Class of 1960

Bennet Brabson
brabson@indiana.edu
2000 Crandall Court
Bloomington, IN 47401-4405
(812) 332-6507
It is with great pleasure that I send holiday greetings from Indiana University. There is a great sense of relief after the November 4 election of Barack Obama our President elect. Members of the Bloomington community worked very hard to help push Indiana into the blue column for the first time in 44 years.

As my research area is the physics of climate, I was particularly pleased to see the country begin to move away from our climate destructive habits. I am also enjoying teaching a junior-level class, Environmental Physics, here at IU. Many of our physics majors take this course and a few have chosen to go into one of the related fields of physics. As all of you are aware, our Carleton education has been so important in our lives.

Boyce Burdick
burdick2@owt.com
414 Snyder Street
Richland, WA 99354
(509) 375-1715
I’ve had two big changes in my life over the last two years. First, my wife of 45 years Kate died In July of 2007. Second, I am now the custodial guardian of our grandson Ashton who just turned 15.

The first weekend of this November, I attended the Yale Department of Physics Alumni Conference in New Haven. Anyone who had received a graduate degree was invited to attend. There was even a PhD recipient from 1939. I was surprised to find that the results of my PhD thesis were being used in a new device being fabricated by the Applied Physics department. It was strange to return to a place after some 40 years of absence—lots of new construction but also complete memory loss for major landmarks like rivers and dams.

Class of 1961

Sig Jaastad
Buena Vista, CO 81211
Much of the year was spent on politics working on behalf of my favorite local, state, and national candidates. We made a few trips but stayed in the country until the end of October when we rode the train from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba, to watch polar bears gather on the shores of Hudson’s Bay waiting for ice up. I’ve signed up with a new piano teacher after my previous teacher left town (the second time that’s happened to me!). Sandee is in her fourth year of recovery from an auto accident, is still wearing a “boot”, and is likely looking at more surgery to repair damage to her right foot.

Class of 1962

Steve Johnson
prairie3@peoplepc.com
1802 Blue Sage Dr
Katy, TX 77494
I am still consulting nearly full time computing depth images for the oil and gas industry. It is nice to come and go as I please, but deadlines are deadlines and my wife gets a little tired of me working from home late at night. It was good to have this freedom as she came down with shingles this spring and I stayed home for 3 weeks. Her painful experience prodded me into getting the shot.

Hurricane Ike shut down Houston for a week and even though we were 50 miles from Ike’s landfall, we had limbs blown off trees, fences flattened and were without power for a couple of days. We drove up to Mpls in August for my 50th high school reunion and it was entertaining to see my old classmates although I think the women are aging better than the men. I am trying to interest my granddaughter in math and physics, but it is an uphill struggle. I bought her a trilobite at the SEG convention in November and she sounded mildly interested so there is hope.

Bruce Murdoch
16401 Grandwood Lake Drive
Crest Hill, IL 60435
My spare time (of which there never is enough) goes to working on community education, participating in Toastmasters communication & leadership activities, and continuing to develop a semblance of piano-playing skill. Reading Noah Adams entertaining book “Piano Lessons” about his own struggles as a mature adult beginning to learn piano encouraged me to charge ahead, knowing there are others like me out there working through their Alfred Adult Basic Piano Method books! Argonne National Laboratory continues as my employment home, where I contribute as Principal Industrial Hygienist to the occupational health and safety program. It is rewarding to collaborate with our many scientists in setting up safe laboratories and procedures, and to help create new and better ways of managing the health and safety work process. Carol and I have found that life does not get easier and simpler with age, but rather more exciting and more interesting!

Jim Weaver

jcw@mit.edu

Post Office Box 429
Sudbury, MA 01776-9928
(978) 443-2812
The power of procrastination is incredible. This is my first contribution to the alumni newsletter since graduating from Carleton. Overall, I continue to be convinced that a Carleton liberal arts education that is based on the quantitative discipline of physics gives one a broad, flexible basis for almost everything.

Very briefly, after Carleton I headed east, thinking that after a Ph.D. I’d return to the Midwest. But this prediction was quite wrong. After finishing an experimental thesis in low temperature physics (Yale) I went to MIT to work with a physics group that was beginning to get involved with biology and medicine. That group was headed by John King, a wide-ranging thinker who was a student of Jerrold Zacharias, of molecular beams fame.

