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spring

We are proud of our forty alumni children currently enrolled at HRS. Can you connect them to their alumni parents on the back?a new generation of jayhawks

New Head of School Rob Lake and Director of Alumni Relations Betsy Ringrose ’85 are looking forward to seeing alumni in the Boston and New York City areas. Please make plans to join us. Visit the Alumni Events section of the HRS web site for details.

For more information about Alumni Reunion Weekend, to contact your class reunion chair, or to RSVP for one or all of the weekend’s events, look for details at www.headroyce.org/alumni.

You may also contact Betsy Ringrose ’85, Director of Alumni Relations, at alumni@

headroyce.org, 510.531.1300, x2191.

Alumni: Hear what is happening at your school and come catch up with friends and classmates at these upcoming events.

Community & Connections

CXXIIIA l u m n i R E u n i O n W E E k E n dHead-Royce School

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Alumni dAy FrIday, aprIl 29, 2011

11:00 AM Welcome Back to School

in the Community Room

11:30 AM Student & Alumni Panel

Noon Lunch with the Faculty

12:35 PM Upper School Choral Concert

12:45 PM Roundtable discussion

with Head of School Rob Lake

1:15 PM Classroom visits

and tour of the campus

2:00 PM Maypole & Spring Dances

in the Pavilion

Alumni REuniOn lunCHEOnSaturday, aprIl 30, 2011at the Claremont Hotel

Honoring Classes Ending in 1 or 6 and the Class of 2011

11:00 AM Reception in the Horizon & Lanai Rooms

11:45 AM Class Reunion Photos

12:15 PM Class of 2011 Alumni Recognition Celebration

12:30 PM Luncheon & Awards Presentationd I S t I n g u I S h e d a l u m n I awa r d Jocelyn Larkin ’76

F o u n d e r S awa r d Shand Lathrop Green ’66

h o n o r I n g o u r 2 0 1 1 Fa C u lt y r e t I r e m e n t S : David Clark, Fine Arts, 22 Years Judy Jonas, World Languages, 29 Years

at Head-Royce School Sunday, may 1, 2011 · 11 AM to 2 PM Lunch begins at 11:30 AM

Join alumni, alumni parents, and their families for swimming, feasting, and fun in the sun, by the pool, on the terrace, in the garden, on the playground.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A l u m n i FA m i ly B A r B e Q u e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

boston &new york city05.13 – 05.15.2011

Regional Alumni Events

Reunion Weekend

magazinespringReaching Out, Reconnecting .......................................................................................... 3 Robert A. Lake, Head of School

Math, Music, and More: A Coversation with Will Glaser ’83 ........................................................................ 4 Blakely Atherton, Parent of ’19, ’21, ’23

Adventures in Space: Stephanie Gregg Geoffrion ’92 .................................................................................... 8 Andrei Ferrera, Director of Publications

Persistence and Determination from a Green Beret: Tom Searle ’78 .................................................................................................................................. 11 Blakely Atherton, Parent of ’19, ’21, ’23

Clear Thinking and Effective Leadership: A Conversation with Mark Searle ’80 ............................................................. 1 3 Blakely Atherton, Parent of ’19, ’21, ’23

Caring for Her Community: Joyce Boykin ’68 .................................... 1 4

Web TKO: Kai Hasson ’02 and Nate Houghteling ’02............................................... 16 Andrei Ferrera, Director of Publications

Sports Fix: Ty Ahmad-Taylor ’86............................................................................ 19

The Sporting Life: David Sternberg ’86 ...................................................... 2 0

Keeping Your Eyes Open: Q & A with Corinne Dixon ’99 ................................................................................. 2 2

Teacher by Day, Artist by Night: Q & A with Nicole Dixon ’98 ...................................................................................... 2 3

Family Practice: Q & A with Tsion Ketema ’98 .................................................................................... 2 4

The Return of Kaleidoscope ....................................................................................... 2 5

The Second Golden Age of the Inventor: Q & A with Corwin Booth ’84 .................................................................................... 2 6

A Life of Learning: Q & A with Quyen Vo ’03 ................................................................................................ 2 8

Art as a Way of Thinking: Mari Lyons ’53................................................ 3 0

Alumni Abroad: Julia Harte ’05 .............................................................................. 31

Alumni Around the United States ...................................................................... 3 2

Alumni Around the Globe............................................................................................. 3 3

Coming Home ............................................................................................................................... 3 4

Our Legacy Families ............................................................................................................. 3 6

Making the Alumni Circuit ......................................................................................... 3 8

HRS By the Numbers ........................................................................................................... 4 0

Athletics: Winter Highlights ..................................................................................... 4 2

Around Campus .......................................................................................................................... 4 4

About the cover: We are proud that so many of our alumni have chosen to send their children to Head-Royce for their education. On the front are yearbook portraits of our forty alumni students. And on the back, the senior portraits of their parents (and two alumni grandparents). Can you guess which students belong to which parents? See page 36 for a full who’s who.

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The mission of Head‑Royce School is to inspire in our students a lifelong love of learning and pursuit of academic excellence, to promote understanding of and respect for diversity that makes our society strong, and to encourage active and responsible global citizenship.

Founded in 1887, Head‑Royce is an independent, non‑denominational, coeducational, college‑preparatory, K–12 school, which offers a challenging educational program to educate the whole child. The School nurtures the development of each individual student through a program that seeks:

· to develop intellectual abilities such as scholarship and disciplined, critical thinking;

· to foster in each student respect, integrity, ethical behavior, compassion and a sense of humor;

· to promote responsibility and leadership, an appreciation of individual and cultural differences, and a respect for the opinions of others;

· to nurture aesthetic abilities such as creativity, imagination, musical and visual talent; and

· to encourage joyful, healthy living, a love of nature, and physical fitness.

All members of the Head‑Royce community strive to create an educational environment that reflects the School’s core values of academic excellence, diversity and citizenship, one in which each student can thrive. We believe that a program based on these core values will prepare our students to be effective global citizens as they face and embrace the challenges and the opportunities of the future.

One of the most important goals for my first year as Head of School was to reach out to a broad swath of the Anna Head and Head-Royce alumni body. Why? Our strength today is due in large part to the people who have come before us. There are countless moments in my first year that have brought me great joy: reading to the kindergarten class, welcoming students on Lincoln Avenue, marveling at our talented actors, and cheering for our athletes. Among these, I have also been inspired by my time spent with alums. As a new head, I have spent much of my time learning, listening, and honoring the culture of Head-Royce through meeting alums.

I am passionate about history. I believe in learning from past experiences, and especially learning from those who have come before me. Since my first day on July 1, 2010, I have had the honor of meeting hundreds of alums from classes ranging from 1935 to the class of 2010. The reason is simple: before I can shape a vision and future, I need to become deeply knowledgeable about our past.

Since August, we have had receptions, dinners, lunches, and parties in Oakland, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, Charleston, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. We still aren’t finished. We have spring alumni events scheduled for New York and Boston. Throughout the year, I have been moved by the deep sense of pride and loyalty in the alumni body.

This spring edition of the HRS magazine is an opportunity to share some of what I have learned by highlighting just a few alums who exemplify the excellence and diver-sity that is Head-Royce School. There are countless numbers of you who we would have been honored to interview. This is an ongoing process of learning and discovery and we expect to do this regularly. So, don’t be surprised if we reach out to you in the future!

One true measure of a school’s strength, in my opinion, is the ability to answer an emphatic yes to the following questions: “Are our alums thought leaders and game changers in a wide range of industries and fields?” “Do our alums positively impact society in a way that is in keeping with the school’s mission?” I am so proud to report that the answer to both questions is indeed, an emphatic ‘yes.’

We have chosen to highlight alums from a range of years and fields. Among this group, we have an internet innovator and inventor, a PhD Green Beret, a rocket scientist, the CEO of a software company, a pair of new media pioneers, a developer of patents, a pro-fessional painter, a freelance international journalist, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs, and a ground breaking doctor in internal medicine. This impressive array of people illustrates that Head-Royce helps to shape critical thinkers and problem solvers. It is a place that helps you learn how to think rather than what to think. I hope that you enjoy reading about some of your fellow alums as much as we did reconnecting with them.

Reaching Out, Reconnecting

Robert A. Lake Head of School

All the very best,

P.S. Please keep your letters and stories coming. To date, I have received many emails and letters about your personal school experiences. These too help to illuminate the school’s past in meaningful ways for me. I hope to see many of you at Reunion Weekend!

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Will Glaser ’83 likes to use both sides of his brain. He has been recognized as an innovative business leader in Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and is a creative, conceptual thinker who is equally comfortable working on complex mathematical problems as well communicating a product’s value proposition or running a management meeting. Named by Microtimes as one of the 100 Most Influential People in High Technology, Will has been the driving force behind a number of successful startup companies, where he has focused his attention on the integration and deployment of sophisticated new technologies.

Math,Music,More

anda conversation with will glaser ’83blakely atherton, parent of ’19, ’21, ’23

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Will, who earned a triple major in computer science, mathematics, and physics at Cornell University, has two daughters, Caroline ’21 and Julia ’23, in the Lower School at Head-Royce. And, in his free time, Will writes music and plays guitar in an amateur rock band in San Francisco called Third Date.

Will says that he has really had two careers over the course of his life: one working as a founder and principal of startup companies, and the other as a technology consultant, which is where he is focusing his energy now. In 1999, Will founded Pandora Media, the best known of his companies, and ran its operations and product development as COO and CTO. Pandora is the leading provider of online radio, with over 80 million registered users. Its website and smart phone apps offer FM-style radio that is customized to the individual taste of each listener. Will currently operates a consulting practice specializing in business startups, new product architectures, and high technology turn-arounds. He is frequently brought in to perform early design work for companies wishing to begin development of a new line of prod-ucts, or to restore structure to existing projects that have fallen behind schedule or gone over budget.

When asked about the biggest accomplishment in his career thus far, Will immediately answers that his daughters are at the top of the list, “My interaction with my kids is the most important part of my life.” As for his professional accomplishments, he says that his work at Pandora has been among the most rewarding. “I’m very proud of what we built at Pandora and the success that it’s having. It’s really great to see how well it’s doing in the market, and it’s so fun to overhear strangers talk about it in passing and to know how much they are enjoying it.”

Will has a rare combination of being an accomplished and capable sci-entist and also an effective communicator and business leader. He says,

“Even if I had never gone to Head-Royce I was still going to be a geek.

I was good at math and science, so that’s really the direction I would have taken no matter what. Head-Royce really broadened me in a way that I didn’t get at the time.” He notes that he had teachers who taught him how to write and think and express himself, which were “all things that I probably wasn’t destined to know given my propensity for math and science.” He believes firmly that he wouldn’t have had the com-munication skills that he now has without that training from HRS: “A huge component of what I do now hinges on effective communication, especially writing, which I learned in my English classes. In my line of work, math and technical knowledge are the most important skills to have, communication is second, and third is an ability to understand where you are, and to figure out where you want to go from there.” The combination of all of these skills has allowed him to be effective in creating products as well as managing teams.

Will has worked diligently throughout his career to perfect the art of making a plan to get from point A to point B. Early in his career, he received some sage advice from the well-known entrepreneur and investor Guy Kawasaki. Will was trying to raise money from venture capitalists in the early days of Pandora, and they asked him who had developed the sophisticated mathematics that made the product work. Will answered that he had created it, and they asked, “Well who are you then?” It was a humbling question. “The venture capitalists weren’t really impressed by me,” Will notes, “and [they] wondered if I’d got-ten it right.” Guy Kawasaki suggested to Will after that meeting that he should think about what he wanted that answer to be, and then to ensure that he had indeed gotten it right. Will admits, “I wanted the answer to be ‘Hawkins and Einstein,’ which I knew was impossible, so instead I did some research and found the most cited (peer reviewed) mathematician of the time, a professor at Stanford named Dave Donoho. I reached out to Professor Donoho, and I offered him shares in the company if he would help refine the math we used in

A Conversation with Will Glaser ’83Will at home with daughters Caroline and Julia

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Math, Music, and More

the product.” Professor Donoho reviewed their work, and loved Will’s math. He didn’t suggest changing anything and even offered Will one of his graduate students to work with him if he needed extra help. Will remembers, “The next time I got the question about who developed our math, I answered that Dave Donoho, the most cited mathematician of our time, had reviewed it and blessed it. That time, the story worked!”

When I asked Will if there’s anything in his career that he would have done differently, he said, “I have had so much fun, so it’s hard to think of anything that I would have changed.” He noted that he had once made a bad financial decision in one of his past ventures, and realizes now that he should have been a bit more patient with his decision to sell the company, which would have led to greater success in two or three more years. He says, “I had a bit of a ‘mid-life crisis’ after that and went on a 7-month motorcycle trip. I was only 28 years old at the time and had been carrying a lot of responsibility for a young man.”

The technology industry is one of constant change and innovation. I asked Will what he thought would change in the industry in the next 10–15 years. “I can make guesses,” he said, “but I can also guarantee that I’ll be wrong.” He remembers predicting in the ’80s that email would never catch on because it was too hard to use, so he’s reluctant to make too many more predictions. However, in looking back over the last four decades of technology innovation, Will notes that there was a big revolution in hardware in the ’70s, and then the ’80s were more about software productivity tools such as Lotus 123 word processors. Then, in the ’90s, the internet revolution started, which shifted every-thing online. He believes that the leading edge of innovation is moving away from electronics and into quality of service, and that the next

wave will be about usability. Will says, “I think the warning shot was the iPod. Before Apple introduced it, there were dozens of mp3 play-ers, but regular people didn’t really use them because they were too technical and funky. Apple revolutionized the space by making them approachable and easy to use. Then they did it again with the iPhone.” He believes that personal computers are still way too hard to use, and that you need to know a lot just to keep them running. He draws an analogy to the early days of automobile technology, “when each driver had to know things like when to open the choke on the carburetor.” Will believes that “everything is getting more usable, less serious, and less technical.” Pandora is a great example of that. “There is a lot of mu-sicological complexity and fancy arithmetic in Pandora, but it still has to be super simple on the screen and really smooth for the end user.” He maintains that companies are learning to make their products serve the user, by thinking better about the computer-human interface, and he believes that trend will continue.

