Class of 1990

David Allaway
Greetings! New news? Got through a stint as acting manager of my section at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and am now back to “regular” project work. Took a month off this summer and returned to Tibet and Western China. Visited some stunning canyons and mountain landscapes including amazing meadows of wildflowers. Unlike the Lhasa area, Eastern Tibet is very green and lush (in the summer). Also enjoyed the local (Tibetan) culture including some towns that felt like the Wild West. Bizarre small world Carleton story: ended up randomly seated next to another Carl from ’90, Carl Jensen, on one of my flights. In September I enjoyed a lovely weekend outside of Flagstaff for Mary Anne McLoud’s wedding – Marcia Franklin(’93) was also there. It was a lovely wedding party, all in a woodsy meadow in the mountains.

Amy Bylsma Engebretson
Email: adengebretson@sio.midco.net
Hi, we are enjoying being back in our hometown of Sioux Falls and are now well adjusted from our move from Fargo. Which of course meant it was time for something new. In September, I started teaching half time at Augustana College. I'm teaching the algebra based physics and enjoying it...and learning some new real world applications of physics as I strive to make it relevant to the biology and exercise science students. Last June Dan switched from working for a local hospital's research institute to directing a research center at USD. The center's goal is to turn good research into viable tech businesses. He's excited about helping SD develop more of a tech-based economy. The kids continue to grow and prove that even though they all look the same they are not copies of each other. Ariel (10) loves to dance and act, Ben (7) loves math and all ball games, Sam (3) smiles and tells long, vivid stories that we sometimes understand.

Mary Anne McLeod
Email: mamcleod@mindspring.com
Phone: (928) 779-6384
Address: 2256 CO Bar Trail
Flagstaff, AZ 86001
Another year gone by already! Not much has changed on the day-to-day end of things, but now when I fill out paperwork I check the "married" rather than the "single" box. Scott and I got hitched in September and managed to lure a couple of other Carleton physics nerds (David Allaway '90 and Marcia Franklin '93), amongst other friends and family, into participating in our potluck/campout/music-and-dance/wedding fest. The weather was cloudless but rather windy, the flowers in the mountain meadows were at their peak, and a yellow jacket stung only one person. The rock "band", which "played" rather loudly into the wee hours of the night from the next campsite about a mile away, was a bit of a drawback, but it was an interesting and surreal juxtaposition to the bugling elk.

Class of 1991

David Feldman
Email: dave@hornacek.coa.edu
URL: http://hornacek.coa.edu/dave
I'm still on the faculty at College of the Atlantic, and I'm still serving as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Teaching continues to go well and be a lot of fun. I have a one-term sabbatical coming up this winter, during which I'll take trips to the University of California at Davis and the Santa Fe Institute (SFI)to work with Research collaborators. I'm looking forward to being able to concentrate on research and writing and to take a break from administration. Last summer I again lectured at the Complex Systems Summer School, hosted in Beijing, China, and sponsored by SFI and The Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This up-coming summer I've been asked to co-direct the summer school. So I'll be in Beijing for a full month, and then will travel in China for another three weeks with my wife, Doreen Stabinsky.

John McCormack
Email: mccormac@uap2nrl.navy.mil
Hi. I’m still in the DC area working at the US Naval Research Laboratory doing upper atmospheric physics. Big news in the last year is that I am now married and I am the proud father of a baby boy, John Aiden. Best wishes to all the ’91 physics alums. I hope to see you all at Reunion next June.

Shannon Mullens Wallis
Email: shannon.m.wallis@valley.net
Phone: (802) 649-1242
Address: 80 Lewis Road
Belmont, MA 02478
URL:
www.CreativeMemories.com/ShannonWallis
I always seem to put this off to be sure I have time to make it profound; and then I miss the deadline. Not this year. Short and sweet: I am home with my two kids, ages 3 and 6, juggling the life of nursery school, after school sports, music classes and a husband who loves playing soccer and hockey. In my spare time, I stamp greeting cards and am a Creative Memories Consultant, teaching people how important it is to put their photos and stories into safe albums. My business brought me to MN this summer and I extended my trip to visit Carleton for reunion planning. I saw Joel, Cindy, and Bill in Olin. I also visited with physics geeks Andrea Lommen, Steve Mormon, Dan Prince and Kris Wedding. See you at Reunion 2006?

