-dym.

Physics Professor Jack Waggoner

A 33-year member of the faculty Jack Holmes Waggoner died July 2. He was born in 1929 and was a native of Ohio. He completed his B.S. (1949) and PhD (1957) at Ohio State University. He taught from 1959 to 1961 at the University of California, Riverside, and then was hired to join the Harvey Mudd College faculty as an assistant professor of physics in 1961. Upon receiving tenure and promotion in 1965, Waggoner wrote to President Joe Platt that “working at the College has been both a pleasure and an inspiration—I do indeed look forward to growing with it.”

Waggoner taught a variety of courses in physics, including Electromagnetic Waves and Optics, Theoretical Mechanics and a number of laboratory courses. He spent his first sabbatical in 1967–1968 as a visiting associate professor at Caltech, where he studied theoretical physics and observed the Caltech undergraduate physics program. Waggoner retired from Harvey Mudd in 1994 after 33 years on the faculty.

Waggoner enjoyed target shooting and archery, collecting model cars and reading biography and history. He assembled an extensive personal library of books on many subjects. He built his own “hi-fi” system so that he could listen to classical music.

His wife, Anne, who regularly attended department and College events with Waggoner, died in 2013.

They had no children. He is survived by his brother Chandler Waggoner of Indiana.

Another Faculty First INCLUDING CONTINUING DEPARTMENT CHAIRS

Kerry Karukstis (chemistry), Elizabeth Orwin ’95 (engineering) and Lisette de Pillis (mathematics), six of seven department chair positions are now held by women professors, marking the largest-ever female presence on the Department Chairs Committee. Stephen Adolph continues as chair of the Department of Biology. New department chairs are: Melissa O’Neill,

Computer Science Department; professor of computer science.

She succeeds Ran Libeskind-Hadas.

O’Neill has taught Data Structures and Program Development, Programming Languages, and Operating Systems. Her other areas of research include memory management and making parallel and concurrent programming easier.

Theresa Lynn,

Department of Physics; associate professor of physics.

She succeeds Peter Saeta. Lynn works on the security of

quantum communications and collaborates with research students on quantum information projects. Lynn also has been instrumental in developing the first-semester writing half-course Writ 1, which prepares students for college-level writing across the curriculum.

Lisa Sullivan, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts (HSA); Willard W. Keith Jr. Fellow in the Humanities and professor of economic history. Succeeding Bill Alves, she will serve as chair during the sabbatical of Paul Steinberg, Malcolm Lewis ’67 Professor of Sustainability and Society, who will become chair of the HSA department beginning July 1, 2017. Sullivan previously served as HSA department chair (2005–2008) and has served as chair of the faculty, associate dean of academic affairs and associate dean for faculty development.

An historian of the concept of work, she specializes in medieval and early American economic history and the history of work ethics.

Leichter Makes Beeline Between Hive and Harvey Mudd Bringing dynamic experience in fields ranging from higher education to technology, Frederick S. Leichter, a key design innovator and executive for Fidelity Investments, is the founding director of The Claremont Colleges’ Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity as well as a clinical professor of engineering at Harvey Mudd.

Known as “the Hive,” the center officially opened in September 2015 as a place

where students can form creative teams, be intellectually daring and work collaboratively to address complex challenges. Created with a $25 million gift from Rick and Susan Sontag—1964 graduates of Harvey Mudd College and Pomona College, respectively—it serves the five undergraduate Claremont Colleges.

Leichter sees Claremont’s unique grouping of small liberal arts institutions as ideal for creative development. “Students will learn and live the mindsets of design thinking, becoming the creative leaders and doers of the future.”

Promotions, Appointments Academic Advancement Mathematics Professor Rachel Levy was promoted to full professor. She researches applications of mathematics to biological and industrial problems. She is co-director of the IMMERSION project, a National Science Foundation-funded study examining how intensive training can affect elementary school teachers’ use of mathematical modeling in the classroom. Levy specializes in math curriculum and innovative design of instruction. Her research in this area has focused on flipped classrooms in undergraduate education and mathematical modeling in K–8 education.

She is vice president of education for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and serves as the College’s associate dean for faculty development.

The HMC Board of Trustees also approved the recommended reappointments of Assistant Professor of Biology Jae Hur, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Colleen Lewis, Hixon Professor of Sustainable Environmental Design Tanja Srebotnjak and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Katherine Van Heuvelen.

Patrick Little, J. Stanley and Mary Wig Johnson Professor of Engineering, will serve a three-year term as chair of the faculty. He succeeds Lisa Sullivan.

Grant News Connecting Local CS Teachers Computer science professors Zachary Dodds and Colleen Lewis have received a $25,000 grant from Google’s CS4HS program for their work providing professional development to local, pre-college computer science educators. They’ll provide support for CS teachers to help Pomona Unified School District offer the new computer science Advanced Placement course CS Principles.

Dodds and Lewis’ work includes both face-to-face and online support. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Dodds has already been working with Pomona Unified, and more than 4,000 students have taken computer science courses developed by Mudders for the Middle-years Computer Science (MyCS) program.

“We’re excited to help Pomona Unified add to their computer science course offerings with support from CS4HS,” says Dodds, who is the Leonhard-Johnson-Rae Professor of Computer Science.

SUMMER 2016

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COLLABORATION

Sharing Expertise Globally Harvey Mudd consults with Pakistan’s Habib University

AS PART OF ITS STRATEGIC VISION TO EXPAND COLLABORATIONS

with key institutions around the world, Harvey Mudd College is consulting with Habib University, Pakistan’s first liberal arts and sciences university and one of Pakistan’s youngest universities.

Harvey Mudd faculty and staff are helping to give depth and breadth to the university’s science and engineering programs by sharing institutional expertise and introducing time-tested teaching and learning techniques to Pakistan’s higher education landscape.

Harvey Mudd’s engineering curriculum includes a strong emphasis on experiential, hands-on learning and team-based projects with contemporary applications—a commonality shared

by Habib University’s vision for its own School of Science & Engineering.

Faculty and staff from the two institutions are learning about each other’s academic and administrative systems and institutional policies. On April 9, Rachel Levy, professor of mathematics and associate dean for faculty development, held a teleconferencing session with Habib faculty during which suggestions and ideas were shared regarding various pedagogical techniques and practices.

“We had a great discussion about pedagogical issues that arise in our institutions,” says Levy. “Faculty benefit greatly from opportunities to hear what is happening in each others’ classrooms. We exchanged ideas about writing across the curriculum and how to design tasks that work well as group projects. We have much in common, even though our institutions have their own cultural contexts.”

Habib University, which from its planning stages has stressed experiential and hands-on learning, finds Harvey Mudd’s Clinic Program a close match to the project-based learning opportunities it wishes to provide to its students. The Clinic Program at Harvey Mudd is a program of collaboration between industry and Harvey Mudd that engages juniors and seniors in the solution of real-world, technical problems for industrial clients. Since the Clinic’s inception, over 1,500 projects have been completed for more than 450 corporate, national laboratory and agency sponsors.

To structure and introduce a similar program at Habib University, faculty members from Habib have held discussions with their counterparts at Harvey Mudd during several visits to the college in the past year. Harvey Mudd’s director of corporate relations and Clinic coordinator, director of the Global Clinic Program and director of the Engineering Clinic have shared their experiences to help structure a similar initiative for the Pakistani context.

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Habib University faculty gather for a teleconference with Harvey Mudd faculty member Rachel Levy (on screen).

benefit greatly from opportunities to hear what “ Fis aculty happening in each others’ classrooms. We have much

in common, even though our institutions have their own cultural contexts.

”

– R ACHEL LEVY, PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS AND ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR FACULTY DEVELOPMENT

Following consultations with local industry representatives, Habib University determined that a structured program like Harvey Mudd’s Clinic Program could give its students specific problems to solve and would allow them to spend productive time in a professional environment.

Harvey Mudd faculty have shared their experiences regarding the structuring of Engineering Design and various computer science courses and will engage further through curriculum workshops and seminars with Habib faculty. Harvey Mudd physics faculty also have shared

resources for an advanced physics lab at Harvey Mudd that can be adopted at Habib, while also sharing details on a course titled The Science of Photography that can be taught at HU. “Habib University’s mission is inspiring and what they are trying to achieve is reminiscent of HMC’s early efforts,” says Jeff Groves, vice president and dean of the faculty. “I’m delighted that we can assist them by sharing what has worked for us.”

Habib University also has partnered with another undergraduate Claremont College, Pitzer, for faculty exchange and collaboration, study abroad, student collaborations and conferences.

CAMPUS CURRENT

S T U D E NT N E WS

MY M UDD L I F E

Good Fellow PHYSICS ALUMNA NATASHA ALLEN ’16 HAS embarked on a yearlong mission to examine barriers to universal energy access in developing countries. Funded by a prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, Allen’s project focuses on methods for providing reliable energy access to help spur economic and social development and eradicate

local grassroots organizations and leaders in order to better understand how to design products and services to empower the people with whom she engages.

“I hope to gain a more complete picture of the global energy access landscape and to understand which areas are hindering development,” Allen says. “Immersing

hope to gain a more complete picture of the global energy access “ Ilandscape and to understand which areas are hindering development.

– N ATASHA ALLEN ’16

poverty. Roughly two billion people lack access to electricity and clean cooking technology, says Allen.

Technological innovation, funding practices, research and policy-making are all integral to tackling the challenge of universal energy access, says Allen.

She travels to Cambodia, Myanmar, Uganda and Ethiopia—each of which poses its own unique challenges to overcoming critical energy issues—to collaborate with

”

myself in local communities, I will explore how people engage with energy and how it can transform their relationship with the world around them.”

The Watson Fellowship is a one-year grant for purposeful, independent study outside the United States, awarded to graduating seniors. Recipients use their $30,000 stipend for a year of personal insight and perspective.

Hyperloop Scoop Harvey Mudd students continued working with a global, multi-university team to build a fully functional, three-fourth scale Hyperloop pod model. Team OpenLoop— composed of students from Harvey Mudd, Cornell University, University of Michigan, Northeastern University, Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada) and Princeton University—was one of 30 teams selected to test its design prototype at the world’s first Hyperloop Test Track adjacent to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The human-scale pods will be unveiled during a competition scheduled for Jan. 27–29, 2017.