As our conversation shifted to education, I asked Will who his favorite teacher was at HRS. “We had a lot of great teachers,” he reflected, “so I really can’t pick one favorite.” He did, however, note his English teach-ers David Enelow and Mary Frederick, who he says taught him how to write, and he praised his fantastic math teachers Lew Douglas and Vera Kerekes and his great Spanish teacher Doctor Albert Suarez. When I asked Will what his favorite non-academic activity at HRS had been, he told me about a club he started with some friends to make sure that they would appear to have well-rounded transcripts. Will used his creativity and entrepreneurism not only to join as many existing clubs as he could, but also by creating a new one, becoming president of the

“So many people do what is easy because it’s natural, but you need to look at what you’re doing now in the context of what you want in order to achieve your goals.”

will glaser ’83

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club, and then creating awards for all of the club members. Perhaps there was a bit of padding of the résumé, but he clearly loved the ability to create something out of nothing, and he’s convinced that this experi-ence helped him get accepted to Cornell. Will feels fortunate to have had so many excellent teachers at Head-Royce, and he now supports HRS on an annual basis because he’s “grateful for the education that they gave me.”

Will says that as a consultant, he gives specific situational advice all the time. If he were in a position to give advice in a broader sense to young people entering the technology field today, he would simply say “work hard and maintain perspective.” He also suggests that “students—or people at any stage in their career really—need to make sure that what they’re doing right now moves them toward their objectives.” He believes strongly that we all need to make daily steps that are informed by a long-term plan, and that our short-term actions need to flow from there. “So many people do what is easy because it’s natural,” Will main-tains, “but you need to look at what you’re doing now in the context of what you want in order to achieve your goals.” Will is a great example of the kind of innovation that can be achieved with that mix of hard work, focus, and perspective.

A Conversation with Will Glaser ’83

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From the time she saw the very first Space Shuttle launch as a first grader, Stephanie Gregg wanted to be an astronaut. But along the way, her path changed course. “After the Challenger explosion in 1986, I remember my friends saying to me: ‘So, do you still want to be an astronaut?’ My answer was resoundingly YES. Later, in 9th grade, Ms. Bobbi Barnier asked us all to do interviews for an English assignment. And of course, I wanted to interview astronauts. To my disappointment, I learned that most astronauts, once selected, have to wait about ten years before they can fly. It seemed so boring to have to wait that long. So I decided to switch to the engineering side, and I was on track. I figured maybe if I’m building the space station, they’ll have to send me up there to help!”

Adventuresin Space

stephanie gregg geoffrion ’92andrei ferrera · director of publications

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Today, Stephanie is an aerospace systems engineer at SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, CA, where she works on the design of a spacecraft called

“Dragon.” The capsule is launched into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida on top of the Falcon 9 rocket. Once in orbit and released from Falcon 9, Dragon docks with the International Space Station, deliv-ers supplies to the station’s crew, stays for 30 days, then returns fully loaded back to Earth. After the Space Shuttle retires, Dragon will be the only system in the world that can bring cargo back down to Earth. “Some people call it a taxi service for space,” Stephanie says. In December of last year, Dragon made history when it became the first spacecraft ever placed in orbit and recovered by a private company. SpaceX began a private/public partnership with NASA in 2006, when the company was awarded a contract for the commercial delivery of cargo to the International Space Station.

Stephanie’s role is multi-faceted, acting as a liaison between engineers at SpaceX and NASA and the space station. On the engineering side,

she ensures that all aspects of the interface between the Dragon capsule and the space station—such as rendezvous operations, attachment mechanisms, and electrical characteristics—are under-stood, implemented, and verified before flight.

“My work is mostly engineering, but with a good deal of communicat-ing as well,” she says. “We’re trying to bridge the gap between two very different organizations: SpaceX and NASA. A lot of my day-to-day work is making sure that both sides are working together. So I’m an engineer and also part translator.”

As the Space Shuttle program winds down (there are only two missions remaining), Stephanie’s role, and that of her colleagues at SpaceX, will become even more important, as the company will focus on transport-ing people. With a big transition on the horizon, the Dragon program will carry out at least 12 scheduled cargo missions to and from the space station as they prepare to carry astronauts. “It’s all part of con-tinuing human exploration of space,” Stephanie explains, “and to keep

The Dragon mission in December 2010 marked the first time a commercial company successfully recovered a spacecraft returning from Earth orbit. It is a feat previously performed by only six nations or government agencies: the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India, and the European Space Agency.

BackgroundI have a two-year-old son, Noa Maxime Geoffrion, and we're expecting a second child in May. I've been working more than full time at SpaceX (sometimes I have to finish work after the kid goes to bed). Weekends, however, are for rowing, yoga class, and family time. My husband, Bruno, is from Montreal and is also an engineer at SpaceX.

Greatest accomplishmentDecember 8, 2010: first flight of Dragon was a complete success! Launch from Cape Canaveral separated from the Falcon 9 rocket, orbited earth twice, entered the atmosphere, deployed para-chutes, and landed gently in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California. We made history by being the first ever commercial spacecraft to return safely to Earth.

Skills needed to achieve successAlways ask questions, pay attention to details, have broad technical knowledge, and figure out why people want things (this helps you get what you want, too!).

Good advice you received“Generally, you don't need a Ph.D. in aerospace en-gineering. In fact it can make it harder to find a job. Stop at the master’s degree and then start getting industry experience as soon as you can.”

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the International Space Station running, supplies and people need to be shipped back and forth. After the Space Shuttle program ends, SpaceX will be one of only five spacecrafts that can provide cargo transportation to the space station. And of those five options, SpaceX is currently the only one that can bring cargo back to Earth.

One of the great features of the Dragon capsule is that it was designed from the very beginning to carry both people and cargo into space and back again. Stephanie notes that the experience with Dragon will help as they make the transition to people. “Instead of building a brand new system, we have the benefit of perfecting Dragon as a cargo system first.” Stephanie is excited at the prospect of tackling the engineering challenges that come with flying people to space.

“There is a whole host of new disciplines to learn when you’re working on long-duration human space flight, but that’s the fun stuff!”

Stephanie attended Princeton for her undergraduate work, earning a degree in mechanical engineering. She received a master’s in aerospace engineering from Stanford University.

Her first job in the industry was at Lockheed Martin. “Once I got the opportunity to go to SpaceX, I jumped. I’ve basically followed whatever was going to get me closer to human space flight.”

Stephanie believes that students should seek out opportunities to solve problems and learn from failures (their own and those of others) so that they can learn how to see them coming. “And learn new things outside of your comfort zone.”

Adventures in Space

“I’m so grateful for Mr. Craig Barrows, who taught the AP Physics class. He set me on the right path for engineering. All of the science and math I had at HRS was great preparation not only for getting me into college and taking all those engineering courses, but also for what I’m doing now.” stephanie gregg geoffrion ’92

Advice for students at Head-RoyceTake advantage of all the great teachers you have. Try to take the most advanced classes you can. Keep challeng-ing yourself; if you make it hard for yourself now, it will give you the confidence and credentials you’ll need later. Keep up on current events in the areas that interest you.

Be passionate about your goals. Changing the aerospace industry and finding new ways to fly people in space (or changing any part of our world for that matter) takes hard work. You will never have the energy to get it all done without that initial passion for the subject.

Funny memories of her time on campusI remember once on senior prank day, either in 1990 or 1991, the students managed to park a Volkswagen bug on the Upper School patio. To this day—and I’m an engineer—I have no idea how they did that!

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Green Beret:and

from a

Lieutenant Colonel Tom Searle ’78 of the United States Armed Forces and older brother of Mark Searle ’80, graduated from Princeton University in 1982 with a BSE (Civil Engineering), and received his PhD in military history from Duke University. Tom has had an interesting and varied career so far, commanding US Army tank units in Germany and Korea, serving as a Green Beret in the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Colombia, among other areas, researching and writing for a think tank and publishing books and articles on various subjects—mainly military.

Tom never expected to be the kind of person who would “bounce around between jobs.” His father has been a professor at UC Berkeley for more than 50 years, and is in fact the longest serving professor at the University. Tom says that he sees in his father’s career a “level of stability that the rest of us can’t fathom,” but that is what he grew up around and in the back of his mind he always expected that his own career would follow a similar path. The organizations with which Tom has worked are likely thrilled that he didn’t choose to stay in one place, because they’ve all undoubtedly benefited from his expertise and involvement.

I asked Tom what he’s doing now, and he said he’s currently working on a series of classified books and articles cover-ing ongoing counter-terrorist operations by US Special Operations Forces to pass on the knowledge gained from those operations to the special ops community. He quickly added, “So there actually isn’t much that I can say about those projects.” Looking back over his career, he notes one good piece of advice that came from a movie (the Rocky Horror Picture Show), “Don’t dream it; be it.” And he says, “I think I’ve managed to follow that advice.”

On a more serious note, Tom feels that the biggest ac-complishment of his career thus far was after 9/11 when he “managed to claw [his] way back onto active duty” with the military. At the time, Tom was a research fellow at the Air Force Research Institute, a think tank, and he was on reserve duty while working on his PhD. He said that after 9/11 there wasn’t any “real legitimate reason” for him to go on active duty, as he says, “who needs a 41-year-old (now a 50-year-old) Green Beret?” but he says he “really wanted to be part of the war, and so I went back in.” Tom says that “it has always been important to me to serve our country in war time, and I was really just afraid that the nation would go to war without me. I didn’t want to be left behind.” He notes that the military really “isn’t designed to take anyone back once they have left, so it was a struggle, but it ended up being a big accomplishment for me.”

When Tom thinks about the skills and attributes that have enabled him to accomplish all that he has through-out his career, he says the most important ones are

“persistence and unwillingness to accept good advice,” adding that “it’s really all sorts of things that have been factors. I do think that in the case of getting back into the military after 9/11, it was pure dogged determination to do what I wanted to do. I don’t necessarily recom-mend that others follow that path, but it is an attribute that has worked for me throughout my life. I could have made more money and been more famous following a different path, but I did what I loved doing.”

Tom has an interesting perspective on the future of the military as an historian and a military expert. He believes that most of the change that might have come in the industry in the next 10–15 years has already

occurred. He says that “The important thing about Obama’s presidency is that it gives the country a sense for which part of the global war on terrorism is bi-par-tisan and not just a product of George W. Bush and the Republicans.” He believes that “there are a lot of paral-lels” between Obama’s presidency and Eisenhower’s presidency, “which told us which part of the Cold War was bi-partisan and not just a product of Truman and the Democrats.” He explained that by the end of the Eisenhower administration, the United States had a sense for the left and right limits of American foreign policy under the Cold War. He says that “similarly, with Obama, we are finding out the limits on the left and on

Tom Searle ’78blakely atherton, parent of ’19, ’21, ’23

Mark and Tom Searle in 2009

PersistenceDetermination

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the right for the War on Terror.” He explains that both sides of the political spectrum were OK with some of the War on Terror policies under Bush, and that some of those policies continue today. But, he adds that “we’re finding out what parts were agreed upon because Bush wanted them, and what parts are common to both parties. The Patriot Act is one example. There is now consensus on it, so we know that it’s not going away.”

He also explains that while a few changes have taken place in the military in the past few years, it takes a while for the ripple effect to pass through the system.

“For example,” he notes, “we’re going to draw down in Afghanistan, but we aren’t really leaving.” He also says that he “will be surprised if we leave Iraq, but the US will likely still have 10,000 or more soldiers in the Gulf region in the future.” As an historian, Tom sees “the out-lines now of how our policies will evolve.” He believes that China is the “wild card on the world scene,” and that nuclear proliferation could make a difference in how our military evolves.

Tom attended HRS from 7th grade through 12th grade, and says that his favorite teachers were David Enelow and Vera Kerekes. He says, “They were both really great at challenging me and the other students intellectually.” And, he “mostly remembers that they worked us really hard.” For example, on the AP Calculus exam, there were 7 questions and it was graded on a scale of 1–5, so 5 out of 7 was the highest score allowed. His AP Calculus teacher, Ms. Kerekes, gave them the previous years’ tests at the end of the year to prepare for the exam, but she graded those practice tests on a scale of 1–7 instead of 1–5, so they were doing a lot of homework and she was giving them Bs and Cs on work that would get them

a maximum score on the AP exam. Tom said that at the end of his senior year, “when students know which college they are going to, and tend to not be very moti-vated, this approach seemed kind of rough.” But when they took the AP Calculus exam, most of them “had no trouble getting a 5 because we were so well prepared.” Tom remembers that “she held the stick pretty high for us to jump over,” and he values how much he was chal-lenged as a result.

I asked Tom what his favorite non-academic activity was at HRS, and he said, “I spent many years on some of the worst soccer teams in the history of kids’ soccer in the Bay Area.” While he notes that it was “definitely painful,” he says “there is also an educational value when your team is 1–11 in a season.” Tom was one of the better play-ers on his team, and says he learned that you don’t brag much about how great you are personally as a player when your team is doing terribly. He says he “definitely learned from that experience, but it wasn’t very fun.”

Tom says that he “really got a lot out of [his] time at HRS” and adds that he “needed a school like HRS” when he was young. As a child, Tom was mildly dyslexic, so he says he “read slowly and spelled badly, and really struggled in the early years of school because there was so much memorization and that was a real challenge” for him. Tom says that he “needed the nurturing and challenging environment” that HRS provided and adds that he “really hadn’t been a star academic performer until [he] got to HRS, where [he] was able to thrive.”

When Tom reflects back on his time at HRS, and thinks about advice for young people entering the military, he says that he “would advise them not to get too wrapped up in their performance early on.” As with many things,

Tom Searle ’78

he explains that you will have bad days, and “that’s understood.” He says that the “real differentiation career-wise will be made much later in your career, and will be based more on how much you learned from your earlier mistakes rather than how many mistakes you made early on.”

As for advice for students entering high school, Tom says, “Try to do more than you can. All the time.” He recommends that students “take full advantage of every opportunity and spread [themselves] thin.” He believes that so many individuals think “it’s all about GPA and taking the easiest road so that you can get the grades you’re after,” but he found immense value in stretching himself and trying new things. As an undergraduate at Princeton, Tom took courses in 17 different departments, and says that he “took huge course loads and played 3 sports and got a lot out of it.”

