Class of 1990

Bill Caplan
bigmoose@giantmoose.org
457 Sidney Street
Madison, WI 53703-1723
(608) 423-3286
Rachel and I are still happily living in Madison, WI. I continue to teach Physics at Madison Area Technical College, where I’m thoroughly enjoying my first semester stepping up to teach real calculus based freshman physics. In my spare time, I’ve been playing a lot of sax with my band, Bonobo Secret Handshake, and running my kids all over creation for their various activities. Our daughters Maggie and Rose are now 11 and 9, respectively and are turning into delightful young women. Maggie is entering that pre-teen phase of life where she could be known as the super-hero Sarcastic Girl. Rosie is my little scientist - we just finished competing in the local Lego Robotics League with a team from her school. We’re happy to have Sarah Van Orman her husband Dan Wang (both ‘90) here in Madison, and we manage to get together with them every once in a while.

Michael Lach

1705 West George Street

Chicago, IL 60657
As I write this, I’m a little more than one year in to managing all high school teaching and learning for the Chicago Public Schools. That means setting curriculum, training teacher and principals, and crafting policies around English, mathematics, science, and social studies work for our 110+ high schools. I have a great team and the work’s certainly important, though hampered by large bureaucracies, politics, and a profound lack of resources. Still, student learning in Chicago is increasing, so we’ve got to be doing something great.

Saw several Carleton alumni over the past year, and even made a visit up to campus. Great to be in touch with so many of you.

Class of 1991

Lori (Adams) DuRussel
21 North Harwood Circle
Madison, WI 53717
The biggest news for me this year was the arrival of my son, Julian, born in April. He was a HUGE surprise and has brought a ton of joy to our lives. My other children -- Gabe (age 6), Bryseida (age 8), and Abby (age 10) -- are all in school, and it’s so much fun watching them grow. Mark and I took all the kids to Guatemala this fall so Bryseida and Gabe could see where they were born. It was a wonderful cultural experience for all of us. While mothering is definitely my #1 job, I also teach parenting classes for adoptive families, and I do some part-time administrative work for an adoption agency. I feel very lucky to have a job that is very rewarding, but also very flexible.

Apart from family and work, everything else is status quo. I’m more than 9 years cancer-free (yay!), and I was very relieved last year when my oncologist reassured me that the pregnancy was safe from a cancer perspective.

I hope everyone’s doing well. If you’re ever in Madison, feel free to look me up! Our schedule can get a bit hectic at times, but I think it’s important to fit in lunch with friends whenever I can. Have a great year!

Andrea Lommen
Hi all. It was another crazy year in the Lommen/Carlson clan. Rose and Xyla are turning 4 shortly. My “binary star system” as Cindy Blaha calls them, is doing very well. Rose likes to explain that Mother Nature is married to the wizard and they live in outer space. Xyla did some experiments involving her teeth, the jungle gym, and gravity, but she’s basically okay as long as you can let that whole thing about having straight white teeth go.

I had a nice year professionally including being granted tenure at F&M. I was also awarded an NSF Career Award that is enabling the formation of an international pulsar timing array - a nanohertz gravitational wave detector. Among other things the grant lets me hire a post-doc and gives me a teaching reduction to start an outreach program at a local high school. I’m still dancing! I gotta go to my dance class now, in fact.

John McCormack
mcdormajp@msn.com
Greetings Fellow Physics Geeks! I’m still residing in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC and working at the Naval Research Laboratory, where I am a research physicist in the Space Science Division. My wife Nina and I are happy to announce the birth of our baby girl this past summer. Along with our two boys, ages 9 & 3, it’s never a dull moment! If you’re in the area, drop me a line and come check out NRL.

Dan Prince

dan.prince@alumni.carleton.edu

I am still enjoying writing software for a small Minneapolis company, Integral7. I live in South Minneapolis with my wife Laura and 2 kids, Grace (7) and Theo (5). Over the past 2 years I have been involved in starting an outsourcing project with a great team of engineers in Suzhou, China. I've been learning some of the language and have traveled to China twice; it has added an interesting and fun twist to my
life as a software engineer.