“Circuitry design and testing has been going on at Mudd, while students in Seattle, Australia, L.A. and Boston have

been working on the central computing, sensor fusion and housings,” says Patrick McKeen ’17, an engineering major who serves as the HMC campus lead.

The Hyperloop concept was first proposed by SpaceX and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk in 2013. It incorporates reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors.

Passengers could travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under 30 minutes, radically transforming the speed and safety of passenger mass transit.

The knowledge gained from the competition will be open sourced.

A rendering of a section of Team OpenLoop's pod model

SUMMER 2016

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CAMPUS CURRENT

S T U D E NT N E WS

World Travelers In pursuit of his dream of becoming a robotics engineer, traveling the world and experiencing new cultures, Jakim Johnson ’19 took part in the Chinese Studies Institute’s E84 in China program this summer with the help of the Fund for Education Abroad (FEA). A member of Black Lives and Allies at Mudd, a diversity intern for the Office of Admission and winner of the College’s Copper Chef competition, he is one of the nation’s top-performing students awarded an FEA scholarship. For eight weeks, Johnson and 17 other Harvey Mudd students studied engineering as well as Chinese language, history and culture at Peking University.

A record number of Harvey Mudd students studied abroad during spring 2016 (32 students, compared to 16 in spring 2015).

Awards Goldwater Winners Christopher Hoyt ’18 (mathematics), Jonas Kaufman ’17 (physics) and Dina Sinclair ’17 (mathematics) have each received the most prestigious national award for undergraduate STEM researchers. Awarded on the basis of academic merit, the annual Barry Goldwater Scholarship helps outstanding students pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. The award covers the cost of tuition, fees, books and room and board up to $7,500 per year.

Stellar Achievement Jakim Johnson ’19

Look! No Hands Just how much can you trust a driverless car?

It’s certainly a question many have asked as the driverless car concept races toward reality. Two student teams from computer science Professor Jim Boerkoel’s HEATlab are asking such questions and sharing their findings.

Human Robot Trust project members Erin Paeng ’17 and Jane Wu ’18 explored the notion of whether increasingly prevalent autonomous robots—such as driverless cars and unmanned aerial vehicles—are capable of making trustworthy decisions. Robot Brunch team members Kyle Lund ’17, Sam Dietrich ’17 and Scott Chow ’17 discussed ways to ensure that robust, multi-robot scheduling technologies are safe and reliable to humans. Both teams presented their research at the 2016 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, a top international robotics conference, June 19 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Boerkoel calls HEATlab’s research “a perfect example of how Harvey Mudd is fulfilling its mission to educate engineers, scientists and mathematicians with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.”

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Mathematics and physics double major Calvin Leung ’17 is one of 40 students nationwide to be named a 2016 Astronaut Scholar by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which provides scholarships for college students pursuing science and technology careers. He has worked on several research projects both on-and off-campus: the study of algorithms for the detection of gravitational wave signals, quantifying camera resolution, and combining cosmological observation with quantum optics. Leung is also a physics tutor, Honor Board member and avid unicyclist. He plans to obtain his PhD in physics and join the effort to bring gravitational wave astronomy to fruition.

Celebrating Impact

HEATlab participants. Back row: Emi Reed ’17, Kyle Lund ’17, Sam Dietrich ’17, Erin Paeng ’17 and Jeb Brooks ’14. Front: Emma Meersman ’17 and Prof. Jim Boerkoel.

The College honored outstanding community members April 28, at its fourth annual Leadership Awards ceremony, which celebrates individuals’ contributions to the campus and local communities. Outstanding Student Organization winner Black Lives and Allies at Mudd (BLAM) was honored for providing a sense of community for African American students at The Claremont Colleges. Outstanding Emerging Leaders Morgan Frisby ’19 and Shailee Samar ’18 were recognized for exhibiting leadership potential through participation in community-building efforts. Outstanding Mudder Award recipients Nithya Menon ’16, Alex Rich ’16 and Lin Yang ’16 earned recognition for embodying what it means to be a “whole person” at Harvey Mudd.

CHEERING SECTION

HA RV E Y M U DD AT HL E T E S/ S C HO L A R S IN C M S S PO RT S

CMS compiled an impressive list of accomplishments during the 2015-2016 academic year. The program claimed its eighth-straight combined All-Sports trophy, accumulating 170 combined points in the 21 sponsored sports. The Athenas earned titles in cross country, basketball, and track and field, and tied for first in women’s volleyball and tennis and took second in soccer, swimming and diving, golf and softball. The Stags took titles in cross-country, water polo, swimming and diving, golf, tennis, and track and field.

Bittersweet

In Memoriam: Tristan Witte ’18 “SO SILLY, SO FUN.” THAT’S HOW ONE CO-WORKER DESCRIBED

Tristan Witte ’18, an engineering student who is being remembered by family and friends in many special ways. Witte passed away in a car accident July 15 along with his friend JJ Adkisson, 20.

At Silbermann’s Ice Cream Shop near Witte’s hometown of San Rafael, California, family members and co-workers concocted a special batch of ice cream in his memory. Mudd Slide contains his favorites: green-dyed vanilla ice cream with fudge, butterscotch, chocolate-coated toffee pieces and molasses chips. Response to the fun flavor was overwhelming— 200 scoops were served in one day, says owner Curtis Silbermann. Witte had worked at the ice cream shop since 2012.

During gatherings on campus, the HMC community recalled a talented athlete, musician and scholar, a fan of the beach, surfing and music, Writing Center consultant and lover of languages (he was taking classes in Chinese).

Students and faculty members describe Witte as easy going and even-keeled in a way that helped his classmates immensely. An engineering faculty member recalls, “When they were super stressed (which was nearly always), he’d crack a joke or play some reggae that would relax everyone and make them all more effective. He also showed great respect for every person on his team.”

Fellow engineering student and friend Lillian Liang ’18 remarks, “He always looked people in the eye and really listened when they talked.”

The son of Marcus and Irmgard Witte, Tristan Witte is survived by his parents and younger sister, Peyton.

Track and Field For the third year in a row, both the CMS Athletics men’s and women’s trackand-field squads swept the team titles at the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) Championships. Mudders: Elizabeth Lee ’17, Ellen Seidel ’17, Kathryn Akmal ’19, Bryan Mehall ’16, Rohan Shankar ’17, Zane Bodenbender ’17, Fernando Fernandez ’18, Matthew Guillory ’19, Sean Mahre ’18, Alex Rich ’16, Kofi Sekyi-Appiah ’18, Finn Southerland ’19, Senghor Joseph ’17

Women’s Softball The Athenas captured their fourth SCIAC Championship. The team’s 37 wins are a program record. Mudders: Rachel Perley ’19, Rachel O’Neill ’17

Women’s Tennis The team clinched a trip to NCAA Regionals with a victory over Pomona-Pitzer May 15. Mudders: Nithya Menon ’16, Kyla Scott ’18

Men’s Tennis SCIAC win streak for Stags Tennis hits 100 and counting. Mudders: Bryan Mehall ’16, Rohan Shankar ’17

Men’s Golf The CMS men’s golf program won its first NCAA National Championship.

Mudder: Sidney Cozier ’19

Football Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Division III Defensive Athlete of the Year Paul Slaats ’17 (shown) was named HMC Athlete of the Year. The nose guard led the conference in points allowed per game (21.9), rushing yards allowed per game (105.8) and interceptions (17).

Memorial website: hmc.edu/remembering-tristan-witte

SUMMER 2016

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STUDENT RESEARCH

Researching Research

Complex concepts explained by student experts ADINKRAS? OAM-ENTANGLED PHOTONS? CRYPTOBEILIC TETRACYCLES?

While Harvey Mudd College recognizes the importance of studentfaculty research, what’s sometimes less recognizable are the descriptive terms within that research. We chose four thesis projects presented during the College’s annual Presentation Days research celebration that included interesting—if not head-scratching—terms, and then asked the authors to explain.

E

k

Free Electrons Dense Plasma Electron Trajectories

Above: An illustration of the stochastic heating process.

Charts: Examples of simulation results showing the electron gaining energy in the duration of the laser pulse.

Stochastic heating The firefly is an example of a coupled oscillator found in nature, as the flashing of one firefly encourages another to flash in response.

Coupled oscillator Alec Dunton ’16, mathematics “Topological Data Analysis for Systems of Coupled Oscillators”

An oscillator is an object that exhibits periodic behavior, like a flashing firefly or a swinging pendulum. An oscillator is called “coupled” when its behavior is tied to that of another or many other oscillators. They are of strong interest in the mathematics community because of their ubiquity in nature and utility in modeling phenomena—think: bullfrogs croaking out of phase or a pacemaker entraining the beating of a heart.

“I learned about the model with which I was most concerned during my research, the Kuramoto model, as a sophomore in an ordinary differential equations class with my advisor Andrew Bernoff,” says Dunton. “A year later, I began a summer research

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

project on the application of techniques from topological data analysis to systems of coupled oscillators governed by the equation derived by Yoshiki Kuramoto.

“I am not sure if I will continue work on this specific subject, but I may revisit it at some point while working toward my PhD at UCLA,” says Dunton, who graduated with High Distinction and received the Stavros Busenberg Prize in Applied Mathematics. “My interests tend to be about data science in general, and coupled oscillators have served as an interesting topic with real-world applications to which to apply techniques from computational topology.”

Xin Zhang ’16, physics “Computational Modeling of Multi-Pass Stochastic Heating”

In stochastic heating, a laser frees electrons from the atoms in a solid (ionizes the solid into plasma) and then heats the electrons by repeatedly pulling them out of the solid and throwing them back in.

“By heating the electrons to energies high enough that they can escape from the solid, we can indirectly transfer laser energy to the ions in the solid,” says Zhang, who graduated with Distinction and is pursuing her doctorate in fusion studies at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Lab. “This could lead to small-scale fusion reactions, which could then be used as a clean, alternative energy source.”

A good analogy, she says, is picking up a bouncy ball from the floor and throwing it back down. By punching it back down every time it bounces up, eventually the ball has a lot more energy than it started

with, bouncing much higher.

This simple comparison belies the complexity of the concept, however.