Scott Nagle
Email: snagle@stanford.edu
We're still living (renting, not owning) in the bay area as I continue my radiology residency training. Jean is enjoying her Creative Memories home business and Kenton is the most fun, happy, amazing almost-2-year-old in the universe. I am taking a year off from clinical radiology training to get back into research, examining the use of MRI to replace transesophageal echocardiography in the assessment of cardiac sources of embolic stroke. Still don't know whether I'll end up on the academic or private practice side of radiology, which is one reason I decided to do this now, rather than waiting until my fellowship in a couple of years.
On the side, I recently led a team in the San Francisco 48 Hour Film Project (www.48hourfilm.com). After an incredible experience of little sleep and great collaboration, we turned our 7-minute film in on time and ultimately earned Best Script and Best Film awards in the competition! It has been exciting for me to rediscover my passion for filmmaking. Digital video and non-linear editing has made the process so much simpler than it was when I was a media studies concentrator, working on analog videotape in Scoville. Hope you're all doing well!

Dan Prince
Email: dan.prince@alumni.carleton.edu
Address: 3329 Garfield Ave S.
Minneapolis, MN 55408
No change in my situation since last year. I still write software for Integral7, a small company that does data management for the certification and licensure industry. We probably cannot classify ourselves as a startup anymore, but it is still a challenging, fun, casual place to work and I enjoy it very much.
My partner Laura Johansson and I still live in a cute little house in South Minneapolis with our daughter Grace (4) and our son Theo (2.5). Laura is the director of a non-profit bilingual (Spanish/English) preschool about a half mile from our house.

Jane Olson
Email: wholesome_olson@yahoo.com
I hope you all are well. I am in my fifth year of teaching for Boulder Valley Public Schools in Colorado. This summer I spent 6 weeks in Brazil visiting old friends in Bello Horizonte and touring the Amazon. Now I’m itching to teach abroad again. Maybe next year I’ll be writing from some new exotic locale!

Class of 1993

Marcia Franklin
Email: mrfranklin@etmeli.us
There were no big changes for us this year; I have continued as Librarian/Distance Education Coordinator at Academy College (Bloomington, MN), adding occasionally to my duties by teaching algebra or astronomy. Next year, however, promises to be much more interesting. I plan to leave my fulltime job to pursue other interests, including writing and impending motherhood - Steve (Wright, '90) and I are expecting our first child in May! Drop me a line sometime; I'd love to hear from folks.

Eric Granstrom
Email: egranstrom@comcast.net
Phone: (763) 525-8621
Breaking news on the career front! Within the last 24 hours, I've told my colleagues at Seagate that, after 6 years of wonderful challenges and growth, I'll be finding very new challenges and, hopefully, growth by joining a little startup in town. Obviously, by the time you read this, I'll be an old hat, but as I write this, the anticipation of my imminent role as V.P. of Business Development for Medical Device Testing Services (should you need a medical device mechanically stressed, let me know...) is about killing me. I'll be laying down the pen one last time at the wipeboard that we used to (really!) debate elements of quantum physics (perhaps embarrassingly simple to any practicing academic physicist), and instead probably be arming myself with a travel bag (I'm in sales, amongst other things) and maybe even a mop (hey, at a startup, everyone has to do everything). Though I love the challenge here, it's time for some exercise on otherwise under-developed regions of this increasingly aged brain... At home, the last year and a half has been both rough and fantastic. Last fall, dad died after a two-year fight with cancer, and that shook the entire extended family, particularly after losing grandma only a few months earlier. Aune, Leah, and Matthew are doing great. Aune's chomping at the bit to start training for a marathon, quite in contrast to my overwhelming apathy for exercise. Leah's happily engaged by preschool, and Matthew's loving his first grade in a Spanish immersion school. By the end of the year, I'm convinced I'll have no idea what his homework means, which will make assistance and discipline there a bit of a challenge.