Class of 1992

Larry Marguiles and Jane Olson
higgsboson70@yahoo.com
wholesome_olson@yahoo.com
Julia Sky Margulies was born November 15 at 4:20 pm during a spectacular sunset at the University Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark

Class of 1993

Marcia Franklin
mrfranklin@etmeli.us
Nothing more earth shattering to report than surviving the year with a pair of two-year-olds. We’re still in St. Paul, and welcome visitors almost any time!

Barron Koralesky
koralesky@gmail.com
1448 Hewitt Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55104
Last year was our 15-year reunion, wow time flies! It was wonderful to see many of you there and doing so well. I hope the rest of you are also doing well. For those of you who I didn’t catch up with at reunion, I live in St. Paul and am the Associate Director of Information Technology Services at Macalester College. I love the small liberal arts college environment. Take care everyone; I hope our paths cross again soon!

Class of 1994

Michael Fleming
mike@sonaura.net
It’s been a busy and exciting couple years since my last update. My, how the time flies. In particular, that online dating thing I wrote about in 2005 worked out after all! My wife, Melanie, and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary this summer. We were married in her hometown of Marietta, GA, in August 2007. Mark Flaherty (’94) was my best man, and Eric Hill (’94) and Tim Munson (’94) also joined us for the festivities. After the wedding, Mel and I spent an amazing honeymoon week in Tahiti before returning to our normal lives in Middle Tennessee.

Melanie works as a research analyst at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and I’m still teaching audio engineering at MTSU, where I submitted my portfolio for tenure and promotion this fall. This year I was elected to the Board of Governors of the Audio Engineering Society, and I’m looking forward to serving in this capacity at the next international convention in Munich in May. We’re also looking forward to revisiting the Carleton campus and seeing everyone at the reunion in June.

Rik Gran
Another busy year around here. Peter is almost two years old, and Alex is 5.5 years, and already getting Kindergarten report cards (very good grades in Math, kind of like his parents). I am finishing up a single-semester teaching release that has let me travel to Fermilab frequently to set up a hadron interaction and calibration experiment that will support the upcoming MINERvA neutrino interaction measurements. Karen is a Geology professor here, working to build a research program and having a good time teaching some mid and upper level courses.
I have recently been working with more research students than usual. There was the regular UMD physics (and electrical engineering and sometimes computer science) crowd, most working on the hadron experiment above, plus one studying the Radon rate in the MINOS far detector cavern. Then a trio of one UMD, one Carleton, and a UM-TC undergraduate working at the Soudan underground mine over the summer; among other activities like leading public tours, they did some event scanning of events with two tracks in the MINOS detector, which was quite helpful for several analyses. And the hadron interaction experiment mentioned above has five students at Fermilab, including a couple from Mexico and another pair from Peru. We just went out to a Peruvian restaurant in Chicago, where the owner tested them on their knowledge of the thirteen Incan kings. I’m slowly trading my Japanese language skills and culture knowledge for Spanish and Latin American history.

At UMD, new challenges appear regularly. The next one up: this spring I will have a go at the notorious, graduate level “Jackson” electrodynamics class. Last spring I taught Griffiths E&M, to try to ease me into it. Plus a project to make the coffee industry recession-resistant by introducing planned obsolescence into their retail products.

Martine Kalke
Martine.Kalke@alumni.carleton.edu
Our daughter Cassidy is now just over two years old. She loves to talk, tell stories, sing songs, read books, help in the kitchen and the yard, and especially run! This year we took her all over the place. In June, we visited Amsterdam and Utrecht in Holland and Brussels in Belgium. And while we had a lot of fun, we found traveling with an (almost) 2 year old, especially overseas, is incredibly tiring. In August we went to Wisconsin and Kentucky to visit relatives - traveling was still fun, but really and is was great to see all our relatives. Our other big news is that my husband got tenure at Boston College last year! We have been very busy with work, family, and traveling the past year. My work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Mike’s work at Boston College continues to be a lot of fun.