“I learned about [stochastic heating] from my research advisor Professor of Physics Tom Donnelly, who painstakingly explained the concept to me at least five times in the first three years of my college career,” says Zhang. “And then, it took me a couple of reads on papers and other textbooks to really understand it.”

For complex research, Zhang has a critical piece of advice: Take your time, read and be patient.

“It takes a lot of background knowledge to understand the big picture, the motivation and the formulation of a research question,” she says. “After that, you can try to understand the technical details.”

Cryptobeilic Tetracycles Shannon Wetzler ’16, chemistry “Biomimetic Diels-Alder Reactions to Cryptobeilic Tetracycles”

Shannon Wetzler ’16 and her advisor, chemistry Professor David Vosburg

Cryptobeilic acid tetracycles are molecules found in a particular species of tropical plant (Beilschmiedia cryptocaryoides). Some cryptobeilic acid tetracycles have been found to have bioactive properties, which include being anti-malarial and anti-inflammatory.

“I knew absolutely nothing about cryptobeilic acid tetracycles, or organic synthesis in general, before attending HMC,” says Wetzler. “I had been working in Professor David Vosburg’s lab since my freshman year, so I had a relatively strong background in organic chemistry. A previous lab member (Eun Bin Go ’15) had worked on a similar project, and I was intrigued by the mechanism through which the synthesis occurred, which spurred me to design my project. Professor Vosburg was

very supportive of my carrying out a project which interested me and helped me develop the project.”

Wetzler, a 2014 Goldwater Scholarship honorable mention recipient and winner of multiple awards at graduation, including the American Chemical Society Analytical Award, says she learned to break down projects into little bits and do a lot of background research. “It also is important to push forward with what interests you and pursue what you are questioning,” she says. “I think it is always important to remember that it is just a problem. Problems aren’t always solved in one day, one week, one try or even one year. Persistence and patience are important.”

Retrotransposon Max Frenkel ’16, chemistry and biology “Mobility of the Human L1 Retrotransposon in Drosophila melanogaster”

Retrotransposons are ancient pieces of DNA that “jump” throughout our genome by a copy-and-paste mechanism, says Frenkel. “It’s pretty astounding to realize that such elements (which mobilize more or less indiscriminately) make up approximately 40 percent of the human genome!”

Before Harvey Mudd, Frenkel says he knew of transposable elements but was unaware of their significant role in evolution and the possibility that retroelements contribute to aging and age-related diseases like neurodegeneration.

“I discovered this field in Professor Jae Hur’s Topic in the Biology of Aging seminar course and adapted the grant proposal I wrote in that course for my thesis research.”

Frenkel, recipient of several departmental awards as well as an American Chemistry Society Polymer Award, has begun his pursuit of an MD/PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his PhD research will be in chemical biology. He says the support of the Department of Chemistry was key to his interest and understanding of the research.

“Given that HMC is an undergraduate institution, I expected to forge meaningful relationships with faculty, but I never expected the depth of commitment and care the chemistry faculty has shown me,” says Frenkel.

A graphic description of the copy-and-paste mechanism by which retransposons mobilize.

SUMMER 2016

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CLINIC PROGRAM

M.C. Storrie-Lombardi P13 EX ECUTIVE D IRECTOR KINOHI INSITITUTE Engineering Clinic | Spatial Heterodyne Raman Spectrometry

Design, build and test a device for capturing the Raman spectra of organic molecules using spatial heterodyne spectrometer optical design operating with near-infrared excitation light. The team’s non-contact, non-destructive material identifying spectrometer has promising applications in many fields.

How well did the team meet its stated project goal?

In nine months, the team succeeded in designing and building the world’s first spatial heterodyne infrared Raman spectrometer. The device is at least two orders of magnitude more sensitive than current Raman spectrometers and produces significantly less damage to microbial or human cells than current generation devices.

What impressed you about the students’ approach to the problem?

The team members worked together seamlessly, never gave up when faced with unanticipated difficulties and seemed unphased that they were building a completely unique device.

What was it like to work with your Harvey Mudd team?

Pivotal Partners Liaisons provide essential wisdom

THE STRONG ALLIANCE OF INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION

continues in the Harvey Mudd College Clinic Program after more than 50 years. Under the guidance of student project managers, faculty advisors and liaisons from sponsoring organizations, Clinic teams have completed more than 1,500 projects.

The role of liaison is critical. President Maria Klawe remarked that liaisons bring deep knowledge in areas that Harvey Mudd students may not have yet encountered.

Liaisons maintain close contact with the team, outline the project requirements, approve the team’s proposal for accomplishing the work and receive weekly progress reports.

Student and faculty interaction with the sponsor’s representative is a key ingredient for a successful project and a valuable educational experience.

A record 124 liaisons—each project has up to four— participated in Clinic during the 2015–2016 academic year.

Alumni made another strong showing (23) this year, and there were two parent liaisons. Here’s what selected liaisons had to say about some of this year’s 44 Clinic projects and their teams.

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Working with this team was a repeat of my early experience 17 years ago: completely delightful. Weekly team meetings were rich in new ideas, novel ways of tackling problems, and always good humor and camaraderie.

James Huey WO O D F I N I S H C OOR D INAT O R S T E E L CA SE INC. Computer Science Clinic | Classifying Wood Veneer

Maximize customer satisfaction by minimizing the perceived variation among pieces of veneer by building a model that sorts veneer into categories based on its color and grain characteristics.

What impressed you about the students’ approach to the problem?

We were most impressed with the development of their team, how they assigned specific duties to each team member and how they came together to work as a team. We also liked the approach of the weekly Web-Ex meetings for updates. We appreciated their willingness to travel to the manufacturing plant several times throughout the year to gain a better understanding of our processes that we previously did manually.

What’s next for this project?

After the success of the prototype development and implementation to our plant process, we have seen a dramatic improvement (40 percent) with our veneer classification system. Our next step is to expand the program to include all of our standard veneer species.

Sarah Lichtman ’14 G R O UP 3 9 , A DVA N C E D C O NC E P T S AND TECHNOLOG IES G ROUP ; A I R , M I S S I L E A ND MA R IT IM E D E F ENSE M I T L I N COL N L A B O R AT ORY Engineering Clinic | Wireless Coordination Testbed

Build a model of clock synchronization and a wireless coordination testbed to compare the performance of synchronization architectures, algorithms and hardware.

How well did the team meet its stated project goal?

The team members did an excellent job on this research-heavy project. I think they learned a lot, and their work certainly granted us valuable insight into this problem of synchronization techniques.

they learned a lot, and thinkwork “ Itheir certainly granted us

valuable insight into this problem of synchronization techniques.

– S ARAH LICHTMAN ’14

”

What impressed you about the students’ approach to the problem?

Each student carved out their own area of expertise within the project and did impressive research and analysis to understand and communicate each piece’s impact on the project.

SUMMER 2016

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CLINIC PROGRAM

Kurt Melstrom S UR GE O N CI T Y O F H OP E Engineering Clinic | Portable Surgical Retractor Attachments

To improve surgery visibility and mobility, design and prototype retractor attachments that are cordless, longlasting, sterilizable and capable of maintaining a safe temperature to prevent injury to surgeons and patients.

impressed that the was mostworked “ Istudents as a group together and alternated tasks. ” – K URT MELSTROM

Why Clinic?

I was interested in working with young students with an educational background different from my own. I had good ideas about technology I would like to use in my job, but I do not have an engineering education to build them.

How well did the team meet its stated project goal?

The team did a great job bringing an idea on paper to a fully working product. It still needs some refinements before being practical to use.

What impressed you about the students’ approach to the problem?

I was most impressed that the students worked as a group together and alternated tasks. I was also impressed with the way they set deadlines and were able to keep them.

Dave Zielski EX ECUTIVE D IRECTOR RAINCATCHER Global Clinic | Low-cost Monitoring of Remote Rainwater Catchment Tanks

Design and build a device to communicate details about rainwater catchment systems in regions of Kenya, Uganda and the Navajo Nation.

Device will allow collection of quantitative data and improve system reliability.

What was it like to work with your Harvey Mudd team?

It was a fantastic experience. We met weekly, and they were able to visit one of our domestic projects. They were able to quickly account for the problems and get them addressed for the final project. I was able to guide them, but they took control to make it happen.

What’s next for this project?

We are evaluating it now and plan to present it to the annual board of directors meeting in late August to get them behind it so we may be able to talk to donors about funding its deployment.

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Nick Orlans

Doug Chudy

P R I N CI PA L E NG IN E E R M I T R E CO R P OR AT ION

M OUNTAIN P RESERV ES MANAGER W ILD LAND S CON SERVANCY

Computer Science Clinic | Digital Aging

Digitally age a face image of a person, building off existing image processing techniques, focusing on young subjects to better help identify missing children when their images are presented to automated tools and human observers.

Why Clinic?

The Clinic supports MITRE’s interest in STEM education and research in areas where we know of real-world problems that need to be addressed.

How well did the team meet its stated project goal?

The goal for forensic-quality age simulation was not fully achieved, but some parts of the work were well done and successful.

What impressed you about the students’ approach to the problem?

The user study was particularly well done, and the final report was comprehensive and complete.

Engineering Clinic | Micro-Hydroelectric System

Design a micro-hydroelectric system optimized for the area surrounding Oak Glen Preserve that ties into the Southern California Edison grid to offset power usage. Design a smaller system to educate visitors about hydroelectric energy.

Why Clinic?

We chose Clinic for a variety of reasons. After several years of trying to achieve the same goal in-house and with very inexperienced (technically speaking) staff, it was time for a new avenue of thought and progression. Also, being a nonprofit, and one in which our mission involves increasing the quality of life for children (as well as adults) through preservation of open space and free educational programs, we are humbled by the College’s thoughtful contribution toward our mission.

What was it like to work with your Harvey Mudd team?

Working with the team was a great professional experience. They were always on time for conference calls (even when we were not) and able to solve complex challenges through dedicated efforts.

The team was very patient, both with our constant need for changes to the overall plan as well as when reaching out to contact various offices and industry professionals who would often not be available for weeks at a time. In the end, the team accomplished what it had set out to do in each task.

humbled wetheareCollege’s “ …by

thoughtful contribution toward our mission.

– D OUG CHUDY

”

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Where Friends Gather

The Galileo auditoria prepares for its big reveal IT ALL BEGAN WITH A GATHERING OF FRIENDS IN 1960.