Scott Thatcher
Email: thatcher@truman.edu
Phone: (606) 785-4552
Address: 2602 Beverly Lane
Kirksville, MO 63501
Carol and I have had a busy year this year--the most exciting of the reasons being that we were expecting and subsequently received a beautiful baby boy this year: Thomas David Thatcher, born in August. He has been healthy and happy (most of the time) during the first two months of his life, and we hope that trend will continue. A relatively recent picture should always be available at www2.truman.edu/~thatcher.
In other news, I've been participating in an exciting new project at Truman State University--a Mathematical Biology Initiative. The project I'm working on involves modeling pollen flight. I've been learning about low Reynolds number fluid dynamics, but any experts out there are welcome to contact me and offer advice. Wish me luck on the tenure decision to be made in January of 2006!

Class of 1994

Reed Busse
Email: Reed.Busse@med.ge.com
Address: 14 Pebble Beach Circle
Madison, WI 53717
2005 was a very eventful year for us. In February, our daughter Evelyn was born. She and her 4-year-old brother Owen keep Sarah and I quite busy. Just as life was getting back to normal (or at least to some quasi-steady state), this summer we decided that we wanted to move back to the Midwest to be closer to family and further from sky-high cost of living expenses in the San Francisco Bay area. After considering a position at Mayo Clinic, I decided to stay with GE Medical Systems and take a senior scientist position at UW Madison, where I'll also have an adjunct professor faculty appointment. Similar to the work I'm doing now with Stanford and UCSF, I'll be working with the scientists and physicians at the university hospital to develop new MRI techniques and technologies. If having two pre-school age children wasn't exhausting enough, getting our house in San Mateo ready to sell just about did us in. In the month before putting it on the market, I packed half of our possessions into storage, repainted the entire interior and, with the help of my dad, remodeled the kitchen installing tile floors and cabinets (the countertops and plumbing were done by professionals). But all is done now, and as I write (early October), we're anxiously waiting to see how it sells. Hopefully fast since we've bought a house in Madison and will have (by the time you read this) closed Nov. 1. We're looking forward to returning to a four-season climate -- perpetually sunny and 70 with no humidity or mosquitoes were getting rather tedious.

Michael Fleming
Email: mfleming@mtsu.edu
Hi from Tennessee again. I'm settling into my second year on the faculty of the Recording Industry Department at MTSU. Things are going well professionally here. It seems like I always have more than enough to do thanks to the standard triad of responsibilities: teaching, research/creative activity and service (committees!!!). While in New York City in October for the Audio Engineering Society convention, I had a nice dinner catching up with Loren Sklar (physics, '94), who is also busy and doing well working in film and TV production. I'll actually get my first feature-film screen credit in 2006 for some recent field sound recording I did for "Come Early Morning," starring Ashley Judd. On the personal front, I decided to dip my toe in the world of online dating this fall. No significant results yet, but I anticipate that I'll have some interesting stories to tell before I find some reason to give up the search!
Whitewater kayaking is a hobby that I've taken up in the last year. Tennessee is a great state for a wide range of outdoor activities, so feel free to contact me if you're in the region for a vacation, recreation or any other business.