Becky (Roy) Lien
blien@pdastats.com
1159 Hoyt Avenue West
St. Paul, MN 55108
(651) 487-2261
Currently consulting with a small company and loving it! Still enjoying the winter sport of curling. My husband and 4-year-old son are great!

Class of 1997

Erika Hansen
hansen.erika@gmail.com
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve written in, since nothing of particular note had occurred during those years. But it’s been pretty exciting around here for the last year and a half, so this is my chance! In the fall of 2007, I moved to Seattle (from northern California) with my boyfriend Tom, who was starting graduate school at the University of Washington. We settled in here and I found myself a terrific job doing structural engineering work in downtown Seattle (three blocks from Pike Place Market). In the spring of 2008, Tom and I got engaged, and a few weeks later, I took the Professional Engineer’s exam for civil engineering in California, and then started training for my first spring-distance triathlon. In August, I found out that I passed the PE exam (yay!), and then discovered that all the swimming, biking, and running practice totally paid off, when I finished the triathlon! (My goal was to finish and still be able to walk the next day, so I was extremely successful - the idea of placing and winning prizes was not even in the picture.) In October, we found out that we’ll be moving back to northern California in December, as Tom has been assigned to the Coast Guard Engineering Unit in Oakland. In early November, we decided to get married before we left Seattle, and 10 days later, on November 22, we did! Next up is looking for a place to live in Oakland, and then getting settled in down there. Whew! Things couldn’t be better. Hope you’re all doing well also.

Craig Henke
cheinke@phys.ualberta.ca
Dept. of Physics, University of Alberta
11322-89 Avenue
Edmonton, AB T6G 2G7, Canada
I’ve had two major changes in my life; Rachel and I had a ceremony in June expressing our covenant as life partners, and I started my position as an assistant professor of physics at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada in July. We drove from Charlottesville, Virginia to Edmonton, which allowed us to see a good portion of the continent (although we paid more attention to the book on tape during the long trek across Saskatchewan). Now I’m looking for grad students and postdocs interested in X-ray astronomy who aren’t afraid of cold Minnesota-like winters.

Class of 1998

Steve Furlanetto
Hi everyone! It’s been another busy year. Last January we moved cross-country (for the third time in five years) and I started a new position as Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA. It’s been an adjustment at such a huge school, but I am enjoying both the teaching (large classes and small) and continuing my research on galaxy formation. Settling back into LA has been great (even with the smoke clogging the city from all our wildfires this fall), and we are enjoying the sunshine and warmth, and we’re looking forward to finally moving into our own house in January!

Jeremy Wahl
jawahl7@gmail.com
Gainfully employed.
Was dumped after Valentine’s.
Will buy a house soon.

Class of 1999

John Weiss
cheshirecatco@gmail.com
6175 Habitat Drive, # 2064
Boulder, CO 80301
Ack, another year already? I’m still working at for the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem (with Carolyn Porco) at CICLOPS/Space Science Institute. Now that I have my own grant, I’ve been promoted to “Researcher”, but apart from new business cards (what am I supposed to *do* with those, anyway?), that’s an irrelevant promotion. I’ve also stepped up into the role of Deputy Director of CICLOPS so I’ve been doing quite a bit more managing people and representing the ISS team at JPL. We’re into the extended mission now and I’m really looking forward to what we’ll see in the next year as we approach Saturnian Equinox. (Watch http://ciclops.org for pictures.) And as is the way with these things, the project is now pondering the Extended-Extended Mission, which may go out to 2017. I’m up to my eyeballs helping pitch this from our team’s side of things, working out how we can do good science on around half the budget and arguing our cases to the rest of the team or the rest of the Cassini project.

The work I was involved in on the growth of moons inside of rings was published in Science a year ago. It was a fun project that turned into a nifty paper, although I doubt it’ll change the field too much. And we just published a paper on modeling ring brightness. The work was a dozen years and a dozen researchers in the making, so it felt good to be the one to carry that ball across the goal finally. I continue that research work, as well as looking into the role of the moon Enceladus in the origin of the E ring. It’s exciting to be working on this stuff! Aside from that, little to report. Chiana-cat and the guinea pigs are all well and happy, as am I. Hope everyone else is, too!