Made up mainly of Claremont residents, the group was first called Honorary Alumni by the board of trustees since, at the time, the College had no alumni. These early friends attended college functions, met with students and faculty and were faithful donors. Over the next two years, the College’s first classes graduated and it was determined that the group should be renamed. It just so happened that 1964 was the 400th anniversary of the birth of Galileo Galilei, the architect of the scientific revolution of the 17th century. The trustees and faculty conferred and agreed that the group’s new name should be the Galileo Society.

For many years, the Galileo Society was led by trustee Gerald R. Case, a certified public accountant, and the namesake of Case Residence Hall (it is named for Florence H. and Gerald R. Case). The group held luncheons and dinners at which they met the students they supported and heard from faculty and administration. During the campaign of the 1970s (Impact/72), the Galileo Society provided the funds to build the lecture hall area in Project Libra (encompassing work on the auditoria, the Keck wing, Sprague Library and Jacobs laboratories). Their area was named Galileo Hall, and separate auditoria were named for members of the society or their family members: Pryne, McAlister and Edwards.

Completed in the early 1970s, the auditoria have hosted roster signings, guest lecturers, classes and many more College events. After extensive renovations, the auditoria—as well as the lobby and ancillary rooms—will be brightened and modernized while retaining a similar function and feel of the beloved Galileo Hall, where friends will continue to gather.

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

The lobby area transformation began during summer 2016.

In this photo from the 1980s, former HMC Board of Trustees Chair Henry T. Mudd examines his likeness.

The bronze bust, created by Los Angeles sculptor Lewis Cohen, will return to the refurbished lobby.

Work is expected to be completed by April 30, 2017 Highlights of the Galileo project include: From learning to lounging, the Galileo Hall spaces have been well used. (Photo circa late 1990s)

• New acoustic demising walls and panels • Modern cosmetic finishes • Upgraded restrooms and other public areas will comply with the Americans with Disability Act • State-of-the-art audio/visual systems • New fire alarm system • Contemporary LED lighting and controls • New lobby and exterior doors • Carpet used throughout the renovation contains post-consumer recycled content • Lecture hall and lobby carpet colors: Liquid Crystal and Mountain Dusk • Paneling system in the lecture hall and on lobby ceilings and walls simulates a Cherry Birch finish Seating specs • Seating for 600, the largest interior meeting space on campus (588 fixed; five removable; seven wheelchair spaces) • Three cool, rich colors—Royal, Caribbean and Bright Blue— bring a fresh and modern vibe.

• The seat fabric is made of 73 percent recycled material.

For information about seat-naming opportunities, see the inside back cover.

Cool, rich colors bring a fresh and modern vibe to the auditoria.

SUMMER 2016

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MARIE WOODS

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Ripple Effect Gravity waves provide humanity a new eye on the universe.

Written by Neal Singer Photos by Bryce Vickmark and Marie Woods

RIPPLE IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE-TIME, GENERATED

by the collision of two black holes 1.4 billion years ago, was detected on Earth late last year by two identically sensitive instruments.

Powerful ripples of this type, called gravity waves, were predicted by Einstein 100 years ago, but he speculated such signals would be so faint reaching Earth that they probably never would be detected.

Proving him right—that gravity waves exist— but wrong in his pessimism is physics graduate and MIT physicist Matthew Evans ’96, who worked for almost two decades to help create a detector sensitive enough to register a distortion less than the diameter of a proton.

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Matt Evans ’96 shown here at MIT, says the waves may help us better understand gravity itself.

BRYCE VICKMARK

he detection process at two widely separated LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) sites in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, works like this: Each site splits a laser beam so that it passes along two arms arranged orthogonally to each other—like the letter “L”—with each arm four kilometers long. If no disturbance is experienced by either wave, the light beams finish their journey perfectly in phase and no signal is produced. When a gravity wave strikes, however, its tiny contractions and expansions stretch and squeeze space-time, shortening one arm of the detector and lengthening the other. This puts the two beams slightly out of phase, which creates a measurable signal.

On Sept. 14, 2015, both LIGO sites detected that signal and produced quarter-second squawks.

Evans describes himself as “sleeping happily at home in Cambridge” when the instruments spoke.

“I woke to the news a few hours after it happened,” Evans says. “My first reaction?

Incredulous. I think I can speak for most of the collaboration when I say that we really didn’t expect to have detected anything. But after I got done with a first pass through the data, by the end of the day I was pretty sure it was real, and at that point I faced an existential struggle: I had been working for 20 years with the goal of making an interferometer that could detect something, and now that nice clean goal was behind us.

“But, I am not one to dwell too much on such things; the next goal is clear enough.”

Evans speaks of the importance of gravity waves in providing humanity a whole new eye on the universe—a means of “analyzing black holes, which are the dinosaur remains of long-dead stars,” he says, or the physical structure, “not just the composition”, of neutron stars. “Are they hard? Are they squishy? Do they have mountains on top?” The waves may help us better understand gravity itself.

Evans entered the field initially as a graduate student. At Harvey Mudd, he had specialized in biophysics, spent time in a computer science lab and worked on a computer simulation of an interferometric microscope, a device that superimposes electromagnetic waves upon each other to gain information.

In graduate school at Caltech, however, he was offered work analyzing monkey brains. Looking for a more personally compatible direction, he was given the task by his graduate advisor of making a simulation of the LIGO interferometer. The project,

with ongoing funding but no successes to its name, was little known at the time except among scientists and science buffs.

“The project leveraged my work at Harvey Mudd, but in a different context,” Evans says.

“I wrote LIGO’s first simulation codes, not about the astrophysics but just to make the device work. There’s a lot of physics and technology that goes into the instrument itself.”

He jokes that he focused on the device, not on its potential subjects—quasars and black holes—because “general relativity was the worst grade I got at Harvey Mudd.” The grade wasn’t that bad, a B+ in a relativity course because he didn’t notice there was one more page to the final exam. Still, he became an experimental physicist rather than a theoretician.

“A lot of what [experimental physicists] do, engineers could do better,” he says modestly, “and at LIGO, there’s a tremendous amount of engineering involved. But, we physicists add

“ T he project leveraged my

work at Harvey Mudd, but in a different context.

I wrote LIGO’s first simulation codes, not about the astrophysics but just to make the device work.

There’s a lot of physics and technology that goes into the instrument itself.

– M ATT EVANS ’96

”

IMAGES COURTESY OF NASA The LIGO Laboratory operates two detector sites, one near Hanford in eastern Washington, and another near Livingston, Louisiana, shown.

This illustration shows the merger of two black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward as the black holes spiral toward each other. The black holes—which represent those detected by LIGO on Dec. 26, 2015—were 14 and 8 times the mass of the sun, until they merged, forming a single black hole 21 times the mass of the sun. In reality, the area near the black holes would appear highly warped, and the gravitational waves would be difficult to see directly.

cutting-edge ingredients to come up with new experiments. You have to understand many aspects of physics—not a deep knowledge of one subject, as in atomic or molecular physics, but a complete, basically undergraduate knowledge of many subjects like electricity and magnetism, statistical mechanics, classical physics and quantum mechanics.”

As a graduate student and then post-doc, still at Caltech, Evans travelled between work locations at MIT and the two LIGO sites, creating models and designing parts. He traveled to see how his parts worked on site, then redid his model and created new parts.

Before starting as a research scientist at MIT in 2007, he also aided ongoing construction of a third gravitational wave observatory in Italy called Virgo that is only 3 kilometers long because of geographic limitations. A fourth site, in Japan, is under construction.

“I spent time doing designs and construction until 2013, trying to better isolate the devices from ground motion as well as create an active, three-layer isolation system with active feedback,” he says.

“There are of course quantum and thermal limitations to the LIGO method,” he says. “We position the mirrors at room temperature, not

cooling them, because with a megawatt of light on the mirror, it’s hard to keep something cold and, in fact, it is a pretty good way to make something warm. And, given the quantum nature of light, we can only measure photons to a certain point.”

The two LIGO sites allow for independent verification of the arrival of a wave, always good to counter the possibility that some other factor caused an individual detector to register. “The signal reached Hanford 6.9 milliseconds after Livingston.

The straight-line distance between the two should take light 10 milliseconds of travel time.” The time gap between the readings is used to get a better handle on the direction from which the wave has arrived, a process called “sky localizing.”

What will he do next? “The big media interest is over, now that we’ve had our first direct detections,” he says. “But, we now have a new way to observe black holes, mountains on neutron stars, gravitational blasts from supernovas, remnant waves of the Big Bang ...”

Last December, another ripple from two intersecting black holes was recorded by LIGO. Thanks in part to Evans’ work, the age of gravity-wave astronomy seems ready to take its place among mankind’s tools that explore the universe.

Prior to sealing the chamber and pumping the vacuum system down, a LIGO optics technician inspects one of LIGO’s core optics (mirrors) by illuminating its surface with light at a glancing angle. It is critical to LIGO’s operation that there is no contamination on any of its optical surfaces.

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Engineering graduate Diana Hawkins ’08 excels as an atypical sommelier Written by Amy DerBedrosian Photos by Anne Ryan

ROWING UP, DIANA HAWKINS ENVISIONED BUILDING

cars and robots, not wine lists. But, that’s exactly what she does today as a sommelier in Chicago.

“From the time I was 8 years old, I wanted to be an engineer,” says Hawkins. “I had an aptitude for science and math. So engineering seemed like a natural fit and was something I wanted to practice.

I was on my high school robotics team and loved working in the machine shop.”

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29

AWKINS CAME TO HARVEY MUDD FULLY

expecting to become an engineer and earned her B.S. degree in 2008. By then, however, she had strong doubts about her career choice. Sitting in a junior-year systems engineering class, Hawkins came to a realization: she didn’t want to build cars if it meant doing this every day. “I absolutely hated it,” she says. But what would she do instead?

The immediate answer was technical sales, although there were already clues that wine would figure in her life. As a senior, Hawkins helped start a wine club at Mudd. She and other students who had reached the legal drinking age sampled wines from Vons supermarket and the sponsoring professor’s wine cellar. She visited Santa Barbara County wineries and discovered how exciting Napa cabernet could be. “I remember the wine was from the late ’80s and was totally unlike anything I’d ever experienced. After that, I was hooked.”