When I asked Tom how HRS prepared him for his professional life, he said, “I think it really encouraged a genuine love of learning and a desire to seek out intellectual challenges.” Tom has clearly sought those challenges, and through his perseverance and hard work, has had a lasting impact on our country and throughout the world.

The Royce Boys soccer team, 1977. Mark is in last row, far left. Tom is in last row, far right.

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Mark Searle ’80, the younger brother of Tom Searle ’78, is a business professional with more than 25 years of experience leading high‑growth technology organizations. Mark is currently CEO of Kinamik, a venture-backed enterprise software company that provides data integrity assur-ance. He has started and run a number of successful companies, including Log Savvy Corporation, a leading provider of hosted log data management and analysis software, where he was President, co-founder and CEO. Before Log Savvy he co-founded Addamark Technologies—now SenSage, Inc.—a pioneer in the SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) market space, which he led as CEO through its first several years. Mark holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an AB cum laude in English and Creative Writing from Princeton.

Mark was hired by Kinamik in September 2009 when the company had 10 months of working capital left, and he was essentially asked by the board to make a solid busi-ness assessment of whether or not the company would be able to succeed. Kinamik is based in Barcelona, Spain, and Mark said that the last time he took Spanish was when he was in high school at HRS. Fortunately for him, he took both the language and literature AP exams and still has enough of a solid foundation in the language to be able to communicate with his new team. In April 2010, the company made its first sale, and in December, they won the ICT prize at the 2010 Eurecan European Venture Contest, naming them as the top IT startup in all of Europe. Mark has had great success throughout his career, and one accomplishment that stands out for him was his ability to launch his former company Addamark Technologies in the wake of 9/11. In March 2002, just a

few months after the September 11th tragedy, Mark was able to raise $5 million in venture investment which enabled the company to continue its growth at a time when it was extremely challenging to find any investors interested in taking a risk. While that accomplishment was significant, Mark says that he is most proud of “the number of people with whom I have worked in the past who have said that they would work with me again.” Mark adds that you “need a team to do just about any-thing,” and at every company where he has worked, there were people who said they would do another proj-ect with him. I had the pleasure of working with Mark at a small start-up more than ten years ago, and can attest that there are dozens of talented individuals who would gladly work with him again.

Mark believes that his ability to “think clearly and ana-lytically about problems or challenges” combined with a high level of transparency in how he works with people has helped him succeed throughout his career. I asked him what he would change about his career, if he could have changed one thing, and he replied that he “didn’t think clearly around about what to do with one company when it was in trouble.” The company was on the verge of succeeding, and Mark believes that without the financial crisis of the past few years, it might have worked. He says that he “made a very emotional decision” about how to manage the company and he wishes that he hadn’t gotten outside of himself in that situation. He explained that it was challenging to keep his emotions in check when his desire for a company he founded to succeed was so strong.

The software industry is constantly evolving, and Mark believes that many things will change in the next 10–15 years, which is part of the reason that he went back to

the security market. Mark says, “If you think about it, every day more organizations are using more data to make increasingly important decisions.” He adds that when the people looking at the data don’t know whether or not the data is correct and legitimate, it could create problems. Mark believes that “as the trend of reliance on electronic data goes up, the level of concern and para-noia and action around it has to go up,” which creates a growth category for sure.

Mark attributes much of the foundation of his education and his success in business to his teachers at Head-Royce. When I asked him who his favorite teacher was, he said that it’s hard for him to pick just one! Not sur-prisingly, among his favorites were Doctor Suarez, Vera Kerekes, and David Enelow, three teachers also noted by Mark’s brother, Tom, as well as Will Glaser ’83. He says that “They all had a combination of very high standards with a measure of compassion and empathy.” Mark says

A Conversation with Mark Searle ’80

andEffective Leadership:

Clear Thinkingblakely atherton, parent of ’19, ’21, ’23

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Mark Searle ’80

that he became an English major in college because of Dr. Enelow. And, he adds that he wouldn’t be running an international company without the foundation of Spanish that he received at HRS. He told me that Dr. Enelow was “famous” for being “tough” (e.g. crossing out a full paragraph in a paper a student had written) and writing in the margin, “so what?” While that may sound harsh to some, Mark says that the high expectations of Dr. Enelow and his other teachers really helped all of the students to work harder and to learn the fundamentals. Mark says that “at an early age those three teach-ers demanded the kind of clear thinking that has been essential to me in my career.” While each taught their classes very differently, they all “promoted a kind of clarity and non-tolerance of obfuscation” that has been invaluable to him.

When asked what advice he would give to young people entering his field today, Mark said to “make sure you work for multiple companies with mul-tiple types of leaders.” He notes that you won’t know how to be an effective leader yourself unless you are exposed to different styles of management. He believes that working “with a few different people who have different styles is how you find your own style.” As for advice for current high school students, Mark says “pay attention to which subjects feel like work and which ones feel like fun and come easily.” He adds that “it will be true that some are easier for you and others are more work, and that’s worth noting.” Mark recommends following those subjects and projects that are exciting to you, because he believes that doing what you love will ultimately set you on a trajectory for success.

Mark enjoyed his time at Head-Royce because “in addition to the teachers and the analytical thinking I was taught, which was rare and valuable, it was a small enough place that everyone had a chance to be heard.” He says that students “don’t get out of HRS feeling like they don’t matter.” He enjoyed being able to play on sports teams and to not feel “lost in a big community.” Because “people cared what you thought,” he believes that young people who attend HRS are starting from a position of knowing that their opinions and attitude and skills are relevant. Mark says that he feels extremely lucky to have gone to all three schools he attended: Head-Royce, Princeton, and Harvard Business School. He believes that all of his schools, as well as his parents, gave him a foundation for his career and his life that have proven invaluable. He says he’s “so grateful” for all of the education to which he has been exposed, and that this “pure gratitude” manifests itself now as ongoing support for the Head-Royce Annual Fund. Mark says that he’s happy to be able to help provide a similar opportunity for today’s students.

Early on, Dr. Joyce Boykin ’68 sought a career in which she could make a difference, and one that would allow her to constantly grow intel‑lectually. She loves to help others—it’s in her DNA. For 22 years, she has been caring for her patients in the Internal Medicine Department at Kaiser Permanente in Riverside, California. Joyce sees anywhere between 18 and 23 patients a day. “My goal is to keep my patients out of the hospital,” she says. “And if they do go into the hospital, I try to maintain their care as best as I can when they are discharged from the hospital.” Joyce graduated from Anna Head School in 1968, and then attended USC for undergraduate work before going to medical school at Tufts University in Boston. She later earned a master’s in public health from UCLA.

Joyce was the first African American student to attend Anna Head for the full twelve years, up through gradu-ation (at the time, students started in first grade). When asked if she was treated differently than her fellow students, she says, “My classmates—they were cool, but some of their parents definitely were not cool. I was told once: ‘I’m sorry Joyce, I can’t invite you to my birthday, because my mother doesn’t want colored people at the house.’ Yet it was okay for their colored maid to be working in their home. But I was invited to almost all of the birthday parties.” Joyce was in third grade when the next African American girl enrolled. “I knew who all the African Americans were at the school and what grades they were in. By the time I graduated, there was at least one African American in every class.”

Thinking back to her school years, Joyce says, “One thing that impressed me about Anna Head School,” Joyce says,

Caring for Her CommunityJoyce Boykin ’68

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“was how, as students, we were exposed to languages” She tells great stories of French class with Madame Hull. “She was the bomb for teaching French! She would spend hours cutting out pictures of garments, food, furniture, or silverware; and she would paste these figures on small cards that we would pass around to each other around the classroom. She would come in and say: ‘Okay, today we’re setting the table.’ Her teaching was very interactive. Today, even if I haven’t used those words for years, I can still retrieve them.” She also took Latin for two years with Ms. Lamar and went on to earn the Summa Cum Laude and Magna Cum Laude awards for her study of Latin. After Heads, her interest in language continued to grow. By the time she was at USC, she was studying German. In the summer before her senior year, she traveled abroad to participate in an intensive language program at the Goethe Institute in Germany for two months. “That was a great experience for me, being with students from all over the world.” She later took one year of Arabic “because I was interested in learning a language with an entirely different alphabet.”

Joyce also remembers that Anna Head School helped her to develop an appreciation of classical music. “We would go into the city on Fridays to see the San Francisco Symphony. It wasn’t required for everyone, but it was an option. They would tell us that if we went to these matinee performances, we would get have ‘free dress’ and would not have to wear our uniforms, and we got to leave school early. I sure didn’t mind getting out of class early, AND we got to dress up. Of course you know what happened: I ended up growing to love classical music!” Joyce’s mother started subscribing to classical music records. “Every time they arrived in the mail, I would open them up and play them on the record player while I did my homework.”

Joyce credits her parents for paving the way for her career. “I’m so glad that my mother had the foresight to

start planning for my education early on. In 7th grade, they were already telling me that I was going to college. I wanted to go to UCLA, but my father wanted me to go to USC, because their class size was smaller than UCLA. When I look back, I realize how fortunate I am that my parents exposed me to so many things and sacrificed a lot to make sure I could graduate from Anna Head. I so appreciate it now.”

After college, Joyce worked at a community mental health center in Watts. “I gained an appreciation for the community, and the needs of the community. I went to a meeting held at Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital, which had just been built. I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is really nice. Here is a hospital for minorities in the community.’ I saw African American doctors walking around and tak-ing care of patients. And I wished that I could do that.”

At one point, Joyce thought she might pursue a master’s degree in social work. “Later, while watching television with some friends, I remember seeing a commercial that said: ‘If you are a minority and interested in pursuing a career in health, call this number.’ And I did. I was on my way.” She went back to school for two years at Cal State Los Angeles, where “I took almost nothing but lab scienc-es for two years.” She started applying to medical schools, and was accepted to UC San Francisco and schools in Minnesota and Boston. “Having lived in California all my life, I wanted to go out of state. I talked to someone who was going to Tufts University and having a good experi-ence there, so she encouraged me to apply.”

Joyce is proud of her many years caring for those in her community. In 1985, she was part of a core group of doctors who opened the Internal Medicine Department for Kaiser Permanente in Riverside. “When we started, of the four people in our group, I was the only female and the only African American in the department.” She notes that, in recent years, her practice has evolved

from internal medicine to also include geriatrics. “The patients are living longer. When I first started practic-ing, we hardly ever saw anyone in the 90s. Today, I have at least 20 patients who are in their 90s, and half of them are 95 or older! It could be due to the fact that we are able to better manage their illnesses and prolong their life and, hopefully, prolong their quality of life.”

She also spent time volunteering for a free clinic in Orange County. The experience proved to have a big impact on her. “Here were people who had no place else to go to get their medical care, and it was so rewarding to offer help and provide them with a critical need. I felt a strong sense of fulfillment when I was there.

Asked about giving advice for younger students beginning their careers, Joyce replied that “Whatever profession you pursue, it’s a good idea to have a mentor, someone who has gone down a similar path. And you should speak with people who already are working in a career that you are considering. They can tell you how to conduct yourself and the steps to take to achieve your goal. Making these kinds of connections and asking these questions will certainly pay off.”

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Kai Hasson ’02 and Nate Houghteling ’02

Even lifelong friends will occasionally fight. But in a boxing ring? Going at each other with hooks and uppercuts day after day? But that’s exactly what Head-Royce alums Nate Houghteling ’02 and Kai Hasson ’02 did for three months last fall as they trained for their latest web video adventure, a documentary series called White Collar Brawler. Over the course of more than twenty episodes, Nate and Kai trans-formed themselves from out-of-shape, white collar workers with desk jobs to amateur boxers. The series averaged 100,000 views a month on YouTube.

Huge in AsiaNate and Kai’s first big video adventure began in an unlikely place: Southeast Asia. Shortly after finishing college, the two friends felt the urge to do something different. “After we graduated,” Kai says, “we both really wanted to do some traveling.” Armed with just a camera and a laptop, they flew to Asia. Eight months later, their project was an Internet sensation. Their travels in Asia took them to Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, China, and Mongolia. As they traveled, they filmed their adventures along the way, uploading their videos twice a week at internet cafes. “We were making content in real time, posting it along the way,” recalls Nate. “After a while, it became apparent to us that we were onto something special.” Their followers wondered: Where are they go-ing to go today? What will they see? “We started getting

andrei ferrera · director of publications

Web TKO

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emails from people around the world,” Nate recalls. “peo-ple we didn’t even know, saying things like ‘I’m in my office right now, and I’m jealous of what you’re doing—you’ve inspired me to travel.’ Huge in Asia really opened our eyes to this new form that was possible.” Three years later, nearly fifty episodes of Huge in Asia are still being viewed on a regular basis. At its peak, Huge in Asia was getting about 1,000 hits a day and they sold a number of their videos to Lonely Planet.

Back home in the Bay Area, and inspired by the suc-cess of Huge in Asia, Nate and Kai started their own company, Portal A Interactive in 2008. When they’re not making their own inspired web adventures, they create videos and commercials for corporations and smaller companies. They’ve even landed some top name clients, such as Google and Fox Sports. A few of their projects, like the 2008 Wal Street parody, Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Banker, went viral with more than one million views.

White Collar BrawlerTheir latest venture, White Collar Brawler, started with a chance visit. As Kai recalls, “One day I walked into a boxing gym just by chance, and I saw these guys sparring. Looking on the faces of these boxers after their rounds, they had a look of real accomplishment,

as if they had just completed a marathon. I thought this might be a great subject for a show. They had been looking for two boxers for the project, when their own trainer approached them with a radical idea: “You know, you guys should just fight each other—that’s what ev-eryone wants to see.” They agreed, and started training full-time. From October through December, they filmed and posted two episodes each week. Along the way, they proved that they also were savvy marketers, hosting a series of events to drum up interest in the White Collar Brawler project. One such happening was a benefit tour-nament billed as “Tech Beat Up” with employees from some of the top Bay Area tech companies like Google, Apple, and Zynga throwing punches at each other with oversize gloves in a bouncy ring. Finally, when it seemed as if everyone was watching, their three-round fight took place on December 10 and was edited for the final episode, shown on December 21.