Richard Gran
Hi y'all. Actual big changes this year. I have started as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. Because they are so close to the MINOS neutrino experiment far detector, they decided they should have a two-person experimental neutrino group, instead of one. Luckily for me, this is the sort of physics experiment I want to be in. So I'm (mostly) winding down activities in Japan, and ramping up experimental work here in northern Minnesota and at Fermilab. As I write this, we have been here for only two months, but we are already getting comfortable with life here on the "Minnesota Riviera".
Karen will be defending her Ph.D. probably within a month of you reading this. She is lining up some post-doc kind of research with her many Minnesota Geology colleagues and will start one or more projects this winter and spring. There is still some uncertainty about long-term prospects. Alex is now two years old. We know he likes to pick up rocks and throw them into Lake Superior (Geology), transport crab-apples from the neighbors yard (Biology, Shipping), sing (Music), draw (Art) including a new black-paint Chinese calligraphy piece that now hangs in my office, and he reads books (English and Japanese, sort of). So he is already a modestly well-rounded scholar. But (!) we were walking the other night, after dark, with no prompting at all he pointed upward and said, "Look! Tars! Up in Kie!”
Working on a joint NSF/Industry proposal to put prizes and science-themed reading material for mature audiences on the back of high-fiber, high-bran content cereal boxes.

Eric Hill
Email: Eric_Hill@redlands.edu
I am now in my 5th year at the University of Redlands in So. Cal. I am also now a father. Evan was born in February '05. He's a real joy, particularly now that he lets us sleep most of the night. Everything is in the right place and does the right thing, though he can do the darndest things with his feet. I am currently taking a one-semester sabbatical, and I'm enjoying focusing on my research (when I'm not indulging in fatherhood or helping my department to prepare for a much anticipated and dreaded, mid-year move to new facilities).

Martine Kalke
Email: kalke@gis.net
In the past two years many things have changed, and much is the same. The wiring and plumbing in our house is now up to 21st century standards, all the floors have been redone, and we have gotten rid of all the terrible carpet and wallpaper we inherited with our house. We have refinished the third floor and moved the bathroom into the smallest bedroom (creating a very large, nice bathroom). All that work took a long time, and our house was almost uninhabitable for six months, but it is so nice now! Still have a few things to do, but our wish list is much smaller now. Our town is even better than it was when we moved in. We now have two bookstores within a few blocks of our house as well as lots of restaurants, grocery stores, the library, post office, and the best toy store within easy walking distance. It is pretty nice to have all this in a suburb of Boston. I’ve been at MIT Lincoln Laboratory for almost three and a half years now, and it is also better than ever. Lincoln encourages its staff to develop a broad background rather than specialize, so I’ve been learning about different areas of ballistic missile defense, which has kept me busy. I’m giving more presentations and leading more projects that I had expected, but I’m getting better at both and having a blast at the same time. Among the things I’ve learned is that there are three essentials for presentations: the illusion of competence, the illusion of comprehensiveness, and the illusion of objectivity (note: the easiest and best way to carry off these illusions is to be competent, comprehensive, and objective).

Class of 1995

Kareem Kazkaz
Phone: (206) 931-1232
Address: 435 West 119th Street #10M
New York, NY 10027
Greetings everyone! This time last year I was hoping to have graduated. O! The wheels of academe! Do they turn slowly? I spent six rather productive months at Los Alamos getting dissertation data. At the end of those six months in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico, I moved to Manhattan to be with my then fiancée (now wife), Helene Wecker. I have been writing my dissertation from New York, and my advisor thinks it's realistic that I'll graduate this winter. (All other self-estimations of my graduation time frame he previously described as "ambitious".) So I know I'm in the home stretch. But I think that's how I described my state in the last Alumni Newsletter.
As I said, I've starting writing my dissertation. I have one chapter (one of the larger ones) finished and off to my advisor for comments. I'm sure he'll bleed red ink all over it and send it back. I've also started applying to postdoc positions, and I have one application in to Lawrence Berkeley Labs, and another in to the University of Minnesota. I just received e-mail today from the UMN that they'd like me to come in for an interview! I'm still hoping to hear from LBL.
Reunion this past June was wonderful, and it was great to catch up with friends both inside and outside the physics department. Until next year...