When I arrived John was exploring the applications of molecular beams methods to biology. He soon allowed me to branch out on my own, even though I was a postdoc. In addition, he somehow obtained special permission from the Provost for me to submit my own research proposals to the NIH. My first NIH grant was to investigate an analytical method based on a quadrupole mass spectrometer that was interfaced to a semipermeable silicone membrane that contained a thin layer of trapped enzymes. The basic idea was to use enzymes to catalyze the liberation of volatile compounds (e.g. carbon dioxide, ethanol) by degrading non-volatile analytes. Put simply, the enzymatic specificity for degrading non-volatile molecules was combined with the high sensitivity of mass spectrometers. While this approach worked, the high cost of the system and the difficulty in suppressing other sources of the volatile molecules made it rather impractical. It did, however, set the stage for other projects.

At about the same time the King group joined a multidisciplinary team that put together at large Project Program Grant proposal to the NIH, and as it turned out, this group was part of the beginning for what was to become the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). It now has about 400 PhD, MD and PhD/MD students scattered over the Harvard and MIT campuses and the teaching hospitals of Harvard Medical School. The founding idea was simple: medicine is important. Therefore, went the argument, different disciplines, particularly the quantitative physics and engineering approaches, should provide a foundation for the division.

As you would guess the HST environment is incredible, with all kinds of opportunities. In addition to academic research there is now strong support to become also involved in commercialization of research results. Without business nothing actually gets widely used.
As part of this I’ve run a seminar course, “Future Medical Technologies”, for many years. But the course title is misleading. It’s really about how to go from a great idea to a biomedical technology that is actually used. To do this scientists and engineers who have helped start companies come and talk informally to the students, describing both delightful and miserable experiences in business.

This environment also led to my helping start one company (One Cell Systems or OCS) and consulting for several others. The technical idea behind OCS is simple, coming from my physics background and collaboration with MIT biologists and chemists. The idea is to stochastically inoculate large numbers of gel microdrops with mainly 0 or 1 cell, and then use optical methods to detect and measure cellular activity. It allows bacteria to be detected and enumerated based on their production of metabolic products, and antibody secretion from individual mammalian cells to be quantified, and the cells sorted out by fluorescent activated cell sorting. While still pursued the explosive growth in compositional analysis (e.g. PCR) has mostly made this a niche application. Along the way I’ve learned a lot about intellectual property, particularly patents.

In February I will have been at MIT for forty years, and our small research group is still pursuing new things. Mostly we have focused on effects of electromagnetic fields on biological systems. This includes “weak” fields involved in animal navigation and epidemiologically-motivated worries about power lines and cell phones, and “strong” fields used to electroporate cells. Our present major effort is quantitative modeling of cell membrane electroporation, and new electroporation models that involve both the membrane level (nanometer scale) and mammalian cell scale (10 micrometers). The first goal (partly reached) is to describe electrical behavior on time scales that range from nanoseconds to seconds. The second goal is to describe molecular transport into cells, as this underlies almost all of the biological and medical applications, but to date has not been accomplished.

Anyone who is interested in our group’s research can visit epore.mit.edu. Most of our reprints for colleagues are available here. For me it all began at Carleton, where Bob Kolenkow and Bob Reitz were key people in getting me started.

Class of 1964

Craig Anderson
mar.cra@comcast.net
21 Battle Creek Place
St. Paul, MN 55119
651-735-0782
There’ve been no dramatic changes for us in the past year. Enjoying the retired life, we’ve been able to travel and reside at our lake cabin more than was previously possible. I’ve done a little volunteer legal and related work, along with spending inordinate amounts of time as a rapt, but perhaps too passive, observer of the political process. Happy holidays to everyone.

Diane (Wallingford) McCarthy
dennis_mccart57@hotmail.com
2432 Riviera Drive
Vienna, VA 22181-3121
703-938-4096
In 2007 after Thanksgiving we took our first Carleton-sponsored trip, a cruise to the Galapagos Islands. 53 of the 80 passengers were Carls, many from my years at Carleton. Our son, Duncan, traveled with us and shared a cabin with Dave Langford ‘64. It was a wonderful, educational, and fun adventure, although snorkeling in 68º-72º water was nippy even with wet suits. Faculty leader Matt Rand was a special bonus.

Dennis, officially retired from the U. S. Naval Observatory since January 2005, continues to work there several days a week as a rehired annuitant. His high PSA test in February led to a prostate biopsy in April that found cancer. Further testing showed it had not spread. After doing a lot of research and obtaining additional opinions, he chose surgery using the daVinci robot, which was done in late July. Results were very good and he has had no further treatment. His latest PSA test was 0.

Duncan (40) is in his fifteenth year with NGA (National Geospatial-intelligence Agency). He develops technology for the government. He continues to date, but remains unmarried.