Don’t Stop BelievingMeanwhile across the Bay, something else caught their attention. As Nate and Kai were training for their big boxing match, the San Francisco Giants were making a serious run for the playoffs, and a new project was born. They enlisted the help of a fellow Bay Area native, rapper friend Ashkon, who wrote Giants-themed lyrics to the #1 Journey hit, “Don’t Stop Believing.” They shot

video outside of AT&T Park, just a few hours before Game 1 of the Giants’ first playoff series against the Atlanta Braves. A few days later, just as Game 3 ended (with the Giants now ahead in the series 2 games to 1) they released the video, posting it to YouTube and sending it to some of the bigger web sites that cover the Giants. The entire project was completed in just four days. “The beauty of internet video is that things can happen so fast, and if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can really strike gold,” Kai says. “And we did. The timing couldn’t have been any better. You need to take the video where the people are. And if it ends up on some of the hot fan sites, you get a lot of eyeballs.” Don’t Stop Believing became the most watched YouTube video in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010.

On the VanguardNate and Kai recognize that they are on the vanguard of something big, yet unknown. As Kai says, “I think web video is in a strange place right now, because the tradi-tional gate keepers of entertainment media are tentative to embrace it, because the business model hasn’t been proven yet. It’s sort of a free for all, which gives us a lot of freedom and artistic license.” “At the same time,” Nate continues, “we’re always trying to be very innovative. We don’t want to just make videos and throw them online; we want our videos to have a purpose, to inspire people to do

“I remember a professor telling us ‘if you ignore the Internet it will come back to bite you.’ We know now that the Internet is where the coolest stories are going to be told.” kai hasson ’02

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Fostering CreativityThinking back to their time at Head-Royce, both agree that the School helped grow their creative spirit. “We had a great experience at Head-Royce,” Nate comments. “It’s a place that is welcoming of new ideas. When I was gradu-ating from college, and everyone was ready to put their head down and go on some path, I was trying to think of creative ways that I could build my own career and take non-traditional routes.” According to Kai, “There is a good mixture at Head-Royce between preparing you for the real world and teaching you to think critically, and mixing that with a high value on creativity. Head-Royce teachers always want you to try new things, and think outside the box. For me, that teacher was Jeff Key, who really turned me on to film. He was such a huge influence. He made sure we had the latest technology in the classroom. And he always wanted us to experiment. In my senior year, one of my final films was a weird animation project based on In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak. Mr. Key encour-aged me to go beyond making simple shorts.”

Last summer, just as Rob Lake was starting as the Head of School, Nate attended an alumni reception hosted by the Lakes. “I remember that Rob read his speech off an iPad, so I knew he was down for the cause and was

a forward thinker in terms of technology. We’ve since talked about the possibilities of producing some kind of digital lecture series, or experimenting with a digital classroom, posting lectures online for students around the globe.”

What’s Next?Currently, Nate and Kai’s home base is Los Angeles. “We’re ‘taking meetings,’ as they say. Because there are so many agencies searching for talent, we realize that this is where we need to be,” Kai says. A third partner in Portal A Interactive, Zach Blume, handles all pub-licity and marketing for the projects. “We’re talking with people who are familiar with our work and have expressed interest in exploring future projects with us. It’s kind of funny at these meetings; we’re not exactly the picture of fashion, and in LA, everyone is so about fashion. You can imagine how it looks when these two Northern California kids walk into the fancy LA agen-cies.” In between meetings, they are still working on the occasional client videos. That is, until the next big web video adventure comes along. Whatever that adventure turns out to be, we will be watching, along with their other 20,000+ followers all over the web.

“We’re always trying to be very innovative. We don’t want to just make videos and throw them online; we want our videos to have a purpose, to inspire people to do things. And we want people to use the tools of the internet and the web to really lift up the story and make it unique.” nate houghteling ’02

Nate and Kai met in elementary school, their friendship continued at Head-Royce, and during their senior year in college, though miles apart, they began making web projects together. Nate studied history and literature at Harvard; Kai was a film studies major at Yale. For a while, they each lived a 9-to-5 lifestyle. Nate worked for Newscorp in New York City and Kai worked for Current TV, a public affairs channel in San Francisco.

things. And we want people to use the tools of the internet and the web to really lift up the story and make it unique.” In their search for content, they admit that they are drawn to the kinds of things that might be on the periphery of pop culture; something that has a ‘this could only happen on the web’ quality to it. Kai says, “I remember a professor at Yale, telling us ‘if you ignore the Internet it will come back to bite you.’ We know now that the Internet is where the coolest stories are going to be told.”

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Ty Ahmad‑Taylor ’86 has been a game changer in technology for a long time. For starters, he holds ten patents in the fields of television and web product development. With more than 15 years of experience in designing for broadband, 14 years in interactive television, and 20 years in information design, Ty is a recognized authority in creating deeply engaging experiences for viewers across multiple screens. 

Ty’s latest endeavor is FanFeedr, a web site that allows sports fans to get real-time personalized news about their favorite sports, teams, and players. The site aggregates news, videos, blogs, and tweets so that users can custom-ize what content they see.

Whether your favorite teams are the Boston Red Sox and Celtics, or the Los Angeles Dodgers and Lakers, the FanFeedr site will take your personal profile and pull all the relevant, late-breaking news on these teams and their players. “We know that people have become accustomed to real-time consumption,” Ty says. “There’s a greater push for immediacy than ever before, not just with scores and stats, but with the whisper currency of scandal and trades. Fans want to know what’s happening up to the minute, and at any hour of the day. FanFeedr provides that. And, they’re getting the full story, as opposed to the official feeds from, say, Major League Baseball or the NBA.”

By utilizing the two biggest social media channels, Facebook and Twitter, the site allows the user to con-nect with their friends—and fellow sports nuts—to see what news they’re following. They can feed their own customized content directly to their Facebook and Twitter accounts or to their Google and mobile applications, where they can easily comment on, rate, or share any articles they’ve read. During the NFL playoffs this past winter, site traffic went up fifty percent from December to January. And the company’s total number of Twitter fol-lowers has doubled in the last six months. Today, the site has more than one million users.

Prior to starting FanFeedr in 2008, Ty was the Senior Vice President for Strategy and Product Development at MTV Networks’ Music & Logo Group, where he oversaw the software development and strategy for MTV, VH1, CMT and Logo.

Throughout his career, Ty has worked for large media and tech firms, and he has worked for small start-ups. In 1996, he became the Creative Director of a start-up called the @Home Network, the very first broadband internet company in the world. He oversaw a staff of art directors, technical art directors, freelance designers, and the video production team. The company built the first three broad-band portals in the U.S. Those three clients were none other than Cox, AT&T Broadband, and Comcast.

During summers after college, Ty was doing design jobs when “I talked my way into a job at the New York Times. I had some basic Macintosh skills from editing The Harbinger, the School newspaper, at Head-Royce.” He worked as a graphics editor at the New York Times for five years, where he specialized in infographics, a blend of information design, reporting, database analysis, and cartography. He reported remotely on the Gulf War, and covered the riots in Los Angeles, as well as the stand-off in Waco, Texas, and was in Oklahoma City just hours after the bombing, creating schematics of the federal building and the surrounding area. “This was all before Google maps,” he says.

Even back in 1985, as a senior at Head-Royce, Ty was a mover in technology. As the editor of the student newspaper, he led the charge to switch to Macintosh computers for produc-ing the paper. “For six months we were without a teacher, with Mrs. Dawes out on maternity leave, but we pushed out the paper by ourselves. And in doing so, we got the school on the path to using Macs for desktop publishing.”

Ty is proud of his five years studying Latin at Head-Royce. “Reading The Iliad in the original tongue is still one of the highlights of my life. And I remember Mr. Barankin had

Ty Ahmad-Taylor is founder and CEO of FanFeedr. He graduated Cum Laude from Haverford College with an economics degree and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

Sports Fix

1. Interactive user interface for television,

published May 1, 2003

2. Method and system for providing an electronic

programming guide, published Oct 20, 2005

3. Method and system for providing on-demand

viewing, published Oct 20, 2005

4. Method and system of recommending television

programs, filed in 2005

5. Method of system of distributing media content

and generating playlists, filed in 2005

6. Method and system of providing user interface,

published Oct 12, 2006

7. Recommendations embedded in metadata

for an asset, filed in 2006

8. Tracking usage of a portable media device,

filed in 2006

9. Hardware, case, and packaging specification

for an advanced digital TV set-top box,

filed in 2007

10. Method and system for delivering TV ads to an

internet website for review, provisional in 2007

Ty’s Patents

us stage Dante’s Inferno in the boiler room next to the pool. Things like that are powerful—the opportunity to re-think learning and how we approach it.”

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When David Sternberg, at the age of 22, took a job in event marketing with the Oakland‑Alameda County Coliseum, little could he have imagined that one day he would be running the preeminent Olympic sports channel in the country. Today, David is the CEO of Universal Sports Network, a partnership between NBC Sports and InterMedia Partners that includes the Universal Sports Television Network and the UniversalSports.com web site. David joined the company in April 2010, succeeding the company’s founder, and David now oversees all aspects of the network’s operations, including advertising sales, distribution, programming, production, and marketing.

Prior to Universal Sports, David spent nearly 12 years at FOX Cable Networks in Los Angeles. For four years, he served as Vice President and General Manager for FOX Sports International, a division of networks in Latin American, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Then, in 2002, David was put in charge of a fast growing portfolio of domestic networks at FOX, including Fox Soccer Channel, Fox Deportes (a Spanish language service), and Fuel TV, an extreme sports channel.

“Growing up as a sports fan, I always thought that it might be a fun field to go into someday,” David says. “And right after college, I was fortunate to get my first exposure to the professional sports world working at the Coliseum. It wasn’t glamorous—it was entry level—but you can imagine how excited I was to be at the ballpark every day. And now to be doing this has been a real labor of love because it’s so easy for me to relate to the content.”

Much of David’s work right now is focused on the upcoming Olympics in London in 2012. “We’ll cover all the events that lead up to the games, such as the regional and world championships,” he explains. “We also cover some of the Olympic trials, where the U.S. teams are determined. And then during the games themselves, our network will be doing a lot of on-site news and informational coverage. Even though the games themselves will be broadcast on the NBC network, Universal Sports will have a strong presence in London throughout the 2012 games.”

Like technology, the world of cable television is also a very fast moving business. When asked about how the industry might change in the near future, David responded that “It’s very hard to predict because things are changing so rapidly. But there’s no question that we are no longer in the TV business; we are in the sports content business. We have to make sure that the content we create—whether it’s live sports events or news programs or non-event shows about athletes—are made available to consumers on whatever technological devices are available. And that’s everything from mobile phones to tablets, iPads, and even devices that have yet to be invented. We have to be aware of what all of those developments are and be able to push our content out in all of those places and in a format that makes sense. Nobody has time to watch a two-hour soccer game on a two-inch cell phone screen, but they might want to see a clip of a great goal that lasts 30 seconds. We need to be able to push that out. And maybe for someone who does have an iPad, maybe it is feasible to watch an entire soccer match. It’s all about anticipating where consumer electronics are going, and making sure we’re producing content in the right way, and also that we’re acquiring the necessary rights to do all that.”

In high school at Head-Royce, David played basketball and also was on the swim team. “I was co-captain my senior year and our coach was Barney Howard, who was such a fantastic, energetic coach. We won the league championship in swimming and our medley relay team went to the North Coast Section state championship.” After Head-Royce, David attended Princeton University, where he joined the student newspaper and ultimately, landed the job of sports editor. He graduated in 1990 with a degree in comparative literature. After working for the Oakland Coliseum for a few years, he moved to Los Angeles where, from 1994 to 1996, he attended business school at UCLA. While he was at UCLA, he had an internship with FOX, on the movie side of their business, but got to know the people at FOX Sports very well. “After business school, I went into management consulting,” he says. “Although they never bought any consulting services from my company, FOX Sports ended up hiring me.”

The Sporting Life

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We asked David how Head-Royce may have impacted his professional path. “There are a few things that really stand out in my mind that I’m sure are common for everyone who went there—above all, having the ability to think critically and write proficiently. This was a tremendous advantage going to college and beyond. Those are skills that nobody teaches better than Head-Royce. It was a lot of work at the time, but it was fantastic preparation for later. I really felt that I had a leg up on my classmates in college.”

David says that Head-Royce also awakened in him an interest to study foreign languages. “Thanks to Doctor (Albert) Suarez, I really found a calling to study languages. I took all of the AP classes and learned so much about Spanish literature. I studied more languages in college. And it has carried over into my professional life and was a big factor for me getting into the international side of this business. It was a huge benefit to conduct business in Latin America for four years speaking fluent Spanish.”

For younger people who are pursuing careers in the media today, David believes that there are more opportunities now than there have even been. “That’s because the barriers for entry into this industry have completely fallen away. Anybody with an idea and a computer can basically become part of the media, which is a phenomenal develop-ment. Thinking back to when I was trying to break into this business, it was very much a guild type mentality, with a few big players in each category: you had television, radio, and print. And that was it. That’s not the case anymore. Now there is so much more opportunity, especially in digital media.”

David is pleased to report that he is still in touch with many of his friends and classmates from his Head-Royce days. “There were only about 60 of us in our class, and we were a close-knit group. It’s always nice to see everyone at the reunions, and I’m looking forward to our big 25th reunion this spring!”

“Above all, having the ability to think critically and write proficiently—this was a tremendous advantage going to college and beyond. Those are skills that nobody teaches better than Head-Royce.”david sternberg ’86

David with his family: wife Julie and children Sarah, Brian, and Nicole.

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Q. Tell us about your position at Google.I am a Contracts Manager on the legal team at Google. I negotiate licensing agreements with map data and other content providers for the data that goes into various Google products, including Google Maps and Google Earth. I’ve been working out of our U.S. headquarters for four years but I have just relocated permanently to our London office, where I recently spent six months on a temporary assignment.

At the time of my hire, I’d read somewhere that Google receives over 13,000 applications per month (I understand that number is much higher now), so I was surprised that I was selected for an interview after randomly applying online. I was living in Paris at the time so my first few rounds of interviews were by phone. It wasn’t until I moved back to the states and actually started working here that I realized what an amazing opportunity a career at Google affords you.