Susan Rodgers
Email: susanerodgers@yahoo.com
Address: 2405 Kenmore Ct.
Schaumburg, IL 60193
I hope this message finds you and your families happy and well. The past year seems to have gone by in a blur! My son Alex will be 20 months old by the time you read this. He is walking and loves to climb on anything, including me. Scott and I love being his dad and mom. We all enjoyed our visit to campus for my 10-year Reunion in June. When I was a sophomore living in Goodhue, I never imagined my husband and baby boy would be sleeping there with me someday! We had fun hanging out in the 'Hue Superlounge, playing ping-pong and reconnecting with friends. The Physics and Astronomy Dept. reception was also a highlight for me. Scott and I also had our first vacation without Alex. He stayed home with Grandma while Scott and I spent a four-day weekend in New York City. It was the first visit there for both of us, and we packed in a lot of sightseeing, great restaurants, and a Broadway show. I'm looking forward to reading everyone else's news. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Elissa Thorn
Email: ethorn @thacher.org
Phone: (805) 640-7897
Address: 5025 Thacher Rd
Ojai, CA 93023
I wish I could have been at reunion this summer! It would have been great to see classmates and professors. I'm hoping to figure out a way to get to Bruce's retirement festivities during the up-coming alumni weekend, though.
I'm still teaching high school physics and horseback riding at The Thacher School in sunny (usually) SoCal. Last spring I fulfilled a long-time goal by adding a quarter-long elective in atmospheric physics to my teaching load. The timing couldn't have been better; we had gloriously unsettled weather for the first two weeks of the class!
I'm about halfway through a Masters in Science Teaching from New Mexico Tech, and I'm in the process of gearing up for real work on my thesis, which will somehow (not quite sure how) involve something (or maybe something else) to do with radio signals generated by lightning, with the intent to investigate differences (which may or may not be there) between natural and triggered lightning strikes. Daunting but exciting!
I am finding life as a student to be a little discouraging, because it keeps causing me to hit the limits of my functioning in unexpected ways. That's something nobody tells you about a head injury...every new experience teaches you something new about the changes in your own brain and body, and it just seems to go on and on, and you never expect it, because you forget that if the last time you did something was BHI (before head injury), then the first time you do it AHI (after head injury), it's going to be different than you remember. Nevertheless, I am thrilled to be in a position to be able to even HAVE these experiences and opportunities. The last year has been surgery free (wahoo!) and even relatively free of follow-up doctor appointments (yippee!), so I feel like I am re-entering the flow of "my life as I want it to be", but I keep waiting for the time that I am just "me" again, instead of "me, adjusting to head injury and bionic titanium-reinforced face". I recognize myself in the mirror now, and photos from before finally look odder than current photos, but I still don't recognize myself reflected in store windows while I'm out for a walk. Someday. :-) In the meantime, onward and upward!

Ted Wyder
Email: wider@rsl.caltech.edu
I'm finally writing into the alumni newsletter so here's the quick summary of what's been going on. I got my PhD in astronomy from the University of Washington back in 2000. Since then I've been working here in Pasadena at Caltech as a postdoc. Primarily I've been working with data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite. GALEX is a small UV telescope that is performing various surveys of the sky in the UV. I'm starting to look for a new job now so wish me luck! If any of you is ever in Pasadena, feel free to say hello.

Class of 1996

Christopher Cooper
Email: COOPER13@COMCAST.NET
I hope everyone is doing well. Mary and I have just found out that we’re expecting child number two. I'm saving this e-mail as a draft until the ultrasound before I send it in! Unfortunately, the timing means that we won't likely make it to reunion this coming year. So, Bruce, congratulations and enjoy your retirement. Your modern physics course was definitely one of my favorites.
Charlotte is turning two in a few days (Oct. 2) and is an amazing toddler. She shows all signs of being brilliant--colors, shapes, and counts to 20--of course every parent says the same thing. We’re still in an apartment in Beverly, saving up to buy a house in the stratospheric market around Boston. We enjoyed a wonderful summer vacation this year--our first really big family trip. We went to the Outer Banks and then across North Carolina visiting beaches, friends, and family. We also squeezed in a day in DC on our way home.
My job is still really enjoyable. It's been a little more than two years, and I'm now a project manager. I've really learned quite a bit about the technical side infrared sensors and spacecraft. Business is doing very well for us, too. In fact, we've had a slow, steady stream of hiring and are still looking for good people. So if anyone (alum or class of '06) is looking for a physics-based job in the Boston area, let me know and I can give you more details.
We took in a Red Sox game with the Boston area Carleton Club. We had a great time and I connected with some old first-year friends from Nourse. Which brings me to my last point--we're always happy to hear from old friends. So if you're going to be in the area, drop me a note!