Deidre (36) will soon complete twelve years at the National Park Service. She has not had a significant multiple sclerosis attack since July 2007. She continues to take Rebif and a monthly IV dose of steroids that seem to ward off problems. She still enjoys her Friesian horse and is improving as a dressage rider. She and Martin Mikhail, her boyfriend of 16 years, live across the street from us in a rambler style home which could accommodate a wheelchair should she need one. Martin’s left leg (tibia and fibula broken in a fall on Memorial Day 2007) is greatly improved. He is back to working out and cut their grass all summer.

I continue to maintain the home front and teach ballroom dancing for the county park authority. I also do church and volunteer work. Sailing this summer on our 31’Cal boat was curtailed by Dennis’s surgery and recovery. We saw the last 2 games of the World Series and Dennis, a lifelong “Phillies Phan”, saw them win!

Paul Zitzewitz
pwz@umich.edu
16229 Country Knoll Drive
Northville, MI 48168-2375
(734) 420-2746
This has been a year with some considerable changes. I taught my last class in spring and have a full-year retirement furlough this year. Just after meeting the class for the last time I was told that I had a very rare cancer of the peritoneum. The surgery and hospitalization consumed most of August. I lost a large fraction of my digestive system which continues to provide challenges, but I feel fine and have regained much of my strength (but not weight). Barbara is fine and continues to do on-line tutoring. Karin and her husband have faculty positions at Michigan State, which means they are only an hour away. We have enjoyed many visits with them and their now one-year-old Clara. Eric and his family are still in Hanover New Hampshire, so visits are much less frequent, although we expect everyone will be here over Christmas.

Class of 1965

Bob Henry
rmh.dcb@verizon.net
6006 Welborn Drive
Bethesda, MD 20816-1158
(301) 229-4936
I continue to thrive here in Bethesda MD in retirement from various financial management positions [got an MBA from U. of Chicago in 1970] – keeping busy with lots of duplicate bridge, golf, reading, opera, theater, symphony, and travel. I just returned from a marvelous three week trip in Argentina [Buenos Aires, Mendoza and Iguazu Falls] with my son who had just completed two years in Peru in the Peace Corps.

Next, my wife and I are off on our annual three week trip to Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands where we read and snorkel and eat – very relaxing and beautiful. Our only regret is that we will miss the wonderful inauguration festivities of President Obama and VP Biden as we both supported them strongly; in addition, my wife knows the Bidens as a result of her second husband being his chief of staff for several years when Sen. Biden was first elected to the Senate.

Richard Karon
karon2@cox.net
140 America Way
Jamestown, RI 02835
Another year logged as Manager of Technology Investments for Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems [IDS] business. My boss was busy helping our new VP of Engineering climb his learning curve, which resulted in more autonomy for me ... an interesting challenge when you have no direct reports, and when the VPs predecessor initiated significant new projects without any increased budget before he moved on to his new assignment. In addition to my other duties, I took on our Division’s planning for a major technology forum scheduled for March, 2009. It’s a challenge to showcase our advanced technology in an open international forum.

I continued my Toastmasters activities, expanded my support for this worldclass organization, and am closing in on completing my second Distinguished Toastmaster [DTM] program. In addition to my speaking and leadership activities, I am serving as an Area Governor to 6 clubs in RI, mostly corporate clubs. It’s enjoyable to share experiences and help others work thru their corporate and community cultures to support their members and officers.

Barbara Goss Levi
bglevi@msn.com
1616 La Vista del Oceano
Santa Barbara, CA 93109
(805) 962-8900
Life continues to be very good to my husband, Ilan, and me. I still write an occasional news story for Physics Today and try to keep up with “science and society” issues such as climate change. Ilan and I devote lots of time to family—especially our four grandkids. We have at least one eager scientist among them. We keep physically active with hiking, biking and working out in the gym. Ilan and I enjoyed a nice lunch in Berkeley last March with Bob Kolenkow. Congratulations to him and to Bob Reitz, who were both on the faculty when I was at Carleton, for having a student scientific research fund named in their honor. It is a well-deserved recognition.

Class of 1966

Eric Lasley
elasley@att.net
4349 Corte de la Fonda
San Diego, CA 92130
(858) 794-0942
As have so many in my age group, I had the experience of losing my sole surviving parent this year. My mother Phyllis died on March 6 at age 87 after several years of declining health. Since she lived so close to me, I was quite involved with her struggle against increasing debilities. Fortunately, she was able to remain at home the entire time and had very devoted caregivers. I was very touched by the response of her friends, but the truth is she had outlived the vast majority of them. Although Mom had done a very good job of organizing her financial affairs, it has still taken many months to try to settle everything. So far, the real estate market crash in California and the shrinkage of the home mortgage market has made it impossible to sell her condominium even at a drastically reduced price.