Q. What do you feel has been the biggest accomplishment of your career?At Google, I’ve been able to design the kind of job that is perfect for me and I’m blessed to be able to have done that even before I’ve turned 30.

Q. What are the skills and attributes that you think allowed you to accomplish all that you have accomplished?

That old adage: “leave well enough alone” could not be less true for my life. I’ve learned never to leave well enough alone—that things can always be better. I know that only I have the power to change my life and I have not been shy about insisting on pursuing that which I feel is best for me, even if it means creating a path that has not been followed by others before.

Q. What do you see changing in your industry in the next 10–15 years?I straddle two worlds: the more traditional legal industry and the cutting edge technology field. On the legal side, Google is involved in areas of law that have not really been tested in this country in the past, so I am actually able to see the law change as technology changes. On the technology side, our industry is ever-changing. The many fast-growing companies in Silicon Valley show us that the manner in which we all interact with each other and with computers and internet technology will continue to look vastly different over time. Fifteen years ago no one could have told me that I would be able to look up a photo of my house on a map online and today Google Street View lets me do just that. The possibilities for the next 15 years are endless.

Q. Who was your favorite teacher at HRS and why?That’s a hard question! I have to say, my favorite HRS teacher wasn’t actually a teacher. She was our former

college counselor, Sharon Cravanas. Her door was always open. For students of color, Head-Royce was sometimes a challenging environment; Ms. Cravanas recognized that and served as a surrogate mom to all of us during school hours. She really did her best to help us navigate a sometimes unfamiliar world with dignity and humor. Most of my teachers were wonder-ful. Madame Shirvani cultivated my love for the French language (I later minored in it in college) and turned me into a lifelong Francophile (I’ve lived in France twice so far). I was in Mr. Reinke’s first history class, and he was able to frame historical discussions about sensitive topics such as race relations and slavery in a sensitive and thoughtful way, which I have always appreciated. And Mr. Mullen, in his Ethics and Philosophy and Comparative Religions classes, challenged me to ques-tion my own beliefs and taught me how to challenge others’ beliefs in a critical yet respectful way.

Q. What is the one piece of advice you’d give to young people entering your field?To any young people who are looking to become involved in a field that allows them to express their creativity, I would say to keep your eyes open. I’ve found that there are so many ways to be creative in any field. Internet technology is one of the most exciting fields of work today. Many of the most popular Google products were created by engineers who had cool ideas for what might be a fun new Google product, and they tinkered with them during their 20% time (Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their work day work-ing on anything that interests them. I spend my 20% time working with certain Google Employee Resource Groups on initiatives such as mentoring, recruiting, and employee retention). In my role on the legal team, I draft and negotiate various licensing agreements and I find the drafting aspect to be a fulfilling way to express my creative side. In short, my advice is to be open. You never know where you will find the most fulfillment in your life.

Keeping Your Eyes Open q & a with corinne dixon ’99

Sisters Corinne ’99 and Nicole Dixon ’98, and Tsion Ketema ’98 have been lifelong friends. This year, the three alumnae are re-connecting with Head-Royce. In January, they were on campus visiting new Head of School Rob Lake and meeting with student members of the Black Student Union. We recently talked with the three graduates about their professional careers, their time at Head-Royce, and their plans for Kaleidoscope, an affinity group for HRS alumni of color.

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Q. Overall, how did Head-Royce help prepare you for college and your professional life?Head-Royce was the best possible prepara-tion for every subsequent part of my life. On a personal level, it is such a small environment that it is impossible to hide in the background. I was really forced to overcome my shyness and learn to speak up for myself. My involvement with the student association groups provided a foundation for my eternal passion to explore race relations and recruiting and retention of people of color in schools and the workplace. This is work that I continue to do at Google to this day. And on an academic level, Head-Royce was incredibly challenging. When I went to col-lege, I sailed through my English classes. And so many of my high school classes were taught in the Socratic method that I already knew how to present my ideas in a clear and articulate way. Head-Royce essentially treats its students as young adults so I did not have to learn to behave like an adult when I started working. I was used to working alongside people in high positions so I had no intimidation about asserting my ideas at work. I may not have appreciated it enough while I attended, but I believe Head-Royce is the kind of place that you instantly appreciate as soon as you leave. I could not have had a better education, and I thank my mother every day for enrolling me.

q & a with nicole dixon ’98

Q. Can you tell me about your position as a supervising teacher at Nia House? I am Head Teacher at Nia House Learning Center, a Montessori School in Berkeley, a 35-year-old non-profit serving a diverse community of families and providing scholarships to families who would ordinarily not have access to Montessori education. Well into my sixth year, I am still one of the newer additions to the school. We are proud to have teachers with over 20 years of experience at Nia House. I am in my second year as head teacher, and am responsible for overseeing the implementation of the curriculum, the progress of children, communications with par-ents, and monitoring staff. In addition, I am the staff representative on the Board of Directors.

I am also a practicing visual artist, and I facilitate the monthly Family Day art workshops at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD) in San Francisco. I am participating in the ProArts East Bay Open Studios in June, and I am in an exhibition in Vallejo, CA later this month.

Q. Can you talk about the path that brought you to teaching and Nia House? Did you pursue education or a teaching credential in college?I was an artist while at Head-Royce and was a Studio Art major and Women’s Studies minor at Spelman College (2002) in Atlanta. But coming from a big family, I was also always involved in childcare and teaching on some level since I was a young girl. Even my Head-Royce senior project was interning at the preschool I attended as a child. During college, I studied abroad for over a year in Botswana and Nepal, and I was even a guest art teacher at a desert school in the Kalahari. When I moved back to California after getting married in 2004, my first instinct was to apply

for teaching positions, and I was hired as an assistant teacher at Nia House. I was also able to lead the art curriculum for the children. They paid for my educa-tion and after two years of rigorous work, I received my Montessori Teaching Credential for Preschool. So, I am a Montessori teacher by day, and an artist by night.

Q. What was your favorite non-academic activity at HRS?I loved art with Jill Erickson, and free periods with friends.

Q. What is one piece of advice you would give to young people entering your field?Be prepared to: have tiny people make you confront your most deeply hidden shortcomings on a daily basis, work harder than you ever have to grow toward your highest self, and burst at the seams with laughter, pride, awe, and gratitude as earth’s most precious be-ings inspire you, test you, and snuggle you all day long.

Q. What is one piece of advice that YOU received that you are grateful for?“This too shall pass.” All adolescent dramas are tem-porary. We grow up, wounds heal, and life goes on.

Q. Overall, how did Head-Royce help prepare you for your professional life?Not only did HRS prepare me for my current pro-fession, but it gave me the skills to excel in any profession I choose—critical thinking, problem- solving, perseverance, and resilience.

Q. Overall, how did Head-Royce help prepare you for your college and graduate studies?HRS prepared me for college so thoroughly that both my sister and I received full-ride scholarships to our #1 choice universities, and graduated with honors. I thank HRS, because I’ve never had to pay off student loans.

Teacher by Day, Artist by Night

Nicole ’98 and Corinne Dixon ’99

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Q. Please tell us about your position at Beth Israel Hospital.I am currently a fourth year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, pursuing a residency in obstetrics and gynecology.

Q. What do you feel has been the biggest accomplishment of your career? Still to come!

Q. What are the skills and attributes that you think allowed you to be where you are today?Dedication. And a keen knack for sleep deprivation!

Q. If you could have changed one thing about your career path, what would it have been? I would have appreciated the opportunity to learn simply for the sake of learning during my college years. Often you get caught up in achieving stellar grades and building your resume, but it’s amazing to be able to expand your knowledge in an environment that allows for feedback and interaction in a community of great minds. After college, I actually went back and re-read a lot of the texts I had sped through in haste, in order to really reflect on the material I was reading.

Q. Who was your favorite teacher at HRS and why? I don’t think I could name just one. I’ve never felt as close to my teachers as I did at Head-Royce. The envi-ronment made you feel as if your teachers were more than advisors and mentors, they were really family and friends. Of course Mama Cravanas will always have a special place in my heart… many Head-Royce students called her house their second home.

Q. What was your favorite non-academic activity at HRS? I loved Kaleidoscope, the multicultural club headed by Dr. Enelow (see sidebar on next page). We had many successful potlucks and events highlighting diversity on campus. I am most proud of the video project we developed in conjunction with two artists-in-residence, Kwame Anku and Juanita Brown, engaging the Head-Royce community in a discussion about issues of diversity on campus and in our community.

Q. Overall, how did Head-Royce help prepare you for your professional life? In college I learned how to perform well in my field and make important connections, but it was at Head-Royce that I learned how to think critically about my educa-tion and the world around me. The small classrooms and one-on-one interaction with teachers encouraged you to speak up, while the varying perspectives of your peers challenged you to assess and defend your opinions. Dr. Enelow, famous for his use of the Socratic method, demanded nothing less than you rationalize an opinion for yourself.

Q. Overall, how did Head-Royce help prepare you for your college and graduate studies?I went to Columbia, which still has a mandatory core curriculum in philosophy, European literature, and art history. In a way, it felt as if I was repeating my junior year at Head-Royce during my first year of college by studying the Bible, the Koran, The Aeneid, Rembrandt, and Michelangelo all over again. Needless to say, my first few college semesters were a breeze.

Q. At what point did you know you wanted to be a doctor?I’ve always known I wanted to be a doctor, though I initially thought I wanted to be a cardiologist.

I remember being in the 3rd grade and giving a presen-tation on the heart to my classmates with full diagrams and anatomy props… you can imagine the clueless blank stares I received. During college, I interned with Dr. Oz at Columbia’s Integrative Medicine Program which sparked my interest in incorporating holistic and integrative healing with allopathic medicine. Since then, I’ve done an herbal apprenticeship, studied qi gong, and taken a course in ethnobotany to further enhance my skills as a holistically oriented practitioner.

Q. Why did you choose this particular area of focus?I was drawn to ob/gyn because it’s such a dynamic field. From delivering babies and performing surgery to women’s health maintenance, there are so many unique components to this career that there is never a dull moment. Also, my family is from Ethiopia, and it was important that I choose a specialty that could be applied in a developing country. Maternal and women’s health, tragically, are still in jeopardy in Ethiopia. My goal is to develop community clinics in rural areas and train fu-ture health care providers to deliver desperately needed care to women living in the countryside.

Q. What is the one piece of advice you’d give to young people entering your field?Understand that you will sacrifice a lot for this career, but there is nothing more rewarding.

Q. What’s next on the horizon for you?I’m beginning my residency in obstetrics and gynecol-ogy this summer at Beth-Israel Medical Center in New York. I’m excited to officially tell my parents I have a job!

Family Practice q & a with tsion ketema ’98

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The Return of KaleidoscopeHRS Grads Establish Alumni of Color Affinity Group

Today, Corinne, Nicole, and Tsion are creating an affinity group for alumni of color called Kaleidoscope, in honor of the original student group from the 1990s.

“After a series of discussions with both HRS faculty and HRS alums of color, we began to realize there was a need for outreach to students of color because of the unique challenges of being a minority student on campus,” says Corinne. “We think it will be great to organize this proj-ect that will allow for both outreach to current students as well as renew connec-tions between alumni of color and the HRS community. Many of us have not even been back to the campus since graduating.”

“Our goal is to build new relationships among our alumni of color and reconnect with them as well,” says Nicole. “We will create an online site that will allow us to network with each other, either through mentor-ing opportunities, discussion groups, social activities, or posting job information.” Corinne adds that, “Like the existing HRS Diversity Council, we envision Kaleidoscope to serve as an umbrella organization for all alumni of color.”

The organizers are in the process of collecting email addresses and inviting all alumni of color to become friends of the Facebook group “Kaleidoscope Head-Royce Alumni of Color Organization.” The group will be used as a way to exchange information, engage in discussions, post photos and links, and announce events. A LinkedIn sub-group for Kaleidoscope will soon be active as part of the existing HRS Alumni LinkedIn professional networking group.

In April, Kaleidoscope will host the first in a series of events for alumni of color. “We hope to reunite alumni of color from across the Bay Area, and recruit more members to engage with current students of color,” says Nicole Dixon. Other plans include a viewing in May of a diversity film project that was created at HRS in 1998 with the guidance of two artists-in-residence. Current students will then have the opportunity to discuss their experiences with alumni and begin building a network of support.

To learn more about the group, to RSVP for events, or to become a member of the group, contact Nicole Dixon at

While they were students at Head-Royce in the 1990s, sisters Corinne ’99 and Nicole Dixon ’98 and best friend Tsion Ketema ’98 were members of Kaleidoscope, a student multicultural club that served as a space for cultural exchange for students of color at Head-Royce. Kaleidoscope sponsored several successful events and potlucks highlighting diversity on campus. During their time with Kaleidoscope, the three students also founded the Black Student Union which, to this day, is still active in the Head-Royce Upper School.

Tsion Ketema ’98, Nicole Dixon ’98, and Corinne Dixon ’99.

conjurewoman7@gmail.com, or search for “Kaleidoscope Head-Royce Alumni of Color Organization” on Facebook. If you can help gather the contact information for alumni of color from any decade, please leave your information with Nicole Dixon.

The Head-Royce Alumni Council, Head of School Rob Lake, and Diversity Director Barbara Gee are excited about this new opportunity for re-connecting with alumni.

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Q: Tell us about your position at Lawrence Berkeley Labs.I am a staff scientist, and more important, I am a principal investigator, which means I determine my own research directions by writing my own grants, and I have control of my own budget. That is good and bad, of course, but I need the control to stay creative. My main expertise is in measuring x-ray absorption spectra of materials. From these spectra, I can actually determine the local atomic arrangement around an atomic species of my choice. Basically, we take x-rays from a big x-ray gun, like the synchrotron at Stanford, and we tune them so that we knock electrons out of a particular energy state in a par-ticular atomic species. It is a bit like having an electron gun inside your material. I work in an actinide chemistry group, which means we specialize in materials and com-pounds that contain elements from the bottom row of the periodic table, the one that is separated off from the rest of the table, together with the lanthanides (or rare-earths). I study metals and metals within organic molecules. The research I do is toward gaining fundamental knowledge. I often get the question: “What can you do with it?” and

the answer to that might be years down the road, but it is possible to imagine unusual electronic devices being made possible from this research.