Nate Hultman
Email: neh3@georgetown
Phone: (202) 944-1865
Address: 2356 40th St. NW, Apt 208
Washington DC 20007
Hello all. Ellen and I are happy to announce the birth of our son Silas Oliver, who arrived with enthusiasm on July 15th. He and sister Linnea seem to be getting on well so far. Also, we had a fun visit in the spring from physics alums Mark Dieterich '96 and Karen Griffith-Dieterich '97, and their son, Nathan. We're always happy to see friends so please do get in touch if you're passing through the District for a conference or whatever. Happy World Year of Physics.

Class of 1997

Peter Czoschke
Phone: (952) 835-1931
Address: 5217 Heritage Hills Drive
Bloomington, MN 55437
Things have been moving along for me the last year. I finished my PhD in condensed matter physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With a little help from Eric Granstrom (physics '93) I landed a job at Seagate Technology up in Bloomington, MN in June (2005) doing research on degradation mechanisms in the read/write heads of hard drives. Since my doctorate work didn't really involve much with magnetics, and since hard drives are all about magnetic recording, I have a lot of learning to do. The underlying physics is very interesting, though, and I am really glad to be back in the Twin Cities.
So the last few months have been busy for my wife (Becky) and I: settling into a new house, a new job, a (sort-of) new city,etc. Becky is staying home with Meredith (our 20-month old daughter), which is a full-time job in itself, and we are preparing her for her first real Minnesota winter.... I hope everyone is doing well.

Karen Griffith-Dieterich
Mark Dieterich
Mark Dieterich and I are still living in Rhode Island, and Mark is still working as a senior systems administrator for the CS department at Brown University. He has also started a side venture with a couple of colleagues. They are working on developing a mapping algorithm geared toward bikers, runners, and other people who prefer scenic, low-traffic roads over interstates. They are hoping to have a beta version ready soon.
I'm still enjoying being a stay-at-home mom to Nathan, our 2 year-old, although I have recently also started doing a small amount of work for BBN Technologies again. Last summer we started delving a bit into the world of camping with a toddler. Nathan had a great time eating outdoors and gathering firewood and exploring neat places. His parents found the experience enjoyable, but perhaps not the most restful of camping trips. It looks as though our camping is to be put on hold for another year or so now though because of our most exciting news of the year. We are expecting our second child next May!

Class of 1998

Amanda Babson
Email: babsona@ocean.washington.edu
Greetings! I'm still plugging away at my PhD in Oceanography at the University of Washington. I've set my hopes on finishing by next summer, but it's possible there are some more hidden roadblocks, we shall see. One really cool thing I did this past summer that I want to pass the word on about is the Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellowship with the National Academies. For any of you in grad school interested in science policy, this is a great opportunity. If you're interested and want to know more, drop me a line.

Kristina Visscher
Email: visscher@brandeis.edu
I've been so remiss in writing my yearly updates-- perhaps it’s because time has been flying so quickly. So an update in reverse chronological order:
I am currently a post-doc at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. My unfortunately named subfield is Psychophysics. You may think it’s because I'm a physics major gone bad; you may be right. Basically, we use quantifiable stimuli to examine people's responses to perception and memory tests, and use the results to find out principles about how their brains work.
I live with boyfriend, Van, also a postdoc. No dogs or cats, just poorly taken care of plants.
I graduated in 2004 from Washington University in St. Louis where I studied neuroscience -- did functional MRI, looking at different timecourses of brain activity. As an aside, I went to SFI summer school in 2003, (and Van was there for 3 years) so am intrigued to see that Carleton faculty are spending time there! (Could the climate have something to do with the draw?)