After college, she joined an Ingersoll Rand sales and leadership training program and traveled to factories and production lines instead of wineries. She sold air compressors and pneumatic tools to engineers. Later, she shifted to selling business hardware and software for Softchoice, an information technology company.

“At the time, wine was something for relaxing, a hobby,” says Hawkins. “Whenever I went on vacation, I would go to a wine region. It was equal parts vacation and learning. I would meet the people who made wine, hear their stories and pester them with questions.”

Soon, she was working a few nights each week at a Chicago wine shop and spending another evening in a wine class through the International Sommelier Guild. Hawkins came to a new realization: She should quit her technical sales job—with its constant stress and buzzing BlackBerry—to work in wine full time.

“I realized I liked wine far more than I did sales.

My company and its competitors were always hiring, so it didn’t feel like a big risk to leave,” says Hawkins. “I never really worried about making the change, and luckily it all worked out.”

Within a few months, Hawkins was a wine captain for Chicago’s newly opened City Winery, responsible for knowing the nuances of 400 different wines and keeping the wine cellar organized for the dining and entertainment venue.

She says, “I got lucky. It was my first real restaurant wine job. I loved the pace. I loved the hours. And I loved the people.”

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“ Tasting and smelling are so subjective, and everyone’s so different. The challenge comes with breaking that smellmemory down so you can describe the wine to others.”

– DIANA HAWKINS ’08

Hawkins was quickly promoted to the position of floor manager and also became a certified sommelier. Through involvement with the Court of Master Sommeliers and Guild of Sommeliers, she learned more about wine and met others passionate about the beverage.

“I do a lot of studying and a lot of tasting. I’m training my palate. I drink wine I don’t like just to bond with it. I’ll drink a bottle of wine over two or three days to see how it develops,” says

Hawkins. “Tasting and smelling are so subjective, and everyone’s so different. Smell often triggers memories: Sometimes a bottle of Viognier from the Northern Rhone smells like Nair [hair removal lotion] to me. It’s bizarre. The challenge comes with breaking that smell memory down so you can describe the wine to others.”

She has proven to have a notable palate. By the time Hawkins joined Lula Café in 2015—less than five years after changing careers—she had

become a standout in the wine world, in Chicago and nationally. The publication Chicagoist included her on its list of “10 Most Buzz-Worthy Sommeliers in Chicago of 2015.” And Food & Wine magazine featured Hawkins and her favorite wine picks in an article published earlier this year.

Hawkins attributes her success in part to her engineering education. Aside from understanding the science behind winemaking, she says, “Going through the process of becoming an engineer teaches you how to study and apply what you know to something totally new. There are always new technologies coming out, and the same is true about wines. I’m constantly questioning and constantly learning. Working in a restaurant, I use my criticalthinking skills to see problems from multiple perspectives and come up with optimal solutions to make processes more efficient. Our system to ring in orders is a good example. It’s basically a computer science project for me.”

Wine and nightly sommelier duties remain her primary focus. “I feel some kind of way about it, but people often describe me as a hipster sommelier.”

Her preference for eclectic offerings include such oddities as orange Pinot Grigio and sparkling wine from the Canary Islands.

Hawkins is also somewhat of an anomaly among sommeliers: an African-American woman with an engineering and corporate background in a role traditionally dominated by men. She says, however, “What’s more challenging for me is that I look like I’m 22. Guests at the restaurant sometimes joke if I’m even old enough to drink. But the real challenge is clothing. If I could find a classic dress with pockets for my wine key, I would be really happy.”

None of this deters Hawkins’ enthusiasm for her work. She says, “Wine is the ideal blend of art, science and vice. I like the knowledge aspect and breaking down perceptions about what wine is supposed to be. I try to make wine approachable.

I may literally have peers from Mudd who are building rockets that are going to get us to Mars, but helping people connect with wine is so uplifting.

There’s this moment after I pour the wine for guests and they have this sublime look on their faces—it’s a perfect moment.”

As homage to West Dorm, Diana Hawkins ’08 presents some bonfirefriendly wines from the West Coast.

Brooks Pinot Noir Rose 2015, Willamette Valley, Oregon “I’m a sucker for Rose and BBQ—cherry, pomegranate and watermelon with a finish of tart raspberry and rhubarb. This is what you want to keep you cool while the fire’s blazing bright.”

Cruse Ultramarine 2011 Pinot Noir Rose, Sonoma Coast, California “Ditto to sparkling Rose. This particular wine gets snapped up quickly for a reason. Champagne style using California grapes. A luxurious mouth-feel with black raspberry, strawberry, fresh herbs and cherry blossoms all on a thick slice of toasted brioche.”

Presq’uile Syrah 2014, Santa Barbara, California “Saying Syrah goes with fire is like beating a dead horse, but Santa Barbara’s cool climate makes this a great Syrah to drink when it’s hot outside. Tart blackberries and blueberries combine with a hint of smoked meat and cigar box all in a wine that’s light on its feet and quaffable to boot.”

Forlorn Hope Que Saudade Verdelho 2014 “Not super well known, Verdelho is a white grape native to Portugal that also does well in California. It’s medium bodied with tons of ripe citrus— lemon curd, pink grapefruit, mandarin orange—and a faint aroma of honeysuckle. Silky in texture with a refreshing minerality, this is a wine perfect for contemplation while watching dancing flames.”

Mouton Noir Knock On Wood Chardonnay 2014, Yamhill-Carlton, Oregon “This ain’t your mother’s chardy-party. An all-stainless-steel production with no malolactic fermentation makes this wine super lean and crisp. Pear, melon, orange, lemon zest and a ton of stone makes this wine a perfect gateway to the Old World.”

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CAREER DIRECTED

BY GPS

John Lavrakas ’74 uses curiosity and persistence to find his way Written by Ashley Festa | Photo by Deborah Tracey

JOHN LAVRAKAS ’74 NEARLY FLUNKED OUT

of Harvey Mudd because he was too busy reprogramming elevator buttons and throwing water balloons from the top of North Dorm.

In fact, he says he shouldn’t have been accepted into the College at all. He was on the waiting list when Bill Arce, then coach for the Claremont-Mudd baseball team, was holding baseball clinics in The Hague, Netherlands.

Lavrakas’ father, a diplomat living with his family in The Hague, arranged an interview with the coach, which led to Lavrakas being admitted to Harvey Mudd and playing briefly on the Stags’ baseball team—before physics labs interfered with practice.

When Lavrakas’ GPA dropped to 1.9 at the end of his sophomore year, the dean of students suggested Harvey Mudd probably wasn’t the right place for him.

That conversation lit a fire under Lavrakas, and he improved his GPA to 3.48 by the second semester of his junior year. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics as the first student to enroll in a five-year, 4+1 accelerated mathematics degree program through Harvey Mudd and (then) Claremont Graduate School.

“When I get pushed on something, I see it as an opportunity to overcome the problem,” he says. “I’m not put off by being told I can’t do something. I rise to the occasion.”

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That challenge-accepted outlook has permeated Lavrakas’ life, contributing to career milestones and influencing his professional relationships.

“What I appreciate most about working with John is his can-do attitude,” says Karen Van Dyke, the director of positioning, navigation and timing for the U.S. Department of Transportation. “No matter what challenge we present, he is always willing to take it on with a professional and pleasant demeanor. I don’t think the word ‘no’ is in his vocabulary.”

Van Dyke met Lavrakas at the Institute of Navigation (ION) Symposium on the Global Positioning System more than 25 years ago.

Lavrakas continues to work with Van Dyke at the DOT to help ensure the government meets its GPS performance standards. His work extends internationally to the United Nations, as he works on the U.S. delegation to the International Committee on Global Navigation Satellite Systems.

Although Lavrakas has dedicated the past 35 years of his career to all aspects of GPS, the diversity of applications still amazes him. When he first learned about GPS, he knew it had wide-ranging potential.

“Because of GPS,” Lavrakas says, “our skies are safer and more efficient, crop yields are up and pollution is down due to reductions in overuse of pesticides and herbicides, high-bandwidth digital telecommunication services are enabled and people don’t get lost as often. Except me—I still get lost all the time.”

In 1980, a colleague asked if Lavrakas would be interested in working with GPS, a new project in the company. Lavrakas jumped at the chance, bringing his undying persistence with him, frequently pursuing ideas that others deemed insignificant.

Like when—as a young engineer contracted by a GPS manufacturer in California—Lavrakas introduced himself to the software lead, who dismissed his work.

“He told me, ‘The testing you’re doing is of no value to this project,’ and I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to prove you wrong,’” Lavrakas says. “I’m not a cocky person. I just liked to learn, and he ended up embracing what I was doing and applying it to other programs.”

In addition to setting up processes to safeguard against mistakes, Lavrakas was part of the team that developed the ground-control system at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs that carries out the commands of the master control station. It is

“ When I get pushed on something, I see it as an opportunity to overcome the problem. I’m not put off by being told I can’t do something. I rise to the occasion. ” – JOHN LAVRAKAS ’74

here that just eight people run the entire worldwide utility of GPS, which includes billions of receivers and thousands of applications.

“What surprises me most is the elegance of its design and operation,” Lavrakas says. “It is a fine-tuned, multiply-redundant system that operates 24 hours a day, silently and effectively, providing positioning, navigation and timing services to users around the globe. It is the ultimate in a fully scalable service, requiring no more effort to operate for a billion people as for one.”

Colleagues, like Brent Renfro, the program manager at Applied Research Labs at the University of Texas at Austin, appreciate Lavrakas’ expertise and thoroughness.

“John’s diligent in getting the details right,” says Renfro, who has worked regularly with Lavrakas for nearly 15 years, primarily on GPS performance monitoring. “Folks will always say, ‘Oh, that’s not important.’ But John’s good about bringing those things to people’s attention until they get resolved.”

After many different jobs and working in nearly every aspect of GPS—development and maintenance, user applications and tracking, commercial applications, performance assessment and policy and more—Lavrakas decided it was time to navigate a new path: entrepreneurship.

He established Advanced Research Corp. in 1993, working on projects like tracking trains for General Motors, weather balloons for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, ocean sensors for Oregon State University, as well as tracking molten steel and stolen jewelry. He also worked at an international level, designing a system to track thousands of vehicles for a Venezuelan telephone company. A PC-based GPS tracking system he developed, StarWatch Asset Location System, had excellent potential. But there was a problem.