Q: What are the skills and attributes that you think allowed you to accomplish all that you have accomplished in your career?I guess the main attribute is that I don’t like looking at things in the same way that they have been looked at before. I also really prefer a more general, less specific way of thinking. Those two attributes together force me to pick the scientific problems that I focus on carefully, but this also means that I have to be creative at what I’m doing or I get bored. I think all scientists strive to understand what they are doing, but I’m a little different because I feel the need to look at phenomena in brand new ways. There are a lot of scientists who, for whatever reason, have a very similar set of tools they apply to problems. I also have a set of tools, but they are different than the ones most folks use. Sticking to that mindset means I often can find explanations that have not been considered before, but it also means that I have a hard time communicating them to my colleagues.

Q: What do you see happening in your industry in the next 10–15 years?I don’t like to think of fundamental scientific research as an “industry.” Unfortunately, this is the direction we’ve been heading for a long time, and I don’t think there is any turning back. Universities have become so cash-strapped that encouraging fundamental scientific research for its own sake has become too much of a luxury. That is really too bad because it bleeds down into the education these universities can offer.

That said, I think we are entering a second Golden Age of the Inventor. Our world’s thirst for energy is out-stripping our ability to provide it and to clean up the mess. Recognition of these facts mean there is real opportunity to make a difference in how we produce energy. In the 1940s and 50s, a lot of scientists felt like they had the power to save the world, either by providing easy energy through nuclear power or through nuclear weapons-based deterrence. I think that is happening again with energy, be it old-school nuclear or all the new exciting technologies like hydrogen fuel cells and solar power. The really cool thing is that now we have a recognized need to diversify our portfolio and really research very many possibilities, which open the door toward smaller, entrepreneurial-style scientific endeav-ors. Although I hope to make contributions myself, just watching this unfold over the next 10-15 years will make terrific theater!

Q: Who was your favorite teacher at Head-Royce and why?There were many. The first one who always pops into my mind is Glenn Kennedy. He taught 7th grade English and 8th grade Medieval and English history. The main thing he did for me was to let me be myself. I was new to the school (there were no boys in 6th grade back then) and I came from a small grade school. The Head-Royce 7th grade class had about 90 kids, which was 10 times

q & a with corwin booth ’84

Corwin Booth ’84 has been a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for more than ten years. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996, with a thesis on local structural distortions and disorder in advanced perovskite materials. He also earned a B.Sc. in physics and a minor in art history from the University of California, San Diego. Corwin is a member of the American Physical Society, the International XAFS Society, and the Materials Research Society. In 2000, he was honored with the International Union of Crystallography Young Scientist award.

The Second Golden Age of the Inventor

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what I was used to. I was basically scared. This might sound silly, but Mr. Kennedy let me have a box in the class I could hide in. This box was the best part of that year for me. (OK, now I’ll get solicitations for psycho-analysis!) And his class was the first history class that really made the subject interesting for me. He used to love to tell us juicy tales that made history real to an adolescent boy!

I also want to give a special mention to Susan Baskin. When I first got to HRS, I was placed in pre-algebra, which was the “accelerated path.” I was good at math,

but was not excelling in that class, and they thought I should go to the other track, which was Ms. Baskin’s class. She managed to get my confidence back after some time. I still use the CRC “Standard Mathematical Tables” I got from that class. Just the other day, I looked for it on my desk, and there it was, lying open to the “Derivatives” section. Anyway, being a physicist, I had to take a lot of math in college and I did just fine in the end. As luck would have it, I was on a bicycle tour with my wife last summer and Mrs. Baskin was on the same trip! We had a great time talking about old times,

including Mr. Kennedy. She told me that his sister had written an autobiography about their lives. I should find it and read it sometime, but I haven’t yet.

Q: What is the one piece of advice you’d give to young people entering your field?Keep your mind open! By that, I mean do not start think-ing you are going to do solar cell research and then only care about that, and do not ignore history and language and writing, because it all matters if you are going to be a good scientist. I do not know any successful scientists who did not switch fields, or do not know how to write, or do not know quite a bit about the past. Do it all.

Q: Overall, how did Head-Royce help prepare you for your professional life?I definitely learned how to study. Writing, in particular, was hard for me to do well, and I worked pretty hard at it just to survive. When I got to college, I was well ahead of the game there. I am not a fast writer, but you cannot be any good as a scientist without good writing skills. The ability to form a logical argument in a manuscript is probably the most important aspect of writing in my field. Without the logical argument and matching construction, you will never convince anybody of anything.

Q. Any projects on the horizon for you?Always! That is part of the joy of being a scientist!

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Q: Tell us how you ended up at Cambridge after your time at Yale?As I began my senior year of college, I considered sever-al possible post-graduate plans, ranging from the Peace Corps to law school. I wanted to pursue a career that would allow me to integrate both the life of the mind and the life of civic engagement. Specifically, I wanted to do three things: to continue to conduct historical research, a passion I gained during my undergradu-ate studies; to teach, as both my parents were teachers when they were in Vietnam and I hoped to continue this family tradition; and to engage in advocacy work. I realized that I couldn’t do all of this immediately at once, and further, that at this moment in my life I’d really love an opportunity to travel and to immerse myself in a

different culture. But I also prefer to travel with a sense of purpose; I thought it’d be great to travel while pursu-ing other interests that could help further my broader goals. Studying history is one such interest. After speak-ing with one of my professors at Yale who had taught at Cambridge for several decades, I realized that pursuing graduate study at Cambridge would be an amazing opportunity. The history faculty at Cambridge is quite large; professors research and teach a wide range of his-torical topics across time and place. Further, Cambridge itself is such a unique place with a rich history.

The three years I spent at Cambridge was an incredibly challenging and rewarding experience, both academi-cally and personally. I will cherish it always.

Q: What are the skills and attributes that allowed you to accomplish what you have thus far?First and perhaps most important, I was very fortunate to have met many extremely bright and kind individuals who provided me with thoughtful and generous advice to help me navigate through my studies…and through life in general!

I would say a desire for learning has been an important part. I’m interested in the answers that researchers seek to provide, but I’m equally, if not more, interested in the questions that scholars ask. And a liberal arts education has trained me to ask different types of questions, and to continue asking further questions, in order to gain a richer understanding of the complexity of historical and contemporary events.

q & a with quyen vo ’03

Quyen Vo graduated from Head-Royce in 2003 and has since traveled far and wide to pursue his academic studies. When he was just seven years old, Quyen’s family left Vietnam and moved to the U.S. In seventh grade, he enrolled in the Heads Up program, an academic enrichment program for underserved students in Oakland public schools. After thriving in the Heads Up program, Quyen began at Head-Royce as a freshman. In his senior year, he was editor of the yearbook, and then went on to study at Yale, where he earned his undergraduate degree in history, with a focus on medieval religious history. Upon graduation, he left for England to pursue a doctorate in history at Cambridge; he successfully defended his disser-tation in January. Today, Quyen is back home in the Bay Area and in his second term of study at UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law. We spoke with Quyen recently as he reflected on his journey.

A Life of Learning

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Q: You first came to Head-Royce as a student in the Heads Up program. What did Heads Up mean to you?Heads Up means much more than I can adequately ex-press. It means so much because it gave me the chance to develop my academic interests and helped open the door to many other great opportunities, both educa-tional and professional. Also, it allowed me to meet and interact with so many wonderful teachers and friends. In short, it was a critical moment for me. I’ll always be grateful for Heads Up.

Q: What are some words of wisdom you might share with our current Heads Up students?Think long-term. By this, I am not suggesting mapping out details of your academic or professional careers; your interests will most likely change and the paths that you take with regard to your studies and employment will certainly change as well. By thinking long-term, I mean try to maintain a broad perspective and keep in

mind what really matters to you in the grand scheme of things. For instance, Heads Up is an amazing program, and you should make the most of this opportunity. But Heads Up lasts only a few years, and you will move on to another chapter in your studies and in your life. Yet, the friendships that you are developing with your classmates and teachers will last long after you graduate from Heads Up. This will be one of the highlights of your time in Heads Up: your relationships. Immerse your-self in the wide range of academic and extra-curricular activities offered to you right now, but at the same time make an intentional effort to get to know your friends and teachers better and to deepen these relationships. I suspect you’ll appreciate and cherish them for many, many years.

Q: You’re now in your second semester at UC Berkeley Boalt School of Law. Is there a specific focus you will pursue? Could you say more about how you might combine your gradu-ate work and dissertation with your legal work?

Ideally, I’d love to pursue a career that will enable me to continue research (historical records mainly, but will likely draw on law and jurisprudence sources as well); to teach; and to engage in advocacy work, both at home and abroad. I imagine it would be very interesting and rewarding to pursue a career that involves international human rights work of some kind.

As an undergraduate, I focused on medieval religious history. But for graduate school, I sought to expand the scope of my research to examine contemporary, pressing issues and hoped to connect this to my study of law. My areas of research are modern European history with a specialty in British social and cultural history. My dissertation explores how the British

“national interests” were defined (and redefined) with respect to “refugees” over the course of the great

“refugee” crises of the twentieth century.

The analysis provides a richer understanding of how the British state interpreted and implemented various international conventions related to refugee asylum, and further, offers a lens onto the changing ideologi-cal framework of relief in the state’s mixed economy of welfare. I analyze a broad spectrum of sources, such as records of the government, papers of key public figures, documents of voluntary organizations, newspapers, and other mediators of public opinion. My work has taken me to some interesting places—I’ve done some of my research in Geneva (at the archives of the League of Nations and United Nations) and attended conferences in Ghent and Vienna. I’m currently revising my disserta-tion and hope to develop it into a manuscript someday.

Q: Overall, how did Head-Royce help prepare you for college and your graduate studies?Simply put, Head-Royce provided the foundation for my academic and professional pursuits. I would not be where I am today without the guidance and support from my Head-Royce teachers and friends.

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Mari Lyons has been painting for more than sixty years and she still works passionately at her craft. “I’m painting more now than I did in the past— I think because I have fewer obligations, and of course our children are all grown up.” Whether at home in her New York City studio or in her studio upstate in Woodstock, Mari regularly paints four or five hours every day.

At the young age of 13, Mari’s father was taking her to Saturday drawing classes at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where she drew from the model for hours at a stretch. At 15, Lyons took a summer painting class at Mills College taught by the German Expressionist Max Beckmann and he had a profound lifelong influence on her.

When she attended Anna Head School for Girls in the late 1940s and early 1950s, art was an option, but not required. “Because of my passion, they allowed me to use an art studio for the few years I boarded.” She also recalls the encouragement of Ms. Katherine Backus, “somebody who believed in art as a way of thinking, as I do.”

A fond memory from her days at Head’s was creating the literary magazine Wanton Wiles with friend and classmate Phoebe Cramer. “Phoebe and I did almost all of the writing together, and I illustrated every copy. The content was vaguely literary and vaguely historical.” Phoebe later went on to teach at Williams College.

After graduation, Mari attended Bard College, 90 miles north of New York, where she studied with Stefan Hirsch, a German emigre who once created a controversial WPA mural depicting an allegorical figure of “Justice” as being mixed race. She also spent six months in Paris where she studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and also at the Atelier 17 of famed painter/printer Stanley William Hayter. She earned an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of art in 1958.

Mari says that she draws inspiration from different aspects of art history, and mainly from Cezanne. The oldest of Mari’s four children, Paul, is named after the French artist.

“Like most painters,” she says, “I am always in a dialogue with the history of art. That dialogue permeates the studio of virtually every serious artist.” She also cites as influ-ences Rembrandt, John Marin, Piero della Francesca, and the economy of Chinese art. The art critic Lance Esplund says “Almost everything in Ms. Lyons’s paintings is animated, excited, and alive,” and Jed Perl, in The New Republic, has called her “the complete painter, the master of every genre.”

Over the past twenty-five years, Mari has had more than three dozen exhibitions and has given talks at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Rider University, and else-where. Her work is in more than 120 private and corporate collections worldwide and in the Rider University Museum and the Museum of the City of New York. Her most recent series is “Sunsets/Hillsides.”

Art as a Way of Thinkingmari lyons ’53

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julia harte ’05

Julia Harte is living in Istanbul where she is pursuing a career as a freelance international journalist. After attending Wellesley for two years, Julia transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in history. Her senior thesis was on the history of world cartography in East Asia. She worked as a journalist for one year after college before moving abroad. “I’ve been writing about Turkey’s climate and energy policy for an American news wire since arriving here seven months ago,” she reports. “However, now that I’m more familiar with the country and the language, I hope to write more about politics as well as ethnic, reli-gious, and cultural issues, all of which frequently overlap here.”

Julia misses Head-Royce and many of her teachers. “I’m grateful for those who most engaged and challenged me—Mr. Reinke, Dr. Enelow, Mr. Scott, Ms. Feidelman, and Mr. Spear. They gave me the desire to study history, literature, and writing beyond the amount required to pass their classes: to grapple with academic questions independent of my coursework. They provoked me to question my nascent ideological and intel-lectual leanings, and to develop more coherent intellectual convictions and sharper rhetorical skills.” She says the HRS school newspaper The Sibylline Leaves was a fantastic introduction to journalism, largely because of the inimitable Andy Spear.

“Looking back, I’m amazed at how sophisticated The Leaves is for a high school paper.”

Asked about giving some advice to younger alums entering the field of journalism, she says, “It’s simple, but the best way to prepare for a difficult task is to understand it as thoroughly as possible beforehand. Make yourself an expert on every source you interview, every article you write, every publication you apply to write for. Also, only follow the herd when there’s a very good reason for it.”

Currently, Julia is working on a story about a geothermal exploration deal in western Turkey that was recently awarded to an Italian renewable energy company, the biggest foreign company that’s ever shown interest in Turkey’s geothermal resources. In the coming months, she will be examining new developments within the Greek community in Istanbul, reporting on the work of local female rights activists, and writing some general travel pieces about other parts of Turkey.