Jeremy Wahl
Email: jawahl7@gmail.com
Address: 16 E Gaslight Village
Ithaca, NY 14850
My postdoc in plant pathology came to a merciful end at the end of August and I've been doing my contract fabrication for NIST full time now. It's less stressful working just one job, but I'm not happy about having to pay for my own health insurance.
In other news, my girlfriend, Yvonne, and I got engaged earlier this fall. We'll get married sometime in the next few years. She's going to leave her PhD program at the end of this academic year and switch fields to interior design. She'll apply for programs starting this winter and I'll start looking for jobs in the same towns. It'll be good to get out of Ithaca and I hope we can move somewhere a bit warmer. She'll go back to Portland with me around Christmas time and I'll try to go with her to Hong Kong next May or June. I've never been to Asia so that'll be cool.

Class of 1999

William Dicks
Email: wdicks@structure-tech.com
This past summer I got married up in Charlevoix, Michigan and shortly after that we moved into a new condo in Wrigleyville (Chicago). It was a busy summer as we had 4 other weddings besides our own (all of which either my wife or I were in the wedding party), plus a two-week honeymoon to Spain and moving out and moving in.
Things settled down in the fall a little bit, although Stephanie (my wife) went back to school to get her Masters Degree. My company (a small technology consulting company) is opening our first expansion office in Milwaukee, so that's been a little hectic. GO WHITE SOX!!!

Greg Stinson
I write from the apartment I moved into last year enjoying yet another beautiful sunset over the water and mountains to the west of Seattle. Astronomy grad school continues to be an immensely enjoyable experience, now filled with a lot of foosball and fantasy sports. Hopefully by the time this letter is published, I will have my first first author paper published as well. We've got this recipe for forming stars and then blowing them up in computer simulations of galaxies forming that seems to work pretty realistically. So for work, I get to watch lots of movies of galaxies forming. Again, a pretty fun time. The first Carl since I arrived at UW, Charlotte Christensen, has appeared, and so far she seems interested in playing the galaxy formation game, so it's nice to see the string of Carls in the astro department out here keep going.
The big work related trip this year was a conference in Cambridge, UK and then hiking around Italy with my family. My digital camera has been busy since I got it for a trip to Italy a couple of years ago, so the pictures from both Italy trips can be found at http:// www.astro.washington.edu/stinson/pictures.html. There's also a bunch of pictures from hikes around Seattle. It's really pretty nice to be able to drive an hour and take a 10-mile walk in beautiful scenery. Every hike makes it harder to think about leaving for a post doc at the end of this year. Hopefully, I'll be able to get a job at another nice place, maybe this time in Europe.
So things are going pretty well here, I look forward to hearing how everyone else is doing.

John Weiss
Email: weissj@ciclops.org
Phone: (303) 447-1842
Address: 2905 Aurora Avenue Apt. 103
Boulder, CO 80303
It's been quite an eventful year here. I'm still living in Boulder, Colorado, although I've moved out of the central part of town. I defended my dissertation on Saturn's rings in March and passed. Hooray! Of course, at the same time I also had to be job-hunting. My search was depressingly un-successful, although I got a few interviews for teaching positions. Happily, a job came to me: I was offered a post-doctoral position working for Carolyn Porco, the principle investigator of the Cassini imaging instrument. Now I'm doing a handful of very different research projects. Also, I am one of the first people to see our data, although mostly I'm capable of saying "Ooo, cool!" (We have many people who are much better at analyzing images than this theorist.) The data keep us theorists on our toes since we're constantly seeing new things. It's very exciting, so everything seems to have turned out well. Oh, and I ended up with a great officemate: Emily Baker ('01). It's a small world. (But a great, big universe.)