“It was 1995, and no one knew what GPS was, so I couldn’t sell it,” Lavrakas says. “One client said, ‘Why do I need a satellite tracking system? I can just call my driver on his cell phone and he’ll tell me where he is.’ Eventually I had to get a regular job because I needed full-time income.”

Though he took an engineering position to support his wife and children, he returned to his company in 2006 and hasn’t looked back. Today, he works on a wide range of projects, like developing fishery information systems to track salmon and reef fish, and doing research on mobile technology for data collection at sea. He also serves as a GPS expert in both criminal and civil cases.

Beyond his technical contributions to the field, Lavrakas helps keep the GPS community connected.

He served as president of ION for 2007–2008 and also as chairman of its satellite division, and he continues to give presentations at international satellite navigation conferences. His contributions haven’t gone unnoticed—Lavrakas received the ION Distinguished Service Award in 2008 and was named an ION Fellow in 2010.

His impact is felt locally as well. He was named the Oregon Small Business Person of the Year in 2011. Since 2015, he’s been sharing his business acumen with the Newport Symphony Orchestra as president of its board, practically a second career, he says.

Though he enjoys his avocations, retirement is still several years away. He says there’s never been a single day that he hasn’t loved his work.

“GPS is used by every nation on earth,” Lavrakas says. “I’ve had the privilege of working on one of the most significant technological achievements of mankind.

“It’s pretty amazing.”

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MUDDERINGS

Alumni Association Awards NOMINATED BY PEERS AND SELECTED BY

the Alumni Association Board of Governors Selections Committee, the Alumni Association recognized a diverse group of individuals who have made significant contributions to science, society and Harvey Mudd College. The Alumni Association awarded its highest honor, The Van Hecke Prize, to Iris Critchell, instructor of aeronautics emerita. The award goes to those who are “synonymous with an extraordinary level of support and commitment to Harvey Mudd College, its students, its alumni and its mission.” Critchell, previously named an honorary alumna, is former instructor of the Bates Aeronautics Program at HMC. She continues to assist with student aero projects and to advise members of the Barnstormers student club. She also serves as curator of the Aeronautical Library Special Collection at the College. Her many honors include the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award as well as inductions into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame and California Aviation Hall of Fame.

Six alumni were selected to receive the 2016 Outstanding Alumni Award. Given from alumni to alumni, the award recognizes individuals who have made a sustained and effective commitment to improving society and whose lives best exemplify the mission of Harvey Mudd College. Awardees are anesthesiology expert Steven Barker ’66, structural engineering expert and the Jude and Eileen Laspa Professor of Engineering Ziyad Duron ’81, biophysicist Scott Fraser ’76, biotechnology CEO Jennifer Holmgren ’81, prolific inventor Charles Lemme ’66 and Academy Award-winning visual effects artist Scott Stokdyk ’91/92.

The Lifetime Recognition Award, which honors outstanding dedication to Harvey Mudd College over many years, went to Patrick Barrett ’66, Penelope Barrett ’67 and Gerald Van Hecke ’61.

Iris Critchell, Van Hecke Prize awardee

Gerald Van Hecke ’61, Lifetime Recognition awardee

Penelope Barrett ’67 and Patrick Barrett ’66, Lifetime Recognition awardees

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Outstanding Alumni Award recipients are invited to give talks at Alumni Weekend. Here’s some of what they had to say.

View all talks at bit.ly/AWtalks2016.

emember, fate will throw “ Ryou these curveballs and

before you swing at them, take a hard think about whether this is really what you want to do.

– STEVEN BARKER ’66

”

Mudd) taught me how to think, how “ (to Harvey be inclusive, how to challenge the status quo. It taught me how important it was to work in teams, and it taught me that being a good scientist wasn’t good enough. You had to be a good human being as well.

– JENNIFER HOLMGREN ’81

any questions as alumni as to “ Iwhether f you haveor not the institution remains the same institution it was when we were here—because, obviously, when we were here, it was better than it is today, right?—you should not worry at all. The institution, I would claim, is better.

– Z IYAD DURON ’81, SHOWN WITH EMERITUS TRUSTEE ROBERT DE PIETRO ’69

”

”

is very important to “ Cpromoting ross-pollination innovation, and that is one of

the major things I took away from Mudd.

That is, knowing the fundamentals of lots of different subjects in order to be able to use a little bit of each type of subject in a totally novel way.

”

– CHARLES LEMME ’66

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MUDDERINGS

New to AABOG THREE NEW MEMBERS HAVE BEEN ELECTED TO

the Alumni Association Board of Governors and will serve three-year terms. AABOG members are leadership representatives of the alumni body who partner with staff, faculty and students to strengthen ties and increase alumni support of the College.

Three new members have been elected to the Alumni Association Board of Governors and will serve three-year terms. They are Kathy French ’97, Betty Johnson ’78 and Chris Strieter ’10.

Board members re-elected to three-year terms are Ruben Arenas ’05, Jerome Jackson ’76, Ron Lloyd ’80, and Lowell Reade ’12. Find all AABOG members and officers at alumni.hmc.edu/ BOGmembers.

AABOG members are leadership representatives of the alumni body who partner with staff, faculty and students to strengthen ties and increase alumni support of the College.

Award Nominations

The Selections Committee is soliciting nominations for the 2017 Alumni Association awards. Visit alumni.hmc.edu/nomination or contact alumni@hmc.edu to make a submission.

Outstanding Alumni Award For significant contributions to humanity or society that demonstrate a high level of sustained commitment and involve personal sacrifice.

Order of the Wart For alumni and friends who have made important contributions to the Harvey Mudd community.

Lifetime Recognition Award For alumni and friends who have provided outstanding and recognizable dedication to Harvey Mudd College over many years.

Become a Volunteer Are you interested in strengthening the HMC alumni network? Do you live in an area where you’d like to see more alumni activity? Would you like to promote Harvey Mudd to high school students? The Harvey Mudd College Alumni Association is seeking volunteers around the country to do these things and more.

Visit alumni.hmc.edu/volunteer, and let us know how you’d like to get involved.

Family Weekend

ARE YOU LINKEDIN?

Feb. 17–18, 2017

Parents, plan now to visit campus Friday, Feb. 17, and Saturday, Feb. 18, 2017, for Family Weekend. Participants will have opportunities to speak with faculty and administrators, to learn about new developments at Harvey Mudd and, most importantly, to re-connect with their students.

Join the active LinkedIn group for the Harvey Mudd College Alumni Association. Expand your professional and personal network, hear about opportunities and contribute to the conversations. alumni.hmc.edu/linkedin_settings

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So Much Fun!

Alumni Weekend 2016 Alumni Weekend images: bit.ly/AWpics201

Alumni Weekend video: bit.ly/AWvideo2016

Save the date

Alumni Weekend 2017: April 28-30

SUMMER 2016

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CLASS NOTES

1959

1979

Written by Peter Loeb (mathematics), one of the first Harvey Mudd graduates and a leading scholar in his field, Real Analysis includes a novel presentation of differentiation and absolute continuity using a local maximum function, resulting in an exposition that is both simpler and more general than the traditional approach.

Theorems are stated for Lebesgue and Borel measures, with a note indicating when the same proof works only for Lebesgue measures. Peter also has published “End Compactifications and General Compactifications” (with M. Insall and M. Marciniak) in the Journal of Logic and Analysis 6:7 (2014) and wrote four chapters and co-edited the second edition of Nonstandard Analysis for the Working Mathematician (2015).

Keri Pearlson (mathematics) recently published the sixth edition of her textbook for graduate management information systems courses, Managing and Using Information Systems: A Strategic Approach. It’s used in about 100 schools around the world and is the No. 1 book in its category.

She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, Dr. Yale Pearlson. Their daughter, Hana, is at Tulane University studying computer science and finance.

by pianist-composer Lajos Delej to whom Robert’s mother was engaged before meeting his father.

Robert was inspired to play piano after hearing stories of Delej, who did not survive the Holocaust.

Last year, a recording of Delej’s Scherzo for Cello and Piano was released on the Warner label. Robert began corresponding with Delej’s living relatives in the U.S., who provided Delej’s sheet music, which Robert played in the competition. Robert is a psychiatrist in full-time private practice, and his life partner, Bev, is a psychiatric nurse.

1976

1983

1963 Paula Diehr (mathematics) and Michael Diehr ’90

(individual program of studies) have developed a Healthy Life Calculator that allows seniors to estimate the number of “good” years they have remaining. Unlike other web calculators, this one estimates how long you’ll be healthy and active, gives ranges of likely values and is documented in a scientific publication. healthylifecalculator.org

(mathematics) completed 35 years of full-time teaching, the last 30 at Rhode Island College (a 10,000-student, public, master’s-granting institution in Providence), where his wife, Rebecca Sparks, is also a full professor. Dave says, “I expect to teach for approximately 10 more years or ’til I can afford to retire, whichever comes first. We have a 10-year-old son, Luke, and we spend all our non-work time driving him back and forth to swim practices and meets around New England.”

1981

Yesh Subramanian (engineering) is senior vice

William Setzer (chemistry) has joined the Zija

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

writes: “I’m in my 18th year and still love being a math professor at Santa Monica College. With 10 prior years of experience in applied math, I believe I’m the only one of about 30 full timers in our department with significant real-world experience, which I use to enhance my teaching. I find success in trying to emulate some of my past teachers, including HMC professors Busenberg, Coleman and Krieger. I teach a variety of courses, including algebra, geometry, calculus, statistics and finite math, and I teach differential equations almost every semester. I get some strong students and dream that one of them will transfer to Mudd one of these years! I still compete in tournament tennis and was ranked No. 13 in the U.S. by the United States Tennis Association in the Men’s 50s Singles division last year.”

1985

1973 Product Advisory Council, which oversees the company’s natural health, beauty and wellness products. William is professor and chair of the chemistry department at University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he began as assistant professor of organic chemistry in 1985. His research in natural products started in 1990 after a trip to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica.

He is interested in natural products drug discovery, essential oils, chemical ecology and molecular modeling.