All the best, Julia, from your friends at Head-Royce!

AlumniAbroad

Julia in Cappadocia, Turkey

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Alumni Around the United States A visuAl guide to where they Are now

California

2,110

New Hampshire

Maine

New York

Vermont

10

98

60

17

36

13521

212

3

9

4

15

7

11

1125

12

3

209

37

1

7

8

58

76

2

1

25

3

3

13

17

171

3

26

60

11

18

4

11

Rhode Island

11Massachusetts

New Jersey

Maryland

Pennsylvania

OhioIndianaIllinois

VirginiaKentucky

Tennessee

Michigan

Wisconsin

Minnesota

Missouri

ArkansasOklahoma

New MexicoArizona

2

Alaska

Hawaii

Kansas

ColoradoUtah

Nevada

Wyoming

Montana

Idaho

Oregon

Washington

Nebraska

South Dakota

Texas

Iowa

West Virginia

North Carolina

GeorgiaAlabamaMississippi

South Carolina

Florida

District of Columbia

Connecticut

Louisiana

North Dakota

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Alumni Around the GlobeA visuAl guide to where they Are now

United States

2,886

Canada

Mexico

Honduras

Costa Rica

Brazil

Australia

JapanChina

Austria

Turkey

Serbia

Greece

Italy

Netherlands

England

Spain

France

Portugal

BelgiumSwitzerland

Thailand

Korea

Argentina

5

2

1

2

1

3

22

2

1

1

1

2

4

9

22

5

1

4

1

1

1

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Q. When you came to Head-Royce as a student, how was the transition?Linda: “The fact that I had an older brother here (Robert Knop ’86) helped my transition. I know that my parents popped a bottle of champagne at the end of my fourth grade year because the 4th grade program was so dif-ficult! The academic transition was hard. I had Judy Kennedy and I just loved her.

Betsy: “When I came here, it was aca-demically scary the first month, but I then realized how bored I had been in public school. I was one of only two new girls in fifth grade. And at that time, we still had to wear uniforms

in Lower School and our entire class was all girls. I was adopted like a new puppy and I loved that! Most of the girls had been together since first grade and they loved having someone new to play with. They took me all around school: ‘This is where we hang out at recess. This is where we have lunch.’ It was fun to be accepted that way.”

Mark: “I actually had mixed feelings about coming to Head-Royce, coming from public school and because I had heard some stereotypes about it being elitist, a country club kind of place; but that was not at all the case. There was no hint of that whatsoever. Everyone

was so friendly and open. I came in 7th grade, and aca-demically at first, it was a bit of jump. Although I loved the smaller classes right away. I had to make some ad-justments in math and science, those classes were hard for me. But everyone was so welcoming and supportive and vibrant.”

Q. What were you like as students?Brendan: “I’ll refer you to my senior page. It’s funny how everything we wrote in our yearbooks was in code. Or words that we thought were in code. Some of my students and kids I now coach have thrust a copy of the

yearbook in front of me and said, ‘Coach Blakeley: What is this?! What does this mean?’”

racheL: “As a younger kid, I started out as a leader and a perfectionist. By high school, I wasn’t so much a leader, but I was an athlete. The switch happened around 11th grade. By then, I tanked academically. I was just done. I think this helps me to be a better counselor today. But of course I pulled it together and got into a good college. I look back and I’m so grateful that I was a lifer; some of my best friends are from here. I have a lot of fond memo-ries from that time.”

kristin: “I was awkward and quiet and shy, yet I had my hands in everything: debate, drama, sports. Coming

This spring, Head of School Rob Lake sat down for a conversation with the eight Head-Royce alumni who have returned to campus to work for their alma mater. In addition to their expertise in their chosen professions, the alums bring years of unique experience having both attended and worked at HRS. The alumni are listed with their positions at the school as well as the number of years they attended as students and the years they have served the school as employees: Deirdre Williams ’80 (accountant: student 10 years + employee 22 years), Betsy Ringrose ’85 (Associate Director of Development & Director of Alumni Relations: 8 + 9), Kristin Clark Dwelley ’88 (Upper School science teacher: 6 + 12), Linda Knop Hoopes ’88 (Middle School teacher and 6th Grade Dean: 9 + 11), Brendan Blakeley ’88 (Director of Athletics: 6 + 5), Rachel Kirshman Concannon ’96 (MS and US Counselor: 13 + 5), Mark Schneider ’00 (Upper School history and English teacher: 6 + 6), and Melissa Gale ’01 (Lower School Intern: 6 + 2).

Coming Home

from the Oakland public schools, to come here and all of sudden have this incredibly rich offering. I wanted to do everything. And you have these great teachers who were encouraging you to do so many things. There is still that aspect in me. It’s hard to say ‘no’ to things. Now, I try to be aware of that when I’m talking with students. When I’m really excited about something, I want to encourage them to do things, but I’m aware about not over-sched-uling them: ‘Hey, there is this really great thing, you should do this, but it’s okay if you don’t do it, because there are so many other great things to do.’”

Mark: “I was very happy and felt very alive here. This place did wonders for my self confidence. The support from teachers and classmates helped me to come alive and pursue my differ-ent interests. I remember being really

busy, doing a lot of work, doing a lot of extra-curriculars. I was on the student council and I played a lot of sports. And I remember having just great friends and being a very enthusiastic member of the school community.”

deirdre: “I was very athletic and very involved in student council from Lower School until high school. I was very outspoken. If there was something I didn’t like, I wasn’t afraid to say it. It wasn’t until I left and was in col-lege that I really appreciated the education I had been granted and it made me want to come back. I felt like it

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She mentioned an open sixth grade position. I thought ‘Hmm… what would it be like to come back here to teach? What do I need to do to make it a reality?’ It all hap-pened so quickly. Two weeks after the reunion, I was moving back to California to teach at Head-Royce. It all fit together in a weird and wonderful way.”

Mark: “I thought that teaching would be a more fulfilling and important career than what I was doing. And I had such esteem for Head-Royce. Once I was here, it took me about a half a year before I felt comfortable speaking at a faculty meeting; it felt like I was at the bottom of the pole, as if I was a freshman all over again. I was shocked that I was able to teach here full-time so soon after graduating. It was very fortuitous and I’m very lucky.”

MeLissa: “It was teachers who brought me back to Head-Royce. I attended the auction a few years ago, and was also helping out as a member of the Alumni Council. I was talking with Nancy Feidelman and some others and was telling them I was applying at other schools to be a teacher. They said: ‘What? What are you doing? I’m going to put in a word, and if we don’t see your resume, we’re going to come find you.’ So I had an interview, and it just felt right.”

deirdre: “I started as a temp. I remember getting a call that Head-Royce was looking for a bookkeeper. I chuckled and thought: ‘that would be pretty interesting.’ So I temped for a year and at some point, I had a

horrible tooth ache. I told the Business Manager at the time, Mike Conheim, ‘You need to hire me because I need to go to the dentist.’ And he did. Once I got here, I realized it was like coming home. There were five of my former teachers around, so I went through that same funny thing about calling them by their first name. That wore off. Obviously it’s a great place to be because I’m still here.”

racheL: “I went to University of Michigan, a very big school, thinking I wanted anonymity and wanted to be in a huge 300-person lecture, but once I got there and tried that, it was awful. I had become so used to the

personal attention and small classes. You realize that those small classes and the relationships you build with your professors make such a difference in how you do as a student. So then I sought out every small class Michigan offered.”

Brendan: “After my freshman year at Head-Royce, I was encouraged by two teachers, Wendy Harris and Doctor Suarez, to go to Mexico for a Spanish immersion program. It was the first time I had ever left the country. When I got home that summer, I was so thankful that they encouraged me to do that.”

Q. When did you start thinking about coming back?Brendan: “I remember getting the Head-Royce alumni magazine and seeing all the photos and thinking: ‘Hey, this looks like a really cool place.’ There were definitely more students of color, the facilities had expanded, and I was just really impressed with how the school had evolved.”

racheL: “I started out as a substitute teacher in the Summer Program. I thought it was so strange to call Dr. Enelow “David” or Mr. Thiermann “Carl.” But eventu-ally, it felt right. It felt good, it felt like coming home.”

kristin: “I had never thought about coming back to teaching. But when I was in my second year in the Houston School District, I came back to campus for our 10-year alumni reunion, and was talking

with Linda Hoopes ’88, who was already teaching here.

was something I could give back. And now as an adult, I feel like I can encourage the kids who are here, and my own child, who loves it here—it’s all she’s known. This is a great place, and to see it from the different perspectives of a student, an employee, and a parent has been great.”

Q. Did you feel like you were well prepared for college?Betsy: “In my freshman year at UC San Diego, I remem-ber teaching some of my suite mates how to write a term paper; they didn’t know how. They didn’t have the basics of writing down. It was amazing to me that some of them had never written papers, or done complex assignments.”

Linda: “Better prepared than I could ever have imagined while I was still here. There were times in high school when it was so hard. And then in college at Scripps, it really hit home. This is something that I can now talk

to current students about—the high level of preparation. You might not know it now, but your HRS education is leading up to something really special.”

Mark: “Especially in writing, I couldn’t believe how well prepared I was. A few have already talked about the Dr. Enelow effect. I was quite nervous about going to school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, but I couldn’t believe how ready I was. Across the board—class discussions, time management, academic skills—the preparation at Head-Royce was amazing.”

MeLissa: “I was never a science person, but getting through science here at Head-Royce really helped me to comprehend some science topics that, even now, I might not have been able to understand. These small pieces

have all added up to a very strong foundation.”

Q. What are some words you would use to describe Head-Royce?

Dynamic. Great faculty. Rigorous. Small. Challenging. Enlightening.

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Our Legacy Families

1 Lee Smith Magnus ’69, Alex Mangus ’13 2 Elena Ortega ’71, Pippa O’Brien ’14 3 Doris Samper Balfour ’45, Natalie Balfour ’73, Siobhan Cove ’16 4 David Gawthorne ’75, Graham Reese-Gawthorne ’12

8 Suzanne Petersen Malmquist ’80, Jens Malmquist ’12 9 Allison Pennell ’80, Jack Fish ’18, Margot Fish ’20 10 Shelby Tupper ’80, Remi Tupper ’16, Grayson Tupper ’18 11 Deirdre Williams ’80, Dejah Hilliard ’17

15 Carl Miller ’82, Scott Miller ’13, Patricia O’Brien ’82 16 Yvonne Hopkins ’83, Linnea Hopkins-Ekdahl ’19 17 Margaret Nomura ’83, Matthew Clark ’13 18 Lisa Benton Hardy ’84, Taya Hardy ’16

23 Nicole Engh Florance ’87, Grady Florance ’20, Phoebe Florance ’22 24 Richard Arney ’88, Buck Arney ’23 25 Linda Knop Hoopes ’88, Bennett Hoopes ’22 26 Jessica Natkin ’89, Roger Biddle ’20

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10

2 4

23

15

8 11

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9

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1

18

3

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5 Katherine Connick Bradley ’33, Joan Bradley Wactor ’76, Nick Wactor ’13, Alex Wactor ’14 6 Jocelyn Larkin ’76, Vince Patti ’11 7 John Miottel ’79, Woody Miottel ’20, Annatie Miottel ’22

12 Will Glaser ’82, Caroline Glaser ’21, Julia Glaser ’23, Eileen Glaser ’92 13 William Marchant ’82, Katherine Marchant ’13, Christopher Marchant ’17, Elizabeth Marchant ’21 14 Carolyn McNiven ’82, Charlie Sohn ’17

19 Mark Epstein ’85, J.T. Epstein ’19, Erin Epstein ’21 20 Daniel Oppenheimer ’85, Simon Oppenheimer ’17 21 David Sandford ’85, Nicholas Sandford ’23 22 Kishore Parwani ’86, Kiran Parwani ’15, Arun Parwani ’21

27 Brent Bamberger ’91, Cole Bamberger ’17, Courtney Read ’91 28 Tim Ripsteen ’93, Margaret Ripsteen ’22, Catherine Ripsteen ’23, Vanessa Mandel Ripsteen ’93 29 Michael Beck ’95, Leo Beck ’20

5

22

12

29

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21

14

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The senior portraits of our thirty-three alumni parents, pictured with their children who are current students at Head-Royce, from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

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Making the

AlumniCircuitNew Head of School Rob Lake Meets with Alumni and Friends around the Country

Oakland

Oakland

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Alumni reception hosted by the Lakes in AugustRob with Christie Batterman Jordan ’65 and Karen Frock ’82

In December, the After Work Holiday Party(L) William Berkey ’02, Aliza Sinkinson ’02, Rob Lake, and Ito Ripsteen ’95(R) Julie Whorton ’03 and Sarah Louie ’03

Alumni Reception in Los Angeles in January(L to R) David Sternberg ’86, Claire Spiegel Brian ’70, Cynthia Watson Arnold ’65, Myles Nye ’99, Liz Chyr ’90, Robina Royer ’74, Rob Lake, Beau LeBlanc ’99, Joyce Boykin ’68, Adam Dumper ’95, Tania Kapoor ’95, Stephanie Gregg Geoffrion ’92, and Tony Hutton ’79

Alumni at the Book Fair in NovemberAt the Book Fair in November, HRS alums Tim Ripsteen ’93, Vanessa Ripsteen ’93, Sara Buckelew ’88, Rick Arney ’88, Ginny Kreiger ’88, and Allison Pennell ’80 with kids Caroline, Catherine, and Margaret Ripsteen; Lola Buckelew; Buck Arney; Trey Sutton; and Wallace Arney.

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Oakland Washington, D.C.

Oakland ChicagoBack from College Assembly and Young Alumni Reunion at Head‑Royce in January

(L) Maritza Taylor ’10, Ashleigh Rondon-Davis ’10, Sam Kaufman-Martin ’10

(R) Blake Miller ’09 and Eric Selvin ’10

Alumni Reception in Chicago in JanuaryLourdes Nichols Kaczkowski ’85, Rob Lake, Persis Berlekamp ’86, and Odele Desmuke Hawkins ’86

Luncheon with the Anna Head Ladies in January(L) Class of 1943: Roberta deVelbis Cords, Betty Mitchell Ames, Bebe

Moorhead Heggie, June Seifert McKenzie, Rob Lake, Harriet Webster Griffith, Laura Piccirillo Waste, Peggy Duffy Kramer

(R) Class of 1966: Deborah Reade, Ellen Singer, Rob Lake, Barbara Fleming, Libby Dunham, Shand Lathhrop Green

Rob Lake meets with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan during a visit to Washington, D.C.