On a brighter note, Judith and I had a great time on a two-week road trip through the southwestern United States. We visited a number of Anasazi and Sinagua archeological sites. One highlight was a jeep tour of Canyon de Chelly led by a Navajo woman who was born in the canyon and whose relatives still farm there. In addition to all the natural wonders, we were also able to see “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Falstaff” at the outdoor opera house in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A couple of friends of mine have gotten a lot of satisfaction out of commissioning new works by classical composers. Although that is well beyond my financial means, this past year I decided to sponsor the visit of the Hugo Wolf String Quartet to the nearby UCSD campus. It was a lot of fun to meet young musicians making a career in the extremely competitive classical music field. European-based musicians find it hard to tour in the US right now due to the decrease value of the dollar relative to the euro. Even veteran performers are having a tough time due to the rapid contraction of the classical music recording business because of excessive costs and competition from web-based music sources.

I was very pleased to learn of the new endowed fund in honor of Robert Kolenkow, my freshman advisor, and Robert Reitz, the Physics and Astronomy department chair during my years at Carleton. What a fine tribute!

Class of 1967

Bob Hanson
hanson@ucolick.org
www.ucolick.org/~npm
On July 1, 2008, I retired after nearly 30 years as a Research Astronomer at Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz. I am “recalled without salary”, which means that I get to keep my office, etc., and will be working part-time on a few astronomy research projects of my own choosing.

My wife, Nancy, also retired from her long career at UCSC, after (most recently) six years as Department Manager in UCSC’s Theater Arts Department. We plan to stay in Santa Cruz indefinitely (it’s a very nice place to live), with a bit of travel on the side. We recently returned from a seven-week, 7K mile road trip to Minnesota and back. Among the perks of retirement is being able to vacation when the fall colors are spectacular and the summer tourists have vanished.

Greetings to any of you old alums who might remember me.

Duncan McBride
dmcbride@nsf.gov
4608 Tara Drive
Fairfax, VA 22032
703-978-4974
I continue to work as a Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in suburban Washington, DC, managing programs in undergraduate education, receiving proposals, managing their review, and deciding which are funded. I handle physics and astronomy proposals in our core program, Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI), as well as some non-physics proposals in other programs. It was nice to work with Joel Weisberg last year during a panel review meeting.

One of the grants I oversee supports the new faculty workshop, run by APS, AAPT and AAS. In early November, 85 new physics and astronomy faculty spent 3½ days at the American Center for Physics, working with many of the leaders in undergraduate physics and astronomy education and networking with each other. They are a diverse and enthusiastic group that represents the future of college and university physics. The workshop is now being held twice a year in order to accommodate more faculty. I am also involved in the NSF-wide nanoscale science and engineering initiative that keeps me in contact with some new physics and related areas. There are always more interesting things to do than time.

Outside of NSF, I am singing with a small choir and working on my house, not old enough to be charming but old enough to need considerable refurbishing. Daughter Alicia (Carleton 2000) and family live in Washington DC, about 45 minutes away, and we get together often. Son Justin is living at home and working nearby. Christmas greetings to everyone.

Class of 1968

Barbara Whitten
bwhitten@coloradocollege.edu
659 Shooks Lane
Colorado Springs, CO 80903
This has been a year of ups and downs for me. I’ll mention the major down first, to get it out of the way. Last spring I learned I have breast cancer, and I spent the summer having chemotherapy, and the fall having radiation. Not my best year ever, but it is almost over, and I am an official breast cancer survivor already. This was caught in an early stage by a routine mammogram—be sure to encourage all the women you love (including yourself) to get regular mammograms.

On the upside: My son Jake graduated from Colorado College in May. Of the thirty or so graduations I’ve attended, this was by far the most moving. Medical school is in his future, but he is at rather loose ends at the moment.

I am in a mutual mentoring group of senior women physicists at liberal arts colleges with Cindy Blaha and three others. We are having a good time and learning a lot from each other.

I had a great vacation in Alaska with a good friend in June (just before starting chemo). We went up to Barrow and saw the midnight sun. Very exciting. We also visited Prudhoe Bay and learned a lot about extractive economies.

Other than that I’ve been doing the usual, teaching, advising students, trying to keep track of my children, and doing research on women in physics. Happy Solstice to all!