Willie Konya (mathematics)

Dave Abrahamson

In July, Robert Berkowitz (mathematics) took first prize at the San Diego International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs. “Much of my formative musical education happened at Scripps College with Alice Shapiro, so the cooperation of the colleges in the consortium underscores this story,” he says. Robert played music

president and head of digital at Mphasis. He is responsible for driving top-line, growth-building, scalable and replicable next-generation digital solutions and building Mphasis’ digital brand. Yesh brings over 25 years of executive management experience across financial services, healthcare, life sciences and technology organizations to Mphasis.

He was previously senior vice president of digital business solutions for platforms at Persistent Systems. Yesh has an MBA in marketing and strategy from Stanford University.

1997

2002

InfoQ discussed “(Cloud) Lock-in” with four software industry leaders, including Joe Beda (computer science), advisor to CoreOS and Shippable and entrepreneur in residence with Accel Partners. “With respect to lock-in, it is worth ‘playing the movie’ about (a) how likely it is that you’ll have to abandon a technology or vendor and (b) how expensive it will be to transition,” said Joe (article at infoq.com/articles/panel-cloudlockin). While at Google and Microsoft, Joe built browsers, designed graphics APIs, connected to the telephone system and optimized ads. Since 2010, he started, managed and launched Google Compute Engine and helped to create, motivate and launch the Kubernetes project. Joe’s current pet project is to make it easy to secure service-to-service communication with an open project called SPIFFE. Joe lives in Seattle with his wife, a physician, and his two children.

Four-year Claremont-Mudd-Scripps track and field member Katie Ray (computer science and mathematics) has been inducted into the CMS Alumni Association Athletics Hall of Fame, Class of 2016. Katie twice earned HMC Athlete of the Year (2001, 2002) and was the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) and NCAA West Region Athlete of the Year (2002).

She earned the NCAA All-American distinction in three events: the heptathlon (second), 100 hurdles (fourth) and 4x100 relay (seventh). Katie ran anchor on that 4x100 relay, which set an SCIAC record of 47.30 and placed fourth at the NCAA Championships. Her best time in the 100 hurdles (14.40) was the second-fastest time in SCIAC history, and her best mark in the heptathlon (4,733) was fourth-best in SCIAC history upon graduation.

2003 Ross Richardson (mathematics) and Meghan Powers SCR ’04 recently welcomed their first child, Remy Elias Richardson.

The family lives in the Upper West Side neighborhood of New York City.

1999 Christian Jones (mathematics) has moved to

Baltimore and is a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins.

Matthew Wright (computer science), a leading

expert in internet security and privacy, has joined Rochester Institute of Technology as a faculty member in the Department of Computing Security and director of the university’s new Center for Cybersecurity. Matthew was previously an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and co-director of the Information Security Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington.

His research in designing an anonymity system for the next-generation internet has been supported by an NSF CAREER Award. Matthew received a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His areas of interest include systems for providing internet privacy, usable security and privacy, and secure and reliable peer-to-peer and ubiquitous computing.

in advancing drugs and vaccines to reduce the disproportionate effect of infectious diseases on low-resource areas. bit.ly/Alexis2016 Kathe Todd-Brown (mathematics) is the Linus Pauling Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Labs in Richland, Washington, developing mathematical and computational models of soil biogeochemical cycles.

2005 Brendan Haberle (physics) is

a commercial and contract attorney with Rusing Lopez & Lizardi in Tucson, Arizona. A registered patent attorney, he has experience advising start-up, technology and emerging growth companies on commercial contracts and transactions. Brendan previously worked as a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a technical analyst on national security and defense issues. He earned his J.D. from the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, graduating magna cum laude and Order of the Coif.

Akemi Kashiwada (mathematics) and Brian Tagiku

(computer science and mathematics) welcomed their first child, Ellie Koharu Tagiku, in February.

2007

2004 Eric Harley (mathematics)

and Sarah Rice CMC ’04 welcomed their second child, Richard Thomas Harley, on Nov. 28, 2015.

Microsoft featured Alexis Kaushansky (chemistry) in the online feature “Malaria research as a form of social justice.” Alexis is a malaria researcher at the Center for Infectious Disease Research in Seattle, the largest independent nonprofit in the U.S. focused solely on infectious disease research.

She and the Center are using new approaches

(mathematics) started the Salt Lake City tutoring company High Performance Tutoring in May 2011 and now employs 23 tutors who focus primarily in the STEM disciplines and also provide SAT/ACT prep. He plans to expand into a few other metro areas around the U.S and is working on ways to make the services affordable to more high school and college students. Victor also has been developing an app to help students prep for the ACT.

Victor Camacho

Maureen Saint Georges Chaumet (mathematics)

completed her pediatric residency at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and has begun a three-year Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship at Vanderbilt.

SUMMER 2016

39

CLASS NOTES

A LUM N I P R O F IL E

Talking Tech Written by Eric Feezell Photo by Seth Affoumado “WE WERE GOING TO DO JUST SIX,” SAYS A ’96 with

an amusement only hindsight can afford.

She’s referring to the number of intended episodes of Embedded.fm, a weekly, 60-minute podcast created and hosted by Elecia and her husband, Christopher White ’96. Now, a whopping 170 episodes later, the pair is busy as ever talking to makers, entrepreneurs and scientists of all stripes about the “how, why and what of engineering,” with particular devotion to devices. Guests have included YouTube sensation Simone Giertz (the self-proclaimed “Queen of Shitty Robots”), tech entrepreneur and author Dan Shapiro ’97 and “All Things Considered” host Kelly McEvers.

For her part, Elecia is amazed by how far the show has come from its meager six-episode goal.

With between 6,000 and 8,000 downloads per show and roughly 20,000 RSS subscribers, the show and its accompanying blog have afforded the hosts a modicum of internet fame and, with it, a steady stream of guests. In the beginning, they relied primarily on industry and alumni connections to find guests. Elecia says, the show is “big enough now where people will come to us,” though she also searches for authors, speakers and entrepreneurs whose brains she wants to pick.

“We’ve had slow and steady growth, so a lot of it is just about continuing to do what we do, to revisit topics that change or that people want more information about and to stay relatively current with new stuff,” says Elecia. This isn’t terribly difficult: Her day job as a consultant keeps her steeped in the latest industry happenings.

Co-owned and -run with Christopher, the consulting firm Logical Elegance specializes in firmware for resource-constrained embedded systems, helping clients take ideas through creation, implementation and manufacturing, resulting in embedded systems technology that values both design beauty and social implication.

“I am a big believer in understanding how your engineering affects the world,” says Elecia.

It’s a sentiment hardwired into her even before attending Harvey Mudd, and one she has carried forward to this day. Logical Elegance’s diverse client list includes socially conscious endeavors

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

like educational toys, medical devices and gunshot location systems. And, working in embedded systems keeps her in her preferred element between engineering and computer science. At Mudd, Elecia designed an individual program of studies that married computer science with systems and theoretical engineering.

“I took all of the applied CS courses,” says Elecia, “anything where I had to actually touch a computer and program. I also took every systems engineering course. This set me up to do signal processing and control software. Between children’s toys and education systems and inertia sensors and DNA scanners—all of these things I’ve gotten to work on.

I could not have designed a better major.”

In fact, she entered Harvey Mudd with the intent of studying pure engineering, but her experience in the school’s fledgling CS department changed that. “CS is natural to me, yet I never gave up the love of engineering, and that’s how I ended up split between them,” she says. Listening to the wide range of topics discussed on Embedded.fm, the dual nature of Elecia’s passion becomes all the more evident.

While Elecia calls herself a proponent of expanding opportunities for women in STEM, it’s the being, rather than the talking, that appeals to her. And this is where the podcast, which typically avoids delving too deeply into social justice topics, nevertheless serves her purpose.

“I don’t want to talk about being a woman in

to talk to other don’t want “ Iwomen about being a woman in tech. I want to talk to them about technology. I believe in being the change you want to see.

”

– E LECIA WHITE ’96

tech. I want to be a woman in tech. I don’t want to talk to other women about being a woman in tech.

I want to talk to them about technology,” she says.

“I believe in being the change you want to see. I don’t really want to talk much about diversity on the show. I just want it to be diverse.”

Embedded.fm is available from iTunes and other podcast sources. Get the show and blog from embedded.fm.

2009

person and a joy to be around.” Kyle finished his fourth year as a Yale graduate student in the math department and is working on random matrices, random graphs and randomized algorithms under the guidance of professor Van Vu.

2012

In July, Aurora Pribram-Jones (chemistry) received the Howes Scholar award presented by the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship Program. Each year, a recent graduate of the CSGF program is selected for the award based on their demonstrated scientific achievement, leadership and service. Aurora is conducting research with the Quantum Simulations Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

She uses mathematics to computationally predict the basic properties of matter and is interested in potential functional theory, linear response for thermal ensembles and mathematical conditions on finite-temperature exchange-correlation functionals. Her research in these areas has appeared in Physical Review, Journal of Chemical Physics and Annual Reviews of Physical Chemistry.

She is a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and collaborates with researchers at Harvey Mudd. Her community activities include mentoring STEM students.

2011 Kyle Luh (mathematics and physics) was one of five

doctoral students honored in May with a Yale Prize Teaching Fellowship, which recognizes “outstanding performance and promise as a teacher.” Recipients are nominated by their students and the faculty members they assist and are awarded a $3,000 stipend for the following academic year. A faculty nominator wrote that he wishes he had “more Kyle Luhs” teaching with him as he is a “very likeable

2015 Madison Hansen

(mathematical and computational biology) was accepted into the prestigious PhD program for comparative biology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It is the only museum in America with the authority to grant its own PhD degree. At the Richard Gilder Graduate School campus, located in the heart of one of the world’s most famous natural history museums, Madison works alongside internationally recognized scientists and curators, conducting research on developing algorithms for evolutionary biology.

2016

Jenny Iglesias (mathematics) finished the fourth year of her PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University. “I am in the algorithms, combinatorics and optimization program, and I’m studying approximation algorithms on network design problems. In the past year, two very exciting things have happened. I helped Kevin Riley develop a board game, Aeon’s End. It was successfully Kickstarted in April and should be on shelves by the end of the year. I also received an NSF grant to do research in Japan for the summer. I will be working with Professor Takuro Fukunaga at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo.”