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admissions

on the clock

$1,028,954 gifts & pledges to Annual Fund

$1,630,117 gifts, pledges, and pledge payments to all funds

$50,000 raised from the online auction

850 essays read by college counselors

960 college apps filed

1,000 hours spent on individualized college counseling for seniors

172 colleges applied to

11 average number of applications per student

47 applications to UC Davis

21 applications to USC

129 days of teacher instruction

200+ applicants for MS art position

40+ HRS fac, staff, admin reading/ processing admissions

5 average number of drafts read by college counselors for each essay

by the Numbershrs

development

college

9% alumni

74% parents

94% employees

100% board & admin

52 cast members in The Wizard of Oz

48 Middle School clubs and activities

45 dancers in FADE

10+ non-profits actively supported by HRS students this year

8,969 library books checked out by Lower School students this year

180 seed books ordered from Lawrence Hall of Science for 4th grade science curriculum

125 average number of students attending After School Program each day

annual fund participation

500 applicants to HRS

100+ letters written on behalf of HRS applicants

40+ HRS faculty, staff, administration reading/processing admissions apps

20+ emails from a single prospective parent

faculty

900 minutes taught each week per teacher

22,500 minutes of teaching time thus far 25 weeks of teaching time

per student 6,815 hours of community service

logged by Middle School students 8 min 30 sec = average mile time for HRS

4th/5th graders

students

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by the Numbers alumni

busin

ess

24 alumni outreach events/activities planned or in progress Alumni

Facebook closed group has 476members

500 members in Alumni LinkedIn 4,838

graduates with diplomas from 1891–2010

2,935 alumni currently on mailing list

21 active Alumni Council members

Annual Fund dollars, gifts, and pledges: $93,500

towards goal of $125,000

electronics

AND technolo

gy

74,805 visits to HRS website

6,000 phone calls per day

809,468 emails received since 1/1/11

19 issues of new eLines sent to 1,285 parent addresses

4,000 digital photos taken since 9/1/10

250 desktops, 350 laptops, 30 Flip and video cameras, 50 digital cameras

80 LCD projectors, 26 servers, 2 firewalls, and 11 switches

A 99.99% wireless campus

14 wireless access points

excellence

sports

12,430 gatehouse

visitors

3,903 payroll checks

92 AP Scholars

2nd place earned by robotics club, Robohawk, in competition

2nd place in East Bay in Middle School Mathcounts competition

8 seniors applying for Global Citizenship Certification

$131 total lost money

returned to US office

$21,143 money spent on postage

$120,000 professional development funds expended this year

show me the money

91–33 win-loss record of HRS varsity teams

4 BCL East championships won

196 Upper School students playing varsity sports

42–16 combined record of varsity basketball teams

5 seniors will play sports in college next year

2 championship Middle School teams

Numbers as of April 1, 2011

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Men’s Freshman/Sophomore Basketballhead coach jason ysip

This past season brought nine students together who had not spent much time on the basketball court. Throughout the season they made great strides to learn about the sport of basketball while working on fundamental skills of the game. Greg Hui showed great leadership and was the floor general of the team. The smooth shooting of Brian Call, the strong rebounding of Nick Thompson, and the hustle of newcomer Nick Wactor all contributed to the on-court success of the team. Ending the season with a three game winning streak showed how the hard work and efforts through-out the season paid off for this outstanding group of young men.

Men’s JV Basketballhead coach gene fountain

The JV basketball team captured a tie for another league title this season. With just one junior, the team bonded together for a very successful season. Our leading scorer, Ryan Diew, averaged over 25 points per game in league play. Our super freshmen, Eian Peters and Sammy Greenwall, joined our starter sophomore Ian Lituchy and veteran, junior Eric Taylor along with Ryan in leading the team.  An amazing supporting cast included sharp-shooting Matt Harband, aka “Silk,” defensive specialist Kian Vafai, the speedy Alex Sommer, and the scrappy, always-giving-200% Tynan Challenor. Beyond our record, this team grew through adversity and meshed personalities to really become a family.

Women’s JV Basketballhead coach tony melendez

After a slow start, the girls came together as a team and hit their stride halfway through the schedule. The high point was during the game at College Prep, when

the team flourished in arguably their best performance of the year. Our three sophomores, Kate Marchant, Veronica Timpane, and Emily Weiss led the way for most of the season, while freshmen Emily Wong and Olivia Lucas shined throughout with outstanding play. Frankie Paris, Helen Lee-Righter, and Michelle Mastin look to be the future of the HRS women’s program. The team’s 9–9 overall record doesn’t truly reflect just how much the girls grew throughout the season not only as better basketball players, but as better teammates as well.

Women’s Varsity Basketballhead coach ray wilson

The 2010–2011 season tipped off with some new faces in the program. In his first year, new Head Coach Ray Wilson followed in the footsteps of the highly success-ful tenure of Coach Mike Talps. As Coach Wilson said,

“I relied on the support of our three returning assistant coaches, alum Leah Becherer ’01, Erica Mooring, and Rob Davenport, who helped immensely with our game strategy. Their knowledge and dedication to the pro-gram provided a smooth transition for me.”

The team started the year with a trip to Sacramento for a three-day tournament. We advanced to the champi-onship game, but lost to Hoopa Valley by 10 points. It became clear early on that we have team resolve that never quits. One of the shining moments in this game was the rugged defensive effort of Kelly Cook. After the tournament, St. Joe’s had our attention. We prepared ourselves for this key December match up. We played a great game, but lost by 11 points. With two fresh-men (Courtney Ng and Haley Wiley), five sophomores (Aminah Luqman, Sierra Ng, Rory Chipman, Becca Benham, and Grace Wong), one junior (Kelly Cook), and four seniors (Alexis Brown, Alex Dorado, Gabrielle Davenport, and Kaitlyn Moore), the team’s youth was evident, but with each passing game, the players grew in confidence and ability.

Athletics Winter Highlights

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fall 2010

women’s volleyball18–9 overall9–3 in BCL-East2nd place BCL-EastNCS Semi-finals

men’s soccer15–2 overall12–0 BCL-East1st place BCL-EastLost 1st round of NCS tournament

men’s cross-country  4th place BCL-East

women’s cross-country 3rd place BCL-East

women’s tennis13–1 overall8–1 BCL-East1st place BCL-EastLost 1st round of NCS tournament

winter 2010–2011

women’s basketball21–8 overall11–1 BCL-EastTied 1st place BCL-East regular season2nd place in BCL-East tournamentNCS tournament 2nd round

men’s basketball21–8 overall11–1 BCL-EastTied 1st place BCL-East regular season1st place in BCL-East tournamentNCS tournament semi-finalsLost in 1st round of NorCal Tournament

Throughout the season, with their core strengths of speed, hustle, and teamwork, the girls demonstrated a level of play that smothered opposing teams and capitalized on turnovers. “Overall, our players gave their best effort each game and bonded as a team,” says Wilson. “I am very proud of our performance this season. I know the returning players are looking forward to keeping the tradition alive!”

Men’s Varsity Basketballhead coach brendan blakeley ’88

This recent season was another in a long line of suc-cessful basketball campaigns for our men’s program. The season started slowly, with the loss of senior Ryan Madden to a knee injury. But after a couple of disappoint-ing losses in December, the team began to gel. Taking 2nd place at the HRS Holiday Shootout gave the team momentum heading into the BCL-East regular season. Finishing the league season with an 11–1 record, the Jayhawks captured their 8th league title in the last 10 years. A thrilling BCL-East tournament win over co-cham-pion St. Elizabeth High School propelled the team to the #3 seed in the NCS Tournament. Wins over Oakland Military Institute and Stuart Hall guaranteed the team a trip to the NorCal tournament for the second straight year. A loss to Sacramento’s Bradshaw Christian in the first round ended the team’s season with a 21–8 record, and solidified our position as one of the most consistently suc-cessful men’s varsity programs at the Division 5 level in Northern California. Post-season accolades were earned by seniors Marcus Byrd (2nd team all-BCL East), Connor Scherer (1st team all-BCL East), and Ryan Isono (BCL-East co-MVP). Strong efforts from seniors Eric Phillips, Willy Fogarty, and Tim Ellis-Caleo throughout the year allowed this team to achieve great success.

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1. (L to R) Coach Vylinh Nguyen, Kellen Scanlan ’12, Eva Allen ’12, Cameron Statton ’12, Julia Musto ’11, Natalie Garrett ’13, Olivia Wilson ’13, Courtney Smith ’12, Sarah Louie ’14, Coach Tay. (Front) Anna Tong ’11, Amara Plaza-Jennings ’11, Sarah Atkinson ’12

2. Ryan Isono ’11 drives to the basket

3. Gabrielle Davenport ’11 in action

4. Alex Sommer ’13

5. Olivia Hill ’11, Heather Anderson ’11, and Annie Wanless ’12

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Around Campus

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1. Anna-Marie Nilsson and kindergarten students take class outside. (L to R) Ian Bai, Jaqueline Min, Ai-li Baird, and Diego Mora.

2. Second graders Nicholas Hebrard, Katherine Jackson, Elizabeth Marchant, Ally Wilkinson, Georgia Milani, and Lara Kammen

3. Aminah Luqman ’13 and Nico Dorado ’13 in chemistry class.

4. Ali Andersen ’11, Larkin Smith ’11, and Rachel Katzoff ’11 working on a project in the English senior elective, “The Big Book.”

5. Seventh graders Alison Simons, Zina Abourjeily, and Kayla Schmidlin

6. Riva Kahn Hallock ’11, Guy Tada ’12, Kirstin Louie ’12, Julia Morris ’11 and supporting cast of the spring musical, The Wizard of Oz.

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Around Campus

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1. Eighth graders Jimmy Almgren-Bell, Harper Moskovitz, Cris Woroch, and Elijah Lajmer playing basketball

2. Lower School Spanish teacher Sita Davis

3. Seventh graders Emma Levine, Karen Lara, and Samantha Hull

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Calling all Head-Royce and Anna Head Alumni…Please use this form to update your information or tell us what you are doing. New Head of School Rob Lake is very interested in getting to know our alumni. Kindly share your story with us. You may also submit your news online at www.headroyce.org/alumni.

Contact Information

Tell us what you’re up to…

full name

address

city

email

state zip

class maiden name

Let us know if you would like to be profiled in a future Head-Royce publication. Or tell us if you wish to assist us with alumni programs.

Tell us what Head-Royce/Anna Head means to you, or share a funny story from your time at school.

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Board of Trustees2010–2011

Charles Freibergboard chair

Lori FogartyH. Peter Smith III ’78co vice chair

Dan Chaotreasurer

Martha Sellerssecretary

Robert A. Lakehead of school

Denise Bass Allen

Laura Baxter-Simons

Sara Buckelew ’88

Eva Camp

James Cavalieri

Elizabeth Crabtree

Leo Dorado

Peter Drake

Lisa Benton Hardy ’84

Lucinda Lee Katz

Neetesh Kumar

Kym Luqman

Lilly Mar-Chee

Edie Zusman Pratt

Tim Ripsteen ’93

Jon Streeter

Theresa Tao

Frank Williams

Frank Yeary

Administration2010–2011

Suzanne Abbeyhead of lower school

Terry Pink Alexanderdirector of development

Kate Augusdirector of college counseling

Brendan Blakeley ’88director of athletics

Catherine Epsteindirector of admissions and financial aid

Andrei Ferreradirector of communications and publications

Barbara Geedirector of diversity

Robert A. Lakehead of school

Crystal Landassistant head of school academic dean

Ray Louiedirector of educational technology

Dennis Malonecfo/director of operations

Betsy Ringrose ’85director of alumni relations & associate director of development

Carol Swainsonhead of middle school

Carl Thiermannhead of upper school

Alumni Council2010–2011

Sara Buckelew ’88president

Rick Arney ’88vice president

Elena Ortega ’71secretary

Ann Catrina-Kligman ’88

Rachel Kirshman Concannon ’96

Sarah Fahey Durantini ’98

Rebecca Carr Eaton ’91

Melissa Gale ’01

Garrett Harley ’91

Judy Hunt ’67

Courtney Jenkins ’03

Bill Marchant ’82

Jessica Naylor Minkoff ’98

Tejal Patel ’86

Jay Rhodes ’85

Terry Richards ’65

Tim Ripsteen ’93

Scott Rogers ’79

Michelle Tajirian Shoffner ’96

Chris van Löben Sels ’87

Betsy Ringrose ’85director of alumni relations & associate director of development

Productioneditor

Andrei Ferrera

editorial assistance

Terry Pink Alexander

Susan Anderson

Blakely Atherton

Ann Quan

Betsy Ringrose ’85

Ida Tolentino

special thanks

Allison Pennell ’80

design & production

Shelby Designs & Illustrates

printer

Pacific Color Graphics

photography

Sam Deaner

Andrei Ferrera

Mark Musto

Students in HRS Photojournalism Class

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Two

Hel

ens

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Over the course of eleven years, Anna Head alumna helen wills moody roark ’23 won eight Wimbledon Women’s Singles titles: 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1933, 1935, and 1938. She also won the U.S. Open seven times and the French Open four times. She won two gold medals at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.

Fellow Anna Head alumna helen hull Jacobs ’26 won the women’s singles title at Wimbledon in 1936. She played in a total of four finals. She also won four U.S. Open titles.

the two helens faced each many times in grand Slam

play: once in the u.S. open, once in the French open,

and three times in the wimbledon finals, in 1932,

1935, and 1938. helen wills moody roark and helen

hull Jacobs are both members of the International

tennis hall of Fame.

Helen Wills Moody Roark ’23 Helen Hull Jacobs ’26

4315 lincoln avenue

oakland · ca 94602

address service requested

Does the person on the mailing label still live or work here? If not, please notify the

Alumni & Development Office of the correct address by calling 510.531.1300 x2149.

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who’s who