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation selected Shanel Wu (physics) as one of 62 New Jersey Teaching Fellows for 2016. The highly competitive program recruits both recent graduates and career changers with strong backgrounds in the STEM fields and prepares them to teach in high-need secondary schools. Each Fellow receives $30,000 to complete a specially designed, cutting-edge master’s degree program— Shanel will attend Montclair State University— based on a yearlong classroom experience. Fellows commit to teach for three years in the urban and rural New Jersey schools that most need strong STEM teachers. Throughout the three-year commitment, Fellows receive ongoing support and mentoring.

2014 Natasha Parikh (mathematics) was awarded a three-year National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellowship for her work in cognitive neuroscience at Duke University. With this funding, she will use brain imaging data from people with anxiety to inform more effective ways to make negative/traumatic memories less emotional over time.

SUMMER 2016

41

CLASS REUNIONS

A LU MNI WE E KE N D 20 16

1961 | 55th Reunion

Back Row: Robert Ashenfelter, Joe Knowles, Maurice White, Walter Naumann,

1966 | 50th Reunion

Back Row: Jim Dewar, Gary Spessard, Ron Varekamp, Chuck Lemme, Chuck Iverson, Stephen Burrin

C. Kelley Crossman

Fourth row: Terence Needham, Robert Smith, Arthur Wood, Charlie Brown, Steve Lundberg

Second Row: Lawrence Hallanger, J. Terry Beckett, Donald Trapp, Kenneth Pope, John Murray

Third row: Stephen Garfield, Wolfgang Pflaum, Dennis Glenn ’68, Don Chamberlin, Ken Orloff,

Front Row: Gael Squibb, David Howell, Jerry Van Hecke, Don Gross, Donald Williams

Turpen Daughters, Patrick Wade Second row: Bill Helliwell, Lawrence Mallach, Gary Seeger, Bob Charrow, Pat Barrett, Dave Kruger, Ernest Sullivan, Ed Wood Front Row: Steve Dequer, Steve Barker, Mark Masaki, Gordon Sproul, Ellyn Grant, Michael Beug, Don Johnston, Dennis Rich

1971

Back Row: Robert Prodan, Jim Fake, Robert Hettel, Ronald Hidinger, William Haas, David Sweetser

1976

Second Row: Robert Jardine, Jim Johnson, Harvey Kaslow, Peter Brumbaugh, Ludd Trozpek,

Gary Kiefer ’70

Back Row: Doug Slakey, Peter Gumaer, Thomas Weldon, Alan Luebs, Dale Wiersma,

Front Row: Tom Weimer, John Renbarger ’70, Michael Thompson, John Mercer, Christopher

Jerome Jackson, Richard Robinson, Scott Fraser

Powell, Arthur Wong

Second Row: Jan Zentler, Paul Baker, Eric Kim, John Carter, Bob Sill, Eric Olsen, Blane Eisenberg, Tony Korkunis Front Row: Khai Le, Rick Simon, Sherman Chan, Susan Lewallen, Nancy Smith,

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Peggy Anschutz ’77

1981

Back Row: Ronald Jackson, Rodney Sinclair, Eric Alan, James Martin, James Sonner, Shun

1986

Back Row: Steve Spielman, Ed Monahan, Peter Barbour, David Fandel, Karl Kaufmann

Cheung, Steven Hoagland, Robert Bergstedt, Bill Spiesman

Second Row: Steven Lin, David Heatley, Brian Zill, Michael Hamilton, David Ryba, Steven

Second Row: Bill Ervin, Shawn Bujalski, Jim Widergren, Erik Sowa, Andrew Yuen, Ziyad

Woo, Connie Bowen

Durón, Jim Au, Donald Holmgren

Front Row: Susan Parker, Patricia Morrison Wong, Kate Freeman, Mark Byrnes, Luciana Lino,

Front Row: Bob Fung, Lynn Kistler, Suzanne Hawley, David Abe, Mary Carpenter Abe, Denise

David Ho, Ximena Avila, George Schnurer, Michele Gibson

Widergren, Diane Berger, Mike Bruno, Jennifer Holmgren, Ned Freed ’82

1991

Back Row: Mark Roedersheimer, Mark Wilkins, Clark Allen, Tushar Nandwana, Eric Burke, Alan Peltier, Manoj Aggarwal, James Hardwick, Jon Ball, Kenji Hashimoto, Chris Principi Second Row: Kevin Doyle, Bill Clark, Rob Carrillo ’92, Harlan McCanne, David Small, Mischelle Mische, Mark Gustafson, John Urata, Steve Applebaum, Nazar Yousif Front Row: Michelle Kimura, Jana Allen, Kari Sutherland, Rachel Watson-Clark, Jennifer Galvin, Keith Kuwata, Chang Hee Kim, Steven Yukawa, Roderick Lee, Peter Martin

2001

Tyson MacDonald, Emily Moradi, Ari Moradi, Roy Pollock, Mike Beebe, David Goldsheft, Jenn Ford

1996

Back Row: Peter Thielen, Darin Grant, William Earner, Bob Hulse, Lawrence Bruhmuller, Tim Schwider, Steven Bordelon, Aaron Thompson, Jorge Jeffery Second Row: Ocie Mitchell, Keith Pitts, Jay Rosenberger, Aaron Adler, Jacob Garcia, Toby Ovod-Everett, Hans Purkey, Joel Steres, Darryl Yong Front Row: Selina DeRose-Juarez, Nichola Bailey, Surya Jayaweera, Kal Wong, Philip Cheung, Khaldoun Shobaki, Ingo Muschenetz, Catherine Nichols Snyder, Dan Snyder SUMMER 2016

43

CLASS REUNIONS

A LU MNI WE E KE N D 20 16

2006

Back Row: Chris Erickson, Mark Kegel, Conrad Harter, Rob Little, Daniel Halperin, Sarah Mann, Mac Mason, Reid Howard, Sean Fogenburg, Sarah Fogenburg, Jim Castelaz, Ruka Sakurai, Matt Reynolds, Josh Slater, Jack Cheng, Dustin Brekke, Justin Kauwale Third row: Chris Dahlberg, Andy Voorhees, Sarah Taliaferro, Tiffany Himmel, Kevin Lloyd, Octavi Semonin, Tyler Jank, Michael Maunupau, Cris Cecka, Erik Shimshock, Eph Lanford, Jeremy Lennert, Matthew Walsh, Jay Wright, Mike Bigelow, Paul Dossa, Tristan Sharp, Stephen Edwards Second row: William Gannett, Sarah Thomson, Alex Himmel, Elaine Hart, Susanna Ricco, Lia Corrales, Amanda Rainer, Sara Hummel, Arran McNabb, Mary Chen Stump, Ajay Shah, Alan Davidson, Rob Chambers, George Malikov, Mark Brenneman, Robert Panish, Topper Kain ’07 Front Row: Laura Angell, Stephanie Levin, Westin Kurlancheek, Kaitlyn Gray, Sarah Adelman, Keane Kaneakua, Annie Tan, Selene Tan, Dana Seaton, Megan Yarnall, Teresa Pineda, Michael Le, Rebecca Toy, Esteban Molina-Estolano, Karen Hsin Wnuk, George Korir, Benson Tsai, Lindsay Muth ’07

2011

Back Row: Dan Ciliske ’12, Brendan Smith, Paige Pruitt, Andrew Ronan, Jennifer Rinker, Eric Nieters, Perry Ellis, David Rolfe, Max Kutler, Ian Jimenez, Russell Melick, Joshua Ehrlich, Alexander McAuley, Steven Berry, Timothy Nguyen, Andrey Shur, Michael Noback, Dmitri Skjorshammer, Jacob Bouricius, Katie Schmiedicke, Anatole Paine, Dillon Ayers Third row: Allison Wynn, Amelia Musselman, Bonnie Gordon, Samantha Ihlenfeldt, Daniel Ihlenfeldt, Brendan Folie, Cullen McMahon, Daniel Fielder, Arthur Audesirk, Kyle Baran, Emma Streshinsky, Matt Streshinsky, Matt Cummins, David Turner, Maxwell Lee, Chris Ferguson, Michael Leece, Sabreen Lakhani, Robert Carrington, Benjamin Hsieh Second row: Skye Berghel, Emily Snyder, Emily Fujimoto, Austin Anderson, Kathleen Ewing, Harry Wornick, Cecily Taylor, Claire Robinson, Zeke Flom, Audrey Lawrence, Kevin Yeung, Daniel Rozenfeld, Scott Almond, Daniel Moore, Anna Cunningham, Millie Fung, Jeffrey Burkert Front Row: Cassie Borish, Aggie Fielder-Szymanska, Maggie Rogers, Jean-Vincent Hong, Julia Diaz, Brigid Poling, Andrea Levy, Kirsten McAfee, Wei Wei, Hufsa Ahmad, Becky Glick, Yael Mayer, Elaine Oyang, Madeleine Ong, Jennifer Messier, Kate Honda

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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Please, Have a Seat As part of the yearlong renovation of the Galileo auditoria, the College invites you to become part of the future of this exciting new facility by making a gift to name one or more of the brand new seats. In recognition of your gift to support this project, you will be able to select your desired seat or seats that will feature an inscribed plaque in your name, in honor or memory of a loved one, faculty member or friend, or in commemoration of an important anniversary or life event.

To claim your seat(s) and make a permanent mark in Galileo Hall’s history, visit our website at hmc.edu/galileo. Here, you can learn more about the project, use the seat-chooser page to select up to four seats and indicate how you would like your gift to be recognized.

If you are interested in purchasing rows or more than four seats, or if you would like to speak to someone about this opportunity, please contact Lily Nguyen, director of development, at linguyen@hmc.edu or 909.607.7924.

is on a mission

THE CAMPAIGN FOR HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

The world needs Harvey Mudd.

And Harvey Mudd needs you. hmc.edu/galileo

Harvey Mudd College 301 Platt Boulevard | Claremont, CA 91711 hmc.edu/magazine

To the Rescue “My plan was to retire in my traditional house in Aleppo,” says Ahmad Adib Sha’ar, who left Syria with his wife, Sawsan, and two sons (five children preceded them in leaving). “I did not anticipate the violence and destruction that would prevent me from fulfilling that dream.” Read more about Sha'ar, a visiting professor of engineering, and Harvey Mudd College's participation in the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund on page 8.

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